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Leslie Kean: UFO "Balloons," Afterlife, Cover-Ups
February 27, 2023
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So basically we're not at the top of the food chain. There's another species, there's another life form or entity or consciousness that is more advanced than we are. You can be afraid of it because, you know, what if whatever this is decides that it doesn't want human beings around anymore? It wants to use the planet for something else. If you can see this, type in Squirtle Squirtle into the chat. Wesley, how's it going?
Hi Kurt, it's going well. Yeah, I'm got a lot going on as a sort of so does everyone else. I think how are you doing? Great. So you're known for your work on UFOs and you've written a New York Times bestseller contributed to Huffington Post and you have a book called Surviving Death. You will have a National Geographic series which just came out premiered I think February 13th called UFOs investigating the unknown of which there will be a link in the description. What else are you known for that I haven't mentioned?
What else am I known for? Well, what else have I done? Maybe I would answer, I would say, you know, I did spend before the 2017 New York Times story, I did spend, I started in reporting on UFOs in the year 2000. That was my first story in the Boston Globe. So I kind of had this whole phase of activity as a reporter before we had this, you know, this kind of crossed over this line in 2017 where everything changed. So I did spend a lot of years when the taboo was really dominant.
and I was just basically trying to get across the simple point that UFOs are real and they need to be paid attention to. I mean even that was like a you know that's the basically was the theme of my book in 2010 and even that was like a major thing for people to consider you know so it's just really because I had all that experience before 2017 I just realized so much
As you know, theories of everything this channel is about, fundamental reality mainly from a theoretical physics perspective, as well as understanding consciousness and
subjectivity and so on. So in that vein, analyze this from a sociological perspective. Why do you think there's been such a plethora of interest since 2017 toward this phenomenon? Yeah, I think, you know, the story in the New York Times revealed the fact that the Pentagon had been studying these objects for quite a while. And, you know, that just set off this this kind of snowball effect. I mean, if indeed the Pentagon has been studying them and devoting resources and staff to that,
and of course the program there was very small and they didn't have money but nonetheless they were still doing the work you know that made that made the point that well there's something to this and there were videos that were released with a story so it just if the Pentagon is paying attention to this there's something to it and then what happened is the Congress wanted to be briefed on it and people were brought in to brief them and they received classified information and we have to remember that
The lawmakers have access to information that none of us have. So when they make their statements about the reality of this, they're basing that on knowledge that we don't have. And, you know, I think people forget that they say, well, why can't why don't we have more videos? Why don't we have more this and that? We have to remember that the people in charge have seen a lot more.
so you know it's just and then you know we had the june 2021 report in which acknowledgement was made in black and white of the reality the phenomena and that they're being the various types of phenomena that are being seen and that you know they had no evidence that they were russian or chinese at that point um you know statements by high level officials both retired and active elected professionals and it so you know the it's just become this this public and
A public thing, you know, the media went crazy with this. The 60 minutes show in June of 2021, I believe it was, was huge. And so, yeah, there's there's now that now that it's sort of OK to take it seriously, the taboo has really sort of stepped more into the background, you know, we still it's still there. But we're in a new world with regards to this. And we even have we've had a congressional hearing. We've had legislation passed.
That's allowing witnesses and whistleblowers to come forward now and, you know, release their security oaths or be protected and be protected in that process. So there's just so much has happened. I mean, I think the why is people have always been interested in this. And now that the lawmakers are involved and the Pentagon is involved and that's all public.
It's just providing a whole different picture of what this is all about. We have, of course, the national security side of it and the aviation safety side of it, which is emphasized a lot, which is a good reason to pay attention and a good reason to investigate and find out what these things are. So what is this when we talk about the reality of this? Can you explain to people who are like, what is she referring to? UFOs? What are UFOs? What are UAPs?
I wish I knew what they were. I don't think anyone really does, but what we do know, I mean, what's happened in the last 20 years or so, our conception of what a UFO is has changed. We don't even use the word UFO really anymore.
So when I first started, there was all the sci-fi and the kind of popular culture attitudes toward it. And the general thinking among the people involved in investigations was what they call the extraterrestrial hypothesis. It was sort of the simplistic idea that we're being visited from, you know, from the people who accept that this is not human. It was a simplistic idea that we're being visited by beings in these disshaped craft and they're coming from some other planet.
And, you know, fast forward to the way it's looked at now. We now use the word unidentified anomalous phenomena. And recently the word aerial was changed to anomalous because the phenomena as it's seen now incorporates so much more than the concept of some craft coming from another solar system or another part of the galaxy. And it's because, you know, the phenomena take so many different forms. It has so many abilities. It affects people's
Consciousness sometimes it has medical effects on people it comes in just about every shape and size that you can imagine And it's just this mystery and nobody really and you ask what it is. That's the big question That we seem to you know, I I know that the military has collected a lot of data on how the the objects behave you know, there's the there's characteristics that are consistent in terms of the extraordinary behavior that appear to be technological and
So we have data about what they look like and how they act, but the actual essence of the question of what they actually are, I don't think anybody knows. Even if we have collected debris or we have crashed objects that are being studied by aerospace companies or by whoever in these very secret programs,
They might have learned something, but even if they understand a little bit about technology, we still don't really know what they are or why they're here or where they come from. Those are the questions that, you know, that everybody's so curious about. And I hope we find the answer someday, but we may never really understand what they're all about. I don't know. Do you have your suspicions as to where they come from and what they are? I don't think my opinion is necessarily any more valid than anyone else's when it comes to, you know, where they come from. I mean, I really don't know. I think
there's so many possible explanations and maybe there's a lot of different phenomena coming from different sources here or maybe it's all one we don't even know that you know and there people have discussed time travel as being involved inter-dimensionality that they're coming from some other mention and kind of bleeding through to ours and then they go back to their dimension or visitors from extraterrestrial locations in the universe or who knows what you know I mean I think
It's just everything's on the table, let's put it that way. And everything's on the table. You mentioned medical effects. Yeah. Medical effects as in salutary or deleterious? The medical effects are not anything you'd want to have from what I understand. And I mean, there've been some papers and some writings about them that basically people who come too close to these things can have
problems that have blood disorders or cancer-related issues. I mean, I'm not up on all the specifics, but there have been medical effects by people who've had close encounters. There have been government-related medical doctors who have been studying these cases. And I know Gary Nolan, the geneticist or the biologist from Stanford, is of course involved with some of these studies. And so are others. And then, you know, yeah, so I mean,
These people are affected when they get too close. And I don't know. I can't go a lot into the specifics. You have to go to the experts who are doing the studies on them. But sometimes people have marks on their bodies afterwards or nosebleeds. But there are a lot more serious effects than that that can happen. By the way, have you seen the Toe show before? Oh, absolutely. It's a wonderful show, Kurt. I watch your show a lot.
We'll just take a meandering relaxed approach getting people introduced to this. We'll start with the 2017 article called the Pentagon's mysterious UFO program. Walk us through the writing process of that. How long does it take? How do you get such an article approved? Do you pitch it to someone? And what is the article?
Okay, well people may or people probably know that it started when I had a meeting with Luis Elizondo right at literally the day he resigned from his job as the head of this program called ATIP in the you know the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program which he was working on with some colleagues at the Pentagon and he resigned because he didn't fill enough resources for being devoted to this and he wanted to
Make a point, make his point. The best way he felt to do that was to leave the job. And so I was some colleagues of his invited me to a meeting with him in October, early October of 2017. And that's how the whole thing started. And I was, that's where I first saw the videos, I was given a lot of documents, I was shown, you know, the
letter from Harry Reid, which showed his involvement in all of this. Lou's letter to the Secretary of Defense, which was really powerful. Spent a lot of time talking with Lou. And then I went to my colleague Ralph Blumenthal, who is a freelance contributor to the New York Times and was on staff there for decades. And we pitched it to the New York Times. You're absolutely right. You have to make a pitch.
You have to get the editors interested. So we were able to have a meeting with a man named Mark Mazzetti, who's the Chief of the Investigation Bureau in DC. We had an in-person meeting with him and they approved the story. I mean, I wasn't all surprised. How could they not? Because we had people on the record, we had documentation, and this was related to the US government. So that's the kind of thing they're interested in.
And then we were assigned Helene Cooper to work with us, who's the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, who's absolutely incredible. What a gift that was. I mean, we never would have been able to do the story without her. She was just amazing. What was her name one more time? Helene Cooper. And yeah, she's the person who recently at the press conference a few days ago or last week asked the question of whatever that General Glenn Van Hurk about
You know, whether these objects that are being shot down could possibly be alien. I mean, she had the guts to ask that question. But anyway, that's an aside. But and she's also featured in episode one of our of our series that you mentioned that just came out. So it was pretty amazing. It follows investigating the unknown. Right. Which people can see on Hulu now. And it was just amazing to get her on camera. I feel like she stole the whole first episode. It was so good.
But anyway, just so she's just an outstanding, you know, reporter who writes front page stories all the time for the New York Times on a lot of topics related to Pentagon issues involving the Pentagon. So anyway, it took us. So once we pitched it, it took a couple of months to do the whole story. We came out in December. We probably pitched it in mid October or something like that. It took a while. We had to the big one of the big things we had to do was to get Harry Reid on the record, which was a big moment.
We had to get a lot of stuff past the eyes of the editors who were very very strict and very controlling when you're doing a story like this and Helene flew out actually to Las Vegas and met with Harry Reid in person and she talks about that in the series. It's really funny how she talks about it but when we knew when we had him we knew we had it. I mean this was really
He was crucial to the story because he was able to verify the existence of the program and the fact that he was the one who got the funding way back before ATIP was really ATIP. He got funding for a DIA program that eventually kind of spawned ATIP, but he was able to verify... What was that program called?
The advanced weapons, oh my God, I might not get it right, you know. Sure. Systems, it's A, it's OSAP. People have to look it up. You got the syllables correct, at least. Yeah, I know. I mean, yeah. So and, you know, A2 was sort of able to ride, rode out from that program into the Pentagon and did a lot of work on specifically on UFOs, whereas OSAP, of course, was much broader than that, covering a lot of other things.
so um yeah um so Lou resigns comes to you with a slew of documents on day one yeah i mean it really wasn't Lou who came to me it was Chris Mellon and some other colleagues who felt um you know that they should talk to me um and so he was just sort of
Willing to go along with it, you know, he doesn't he's not fully responsible for that He's not responsible for me getting those videos are being shown the videos, but it was a group of his colleagues I mean, I think it's public knowledge. It was Chris Mellon and how put off and Jim semi then Who were there at the meeting along with me and Lou? Was there one other person? I think that was
Yeah, I'll tell you that changed my life. That moment I was just blown away by what I was being told and what I was seeing. After all the years, you know, of what I'd been through to be given a story like this was something I never would have imagined happening.
The way that it works for myself is much different than the way it works for yourself. You have a much more professional and seasoned approach. For me, when I'm choosing a guest, I'll hear about them once or twice. I look them up here and there over the course of weeks, and then at some point I start to do a deep dive. This sounds like you just got thrown into the deep end right away. Is that the case, or did you have some contact with Chris or Lou prior to get some semblance of what's going to happen at some point?
I mean, I knew I had known Chris for years. So Chris Mellon, I knew I knew how put off for many years, even longer than Chris Mellon. And Lou, I believe, had already just don't remember the the timeline, but I think he had already spoken on behalf of to the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. Remember when they did that initial press conference? So I wasn't like I mean, I knew who he was.
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Were there elements that you had to leave out of the 2017 article?
There always are. I mean, we always, every, and I've done a whole series of times stories with the three of us and then some with just Ralph Blumenthal since then. There's always more than they give you space for. But that was a long, they gave us a lot of space for that story. And not only did we have the story about ATIP, but we had a section about the Nimitz event. And we had, Helene and I had actually sat down in Washington with Dave Fravor and spoke to him for hours about what happened there.
And I think this was the first time he ever came forward. So that was one aspect. We would have loved to have included more about that event, for instance. But, you know, there's only so much space. We would have liked to have included more about what they actually learned within the program about UFOs. And the story was not so much about the UFO phenomenon itself. It was about the fact that this ATIP program existed and how it got set up and
You know, all of that, what the background was for that program, and that's what the Times was really interested in our reporting on. And then in 2019, when Ralph and the three of us did our second story, then we got to focus more on the actual objects themselves, which is what people really missed in the first one, I think. And we tried our best. I mean, there's a lot more we would have liked to have included in that story.
But the editors at the New York Times are really rigorous and they vet everything and they decide basically what can go in and what can't, you know, and you can argue for certain things and you got to pick your arguments and at some point you just, it's what it is, it is what it is, you know. So it's not like we wouldn't have liked to have included more, we would have.
But, you know, we're at the mercy of the editors and I think the second story in 2019 was so explosive because it did include
Descriptions from pilots. We had Ryan Graves in that story. And people just love reading about what the pilots are actually seeing, what the objects look like, what have they learned about them. That's what was missing in the first one. And what is left out is generally left out because of reasons of space. It's always space. So that's the number one. You always have a certain amount of a word count that you're given. You can make it this long. So then we as the writers have to determine what we think is most, you know, has the priority for that space.
But there might be things that they want to take out or that they want us to add. For instance, in that first story, they wanted us to have some comments from skeptics. That's another thing we would have chosen because we didn't think it was relevant to what we were writing about. I mean, there's nothing in the story that was questionable or opinion or something that a skeptic needs to weigh in on.
but they wanted a, you know, an astrophysicist to say, well, we know, we don't, we don't know if they're, you know, they're probably not extraterrestrials or something, which we weren't saying anyway. So they, they were like maybe three paragraphs that had to be taken up with comments from skeptics. That's not something we chose. They're thinking in terms of perception management. I have to ask the editors. I mean, you just, you know, I can't speak for the editors. They just feel like I think it's an idea that it has to be balanced in some way because this is such a controversial topic.
What would you include that you weren't able to include in 2017 and 2019?
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Well, I mean, we've come a long way now, so a lot more has come out since then. So, you know, if I was writing a news story now, which I still hope to do,
It would cover more recent developments. I don't want to divulge too much, but it would focus on some of the legislation that's happened and maybe people who are coming forward and speaking to Congress, speaking to ARO, the new DOD office. I always want to move the ball forward, so it just depends on where we're at and what
what kind of a story Ralph and I can get. I mean, it's very, very difficult to get a story that will satisfy the New York Times editors. I would like to be writing for them, you know, every other month if I could. I think there's enough to cover. But this is not a topic that they want to be covered in that way. And if it's something that they can put their own staff on, they will. Because I'm not a staff. I want, you know, I have to really be clear that people understand I'm not on the staff of the New York Times.
Can you explain the difference? Yeah, so somebody like Julian Barnes, who has written more skeptical articles, is a full-time employee of the New York Times. And he writes about a lot of stuff, and he's in the office working with the New York Times every day. He's their national security correspondent. And so he'll be assigned a whole lot of stories on a regular basis.
But the difference is that I'm a freelancer, and so is Ralph, which means that we're not working for the paper. Every story we do, we pitch independently. We ask them, are you interested in this? Can we do this story for you? Whereas somebody like Julianne Barnes, someone who's on staff, is actually assigned stories. So we're like, we have to go to them with our pitch, like we talked earlier about how we had to pitch the 2017 story to them.
we're not assigned it we have to interest them we have to say we even though we're not your employee right because they prefer to use their own staff for stories even though we're not on your staff we have something we think that's good enough that you you should be interested in it and maybe you are and in fact we have an exclusive that your reporters are not going to get access to i mentioned that's a major selling point you're absolutely right it is
And I always tell people who are working with me to try to develop stories, sources and so on, that that's the reason why I have to ask people to be very quiet if they're working with me on a story, because if it's not exclusive, if it gets out all over the internet or if other media pick it up, first, the New York Times isn't going to run with it. It's just, you know, it's not like I want to prevent other people from getting access to this information, but if I
Don't if we don't have an exclusive for the times the chances that we'll be able to publish it are greatly diminished So it's more about once the story comes out in the times that everybody run with it do whatever you want but we So, you know people that I sources that I'm working with to develop stories usually understand that and they're very good about They understand that they want this to come out in the times because the times make such a huge impact. So it's worth it and
But it is an important selling point, the exclusivity factor. And that's why, you know, the fact that Ralph and I are out there and we know a lot of sources, I'm monitoring this thing every day, staff members at the New York Times aren't doing that. So I am definitely going to come across stories and information that only I would know about and their staff wouldn't know about.
Here's something I think about. Why isn't it that staff at the New York Times and virtually any of the major media institutes, why aren't they thinking about this topic more frequently? You'd have to ask them, Kurt. I don't know. I mean, except that, you know, there's still a stigma and that stigma is definitely still at play. And the New York Times covers so many topics they would consider
to be way more important than this, such as the war in Ukraine, you know, all kinds of things. They certainly have gone with the Chinese balloon story, but that's not really the kind of story we're talking about. So I really can't answer that. And it's especially mystifying to me because the stories that we've done so far have gotten huge attention for the New York Times.
You know huge number of people viewing them the readers obviously loved the stories and want more But I can't speak for them. I just know that it they don't cover it on a regular basis They will cover things like a hearing that takes place in Washington or when the report comes out near the ODNI report They have one of their people cover that So
Yeah, I don't know. People would have to ask them, people have to write to the editorial department, write to them and say, we want to see more coverage of this. But I can't speak for them. But I do know that that stigma is pretty powerful at the New York Times, maybe more so there than a lot of other media because they are considered the paper of record and they're very cautious.
And the Chinese balloon story, you're referring to what happened in Yukon? Yeah, I'm referring to everything starting with the shooting down of the Chinese balloon going forward from that. I mean, that's been such a huge thing in the media and the Times has been doing a lot of coverage on that. And Helene Cooper's been part of that.
Can you walk us through that storyline and the North American issues that have popped up as a couple weeks ago? I wish I, you know, I have been so busy in the last few days with other stuff. I wish I don't feel like I'm as informed about this as I would like to be. But, you know, as we all know, there were there was first the Chinese balloon that was shot down.
which was clearly a spy balloon, and that was made very clear, shot down over the Atlantic Ocean, and then over this past weekend we had three more objects shot down, right? We had one in Alaska on February 2nd, which they said was about the size of a small car, another one in Yukon, Canada, on February 3rd, and then another one over Lake Huron on, I believe, February 4th. I think those were the dates and, you know, they're just these small objects and we don't
There has been no definitive, I mean, not enough of a definitive statement, let's put it that way, about what they actually were or are. And they're having trouble collecting the debris. But so there's, there's a kind of chaos around all of this. And it's become this sort of
you know it's been kind of heightened and there's escalation that's been going on every day around this topic and I just think I mean it's clear to me that these are not alien objects and that's been stated even though that some people say the door is still open but clearly they're not they're most likely Chinese and you know it's it's a little confusing as to why
that has not been stated more clearly. I don't know if people aren't talking to each other. There's not an organized messaging that's going on around it. They haven't found the debris from the objects, so they maybe don't feel comfortable saying definitively what they are, although I suspect they do know what they are. So, I don't know. The objects are clearly not
ET though. Why do you say they're clearly not? The statement has been made by the press secretary for Biden who said that they have no indication that they're extraterrestrial. There are Air Force officials that have said the same thing and they don't behave in any, they don't demonstrate the kind of behaviors that we're used to when something is extraterrestrial.
I have sources that have told me, also from the intelligence community, that they're Chinese, basically. I think the bigger issue here has to do with the geopolitical dynamics between China and the United States. There's a lot going on, I think, behind the scenes around all of this that
We're not privy to and hopefully over time more will come out. They don't want to state publicly this is Chinese because it would cause more of a conflict than they would like. I, you know, I don't know if they're just not 100% certain or if they're yeah, there may be reasons why they don't want to say it or they want to use this UFOs as kind of a cover. So they're sort of hedging it.
or they're just not clear. And maybe some of the Congress people feel they've been left out and they want to know more. And then one person says this and somebody else says that and it's just messy. But I think there's, you know, there's more that we I'm sure will come out over time, but I just, I feel clear that these are not, we don't have to speculate that these are some kind of non-human technology or something. I really don't think that's the case.
I'm going to read a comment from Ross Coulthart and I'll put it on the screen because it's fairly wordy. I asked him for a question and he gave me a comment. So you can just comment on his comment. Just so people know, he has been really focused on this and he's brilliant and he's, you know, he's really, really been monitoring everything and thinking a lot about it more than I have. So let his comment carry the day. Sure.
There is clearly dissent between sections of the Pentagon, notably the US Air Force and the White House. When National Security Advisor Jake Kirby saw that the DOD had publicly briefed journalists these objects were likely balloons, he clearly knew enough to directly overrule that assumption. They are not balloons. You do not fire sidewinder missiles at balloons, and balloons do not have the structure clearly described by the pilots. Someone tried to lie to the public, and for the first time in decades, the White House has overruled that lie.
Fascinating, right? And I mean, I agree with Ross, and also the White House has said that they want to set up their own agency to look into this, which was kind of a shock too, because we have the Arrow Department of Defense entity doing its job, and now suddenly the president announces that he wants to set up another task force. So
Yeah, it's all these contradictory issues that are going on at once as Ross points out and hopefully it's gonna it'll smooth itself out over time. Did you receive a considerable amount of pushback or reproach from your article from the 2017-2019 one? You mean by like skeptics or? From the editorial teams at the New York Times or from your colleagues or from the broader community. I'm curious to know where does the pushback come from and where does the adulation come from? Where does the praise come from?
Yeah, I mean, I think the story was just so explosive that, you know, I mean, it changed everything, you know.
So, I don't know. I'm sure there are people that have criticisms of it. And I know that, you know, we didn't reference the OSAP program, which has upset some people. But I don't know, it's hard for me to answer, like, where does criticism come from? Where does praise come from? I mean, it was just like this was
set off like a cannonball, you know, reverberated around the world. And I think the focus was just, oh my God, look, these are real and the Pentagon studying them. And what's going to happen now? I mean,
We were not focused. I don't remember getting people critical at the time, the time this thing came out. And yeah, I mean, Harry Reid was on the record and he didn't object to anything in the story. I mean, it was all, you know, let's go, moving it forward here. That was really the point of it.
And the fact that this was explosive to me indicates that the public is so desperate to hear about this topic. I was speaking to Ryan Graves recently. Actually, Ryan Graves has a podcast for people who don't know it's called merged and he interviewed me on the podcast, which should come out in a few weeks. And I say that I don't think there's a stigma. I think we have a collective illusion of stigma and I
I go into this topic called collective illusions, which means we behave one way in public because we believe other people behave that same way. In the 1960s, most southerners were against segregation, but they thought that their neighbor was for it. So they would say, no, I'm for it. And I believe that stigma is similar where we feel like other people stigmatize it so we don't talk about it much. And that's why what you did is extremely important. What Ryan Graves is extremely important, legitimizing the issue by getting people to talk about it.
So I don't think we have a stigma problem, I think we have a cowardice problem. And the fact that your article was explosive indicates that people want this topic. There are people that I interview, math professors, physics professors, that you would think they're the skeptical type. They come to me afterward and say, Kurt, why aren't more people talking about this top subject? I'm like, why don't you bring that up on the podcast? Like show that you're interested in it.
Yeah, I mean, that's basically what I mean by a stigma. I mean, I think your point's valid. Yeah, people are afraid to say what they really feel because they think other people won't accept it. But that's really how a stigma operates. I mean, why are they afraid to say it? Because there's this taboo because they are afraid they'll be ridiculed or not respected.
And so it's all, I mean, I think it's just, you're basically saying, you know, we're basically saying the same thing. It just depends on how people operate in the face of that stigma. But I mean, I just, you know, there is still this hesitation, however you want to describe it, to be public about it. But it's changing rapidly. It's changing rapidly. I think more and more people are not afraid of it now.
Yeah, great, great, great. So what's some of the most compelling evidence that you've seen on this, which we've referred to earlier, which is a synonym for the phenomenon that it's not something terrestrial, it's something that's extraordinary in a sense, or if it is terrestrial could be a breakaway civilization, but I mean, it's not something ordinary. Yeah, well, I mean, the huge question. I mean, the best I mean, I think what what's really compelling to me is to look back into the 50s and 60s.
back in a time when we, you know, it's really hard to imagine that the technology that we're observing could have existed then. I mean, now many cases could be American technology or maybe even Russian or Chinese, right? But in those early days, it's just inconceivable that any country had the technology that was observed. And the optics being observed then demonstrated the same behaviors that we see now.
and our government was very very concerned about it and it was the Cold War so they made sure to try to make it go away and not let the public become involved and that's when all the programs for ridicule and everything else became operative but how could that have been Russian, Chinese or American technology back in those early days? I mean that is a very basic question and then you can look back at the government documents from the time and see what kinds of observations were made
And, you know, it has to do too with the credibility of the people observing these things as, you know, as General Samford said in that famous speech in 1952 after those flyovers in Washington, D.C., you know, credible, what did he say, credible observers of, you know, these people, credible observers of relatively incredible things. I mean, and this has been going on for decades. There are hundreds and hundreds of reports
that are very hard to explain away. And so, you know, you put it all together and you have this picture. And I think for me personally, it's also about people that I have talked to with clearances, many of them off the record for years, who from whom I have learned a lot and who have helped, you know, validate for me a lot of things that, you know, are off the record. So I can't talk about them. But
you know when you put it all together it's like if you just spend years digging into this if it wasn't if it was something explainable right if you dig into something for years and years then the more you discover the more you'll you'll you'll get towards an explanation you know you'll start to get to the truth which would be well this could be explained this way or that way but it's the opposite it's like the more you study it
the more it becomes unexplainable. And I'm talking about only the very best information. Military documents, military observers, cases involving multiple levels of evidence such as radar and photographs and multiple witnesses that are military or pilots or police officers, just a wealth of data. And you see the behavior of these objects. And I'm sure, I mean,
You know, of course, most sightings that people have can be explained. So once you narrow it down to the ones that are really spectacular, for which there's enough evidence that you can eliminate at least any known explanation according to it being manmade, right? Or at least as far as anybody would know at that time, if it's not super, super, super secret.
you just you just see over and over and over again these things happening and eventually you know there's plenty of evidence as as well documented and now you know we have our our government acknowledging that now we have uh... u s government involved in not you know in investigating something here so they're not wasting their time investigating something that doesn't exist or something that they feel they can easily explain so i mean we don't have the answers yet but
There are so many interesting cases and so much history to this, and it takes a long time to wrap that in your mind around all of that, but it's hard to imagine that all these cases that we know about that are on the record could all be explained through some conventional explanation when they've been studied as thoroughly as they have been by the best people with the ability to do that.
And then the whole realm of classified information, we have to constantly remind ourselves that, I mean, I think Lou Elizondo said, I forget the percentage, he said, maybe 10% of what the public knows is out, you know, we might know maybe 10% of what is known on the classified level about this phenomenon.
so we have to constantly remind ourselves of that that there's so much more and if it was something easily explainable i think we'd know by now i i think the navy would have been happy to tell us the gimbal video was an airplane if if that's what they hear that sound
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Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories figured out it was and you know they have enough expertise and enough experts to go to within their realm of within you know all the agencies that they have access to
To get that video analyzed properly and make a decision based on not only a video itself, but the classified information they have that goes along with it that we don't even have. You know, so if that video is explainable, they'd be happy to tell us that.
You mentioned that the way that it ordinarily works when you investigate a topic, so let's say physics or particle physics, there's a pruning of the possibility tree down and down and down to a singular solution, generally. But in this one, it seems like more and more questions open up. Can you walk us through your mental models? What did you think? What did you learn? And why did that change? And what did it change to? I'll try. It's a big question. I mean, when I first started, you know, I received this report from
Some French officials. I don't know. I don't know how if people have probably heard me talk about this before this French report called the Kometa report and basically these high-level French officials that study this thing for a number of years and they were admirals and generals and police officers and Engineers and people like that and they had that they had written in this report what they called the extraterrestrial hypothesis, right and
They said they thought these cases could best be explained through that hypothesis, and it was only an hypothesis. It couldn't be proven. But it was a sort of notion that we're being visited, as I said earlier, being visited from somewhere else. And so I think for the whole first 10 years of my, or maybe more,
of my work on this, I kind of held in my mind that the ones that aren't explainable, I agree with those generals and admirals, they're most likely explainable through the extraterrestrial hypothesis. And that was sort of the way I viewed it, you know. And my next story was about aviation safety issues and about these objects flying around and impacting aircraft. But it was always about, they're physical objects that have come from somewhere else. It's fairly simple.
And then, you know, over time, I just learned more about the more, the more what they call high strangeness aspects of this related phenomenon, you know, things that affect people's minds. It's all kind of what I said before, Kurt. You know, Jacques Vallee has been writing about this for decades. I mean, Jacques Vallee, the famous UFO writer and researcher and investigator and scientist,
has always had a theory about UFOs that was much broader and all-encompassing than the extraterrestrial hypothesis. And a lot of people didn't like him for that. And now I think it's, you know, we can see that he was really ahead of his time because now we're just more aware of the multi-dimensional complicated aspects of the way the phenomenon manifests itself. And I mean, books like Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, for instance,
which document some of the things that happened related to the skinwalker ranch and which you know one of the things that's always stuck with me was the description of this blue orb that went into the body of a man who was driving a car and his daughter was with him and it actually penetrated his body and then he became severely ill after that
Now, something like that, that's not a physical craft that's come from another planet, right? It's something else. And these orbs are described by a lot of people. And so the phenomenon just takes on this broader umbrella. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock.
I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock. Over time. And I wasn't so aware of that earlier in my career. And it's harder to write about because
When I'm writing for the New York Times, I'm not going to go into that kind of stuff because it all has to happen in steps. You know, the members of Congress are not really interested in that. They just want to deal with the national security implications of these physical objects flying around our Navy ships, you know, but they did include in legislation, which was passed. You know, they had the legislation this year and legislation last year.
that they wanted psychological and medical effects on people to be studied and reported to Congress. So there is an acknowledgement on their part that they're aware of the broader, some of the broader implications of this and then how it, how it can affect people. And if it was just, yeah. So, I mean, it's hard for me to describe it, but I just, I have much more of a sense that it's really is difficult to explain what this thing is. And then it has so many more components to it.
than I ever realized before and it's connected to consciousness and it's connected to other dimensions and it's uh manifests in all kinds of strange ways and some of the phenomena at Skinwalker Ranch you have to ask are those really UAP or are they something else?
What is the borderline where it's not UAP anymore? That's something I was thinking. When we say that there's this phenomenon and then we keep talking about how it's so varied, what is the relationship between them all aside from it being anomalous, which by the way, someone knocks on my door and I open it and no one's there, that's anomalous. We wouldn't call that part of the phenomenon unless there was also a blue light associated with it or some orbit and so on. What is it that strings these together such that we can even put the label to categorize them as the phenomenon?
That's such a good question. It really is. I mean, I think sometimes maybe it's not clear. But I mean, I think as far as the Pentagon is concerned, I mean, they have their, their characteristics that relate to the way they behave, they have their physical, their data showing that the presence of some object
They're more focused on the physicality of it and the national security implications. So there's a whole universe that they can sort of wrap around that, you know, and not the rest of it doesn't really come into play. But for other people who are more interested in this in a bigger way, that's where those questions come into play. Where do you draw that long line? I don't know. You know, when is it a UAP and when is it something else?
And I think probably people have their own ways of seeing that in terms of how they personally interpret what that term actually means. I don't think we have any set agreed upon definition of what characterizes an unidentified anomalous phenomenon and what doesn't. I mean just that term unidentified anomalous phenomenon
Yeah, that's, you know, is so broad. We don't even have aerial in there anymore, you know? Yeah. So that it's partly because they wanted to be able to include the ones that go in the water, but it broadens it up to mean who knows what, right? Yeah. So, yeah, it's just a fascinating, fascinating question to ponder. And there's so many such a variety of experiences that people have had engaging with these things that you don't know even almost how to define it anymore.
It's not like what you're saying with physics. You can just get down to one equation, right? It's like the opposite is happening with this. It's like it just gets less that way over time. Although there's more data being collected at the same time, you know, but there's another dimension, I think, of the phenomenon that's not... You can't pin it down. It's just not something that... It's almost like science isn't the right tool sometimes to even try and capture this. It's beyond our capability at some level.
What is the connection between UAPs and consciousness? Does human consciousness in some way determine
not just the presence of the UFO, but does it play a role in how a person perceives it or what kind of experience a person might have in connection to that phenomenon? I mean, for instance, there will be witnesses to the same phenomenon, but their experience of it is each person perceives it in a different way. They'll describe it differently. They'll have a different kind of experience.
what is that about is that because of the consciousness of the of the human being that's in the presence of this thing even though the thing itself was just something out there you know it's it's like um and also sometimes people have an encounter and then they develop these abilities you know such as clairvoyance or telepathy they develop kind of more psychic powers or however you want to describe it after that
as if their consciousness has been impacted in some level that we don't understand. They're able to perceive more on the realm of the paranormal than they were before. And then there's questions about whether it's connected to what people consider to be the afterlife, where we go when we die. People are studying that question a lot.
It's mysterious. And then the whole question of time, how we define time comes into play. I mean, there's a series on Netflix called Dark. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's a German series, but it's really profoundly deals with the question of time travel. And it has a lot of messaging in that show that I think relates to how we perceive this phenomenon and what the deeper level of it is.
And so, you know, you can just keep going, peeling back the layers and peeling back the layers and you go to places with this that just expand your mind and you can't contain them in a certain way. Take us through your journey into the studies of afterlife then, please. Yeah, well, that's something I could spend three hours talking about, but I'll try. I have the time. I have the time, Leslie. The door is open. I would not put you through that.
So after my UFO book came out and then I did a series based on my book. I did a TV special for History Channel in 2011 based on the book. And after that, I kind of felt like I'm kind of ready to explore something else for a while. And I've always been interested in this question of survival past death. And so it just naturally evolved. My publisher came back to me and said, do you want to write about something else? Right at the moment where I was thinking about, I wanted to write about that.
And so it was just this synchronicity really. And I jumped into that book with some awareness of what I was going to write about. But it was really a journey for me in the way that the UFO book wasn't because I didn't know where that book was going to go. I knew the topics of research that I wanted to cover, but I learned a lot as I went along. And I also lost my younger brother during the process of writing the book.
And so it became a more personal journey for me because I was, for instance, one of the things I covered in the book was mediumship, which is, and you know, most people think it's completely bogus. You're just talking about people in, you know, have a sign in their window saying they can come in and they have a crystal ball or something like that. It's not like that. There's some very skilled individuals out there.
who can access information that appears to be coming from a deceased person. And so I had some profound experiences with some mediums in which my brother and my friend Bob Hopkins, who I had actually been with when he died in 2011, both seem to be communicating to me through this medium. So
How do you separate that from cold reading?
That's usually when you're physically with the person. So in these readings I had, one of them was on the phone. I couldn't even see it. The person couldn't even see me. And the second one was on Skype. She didn't know anything about me. She just saw me sitting in a room with a blank wall. But a cold reading, it's a way of manipulation. So like they'll get information from somebody in the room and then they'll assume certain things. They'll come back with other questions to kind of
Trick people into certain kinds of answers. I mean, I wrote about it in my book. I don't remember all the details. It's just a way of kind of creating a phony perception that there is this dead person there. The thing about a cold reading is it doesn't have the kind of specific information that I was talking about in the readings that I had where
just endless specific very very specific information is delivered that this medium couldn't possibly know that I'm not revealing hints about in any way and it's also the personality of the deceased person comes through you know none of these things happen with a cold reading they're they're just much more vague and it's just another order you know of experience I mean there's no there's no comparison and that's just one
You want to know what the best evidence is for survival after death. I don't think it's something we can prove, but there are so many areas to draw from. One of them is young children who remember past lives. Very young children.
Investigators are able to verify their memories by locating the actual person that they said they were because they provide enough details to be able to do that and this is you're talking two and three year olds who didn't you know have never been exposed to anything related to that previous person with all kinds of emotional reactivity and sometimes knowledge of
of skills that that previous person had that a three-year-old would never otherwise know, you know, a lot of things like this. Very interesting and compelling cases that were studied by researchers at the University of Virginia for a long time. And then you have these near-death experiences which I think people know about where you go into, you know, you apparently don't have any
you're not, you're basically clinically dead when these things happen and you leave your body and you go off into this afterlife realm and you come back and people's lives are forever to change because of that and there are certain characteristics of those experiences that are consistent throughout the world and those have been studied by many scientists, medical doctors, you know, and these are the people I drew from in my book to really get to the bottom of what those experiences are about
And then there's things that happen to people at the very end of life, when they're dying, that seem to be communications with the other side, you know, there's investigators in the UK that have studied these cases, and then there's mediumship, and there's both mental and physical mediumship, they're two different things. After death communications, I'm sure a lot of people have experienced that, where you
You've lost someone you love and you're probably grieving when these things happen and you sense, you have some kind of experience where you feel that you are getting a communication from that person. You don't need a medium for that. You can get a direct communication. It can come in many forms and it's absolutely unprovable. It's totally subjective.
but there's a sense of knowing when something like that happens and it's very meaningful to the person receiving it and I bet a lot of the listeners right now have had those kinds of experiences and most people don't talk about them or they do just among their family members or their close friends but it's it's very I had a number of these events happen to me when I lost my brother and it's just very very in some ways
more compelling evidence for an individual than any of the research could ever be because it's your own experience of something. So that's another, and those have also been studied. There have been statistical studies on them and all kinds of studies by psychologists and people like that. Yeah. And then there's apparitions that are actually interactive. I'm not just talking about, you see a ghost somewhere, but I'm talking about something that appears to be conscious that doesn't have a body.
that's actually responsive to a human, the action of a human being, like if you wave to it, it waves back, something like that, which you're seeing this ghostly form and it responds to you and that suggests that there's an actual consciousness there. And then you can pick up, there's one case in my book where you're able, actually this young boy was able to actually pick up messages from that entity which was in their house and everybody in the family was seeing it.
and the entity revealed enough information about herself that they were able to confirm that she was the person who had previously lived in the house, and nobody knew anything about her when they moved in. So, you know, that's a very strong case of an apparition that's evidential. It's not just the same as somebody saying, oh, I was in a haunted house and I saw a ghost, you know. There's really a high level way you can study
the best of the best when it comes to evidence for these kinds of things. And that's what I tried to bring together in my book called Surviving Death, a journalist investigates evidence for an afterlife, which came out in 2017. And there was a series on Netflix with the same title. It's actually there now. It came out in 2021, I think. It's a six part series on Netflix called Surviving Death, which also covers a lot of this stuff. And I think people might enjoy seeing that. So
Yeah, so in my book I tried to bring together the best evidence from all these different areas and kind of consolidate them into one volume where you really only have to look at this if you want to get a sense of what's being done in all these very areas of research and also read direct testimonies of people who have had near-death experiences, people who have studied mediums. A lot of people wrote their own chapters in my book just like they did for my UFO book.
Anyway, I just think there's a lot of compelling evidence, but it's not provable because, you know, when you're dead, you're not, unless you can die and come back some way that you can actually prove it, which we can't do, but it's just suggestive and it's fascinating to ponder and think about. I mean, it depends on what your personal definition is of proof, right? Some people feel that if they've just had a certain kind of a dream of someone or they've felt like they've had a communication from someone, that's enough for them.
When people encounter UFOs and they develop some of these extraordinary psychic abilities, is that related to the hitchhiker effect?
And I don't know, I don't know if people who have had the Hitchhiker effect have developed these other abilities. I actually don't know. Maybe they have. But it's not, the Hitchhiker effect is not something I would ever want to have happen to me, I'll tell you that. I wouldn't go near that ranch, that Skinwalker Ranch, if I were anybody out there. So I don't know. You'd have to, I mean, I'm sure that that information is probably out there. I don't know how they were affected by that.
Can you briefly outline Skinwalker, as it's been mentioned a couple times, and I know that several people may be new to this whole phenomenon. So briefly, if you can give an outline as to what Skinwalker is. Yeah, I mean, it's a large track of land in Utah that was purchased by Robert Bigelow back in the 90s, I believe, and was... Hear that sound?
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Studied by his group, which was called NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science, and then eventually sold it, and now it's being studied by another team of people. But it was a location where a lot of paranormal stuff was going on.
And so the studies that NIDS did did, you know, extraordinarily, you know, accurate and detailed documentation of some of these events. And the documents are with the DIA right now. I don't think a lot or with Robert Bigelow, they haven't come out. But books have been written about it by George Knapp and Colin Callagher, who was involved, and Jim Lakatsky, three of them wrote the most recent book. And basically, there were just a lot of very weird
phenomena that went on there such as animal mutilations and beings that seem to come through portals and you know that you mentioned the hitchhiker effect where people would have encounters with strange things when they were there and then they'd go home and the thing would seem to follow them home and they'd have events happening in their home that hadn't happened before which would end up involving their whole family so it's it's just
and there were UFOs there too but there was a whole range of other strange things that are more like poltergeist kind of effects or you know weird portals and I mean those are things I think of animal mutilations very you know a lot of dark very unpleasant things going on there were I think it's come out that there was some nuclear waste buried near you're there and there are
you know, things to do with the land around there that could be impacting this, but I think there's still, there's ongoing studies to try to figure out what's going on in that location. Do you happen to know if some of these studies are open to people who aren't a part of NIDS or the Bigelow Institute? For instance, I'm thinking as someone who has a background in math and physics, like say to the people in the physics or the math or the skeptic community, hey, James Randi or Penn and Teller or Michael Sherman or Neil deGrasteis,
Hey, come here. Here's an open ticket. In fact, we'll pay for your flight and your hotel. The hotel is the Skinwalker. Come stay here. Bring whatever equipment you like. It's fairly reliable in that something occurs once a week or three times per week or whatever the frequency is. It's repeatable in that sense. Are you aware of any such invitations or studies that are conducted by people who don't own the ranch or aren't associated with the ranch?
I don't know because I am not connected to it at all, but I don't know how they work. You'd have to get in touch with the people who are now there. It's no longer in the hands of Robert Bigelow and his team. There were physicists that were there, but
It's a great question. I mean, if a skeptic wanted to go there with his equipment, I have no idea what they would say. I'm not going to speak for them. I believe the current owner is Fugl. Is that correct? Brandon Fugl. Correct. Brandon Fugl. Yeah. So yeah, all you skeptics out there. Yeah. See if you can get on that property. But I don't recommend it because then you might get some weirdness following you home. So, you know,
Some people say they'd rather be the informed sufferer than the ignorant pig. I don't know about that. I think that's just a form of intellectual grandstanding. I think that people would beg for the rewind button. Yeah, I still wouldn't want those creepy things coming into my house, but I understand that approach too. Continuing on this thread of studies that have been done on the afterlife, they're catalogued in your book, correct?
Yeah, I mean, the book covers them, and there are chapters written by some of the investigators themselves. There's great stories about people who have had amazing near-death experiences. Yeah, it's all there. And there's a huge list as an index in the back, so it references all kinds of papers and books and places where people can go to get more information.
And the most powerful kind of study is a peer-reviewed study. Sorry, that's not the most powerful kind, but that's something that is given plenty of credence. Are there peer-reviewed studies in that book? Yes. I mean, some, I think that the near, some of the near-death experiences, definitely there was one paper that was published, oh my God, by Pimba, Lomol and Thiem, in one of the major, I wish I could remember the name, but one of the major science journals. I don't think it was science, but one of the leading, Lancet or something, one of the leading medical journals.
I know there have been studies on mediumship that have been peer-reviewed.
I'm so happy speaking with you because when I ask you a question about evidence or studies, you don't even bat an eye. You don't take it as an offensive question. And there's some people who I've interviewed more in the UFO scene that they see that as an attack on their legitimacy. And I understand because it's such a contentious topic, but it's refreshing when someone says, oh, yeah, and here it is, or, oh, we can't prove and so on. So I appreciate that.
Well, thanks. I mean, yeah, I don't see why that would be. I mean, obviously, I'm I want I'm not my my interest is for the general public for the, you know, to become more aware of all of this. So, yeah, it's a natural question to ask. Well, what's the evidence? And then it's natural to want to share that. And I'm sure there's things I didn't think of. I mean, part of it for me is I don't have everything in my brain because I've been at this for so long.
and so i can't i'm sure like afterwards i'll think oh i wish i said that or that i'm sure there's things i'm not thinking of but um yeah i mean that's what it's all about
If there's enough time, if you can get your book Surviving Death and find two or three studies just to say aloud because some people are driving listening to this so that they can look it up later and say, oh, I would like to look at the study by so and so. OK, I think there's I think the realm of the near death experience is one of the ones that has the most published peer review papers. But there's in other fields there are two. But the one I mentioned to you is December 2001 in The Lancet, which I think is, you know, one of the leading medical journals.
I mean, I know it is. It's one of the leading medical journals. And it's, you know, there's four authors to it. I can give you their names and you want it's called. OK, Pim van Lommel, he's probably the lead author and he wrote a chapter in my book. He's been setting near-death experiences forever. He's a medical doctor and from the Netherlands. And then the second one is Ruud van Wees, Vincent Myers and Ingrid Elferich. Elferich.
Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest. A prospective study in the Netherlands is the title. It's in the Lancet 358 and then, you know, in 2001 and I've got the name of the, you know, the reference numbers that you need to access it. And then there's some other studies here. Here's another one.
A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidents features an etiology of near-death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors. That's in a journal called Resuscitation. It has one, two, three, four authors, one of them being Sam Parnia, who's the lead author. He's very well known. He's a resuscitation expert. That's his field, and he's done a lot of work on this.
And then there's another one, a prospectively studied near-death experience with corroborated out-of-body perception and unexplained healing in the Journal of Near-Death Studies. I don't know if that's peer review, but I think it is. Another one by Bruce Grayson, incidents and correlates of near-death experiences in a cardiac care unit. It's in the journal called the General Hospital Psychiatry. Okay, that's enough and I will put some of the links in the description.
Thank you for that. What does disclosure mean to you? When people say we, I want disclosure. Some people, by the way, say disclosure has occurred. In which case I say, by man, you have such a disconnect from the people who are clamoring for more evidence and it's just such a removal of yourself from the community that I feel like I don't know if we're speaking the same language when we say disclosure has occurred. But some people say that and I'm sure they have their reasons.
Yeah, and I think I think the fact that people do have different perceptions of it means that we don't really know what it means. I mean, it means I've always thought that that term I never quite, you know, was on the disclosure wagon for all the years that that term has been tossed around. I never I think people have different perceptions of what it means. But my perception is that it would mean an official statement
Basically saying that we're not alone in whatever form that statement might take. An acknowledgement of the fact that, I mean, and some people think it means an acknowledgement of the fact that we've known about this since 1947. I mean, I don't know. It's not a term that I use or that I identify with very much. So it's really up to those who use that term to tell you what it means.
I find it so tricky because even if the government did quote-unquote disclose some fact or set of facts, it's not as if we would believe it. Even if they say, hey, we're not alone. We would say, well, prove it. Or we have bodies. Show me. Or we don't have bodies. Prove that. We don't believe you. You've lied to us so much. And further, even if they disclose to me, like Lou mentioned, what we know is 10%, a partial truth can be a lie. In some sense, a partial disclosure is worse than no disclosure.
There are several cases you can convince yourself of that telling a bit of a truth is much more misleading than saying nothing at all. It's just a tricky word for me, disclosure. To me, disclosure would be that the scientific community has access to some of the data, or all of the data. It has to come through, otherwise it's just we're believing them. Well, maybe disclosure will be when the Galileo project, led by Avi Loeb at Harvard, actually gets some data. Maybe it'll be the scientists that'll make it happen. People think of it as being
up to the government to make it happen, but you just raise an interesting point. It's like, where are the scientists in this? And so the Galileo project is, you know, they're going to set up their own means of capturing data that may disclose, may be able to be proven to be technology from somewhere else or an object from somewhere else. You know, so
We don't really know what it means, I think, and what form it might take, and maybe it's a process that happens in stages, which is why some people think it's already happened, because certain stages of it have happened. I mean, if step one was for the government to acknowledge that UFOs are real objects, they've done that, and they had not done that before, you know, June of 21, or maybe they did a little earlier, but certainly not before 2017. They had not acknowledged any of that.
You know, since the close of Blue Book, it was like silence and it was ignoring cases that no, ignore events that happen. And if you can't ignore them, you make up something or you try to say something to make them go away. And that was been the approach of the government in all those decades. So, you know, even that is a level of disclosure. And maybe that's what people are talking about when they say it's already happened. Some people feel that the government documents released in the 1970s,
our disclosure that basically they show that UFOs are real and a lot of the documents from the fifties describe the perception that they were not from earth that they were interplanetary or whatever you know so how do you define it I think that's I think I mean my perception has always been that the real disclosure people are talking about some massively dramatic
official government statement that takes us to another level than where we've been so far. I don't know if that's going to happen. But, you know, I mean, I think one thing people think about is if some of these witnesses who are coming forward now to Congress and to Arrow do come up with information about crashed objects or even debris that has been that have been studied enough to prove that they're not from here.
If that was ever to be released, perhaps that's a form of disclosure, perhaps that's a form of proof. The question is, will that happen? And if they do report these things to Congress, first of all, Congress or ARRO or everybody involved with this investigation will have to track it down and make sure it's accurate and verified for themselves. Then the question becomes, do we make this public or not? What are the risks in doing that? Maybe it won't be made public, you know, so
But I think we get closer and closer to something like that happening the more time that passes. And a lot of people have expectations that this
The process that's underway now, people are already involved with it. That maybe it will lead to something like that.
Let's jump off the speculative end and say what would be some of the reasons that the government would not tell the citizens of something extraordinary occurring other than wanting the technology so that they can outpace China or Russia. For instance, one reason would be panic, but what would be some other reasons?
Yeah, I mean, panic is a broad term, but it could be this sort of the destabilization of a society that might occur if people were really freaked out about it. I mean, I think that protecting technology is the number one, protecting data that we don't want our adversaries to have.
But number two, yeah, could be the impact on society. Number three could be concerns about, you know, going after people who, you know, trying to convict people or going after people who have been involved with keeping the secret over so many years, trying to take them to court or whatever, you know, kind of a vendetta going on. A lot of anger that we haven't been told sooner.
You know, it's loaded. I think if something like this does come out, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some kind of amnesty for those from the past who were doing what they thought they needed to do and were told to do. But then, you know, there's questions of crimes that may have been committed, of people who were harmed or even killed.
To keep them quiet, I mean, you know, it opens up such a can of worms. And maybe there's a way for something to come out in which the past is not dragged along with it, which I personally think would make a lot more sense and be cleaner and for us to just focus on the present, what we know now,
and not get bogged down in digging through the past and all the misdeeds that occurred for all kinds of complicated reasons. And I don't know, some people might not like me saying that, but I don't think it's productive personally. So, and then there, you know, there could be other reasons. I mean, maybe the explanations that our government is withholding for us are much
scarier than we might think, or there's a acknowledgement that has to be made of a lack of power that we might have, or our military might have, a lack of ability to control this phenomenon, to keep people safe. That, of course, is connected to what you're saying about panic, but, you know, the implications that it might have
The fact that it's a gradual unfoldment probably makes a lot of sense. You don't want to shock people. You don't want to disrupt the structures that we have in society that could be impacted by this. And some people believe, Kurt, that
It really isn't going to be a big deal for if this announcement were made some people believe and if you know people have pie levels that who have been involved with this thing for a long time that it really won't be a big deal and then most people just won't be that concerned about it. I mean we have to remember that the people who are interested in this topic are a very small number. We kind of get we're so involved that we think it's it's reality it's life right but there's so many people that are just concerned about
paying their bills and doing their jobs and raising their kids. And the question for them would be, well, yeah, that's kind of interesting, but it doesn't affect my life. And if it's not anything that I have to worry about or be scared of, for me and my family, then I don't really care that much. And I'm just going to go about my life, you know, it's not necessarily going to affect everyone.
Some people don't have a curiosity about stuff either. They're just focused on their daily lives and they're struggling to survive every day. So it's so hard to predict how it might impact people, I think. Tom DeLonge has intimated that it could be that the government is benevolent and that they're withholding for a positive reason, not something that is a power struggle.
or because they're trying to increase their influence and dominance and so on. I don't recall his reasoning for that, but do you remember? You mean positive, what he's saying is that it's a good thing it's being withheld. Yeah, that when we find out, we'll thank them, something like that. Could be. I mean, it could be. That's what I mean about if it's something frightening, you know, maybe every element of that is not going to be helpful for people to know about. I mean, I can understand the thinking along those lines.
Right? What's it gonna... Do you want to terrify and depress everybody in the society when they learn, you know, about what's going on that they never even imagined was going on? I mean, it's a valid question. What good would it do? Would you want to learn it some truth if it was terrifying and depressing? I definitely do. I want to know the truth. And part of it is because I've been involved with this for a long time. And I already think things look pretty dire in the world anyway. So, you know, I always want to know
I think the majority of the people in the comments section agree with you. Have you read the Dark Forest or heard of the remembrance of Earth's past? I haven't.
Okay, I'll give a two-minute explanation. See, here's something that I think about frequently. I think that if you haven't found the bounds that could be revealed to you, such as you would want to rewind time and you would wish, oh my gosh, I wish I didn't know, I wish I didn't investigate, I wish I didn't fly too close to the sun. For instance, in AI, if the people who are behind the development of machine learning, like open AI people, can't see how their technology can go terribly, terribly wrong, if they haven't thought about that, then they shouldn't be developing it. And same with the people who are developing the nuclear bomb, like Richard Feynman and so on. He said if we were just having fun as physicists,
And Einstein even said, later, I wish I could burn my hands. I would never have signed off on this had I thought about the implications. So, in The Dark Forest, it's a book series that's called The Remembrance of Earth's Past.
There's this Chinese scientist who found a way to communicate with other galaxies and she says to respond to us if we're not alone, something like that. Someone answers back from a different galaxy and says, if you know what's good for you, do not send out any more messages. The universe is a hostile, hostile place. Anyway, I'm not going to go more into the book, but she doesn't listen and there are dire consequences. So what frightens you about this phenomenon? Um,
I mean, I can't really say that I'm frightened personally, but I'm more, I don't know, I'm not totally comfortable responding to that. How would I respond to what frightens me? I mean, I think the reality is, and you know, if you talk to someone like Jim Semivan or people that have actually encountered it, which I haven't, that it has complete power over us, right? It's way more advanced than we are, so
It can do whatever it wants. And I'm not saying that it has done anything harmful, but it's something more advanced than we are. And we're not so basically we're not at the top of the food chain, right? Even though we've always thought of ourselves as being at the top of the food chain, you know, we are the most intelligent, advanced species on the planet Earth. And really, that's not true.
There's another species, there's another life form or entity or consciousness, non-human consciousness, however you want to describe it, that is more advanced than we are. And it's a shock in our thinking to come to terms with that. I don't think most people are aware of that, but that's reality. And so you can be afraid of it because, you know, you're not in control. And
What if this, whatever this is, decides that it doesn't want human beings around anymore? It wants to use the planet for something else? There's nothing we can do about it. What keeps you up at night, Leslie? Nothing except maybe the trucks on the street of New York City. I mean, no. No, I
I'm not, I'm not really kept up. I'm not anxious. I mean, I'm just always trying to learn more. Um, so I wouldn't say I'm kept up at night. I'm a good sleeper. Can you tell us about the case in Brazil? The Farinha, I believe it's called for people who are unaware. Yeah. Virginia is how it's pronounced. I mean, people may have seen James Fox's film called moment of contact.
which just came out this past year. It's really worth seeing, but it's basically a fascinating case because it involved the capture of creatures. How are you going to describe them? Non-human creatures. There's a lot of interviews that James has done. We know that there are videos and pictures of these creatures that exist. They were in the hospital.
They died. Their bodies and debris from the incident were taken to the United States, apparently. It's a very, very involved case, which people have been looking into for years. And the people, the witnesses and people involved have been terrified to talk about it because of the threats that they've received. So I've been doing a little work on the medical. There was one police officer, military police officer, who actually was the one who grabbed
this entity when they were trying
documenting because he was in the hospital. He was treated by a bunch of doctors. There's all kinds of records about what happened to him. And so I have talked to some of the doctors that were involved and I've gotten some documents translated, which were autopsy reports done on him that are interesting, but it's an ongoing investigation. It's not, I don't have a whole lot to share about it yet.
And I hope to keep going with that, but it's really fascinating. And, you know, what's the potential in that case is so what's so explosive about it is that if we could actually document the reality of these entities, if they're, you know, and we know that the proof of that is there, it's just not coming out. But think how that if you talk about disclosure,
You know, think about that. If there could be proof, and this is in another country, so America, I'm sure America has a lot of control over what comes out, but maybe not complete control. And you just don't know if some of the people in Brazil that are sitting on this information might feel they can release it. So far, they haven't, and it's because they're terrified.
so the doctors they remember this person you just say hey do you recall a case from a few years ago about so-and-so no i mean this case was hugely famous it was covered you know by media and they all know about it so you know you know you just mentioned the name of the person who died and they know exactly who you're talking about
This is known throughout the world and it's been investigated for so long. It took place in the 1990s, so it was a while ago, but they definitely know what this is about, the people you talk to. Do you think that private corporations have more information on the phenomenon than the government? I don't know about more, but I think some of the aerospace companies who are contracted with the government probably have
Sure. Can you expand on how some private aerospace companies may have material? How do they come in possession of that? What do they do with it?
Well, I wish I knew more. Again, this is all super sensitive stuff, so I don't know that much about it, but I mean, I have been told by sources that aerospace companies definitely are involved. Harry Reid certainly strongly implied this in my one interview I did with him. And others have told me this, too. And, you know, but how it happens and what they know and all of those details, I don't know. That's all. I forget what your exact question was.
I just believe, and again another thing is the Wilson memo, that famous memo written by Eric Davis references aerospace companies being involved too. You can find it throughout, and I'm sure researchers who document all this stuff to people like Richard Dolan and others probably have a lot of information. They probably have it all organized in terms of every time it's been referenced.
What do you make of the Wilson memos and can you outline what they are for people who are unfamiliar?
Well, the Wilson document, or the Eric Davis memo, however you want to refer to it, was a series of notes recorded by Eric Davis, who's a physicist, with an absolute, unbelievable memory. And I've talked to that guy, the details that are in his brain.
are phenomenal. So it's conceivable that he could remember such a meeting. So he had a meeting with a man named Admiral Tom Wilson back in the 1990s. Again, I just don't remember the exact year, but and it was in a car. And then after the meeting was over, he made these notes about what happened in that meeting. And it's in that meeting, Admiral Wilson described how he had tried to get access to some of these special, he was
I think he was a Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Again, if I had known we were going to talk about this, I would have refreshed my memory before I came on. But he was very high level and he believed that he should if there were such a program which was looking into crashed objects of non-human origin that he would know. So he went banging on doors trying to find the location of these programs. And he was telling Eric Davis at this meeting that he had found one
And they acknowledged that they had a crashed object not made by human hands was the way they described it. These people in this program, but they were not going to allow him access. He was not on the bigot list of people who had access. And they basically told him to go away. And then he was told to keep his mouth shut by people about it and not to pursue this any further. And that's basically what I mean. I encourage it's fascinating to read this memo.
You have to go on and read it. And so Wilson has denied that the meeting ever happened and Eric cannot comment on it. So he doesn't say one way or the other. Exactly. Yeah, he's not going to comment on it. My colleague Ralph Blumenthal and I tried to dig into this and it's very hard to get any definitive on the record sources that could verify
anything around that memo, even though there's a lot of names in there and stuff like that. It's just impossible. I mean, there's been some great research done on it. I'm not the one who's done it by various people in the UFO research world and fantastic documents and long reports on this, which I'm trying to trouble naming right now. But
There's a lot of information out there about it. Yeah. And do you take Eric Davis's no comment as an admission of its veracity? Because if it was false, he would just say, no, it's false. Does he always say no comment no matter what?
well you have to look and again there are documents out there that have have everything eric has ever said about this written down you know so you can look and decide for yourself i personally know him i believe he's an honest individual he would not make so i don't believe personally he would make this up so i don't believe he did make it up and i know he has an extraordinary memory and
You know, I'll leave it at that. And if you want to analyze the way he's responded to questions about it, again, you can look. I bet there's somebody who could put in the chat right now the exact document I'm talking about. It came out within the last six months, I think this long detailed analysis under a pseudonym by somebody who analyzed that document in incredible detail. Somebody could probably put that in the chat right now. I just can't.
Who is Stuart Alexander and why is he important to the development of your work? Stuart Alexander is a physical medium who lives in the UK who I got involved studying his mediumship when I was writing my book Surviving Death and then I ended up having a lot of experiences with him that were really interesting and both from a you know journalistic perspective and from a personal perspective and I'm still very involved with this group that work with him and physical mediumship is a very strange
How long would that take? Five minutes to do that or much longer? I don't know. You want to try? Do you want to start? And then feel like, ah, no.
I mean, I can, I'll give a little synopsis, but I would. Yeah, because that's way too much of a teaser. Everyone's like, no, it's true. I would hope that people would. I mean, I'm not trying to sell my book, but I spent so much time in my book building up to talk. His mediumship was the very end of the book. Right. And I spent many chapters contextualizing it, showing the history, showing scientific studies that have been done on people similar to him in the past that were absolutely, you know,
irrefutable in terms of documenting the abilities, the same abilities he has that have been documented in other people by scientists in published books and papers. I mean, I just had to set the context for this because it's too weird if you just dump it on somebody. Yeah, it's all there if you want to read about it. And the other thing is that Stuart Alexander, if you go to my website, which is LeslieKane.com and go under surviving death,
I think it's called book materials or something like that. There is a video of Stuart, a two part, fairly lengthy video of him describing his whole development and journey as a physical medium. And I would encourage anybody who's curious to go listen to him and you get a real sense of who he is as a person.
and how sincere and genuine he is.
But in a nutshell, what physical meetingship is, and I'm going to base that around what I've experienced with Stuart Alexander, is that he goes into a room with a group of people who he works with regularly every week. And I've sort of become part of this group, only I do a lot of it through the computer here in New York. I'd link into their meetings.
But I've been inside that group many, many times and experienced all these things myself. And the initial thing is you, of course, eliminate any possibility of there being trickery. And I'm not going to spend time describing how I did that, but I scrutinized everything that was going on to make sure there were no ways that this could be done through cheating or trickery. And what happens is he goes into a trance state where he basically leaves. He's unconscious.
And then these entities who are supposedly beings from the afterlife come into his body and make use of his vocal cords basically to communicate with people in the room and they perform all these physical miraculous physical things that you can witness that everybody in the group can witness at the same time. So it's objective.
And it's in the dark, but things are lit up enough. Some things are not in the dark so that you can, you know, you can see enough of what's going on depending on what the actual experiment is. They call them experiments. And the dark is important? The dark is important because again, this is the thing that could make us go on for half an hour about this, you know, and I do go into a lot of this to my book and I know people find it suspicious that it has to be in the dark, but it's been the it's just the way he developed and a lot of mediums develop.
Because there's a substance that is used, that is exuded from his body to make these physical phenomena happen, that is extremely sensitive to light. And that's just the way it is. People can say, oh, it's just so that they can fake things in the dark, you know, but it's just not the way it is. And the physical substance, is that something that you can capture and then you could measure that? It's more like an energy substance. I mean, people have tried to capture it and take it into a lab.
But it kind of disintegrates. It's basically all that's left is some of the saliva from the medium because it's exuded from his mouth or it can be exuded from other parts of his body. But, you know, it's more energy, but it can solidify. I mean, it all sounds like magic and it's like magic. This stuff that's emitted can solidify into something solid. And what it does is it can move. So then what you witness as a person in the room is an object
moving around the room you witness all kinds of levitation and physical objects moving around the room because this substance is attaching themselves to it but you don't see the substance so you're witnessing there's this thing called a trumpet which is a cone shaped object which is a tradition they use in physical mediumship and it's got this illuminated band around the end of it so that even though you're in the dark you can see it
And you can watch this thing go up into the sky and fly all over the room and bang on the walls and go to the ceiling and touch you right in a perfect spot in your forehead. Answer, you know, respond to requests and move around. And that's one thing is this levitation of this object. The trumpet responds to requests. It will respond like if you say it'll it'll. Yeah. And sometimes a voice will speak through the trumpet. A disembodied voice. I've heard that numerous times.
I mean, you cannot wrap your mind around this. Yeah, I see why you're saying now that several chapters lead up to this. Exactly, because it's like people think this is completely nuts. And it's very hard for me to talk about because of that. It's so sensitive. And I know that it's real because I've done my due diligence and I've been involved with it for seven years or something. And I know everybody in that group very well. And I know Stuart very well.
And I you know, there's absolutely it's real that's without question. It's been witnessed by hundreds of people not just me Over the years, you know, so but it's very I find it hard to talk about and I gave a I was invited to give a talk about this a Rice University Last year at their archives of the impossible conference news held by Jeffrey Kreipel a professor there and I talked about this because he asked me to he asked me to talk about this and
Because Stuart Alexander's archives are now with the Rice University collection. All his archives have been donated with my help to Rice. And it was very, very difficult for me to talk about this. And if people want, they can go and look at the talk I gave. And that's another way you can get a sense of the seriousness of this and the history of it. I was so nervous doing it, Kurt. It's so sensitive. It's very personal and very strange and hard for people to accept as real for good reason.
So I just find it hard to talk about that, you know, for that reason. But I, you'll see that when I, if you watch this talk I gave that I was pretty nervous about it and I acknowledge that. But, you know, there's also things like the materializations of things happen. So, you know, I have experienced numerous times, as have others, in the light, you can see this, a hand materialized out of nothing on a table.
And I was able to touch this materialized hand. And then, you know, what do you want to make of that? And what is the hand supposed to represent? Someone who is no longer with us? Yeah, it's one of the spirit people. That's what we call them, for lack of a better word. The spirit people who works through Stuart is actually materializing his own hand by
the spirit has a high vibration they slow it down and they use
a substance to slow themselves down or a substance is given off as a result. To put their etheric hand into it. I mean, this is how, you know, again, again, I'm just telling you what I was... So they have to lower, they have to lower their vibration to just be in our physical world and manifest physically, to manifest this hand. So they, somehow there's an etheric hand, there's a non-physical hand that exists and that non-physical, etheric hand is placed inside this
Materials stuff called ectoplasm and then by slowing it by by Somehow he's able to materialize that hand. I mean, I don't know how I sure sure sure all I know is I've witnessed it numerous times and so have many other people and it's One of it is probably the most mind-blowing experience I've ever had in my life
You know, and, but it's documented, it's been written in about, but you know, it's, it's not, it would never satisfy a scientist unless they went in that room and experience it for themselves. You know, a scientist is hearing me say that is going to think it's ridiculous. But if they go in that room and experience it for themselves and have, and you know, can, can satisfy themselves that there's no trickery going on. You're stuck with this. How does it happen?
You said something interesting that is one of the most interesting or mind-blowing experiences of your life. I'm like, that's one of the most? That would be top. Absolute. Bar none. Can you give me two others that you haven't named so far? You're really putting me on the spot here, Kurt. This is not the kind of stuff I usually talk about and I hope... You don't get asked these sorts of questions often? Yeah, but I, you know, I'm hesitant to talk about them too much. I'm a, you know,
Yeah, whatever you're comfortable with, we'll come back to that. I'm going to give you some time to get comfortable and I'll ask you one more time. The hand, were you able to see the color of the hand? Was it more like a dead hand? Was it a white person's hand? Was it a brown person's hand? Were the nails grown or are they manicured? I'll explain it. So what happens is the light, it's actually a silhouette that you see. So there's a table that has a light underneath it.
with a red cloth over it so there's a red light that's coming up from the table and so the hand is on top of the table so what you you can see is the out you know the it's like a silhouette and you see the physical hand you see it actually form and it makes a fist and bangs on the table right when it forms so you know it's physical because you can hear that bang
And you can't see all the details of it because it's a silhouette. Because if there's too much light, they won't be able to do it. But when you touch the hand, yeah, there has to be a certain amount of darkness, but there's enough light here that you can see it.
Um, and then when you touch it, if you feel everything, I mean, it's exactly, you feel the fingernails, the knuckles, even the warmth of a hand or no. Yeah. So the way I would describe it to what I experienced when I held that hand was that it was way softer than a normal man's hand. The skin felt like a baby skin. It was very, very soft and it was also very, very warm.
Warmer than you would normally experience a hand and look pretty large too But I have a small hand so comparison of my hand It was pretty large but the the warmth of it and the softness of the skin were really striking to me But everything else the way it moved the way it felt the fingernails that knuckles all the features of our normal It felt just like a human hand. I mean it it was um, you know materialized hand and it was physical and
And, you know, so, but I couldn't actually see the color of it because of the silhouette effect. Yeah. So about the, let's just say one other incident in your life that's more on the extraordinary end that you're comfortable speaking about. I'd rather have people read it just because it's so hard to talk about out of context. I, you know, I did witness an apparition that then I write about in my book that I
Were you scared? It was basically a black shape of a person
That was very close to my bed. I could have touched it. You know, it was during the night. It was a full moon. So there was enough light coming in the room that I could see it. I was and I was so afraid that I really couldn't move. At first, I thought it was an intruder in the room. And then I thought maybe it was one of my family members. But then I knew it was I just went through these things in my mind. And then I watched it kind of disintegrate. It just
turned into these little silver particles and disappeared. And yeah, I mean, it was so clearly something otherworldly that it was just mind blowing. I was absolutely convincing, convinced that this was something otherworldly. It was like, there's no other way to explain it because I watched it turn into silver particles and then dissolve before my eyes. And I know it was solid because the pictures on the wall behind it were blocked out.
by the shape of this thing. But it was very frightening to me. Very frightening. Afterward, I imagined you just turned on the lights and you weren't able to sleep for a while. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's exactly what I write about that, too. I mean, I think I lay in that bed for like 40 minutes before I could even move. OK, I was just so shocked.
Yeah. I don't know. You know, looking back at me, I'm thinking, why was I so frightened? I wish I had like, number one, tried to communicate with it, or number two, grabbed my phone, you know, and taken a picture. I don't know. I regret that I was so afraid. But it's just a shocking thing to see somebody, some form standing right by your bed and very close, you know,
Uh, so I kind of wish I'd handle it differently, but I just was kind of frozen with the shock of it. And then I did put on the light. And as I recall, I went into another room to sleep and I don't think I really slept much the whole night. Yeah. I mean, that was different because in the Stuart Alexander seance room, it's a controlled environment where you're with other people and you're choosing for these, these manifestations, you know, they're going to happen and you want them to happen and everything's safe and predictable.
And so, you know, you go in and over and over again, you can witness the same things at a designated time and place. But this was something that just came out of the blue. And so that's why it was so much worse. It was shocking, you know, I wasn't asking for it, although I was always looking for proof of some kind of afterlife at that time.
But anyway, that was a shocking experience. And you know, again, it's hard to talk about out of context, but I'm doing it anyway, Kurt, because you're asking interesting questions. What can I do?
Yeah, I appreciate your candor. I appreciate that even when I ask a question that I know or hope that you can sense that I'm asking it from a place of curiosity and not a place of disregard or discounting or repudiation. So if I say like, oh, what color was the hand? I'm not trying to trip you up at all. I didn't feel that way. If I felt that way, I wouldn't, I wouldn't respond. So no, I feel your curiosity and I'm hoping that the listeners will come from that same place.
And, you know, if they feel skeptical, which is completely understandable, I again encourage them to look at my book or look at the video of Stuart Alexander on my website. It's a very well produced video. It's really fascinating. And so met my, you know, for those that are interested. And I just can't deny my own experience. I mean, I, you know, I'm talking about it because it's in my book. So it's there already. So, you know, were there experiences you had to leave out of the book?
I would say at the time, I mean, I thought carefully about whether I should even include my own personal experiences in this book. Should it just be a more sort of sciency, journalistic, researchy book, you know? And I knew that it was really risky for me to do that. But I thought it's not honest if I don't, because these experiences impacted my perception of what
I was writing about and they were part of the journey and I thought they'd be interesting to people. And so I just felt like, and I talk about this in the beginning of my book, that it wouldn't have been honest for me to pretend none of these things happened to me. And so I just decided I'm going to jump off that cliff and do it. At this point, you know, I think of all the people who have come out talking about their UFO abduction experiences or paranormal encounters they've had with things, they've all taken a risk.
Um, people who, you know, I've written research books, like someone like Robert Hastings, who wrote the book UFOs and nukes, and nobody would have ever imagined that he was an experiencer himself. So, you know, I, I people do that people have done that, and then I'm not going to be any different. Um, so I decided to do it. And sorry, why would it have been risky for you to include some of your own personal testimony?
just because you know people think they don't I don't know it's good because it's strange stuff you know and they might not believe it or they might think I'm I've lost my mind or I'm okay so they would think that you're biased well not so much biased as that I'm just sort of wacky you know they're nothing just not going to be able to believe this and they're going to think well she's I mean she's really lost it you know I thought she was like this journalist
um but i'm also a human being who's had experiences because when you really dive into something you're you might end up having experiences you know i wanted to originally i wanted to test mediumship right i wanted to see is there anything to me is there anything as a medium that can really do what they say they can do i wanted to
Study that for my book as a journalist. So I found out who some of the absolute best mediums were and I'm not talking about Stuart I'm talking about mental medium shit. We talked about earlier Yeah, and I take the session not knowing for a second if any of it would mean anything. I thought it might be complete baloney, you know, and I was so shocked by what happened and
You know, so it turned out to be a personal experience for me, right? But it was kind of built into my exploration and desire to study it. And sometimes you can't separate them out, you know, you can't separate it. And so I tried to be as analytical as I could about those readings that I had, but they were, I'm not going to pretend that they didn't have a profoundly personal impact on me. And so same, you know, same thing when I'm writing about after death communications,
Studies that have done on them, I have some other very, very credible people in the book who had amazing after-death communications, way more evidential than mine, who I write about. They're willing to put themselves on the line. But I think it was more a fear that I just wouldn't be taken seriously by people. But there are a lot of people that feel the opposite way.
And a lot of people who watch the series on Netflix are very grateful because they feel that this material opens a door for them to feel safe to talk about things they never felt safe to talk about before. And if I can do that for somebody, it's all worth it.
And I've done that for a lot of people in this situation. Great. Is there something about the skeptic mindset, like let's say the Randy James or James Randi, is there something about their mindset that would make it such that the phenomenon, and maybe I shouldn't call it that, apparitions or mediumship, physical medium, is less likely to occur in their presence? I mean, that's a good question. I don't know if that would be true with mental mediumship. I mean, if they lost someone they loved and they were grieving,
And they felt a genuine desire to contact that person. I, you know, but if I just don't know, I mean, it'd be an interesting experiment if they went into a reading with, you know, hostility and doubt and disbelief and a desire to prove that it was all fake. Maybe nothing would happen for them. I don't know. I think in the situation with Stuart, it would have an impact. And he's talked about that.
When somebody is in there with a very negative attitude it can impact, it's a very sensitive environment all about energies of people and the energies that come and play in that room and there's a harmony among everybody sitting in that room that's really profound and that there's a peace and a love and a harmony. You feel like you're entering into another world when you go in there. If there were people in there that were
the opposite, who are hostile and, you know, out to prove that this was funny. I don't know if that would affect the energy of the room and affect the ability of Stuart to perform what he does. It's not really him. It's the beings that come through him. But it's a really interesting question. I've thought about that before. If the skeptic could pretend, you know, that they were totally into this,
but weren't really, I don't know what would happen. I would hope that maybe they get to go in there and see that hand materialize and have their lives changed. And they would have to pretend that they're into it in order to be allowed into the room to begin with? I would think. I mean, if, and it's very hard, it's hard. I mean, Stuart does do guest sittings where people can come in, you know, it's, but normally he works with the same group every week, but
There have been plenty of guests that have come in.
I don't know. It would depend on the sense. I mean, Stuart is not interested in being studied scientifically. It's just not something he's interested in. He's not interested in trying to prove anything. He feels that that would be very disruptive to the weekly process that he's involved in, which for him is really about the experiments that go on. It's about continuing to develop. It's about showing people that life doesn't end with death.
which is basically how he and the beings that work through him, if you're willing to accept that they exist, all that's their purpose for doing what they do. And he's not interested in subjecting himself to the kind of studies that many mediums of the past did subject themselves to. And that's why we have documentation for the validity of this, because of some of the past studies, but those mediums were also
really tortured and tormented and you know it was very very difficult for them to go through what they went through and basically he just wants to keep sitting every week you know uh and he he doesn't want the kind of public attention that would come from scientific scrutiny and the disruption to the process that he's involved with he just doesn't
doesn't care about trying to prove it. They were tortured, you said? They were just put through such the wringer so much that they, you know, one, they'd be asked to do one thing, they'd be asked to do something more, you know, they'd be put under these very incredible physical restraints or, you know, be forced to, they'd eat certain things that might affect this ectoplasmic energy, you know, dyes and things like that. I mean, a lot of them were photographed and
They don't like certain types of food, like food with dyes and processed food. No, I'm just saying that it was one of the experiment. One of the ways they would do studies was that the they try to. I mean, again, this is really kind of off topic, but, you know, they they give them something to eat that might color the stuff coming out of their mouths if that was fake. So if they were regurgitating something that they might have eaten before they went in the room to produce a fake substance, for instance.
the dye from whatever they ate would show up in that you know things like that but I mean they weren't they weren't horrible but you know they would go on and on and on and there was never enough and there was always doubt no matter what these individuals were able to show to the scientists and sometimes people disrespect the rules of the room there were cases where were investigators or just skeptics would flip the light switch on
in the middle of an event where there was this sensitivity, this sensitive energy in the room and the medium was severely injured because of that or died even or wasn't able to die. Yeah, there was one very famous medium who was injured and then just was never able to practice again and eventually died. I mean, it's so sensitive the state that they get into and the substance that is exuded from them
If the light suddenly comes on, it rushes back into their bodies. I mean, again, out of context, this is all going to sound insane to people. We probably shouldn't talk about it too much. We'll finish this and then we probably shouldn't talk about it anymore. You know, but it rushes back into their bodies and can cause a lot of injury, physical injury to their bodies. And that's why they have to be extremely careful about who's allowed into the room.
Because this has happened in a number of cases where somebody has put the light on and it's been has severe consequences. And it can it's the protection of the medium that's really the number one priority. So anyway, I mean,
I know people probably think it's it's very hard to comprehend all this, but I've studied a lot of it. I've studied it. Well, I think most of the people listening and watching are much more open than you would think. And I think as soon as you said, oh, we should move on, they're like, what? No, this is right when it started to get good. OK. I mean, there are books and documents and papers about all of this. And these these mediums of the past were research. And I have the best the best research is in my book. So and all the references are there.
for people who want to find out more about how this could possibly be true. It's, you know, I would recommend looking at some of the historical documentation. And if anybody gets a chance to sit with Stuart Alexander, fantastic. And I wish everyone could. And maybe the problem is that during COVID, there was such an interruption because they couldn't sit together for I don't know how long, a long time, because they can't, you know, during COVID, they couldn't go in this small, dark room.
for an hour every week. Everybody's quarantining, right? And so now the energies, I mean, it's happening again, but Stuart hasn't done any guest circles yet since COVID ended. But I hope you will. And then people can come and sit and then experience this for themselves.
We're going to end with just a couple more questions. Firstly, I want to know what you make of the Pentagon reports. So getting back to the UFO topic, what do you make of them? Even if it's null, that's still something. And secondly, in the same way that you read aloud three references for some of the peer-reviewed studies from before, you mentioned that there's some documentation, maybe not peer-reviewed studies, but there's some documentation. If you could also read a couple of them for people who are driving who want to listen and be like, okay, I want to look up that resource.
Okay, you mean on the physical mediumship? Yes. This is one of my favorites. It's a book called Clairvoyance and Materialization, a Record of Experiments, and it was published in 1927, and I actually have an original edition of this book, which is really precious to me, written by Gustave Gillet, who was a French investigator. And within that book, he studied this medium named Franek Kluski,
who also materialized hands and these hands, he was able to make these plaster molds of the hands and I talk about this in the talk I gave at Rice University and I also write, I've got pictures of them in my book, but basically his hands materialized, they dipped themselves into hot wax. The hand came out of the wax, the hand dematerializes and then you're left with this wax glove.
right? And the only way the hand could extract from that glove is to dematerialize because there's no brakes or and some of them are like this. Some of them are two hands that are linked. So there's no way you could like slide your hand out of the glove if you were like a human being. So the only way that can happen is they do and people in the room were actually able to see this because there were there was enough light in the room. And again,
How do you believe this? Well, it was documented by these scientists in these papers, and they have pictures and records of all the experiments they did to get these molds that still exist. And I've actually seen them. I went to Paris where they're housed. I was able to see these amazing molds with these hands. And it meant a huge amount to me to see them. I mean, maybe I can show you
Here's a picture of some of them. I don't know how well you can see that. Yeah, these are from what year? 1927, you said? Yeah, the 1920s. Yep. You know, they're not all perfect, but this one on top is too. And again, in my lecture at Rice, I've got a lot more pictures that are better than these because I took them myself when I was there. They're better. But
You know, it's just, and when you read the documentation of these two, and it wasn't just Chalet, he was partnered with another, oh my God, I'm blanking out on his name, a name I know very, very well, but I'm blanking out on it right now because we've been talking so much, Kurt, my brain's like... I appreciate you taking all this time. Yeah, it's all documented in the book, very detailed, meticulous documentation of everything that they did. And these were two scientists who were not
going to risk their careers by making this stuff up. And there were witnesses to it and studies done on all kinds of stuff. But it's phenomenal, right? How do you explain the materialization of living hands? And this is something that's been documented and there are other studies that have documented it too with other mediums. So what was amazing to me that I had studied these documents,
and I was fascinated by it and then suddenly I found this medium who can do the same thing now. And it allowed me to be much more accepting of it to realize if it could be done then as was well documented by numerous mediums and sort of what we call the golden age of physical mediumship which was mainly 1920s, 30s or even the end of the 1800s. And why couldn't it happen now if it happened then, right?
And so, even though Stuart does not want these scientists coming in and filming it and documenting it and all that, nonetheless, it's happening now on the planet, the same thing. And so that's why for me to discover that and to be able to experience it myself, after being so interested in this, was amazing. I don't know how to describe it, but it was really, really profound that that ever happened to me. So, Leslie,
What's next for you? I've got another writing project in the wings, but it's not a book. It's another type form of writing, which I don't really want to talk about because I don't like to until I know something's really going to happen. Let's see. I'm helping get the current series. I'm dealing with a lot of communications and responses to that and hoping interviews to try to get
The word out to the American public. The series being the Netflix Hulu one. Yeah, it's not Netflix. It's it's Nat Geo and Hulu. For people who are listening once more to UFOs investigating the unknown. Is that correct? Yes. And if we just go to Hulu, it's right there. And it was just released a couple days ago. The first two episodes, the next two episodes are next Monday on Nat Geo and then Tuesday on Hulu. And then the fifth episode is the following Monday on Nat Geo and then on Hulu.
so in two weeks all episodes will be on hulu but you can watch them gradually as they as they're released yeah to be clear this is february 2023 so if you're listening to this much later all episodes may be released yeah depends um so i think the last date i don't have my calendar in front of me is two weeks from
The previous Monday, you're all be out there. Anyway, I'm always hoping to be able to do more reporting for the New York Times as well with my colleague Ralph Blumenthal. And we're always digging and talking to people and, you know, seeing what we can come up with on that score. And it takes way more time than you might imagine, because not everything pans out. You have to spend a lot of time talking to sources to get maybe a nugget that would lead to a story.
So, yeah, and I never know where my path will go. You know, there might be other projects I'll do with Breakthrough Films, which is the company that made this current series and also made Surviving Death, the series we just talked about on Netflix. This amazing independent film company in New York who I've worked with for years and years, so we may end up doing another series or documentary or something together. I don't know yet, but
Do you have a dream project? Kind of, but I don't know. I can't talk. I don't want to talk about it. You don't have to talk about it, but one that is not in the works right now that you're thinking, I'm working up to that. I would say yes. I'm similar in that I don't like to talk about what's embryonic. How many years is that away in your best case scenario? I don't know. It depends how much focus is put on it.
Okay, I'm going to hold you to that within a decade. Okay.
Oh, definitely. Yeah, it better happen before that. I don't think we're going to be in any shape in a decade to be doing very much of anything, so I'm not hopeful for the future direction that we're moving in. And the future direction climate-wise, AI-wise? Climate-wise and geopolitical-wise. You know, the whole thing, I think, is going to kind of come. I think things are going to be pretty difficult starting in a few years.
And from what I've been told by sources. What does that mean? It's going to be difficult. It's just, I mean, I can't say specifically, I don't know that much yet. And I can't really say, but just that a lot of what we take for granted now in life, I don't think is going to be, you know, we're not going to have it. A lot of things we have now that makes our lives as wonderful as they are. Like electricity? I don't know. I don't know. Just the access to all the things we have access to now that are that are dependent on
The globalization basically, which just aren't sustainable. A lot of the things we have aren't sustainable. The populations are growing and I think the climate issues are major as well. And that's just my opinion. But I have studied quite a bit about the climate change problem and I take it really seriously. Is there something about the geopolitical situation? Because you just referenced population and climate change. It's not that simple. I just don't feel qualified to talk about it.
But I just don't think things as they are now are sustainable. And I'm not qualified to really talk about that. I'm just concerned, that's all. So I don't think 10 years in the future. I only think three or four years into the future. It's too uncertain past that point. I would say so. I would say so, yeah. OK.
I'm going to check with the audience just a moment. Do we have some questions from the audience? Someone said, you're working on disclosure. Kind of, I think so, yeah. Yeah, of a sort, huh? Right. If I can report new information, it kind of moves the ball towards greater disclosure.
While we're talking about that, I get probably as frustrated as you do, and as anyone who's listening to this, watching interviews with the supposed UFO bigwigs. We're hoping, we're watching them thinking, please slip up, say something that crosses your NDA. There's such a lack of information, it's constantly disappointing, or there's equivocation, and we just want more answers, more answers. And you mentioned there are some necessary preconditions for further disclosure.
I think one of them is destigmatization and I think part of that is also people watching. In a sense, if you're watching, when you're hearing this, you're listening to this, you're a part of a necessary precondition for disclosure. So it's not all lost. I know I can get dismayed when I watch interviews or read transcripts and so on and I'm thinking like, come on, I just want to hear the answers, hear the answers. You're gonna mess up lapsus lingui somewhere.
Right. They're so careful not to because they don't want to get in trouble. But there is this process now that people can go through with this with information like that to reveal it to the authorities and to Congress that maybe will eventually become available for us. So people with that information now have something they can do with it and they don't just sit on it anymore. So we'll see what happens.
So I'll read some of the comments. Many, many plaudits toward you saying, appreciate all of your time. Leslie, thank you. Leslie, your 2017 article was a paradigm shift. This is my favorite interview yet. Great. Wow, people like the weird stuff. I think they like honesty more than anything else. I do feel very, I almost feel vulnerable talking about all that stuff and I hope people will understand that it's very personal and it's also out of context when you're hearing it.
Grant me that. Yeah. What's been your experience with the phenomenon as in the more UFO, UAP related phenomena? I would say nothing. I mean, I may have seen some things in the sky that I thought wonder what that is, but you know, nothing dramatic at all. That's really all the people I've talked to who are witnesses rather than me being a witness.
How do you think the world would change if they knew what you knew? That is to say, there are some pieces of information that were given to you that you can't disclose because it was told to you off the record or for whatever other reason. Given that, you can't say what it is, but how do you think the world would change if people had access to the same knowledge? I don't think I have access to that much more than most people, but I mean,
I don't know if I can say without revealing what that knowledge is, you know? It's just think about if, I mean we talked about it earlier, if people become convinced that there is something here that's not human and it's an intelligence and it has power, how would they react? I mean that's kind of, when we talked about it earlier.
You know, I don't know what else I can say
With regard to the UAPs, what convinces you that there's something intelligent behind it? I'll preface this with. The way it moves in the sky doesn't, to me, indicate intelligence per se, because it could be some advanced drone. If it's even extraterrestrial, extraterrestrials sent something unmanned or sent a biological robot. And it doesn't necessarily mean creativity or intelligence or intention. What convinces you that there's intelligence behind the UAPs? Well, I mean, there are some cases where they're responsive.
So there are cases, I remember in the study by Richard Haynes that I wrote about in 2001, it goes way back, documenting all these cases of aviation safety issues with commercial airplanes. There were many cases where the UFOs appeared to respond to the actions of the pilot or the movements of the airplane.
even in the tic tac event right you know the the way that tic tac was responding to the to dave fravor and kind of interacting with him other another case is the peruvian case of 1980 where oscar santamaria was sent out to shoot down something that they thought with us it's funny about bringing this up now they thought it was a spy balloon
Uh, and, um, this thing kind of got involved in it. He realized it wasn't a balloon. It was a, he tried to shoot it down and he couldn't shoot it down, but then it started to maneuver along with his plane and it would interact with him. I mean, I won't go into the details, but there was sort of this cat and mouse game going on. So lots of times there seems to be interactions that are occurring.
So that's where I think the intelligence comes in. And a lot of the military people, I mean, the famous phrase of Charles Holt from the Rendlesian incident is he said so many times that they appear to be under intelligent control. It's just a phrase I've heard a lot of them use. And I think when the pilots are in the air and observing them, if there's any sense of responsiveness to their presence, that would indicate there's some consciousness there, there's some awareness of them, which implies intelligence.
So you have to look at the cases when there's more of an interaction. Because you're right, if they're just flying around up there doing their own thing, it doesn't show particularly intelligence. It's when they're responding to something that's happening around them in the moment that they couldn't predict. Unless there's some kind of technology where they can do that without intelligence. It depends on how you define intelligence, I guess.
I mean, maybe they're just sophisticated technology that can adapt and respond to what's going on around them. So, I don't know, but I've heard so many military witnesses and military experts use that phrase that they appear to be under intelligent control that I just kind of, in many cases, it appears to me that way too. Have you heard anything credible or anything interesting with regard to the time traveling humans hypothesis?
Yeah, I find it really interesting, Kurt. It's funny you raise that question because I have this little thing in front of me. I was thinking about reading. It's a little it's sent to me by a colleague who is very interested in that question. And it kind of relates to the show called Dark that I mentioned earlier, which I would encourage everyone to watch because it deals with that question and it's metaphorical.
It deals with humans involved with time travel, but you have to look at the deeper layers of it and it really speaks to the question of that that you bring up. And I just want to, I want to just read, I was really affected by these few lines that this friend sent to me. And it says, what he wrote was, we trust that time is linear, that it proceeds eternally, uniformly into infinity. But the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion.
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are not consecutive. They are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected. We exist within a spiral galaxy, after all. Ultimately, what we know is a drop. What we don't know is an ocean. Maybe that doesn't really relate to time travel, but it sort of does, because time travel is connected with time.
the nature of time and what is time and some of the lines from this text actually came from the show dark and so I would yeah that's about you know I'm I'm still trying to figure all this out I don't know but I would encourage people to watch that and see what they think of it because I learned a lot from that show about time and time travel and
It all relates to the ultimate nature of the phenomenon we're dealing with, which is something vast and big and defies time. Yeah, so can it be connected to time travel? Yes, I'd say so. Leslie, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate you spending three hours at least with me. Well, Kurt, it went really fast because I'm blabbing away and talking a lot. But I think you asked fantastic questions.
I appreciate the respect and curiosity you have for these strange things that happen to, and I'm not the only one they happen to, they happen to lots of people. So I want people to realize that they're not weird. And I appreciate your putting this information out because it's important that people understand that life isn't what they think it is. And they don't have to feel weird if they have anomalous experiences.
Thank you, Leslie. Thank you so much, Kurt. Appreciate it very much.
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"text": " With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can try those limited edition donuts. Because why not? TD Early Pay. That's how TD makes payday unexpectedly human."
},
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"text": " So basically we're not at the top of the food chain. There's another species, there's another life form or entity or consciousness that is more advanced than we are. You can be afraid of it because, you know, what if whatever this is decides that it doesn't want human beings around anymore? It wants to use the planet for something else. If you can see this, type in Squirtle Squirtle into the chat. Wesley, how's it going?"
},
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"text": " Hi Kurt, it's going well. Yeah, I'm got a lot going on as a sort of so does everyone else. I think how are you doing? Great. So you're known for your work on UFOs and you've written a New York Times bestseller contributed to Huffington Post and you have a book called Surviving Death. You will have a National Geographic series which just came out premiered I think February 13th called UFOs investigating the unknown of which there will be a link in the description. What else are you known for that I haven't mentioned?"
},
{
"end_time": 167.329,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 138.763,
"text": " What else am I known for? Well, what else have I done? Maybe I would answer, I would say, you know, I did spend before the 2017 New York Times story, I did spend, I started in reporting on UFOs in the year 2000. That was my first story in the Boston Globe. So I kind of had this whole phase of activity as a reporter before we had this, you know, this kind of crossed over this line in 2017 where everything changed. So I did spend a lot of years when the taboo was really dominant."
},
{
"end_time": 190.64,
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"start_time": 167.824,
"text": " and I was just basically trying to get across the simple point that UFOs are real and they need to be paid attention to. I mean even that was like a you know that's the basically was the theme of my book in 2010 and even that was like a major thing for people to consider you know so it's just really because I had all that experience before 2017 I just realized so much"
},
{
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"text": " As you know, theories of everything this channel is about, fundamental reality mainly from a theoretical physics perspective, as well as understanding consciousness and"
},
{
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"index": 9,
"start_time": 219.753,
"text": " subjectivity and so on. So in that vein, analyze this from a sociological perspective. Why do you think there's been such a plethora of interest since 2017 toward this phenomenon? Yeah, I think, you know, the story in the New York Times revealed the fact that the Pentagon had been studying these objects for quite a while. And, you know, that just set off this this kind of snowball effect. I mean, if indeed the Pentagon has been studying them and devoting resources and staff to that,"
},
{
"end_time": 276.152,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 248.558,
"text": " and of course the program there was very small and they didn't have money but nonetheless they were still doing the work you know that made that made the point that well there's something to this and there were videos that were released with a story so it just if the Pentagon is paying attention to this there's something to it and then what happened is the Congress wanted to be briefed on it and people were brought in to brief them and they received classified information and we have to remember that"
},
{
"end_time": 295.589,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 276.408,
"text": " The lawmakers have access to information that none of us have. So when they make their statements about the reality of this, they're basing that on knowledge that we don't have. And, you know, I think people forget that they say, well, why can't why don't we have more videos? Why don't we have more this and that? We have to remember that the people in charge have seen a lot more."
},
{
"end_time": 324.48,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 296.152,
"text": " so you know it's just and then you know we had the june 2021 report in which acknowledgement was made in black and white of the reality the phenomena and that they're being the various types of phenomena that are being seen and that you know they had no evidence that they were russian or chinese at that point um you know statements by high level officials both retired and active elected professionals and it so you know the it's just become this this public and"
},
{
"end_time": 352.005,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 325.213,
"text": " A public thing, you know, the media went crazy with this. The 60 minutes show in June of 2021, I believe it was, was huge. And so, yeah, there's there's now that now that it's sort of OK to take it seriously, the taboo has really sort of stepped more into the background, you know, we still it's still there. But we're in a new world with regards to this. And we even have we've had a congressional hearing. We've had legislation passed."
},
{
"end_time": 372.978,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 352.449,
"text": " That's allowing witnesses and whistleblowers to come forward now and, you know, release their security oaths or be protected and be protected in that process. So there's just so much has happened. I mean, I think the why is people have always been interested in this. And now that the lawmakers are involved and the Pentagon is involved and that's all public."
},
{
"end_time": 397.978,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 373.592,
"text": " It's just providing a whole different picture of what this is all about. We have, of course, the national security side of it and the aviation safety side of it, which is emphasized a lot, which is a good reason to pay attention and a good reason to investigate and find out what these things are. So what is this when we talk about the reality of this? Can you explain to people who are like, what is she referring to? UFOs? What are UFOs? What are UAPs?"
},
{
"end_time": 414.36,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 399.582,
"text": " I wish I knew what they were. I don't think anyone really does, but what we do know, I mean, what's happened in the last 20 years or so, our conception of what a UFO is has changed. We don't even use the word UFO really anymore."
},
{
"end_time": 439.65,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 414.599,
"text": " So when I first started, there was all the sci-fi and the kind of popular culture attitudes toward it. And the general thinking among the people involved in investigations was what they call the extraterrestrial hypothesis. It was sort of the simplistic idea that we're being visited from, you know, from the people who accept that this is not human. It was a simplistic idea that we're being visited by beings in these disshaped craft and they're coming from some other planet."
},
{
"end_time": 467.773,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 440.06,
"text": " And, you know, fast forward to the way it's looked at now. We now use the word unidentified anomalous phenomena. And recently the word aerial was changed to anomalous because the phenomena as it's seen now incorporates so much more than the concept of some craft coming from another solar system or another part of the galaxy. And it's because, you know, the phenomena take so many different forms. It has so many abilities. It affects people's"
},
{
"end_time": 496.715,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 468.148,
"text": " Consciousness sometimes it has medical effects on people it comes in just about every shape and size that you can imagine And it's just this mystery and nobody really and you ask what it is. That's the big question That we seem to you know, I I know that the military has collected a lot of data on how the the objects behave you know, there's the there's characteristics that are consistent in terms of the extraordinary behavior that appear to be technological and"
},
{
"end_time": 521.954,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 497.244,
"text": " So we have data about what they look like and how they act, but the actual essence of the question of what they actually are, I don't think anybody knows. Even if we have collected debris or we have crashed objects that are being studied by aerospace companies or by whoever in these very secret programs,"
},
{
"end_time": 550.589,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 522.415,
"text": " They might have learned something, but even if they understand a little bit about technology, we still don't really know what they are or why they're here or where they come from. Those are the questions that, you know, that everybody's so curious about. And I hope we find the answer someday, but we may never really understand what they're all about. I don't know. Do you have your suspicions as to where they come from and what they are? I don't think my opinion is necessarily any more valid than anyone else's when it comes to, you know, where they come from. I mean, I really don't know. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 580.213,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 550.964,
"text": " there's so many possible explanations and maybe there's a lot of different phenomena coming from different sources here or maybe it's all one we don't even know that you know and there people have discussed time travel as being involved inter-dimensionality that they're coming from some other mention and kind of bleeding through to ours and then they go back to their dimension or visitors from extraterrestrial locations in the universe or who knows what you know I mean I think"
},
{
"end_time": 608.456,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 581.101,
"text": " It's just everything's on the table, let's put it that way. And everything's on the table. You mentioned medical effects. Yeah. Medical effects as in salutary or deleterious? The medical effects are not anything you'd want to have from what I understand. And I mean, there've been some papers and some writings about them that basically people who come too close to these things can have"
},
{
"end_time": 636.869,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 608.695,
"text": " problems that have blood disorders or cancer-related issues. I mean, I'm not up on all the specifics, but there have been medical effects by people who've had close encounters. There have been government-related medical doctors who have been studying these cases. And I know Gary Nolan, the geneticist or the biologist from Stanford, is of course involved with some of these studies. And so are others. And then, you know, yeah, so I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 663.37,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 637.312,
"text": " These people are affected when they get too close. And I don't know. I can't go a lot into the specifics. You have to go to the experts who are doing the studies on them. But sometimes people have marks on their bodies afterwards or nosebleeds. But there are a lot more serious effects than that that can happen. By the way, have you seen the Toe show before? Oh, absolutely. It's a wonderful show, Kurt. I watch your show a lot."
},
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"text": " We'll just take a meandering relaxed approach getting people introduced to this. We'll start with the 2017 article called the Pentagon's mysterious UFO program. Walk us through the writing process of that. How long does it take? How do you get such an article approved? Do you pitch it to someone? And what is the article?"
},
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"start_time": 694.565,
"text": " Okay, well people may or people probably know that it started when I had a meeting with Luis Elizondo right at literally the day he resigned from his job as the head of this program called ATIP in the you know the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program which he was working on with some colleagues at the Pentagon and he resigned because he didn't fill enough resources for being devoted to this and he wanted to"
},
{
"end_time": 741.613,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 722.159,
"text": " Make a point, make his point. The best way he felt to do that was to leave the job. And so I was some colleagues of his invited me to a meeting with him in October, early October of 2017. And that's how the whole thing started. And I was, that's where I first saw the videos, I was given a lot of documents, I was shown, you know, the"
},
{
"end_time": 768.387,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 742.005,
"text": " letter from Harry Reid, which showed his involvement in all of this. Lou's letter to the Secretary of Defense, which was really powerful. Spent a lot of time talking with Lou. And then I went to my colleague Ralph Blumenthal, who is a freelance contributor to the New York Times and was on staff there for decades. And we pitched it to the New York Times. You're absolutely right. You have to make a pitch."
},
{
"end_time": 794.821,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 768.746,
"text": " You have to get the editors interested. So we were able to have a meeting with a man named Mark Mazzetti, who's the Chief of the Investigation Bureau in DC. We had an in-person meeting with him and they approved the story. I mean, I wasn't all surprised. How could they not? Because we had people on the record, we had documentation, and this was related to the US government. So that's the kind of thing they're interested in."
},
{
"end_time": 820.094,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 795.213,
"text": " And then we were assigned Helene Cooper to work with us, who's the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, who's absolutely incredible. What a gift that was. I mean, we never would have been able to do the story without her. She was just amazing. What was her name one more time? Helene Cooper. And yeah, she's the person who recently at the press conference a few days ago or last week asked the question of whatever that General Glenn Van Hurk about"
},
{
"end_time": 846.596,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 820.623,
"text": " You know, whether these objects that are being shot down could possibly be alien. I mean, she had the guts to ask that question. But anyway, that's an aside. But and she's also featured in episode one of our of our series that you mentioned that just came out. So it was pretty amazing. It follows investigating the unknown. Right. Which people can see on Hulu now. And it was just amazing to get her on camera. I feel like she stole the whole first episode. It was so good."
},
{
"end_time": 876.118,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 847.142,
"text": " But anyway, just so she's just an outstanding, you know, reporter who writes front page stories all the time for the New York Times on a lot of topics related to Pentagon issues involving the Pentagon. So anyway, it took us. So once we pitched it, it took a couple of months to do the whole story. We came out in December. We probably pitched it in mid October or something like that. It took a while. We had to the big one of the big things we had to do was to get Harry Reid on the record, which was a big moment."
},
{
"end_time": 900.913,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 876.493,
"text": " We had to get a lot of stuff past the eyes of the editors who were very very strict and very controlling when you're doing a story like this and Helene flew out actually to Las Vegas and met with Harry Reid in person and she talks about that in the series. It's really funny how she talks about it but when we knew when we had him we knew we had it. I mean this was really"
},
{
"end_time": 919.701,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 901.408,
"text": " He was crucial to the story because he was able to verify the existence of the program and the fact that he was the one who got the funding way back before ATIP was really ATIP. He got funding for a DIA program that eventually kind of spawned ATIP, but he was able to verify... What was that program called?"
},
{
"end_time": 949.189,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 920.247,
"text": " The advanced weapons, oh my God, I might not get it right, you know. Sure. Systems, it's A, it's OSAP. People have to look it up. You got the syllables correct, at least. Yeah, I know. I mean, yeah. So and, you know, A2 was sort of able to ride, rode out from that program into the Pentagon and did a lot of work on specifically on UFOs, whereas OSAP, of course, was much broader than that, covering a lot of other things."
},
{
"end_time": 970.196,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 950.128,
"text": " so um yeah um so Lou resigns comes to you with a slew of documents on day one yeah i mean it really wasn't Lou who came to me it was Chris Mellon and some other colleagues who felt um you know that they should talk to me um and so he was just sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 993.2,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 970.947,
"text": " Willing to go along with it, you know, he doesn't he's not fully responsible for that He's not responsible for me getting those videos are being shown the videos, but it was a group of his colleagues I mean, I think it's public knowledge. It was Chris Mellon and how put off and Jim semi then Who were there at the meeting along with me and Lou? Was there one other person? I think that was"
},
{
"end_time": 1007.961,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 993.353,
"text": " Yeah, I'll tell you that changed my life. That moment I was just blown away by what I was being told and what I was seeing. After all the years, you know, of what I'd been through to be given a story like this was something I never would have imagined happening."
},
{
"end_time": 1031.459,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1008.677,
"text": " The way that it works for myself is much different than the way it works for yourself. You have a much more professional and seasoned approach. For me, when I'm choosing a guest, I'll hear about them once or twice. I look them up here and there over the course of weeks, and then at some point I start to do a deep dive. This sounds like you just got thrown into the deep end right away. Is that the case, or did you have some contact with Chris or Lou prior to get some semblance of what's going to happen at some point?"
},
{
"end_time": 1059.548,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1031.459,
"text": " I mean, I knew I had known Chris for years. So Chris Mellon, I knew I knew how put off for many years, even longer than Chris Mellon. And Lou, I believe, had already just don't remember the the timeline, but I think he had already spoken on behalf of to the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. Remember when they did that initial press conference? So I wasn't like I mean, I knew who he was."
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"text": " This Marshawn beats my old Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun on prize picks whether you"
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"text": " Football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections."
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"text": " Anything from touchdown to threes, and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
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"text": " Were there elements that you had to leave out of the 2017 article?"
},
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"index": 46,
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"text": " There always are. I mean, we always, every, and I've done a whole series of times stories with the three of us and then some with just Ralph Blumenthal since then. There's always more than they give you space for. But that was a long, they gave us a lot of space for that story. And not only did we have the story about ATIP, but we had a section about the Nimitz event. And we had, Helene and I had actually sat down in Washington with Dave Fravor and spoke to him for hours about what happened there."
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"end_time": 1201.203,
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"text": " And I think this was the first time he ever came forward. So that was one aspect. We would have loved to have included more about that event, for instance. But, you know, there's only so much space. We would have liked to have included more about what they actually learned within the program about UFOs. And the story was not so much about the UFO phenomenon itself. It was about the fact that this ATIP program existed and how it got set up and"
},
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"end_time": 1223.831,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1201.698,
"text": " You know, all of that, what the background was for that program, and that's what the Times was really interested in our reporting on. And then in 2019, when Ralph and the three of us did our second story, then we got to focus more on the actual objects themselves, which is what people really missed in the first one, I think. And we tried our best. I mean, there's a lot more we would have liked to have included in that story."
},
{
"end_time": 1250.35,
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"start_time": 1224.241,
"text": " But the editors at the New York Times are really rigorous and they vet everything and they decide basically what can go in and what can't, you know, and you can argue for certain things and you got to pick your arguments and at some point you just, it's what it is, it is what it is, you know. So it's not like we wouldn't have liked to have included more, we would have."
},
{
"end_time": 1260.452,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1251.067,
"text": " But, you know, we're at the mercy of the editors and I think the second story in 2019 was so explosive because it did include"
},
{
"end_time": 1290.162,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1261.237,
"text": " Descriptions from pilots. We had Ryan Graves in that story. And people just love reading about what the pilots are actually seeing, what the objects look like, what have they learned about them. That's what was missing in the first one. And what is left out is generally left out because of reasons of space. It's always space. So that's the number one. You always have a certain amount of a word count that you're given. You can make it this long. So then we as the writers have to determine what we think is most, you know, has the priority for that space."
},
{
"end_time": 1312.79,
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"start_time": 1290.64,
"text": " But there might be things that they want to take out or that they want us to add. For instance, in that first story, they wanted us to have some comments from skeptics. That's another thing we would have chosen because we didn't think it was relevant to what we were writing about. I mean, there's nothing in the story that was questionable or opinion or something that a skeptic needs to weigh in on."
},
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"end_time": 1342.995,
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"text": " but they wanted a, you know, an astrophysicist to say, well, we know, we don't, we don't know if they're, you know, they're probably not extraterrestrials or something, which we weren't saying anyway. So they, they were like maybe three paragraphs that had to be taken up with comments from skeptics. That's not something we chose. They're thinking in terms of perception management. I have to ask the editors. I mean, you just, you know, I can't speak for the editors. They just feel like I think it's an idea that it has to be balanced in some way because this is such a controversial topic."
},
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"end_time": 1361.63,
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"text": " What would you include that you weren't able to include in 2017 and 2019?"
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"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
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"text": " go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories razor blades are like diving boards the longer the board the more the wobble the more the wobble the more nicks cuts scrapes a bad shave isn't a blade problem it's an extension problem henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the international space station and the mars rover"
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"text": " Well, I mean, we've come a long way now, so a lot more has come out since then. So, you know, if I was writing a news story now, which I still hope to do,"
},
{
"end_time": 1568.916,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1545.094,
"text": " It would cover more recent developments. I don't want to divulge too much, but it would focus on some of the legislation that's happened and maybe people who are coming forward and speaking to Congress, speaking to ARO, the new DOD office. I always want to move the ball forward, so it just depends on where we're at and what"
},
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"end_time": 1598.029,
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"start_time": 1569.804,
"text": " what kind of a story Ralph and I can get. I mean, it's very, very difficult to get a story that will satisfy the New York Times editors. I would like to be writing for them, you know, every other month if I could. I think there's enough to cover. But this is not a topic that they want to be covered in that way. And if it's something that they can put their own staff on, they will. Because I'm not a staff. I want, you know, I have to really be clear that people understand I'm not on the staff of the New York Times."
},
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"text": " Can you explain the difference? Yeah, so somebody like Julian Barnes, who has written more skeptical articles, is a full-time employee of the New York Times. And he writes about a lot of stuff, and he's in the office working with the New York Times every day. He's their national security correspondent. And so he'll be assigned a whole lot of stories on a regular basis."
},
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"end_time": 1649.77,
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"text": " But the difference is that I'm a freelancer, and so is Ralph, which means that we're not working for the paper. Every story we do, we pitch independently. We ask them, are you interested in this? Can we do this story for you? Whereas somebody like Julianne Barnes, someone who's on staff, is actually assigned stories. So we're like, we have to go to them with our pitch, like we talked earlier about how we had to pitch the 2017 story to them."
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"text": " we're not assigned it we have to interest them we have to say we even though we're not your employee right because they prefer to use their own staff for stories even though we're not on your staff we have something we think that's good enough that you you should be interested in it and maybe you are and in fact we have an exclusive that your reporters are not going to get access to i mentioned that's a major selling point you're absolutely right it is"
},
{
"end_time": 1703.114,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1675.572,
"text": " And I always tell people who are working with me to try to develop stories, sources and so on, that that's the reason why I have to ask people to be very quiet if they're working with me on a story, because if it's not exclusive, if it gets out all over the internet or if other media pick it up, first, the New York Times isn't going to run with it. It's just, you know, it's not like I want to prevent other people from getting access to this information, but if I"
},
{
"end_time": 1728.251,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1703.643,
"text": " Don't if we don't have an exclusive for the times the chances that we'll be able to publish it are greatly diminished So it's more about once the story comes out in the times that everybody run with it do whatever you want but we So, you know people that I sources that I'm working with to develop stories usually understand that and they're very good about They understand that they want this to come out in the times because the times make such a huge impact. So it's worth it and"
},
{
"end_time": 1750.128,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1728.78,
"text": " But it is an important selling point, the exclusivity factor. And that's why, you know, the fact that Ralph and I are out there and we know a lot of sources, I'm monitoring this thing every day, staff members at the New York Times aren't doing that. So I am definitely going to come across stories and information that only I would know about and their staff wouldn't know about."
},
{
"end_time": 1775.759,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1750.759,
"text": " Here's something I think about. Why isn't it that staff at the New York Times and virtually any of the major media institutes, why aren't they thinking about this topic more frequently? You'd have to ask them, Kurt. I don't know. I mean, except that, you know, there's still a stigma and that stigma is definitely still at play. And the New York Times covers so many topics they would consider"
},
{
"end_time": 1799.957,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1776.22,
"text": " to be way more important than this, such as the war in Ukraine, you know, all kinds of things. They certainly have gone with the Chinese balloon story, but that's not really the kind of story we're talking about. So I really can't answer that. And it's especially mystifying to me because the stories that we've done so far have gotten huge attention for the New York Times."
},
{
"end_time": 1824.974,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1800.469,
"text": " You know huge number of people viewing them the readers obviously loved the stories and want more But I can't speak for them. I just know that it they don't cover it on a regular basis They will cover things like a hearing that takes place in Washington or when the report comes out near the ODNI report They have one of their people cover that So"
},
{
"end_time": 1847.824,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1825.538,
"text": " Yeah, I don't know. People would have to ask them, people have to write to the editorial department, write to them and say, we want to see more coverage of this. But I can't speak for them. But I do know that that stigma is pretty powerful at the New York Times, maybe more so there than a lot of other media because they are considered the paper of record and they're very cautious."
},
{
"end_time": 1864.002,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1847.995,
"text": " And the Chinese balloon story, you're referring to what happened in Yukon? Yeah, I'm referring to everything starting with the shooting down of the Chinese balloon going forward from that. I mean, that's been such a huge thing in the media and the Times has been doing a lot of coverage on that. And Helene Cooper's been part of that."
},
{
"end_time": 1882.756,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1864.326,
"text": " Can you walk us through that storyline and the North American issues that have popped up as a couple weeks ago? I wish I, you know, I have been so busy in the last few days with other stuff. I wish I don't feel like I'm as informed about this as I would like to be. But, you know, as we all know, there were there was first the Chinese balloon that was shot down."
},
{
"end_time": 1913.029,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1883.285,
"text": " which was clearly a spy balloon, and that was made very clear, shot down over the Atlantic Ocean, and then over this past weekend we had three more objects shot down, right? We had one in Alaska on February 2nd, which they said was about the size of a small car, another one in Yukon, Canada, on February 3rd, and then another one over Lake Huron on, I believe, February 4th. I think those were the dates and, you know, they're just these small objects and we don't"
},
{
"end_time": 1930.06,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1913.404,
"text": " There has been no definitive, I mean, not enough of a definitive statement, let's put it that way, about what they actually were or are. And they're having trouble collecting the debris. But so there's, there's a kind of chaos around all of this. And it's become this sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 1958.933,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1931.476,
"text": " you know it's been kind of heightened and there's escalation that's been going on every day around this topic and I just think I mean it's clear to me that these are not alien objects and that's been stated even though that some people say the door is still open but clearly they're not they're most likely Chinese and you know it's it's a little confusing as to why"
},
{
"end_time": 1982.978,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1959.411,
"text": " that has not been stated more clearly. I don't know if people aren't talking to each other. There's not an organized messaging that's going on around it. They haven't found the debris from the objects, so they maybe don't feel comfortable saying definitively what they are, although I suspect they do know what they are. So, I don't know. The objects are clearly not"
},
{
"end_time": 2004.48,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1983.507,
"text": " ET though. Why do you say they're clearly not? The statement has been made by the press secretary for Biden who said that they have no indication that they're extraterrestrial. There are Air Force officials that have said the same thing and they don't behave in any, they don't demonstrate the kind of behaviors that we're used to when something is extraterrestrial."
},
{
"end_time": 2026.869,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2004.821,
"text": " I have sources that have told me, also from the intelligence community, that they're Chinese, basically. I think the bigger issue here has to do with the geopolitical dynamics between China and the United States. There's a lot going on, I think, behind the scenes around all of this that"
},
{
"end_time": 2048.08,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2027.841,
"text": " We're not privy to and hopefully over time more will come out. They don't want to state publicly this is Chinese because it would cause more of a conflict than they would like. I, you know, I don't know if they're just not 100% certain or if they're yeah, there may be reasons why they don't want to say it or they want to use this UFOs as kind of a cover. So they're sort of hedging it."
},
{
"end_time": 2074.923,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2048.439,
"text": " or they're just not clear. And maybe some of the Congress people feel they've been left out and they want to know more. And then one person says this and somebody else says that and it's just messy. But I think there's, you know, there's more that we I'm sure will come out over time, but I just, I feel clear that these are not, we don't have to speculate that these are some kind of non-human technology or something. I really don't think that's the case."
},
{
"end_time": 2098.814,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2075.657,
"text": " I'm going to read a comment from Ross Coulthart and I'll put it on the screen because it's fairly wordy. I asked him for a question and he gave me a comment. So you can just comment on his comment. Just so people know, he has been really focused on this and he's brilliant and he's, you know, he's really, really been monitoring everything and thinking a lot about it more than I have. So let his comment carry the day. Sure."
},
{
"end_time": 2126.886,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2099.258,
"text": " There is clearly dissent between sections of the Pentagon, notably the US Air Force and the White House. When National Security Advisor Jake Kirby saw that the DOD had publicly briefed journalists these objects were likely balloons, he clearly knew enough to directly overrule that assumption. They are not balloons. You do not fire sidewinder missiles at balloons, and balloons do not have the structure clearly described by the pilots. Someone tried to lie to the public, and for the first time in decades, the White House has overruled that lie."
},
{
"end_time": 2151.323,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2126.886,
"text": " Fascinating, right? And I mean, I agree with Ross, and also the White House has said that they want to set up their own agency to look into this, which was kind of a shock too, because we have the Arrow Department of Defense entity doing its job, and now suddenly the president announces that he wants to set up another task force. So"
},
{
"end_time": 2179.121,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2151.852,
"text": " Yeah, it's all these contradictory issues that are going on at once as Ross points out and hopefully it's gonna it'll smooth itself out over time. Did you receive a considerable amount of pushback or reproach from your article from the 2017-2019 one? You mean by like skeptics or? From the editorial teams at the New York Times or from your colleagues or from the broader community. I'm curious to know where does the pushback come from and where does the adulation come from? Where does the praise come from?"
},
{
"end_time": 2191.766,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2180.196,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, I think the story was just so explosive that, you know, I mean, it changed everything, you know."
},
{
"end_time": 2213.899,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2192.261,
"text": " So, I don't know. I'm sure there are people that have criticisms of it. And I know that, you know, we didn't reference the OSAP program, which has upset some people. But I don't know, it's hard for me to answer, like, where does criticism come from? Where does praise come from? I mean, it was just like this was"
},
{
"end_time": 2228.814,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2213.899,
"text": " set off like a cannonball, you know, reverberated around the world. And I think the focus was just, oh my God, look, these are real and the Pentagon studying them. And what's going to happen now? I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 2248.097,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2229.343,
"text": " We were not focused. I don't remember getting people critical at the time, the time this thing came out. And yeah, I mean, Harry Reid was on the record and he didn't object to anything in the story. I mean, it was all, you know, let's go, moving it forward here. That was really the point of it."
},
{
"end_time": 2266.63,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2248.916,
"text": " And the fact that this was explosive to me indicates that the public is so desperate to hear about this topic. I was speaking to Ryan Graves recently. Actually, Ryan Graves has a podcast for people who don't know it's called merged and he interviewed me on the podcast, which should come out in a few weeks. And I say that I don't think there's a stigma. I think we have a collective illusion of stigma and I"
},
{
"end_time": 2292.534,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2266.63,
"text": " I go into this topic called collective illusions, which means we behave one way in public because we believe other people behave that same way. In the 1960s, most southerners were against segregation, but they thought that their neighbor was for it. So they would say, no, I'm for it. And I believe that stigma is similar where we feel like other people stigmatize it so we don't talk about it much. And that's why what you did is extremely important. What Ryan Graves is extremely important, legitimizing the issue by getting people to talk about it."
},
{
"end_time": 2311.664,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2292.534,
"text": " So I don't think we have a stigma problem, I think we have a cowardice problem. And the fact that your article was explosive indicates that people want this topic. There are people that I interview, math professors, physics professors, that you would think they're the skeptical type. They come to me afterward and say, Kurt, why aren't more people talking about this top subject? I'm like, why don't you bring that up on the podcast? Like show that you're interested in it."
},
{
"end_time": 2334.275,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2312.278,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, that's basically what I mean by a stigma. I mean, I think your point's valid. Yeah, people are afraid to say what they really feel because they think other people won't accept it. But that's really how a stigma operates. I mean, why are they afraid to say it? Because there's this taboo because they are afraid they'll be ridiculed or not respected."
},
{
"end_time": 2358.456,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2334.701,
"text": " And so it's all, I mean, I think it's just, you're basically saying, you know, we're basically saying the same thing. It just depends on how people operate in the face of that stigma. But I mean, I just, you know, there is still this hesitation, however you want to describe it, to be public about it. But it's changing rapidly. It's changing rapidly. I think more and more people are not afraid of it now."
},
{
"end_time": 2383.899,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2359.002,
"text": " Yeah, great, great, great. So what's some of the most compelling evidence that you've seen on this, which we've referred to earlier, which is a synonym for the phenomenon that it's not something terrestrial, it's something that's extraordinary in a sense, or if it is terrestrial could be a breakaway civilization, but I mean, it's not something ordinary. Yeah, well, I mean, the huge question. I mean, the best I mean, I think what what's really compelling to me is to look back into the 50s and 60s."
},
{
"end_time": 2409.445,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2384.377,
"text": " back in a time when we, you know, it's really hard to imagine that the technology that we're observing could have existed then. I mean, now many cases could be American technology or maybe even Russian or Chinese, right? But in those early days, it's just inconceivable that any country had the technology that was observed. And the optics being observed then demonstrated the same behaviors that we see now."
},
{
"end_time": 2437.705,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2410.23,
"text": " and our government was very very concerned about it and it was the Cold War so they made sure to try to make it go away and not let the public become involved and that's when all the programs for ridicule and everything else became operative but how could that have been Russian, Chinese or American technology back in those early days? I mean that is a very basic question and then you can look back at the government documents from the time and see what kinds of observations were made"
},
{
"end_time": 2463.865,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2438.251,
"text": " And, you know, it has to do too with the credibility of the people observing these things as, you know, as General Samford said in that famous speech in 1952 after those flyovers in Washington, D.C., you know, credible, what did he say, credible observers of, you know, these people, credible observers of relatively incredible things. I mean, and this has been going on for decades. There are hundreds and hundreds of reports"
},
{
"end_time": 2494.002,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2464.394,
"text": " that are very hard to explain away. And so, you know, you put it all together and you have this picture. And I think for me personally, it's also about people that I have talked to with clearances, many of them off the record for years, who from whom I have learned a lot and who have helped, you know, validate for me a lot of things that, you know, are off the record. So I can't talk about them. But"
},
{
"end_time": 2518.643,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2494.735,
"text": " you know when you put it all together it's like if you just spend years digging into this if it wasn't if it was something explainable right if you dig into something for years and years then the more you discover the more you'll you'll you'll get towards an explanation you know you'll start to get to the truth which would be well this could be explained this way or that way but it's the opposite it's like the more you study it"
},
{
"end_time": 2547.261,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2519.326,
"text": " the more it becomes unexplainable. And I'm talking about only the very best information. Military documents, military observers, cases involving multiple levels of evidence such as radar and photographs and multiple witnesses that are military or pilots or police officers, just a wealth of data. And you see the behavior of these objects. And I'm sure, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 2571.34,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2547.841,
"text": " You know, of course, most sightings that people have can be explained. So once you narrow it down to the ones that are really spectacular, for which there's enough evidence that you can eliminate at least any known explanation according to it being manmade, right? Or at least as far as anybody would know at that time, if it's not super, super, super secret."
},
{
"end_time": 2600.93,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2571.63,
"text": " you just you just see over and over and over again these things happening and eventually you know there's plenty of evidence as as well documented and now you know we have our our government acknowledging that now we have uh... u s government involved in not you know in investigating something here so they're not wasting their time investigating something that doesn't exist or something that they feel they can easily explain so i mean we don't have the answers yet but"
},
{
"end_time": 2626.903,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2601.954,
"text": " There are so many interesting cases and so much history to this, and it takes a long time to wrap that in your mind around all of that, but it's hard to imagine that all these cases that we know about that are on the record could all be explained through some conventional explanation when they've been studied as thoroughly as they have been by the best people with the ability to do that."
},
{
"end_time": 2651.698,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2627.381,
"text": " And then the whole realm of classified information, we have to constantly remind ourselves that, I mean, I think Lou Elizondo said, I forget the percentage, he said, maybe 10% of what the public knows is out, you know, we might know maybe 10% of what is known on the classified level about this phenomenon."
},
{
"end_time": 2671.852,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2652.739,
"text": " so we have to constantly remind ourselves of that that there's so much more and if it was something easily explainable i think we'd know by now i i think the navy would have been happy to tell us the gimbal video was an airplane if if that's what they hear that sound"
},
{
"end_time": 2698.729,
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"start_time": 2672.637,
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{
"end_time": 2750.623,
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"start_time": 2724.889,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
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{
"end_time": 2772.739,
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"start_time": 2750.623,
"text": " Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories figured out it was and you know they have enough expertise and enough experts to go to within their realm of within you know all the agencies that they have access to"
},
{
"end_time": 2789.48,
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"text": " To get that video analyzed properly and make a decision based on not only a video itself, but the classified information they have that goes along with it that we don't even have. You know, so if that video is explainable, they'd be happy to tell us that."
},
{
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"text": " You mentioned that the way that it ordinarily works when you investigate a topic, so let's say physics or particle physics, there's a pruning of the possibility tree down and down and down to a singular solution, generally. But in this one, it seems like more and more questions open up. Can you walk us through your mental models? What did you think? What did you learn? And why did that change? And what did it change to? I'll try. It's a big question. I mean, when I first started, you know, I received this report from"
},
{
"end_time": 2842.381,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2819.394,
"text": " Some French officials. I don't know. I don't know how if people have probably heard me talk about this before this French report called the Kometa report and basically these high-level French officials that study this thing for a number of years and they were admirals and generals and police officers and Engineers and people like that and they had that they had written in this report what they called the extraterrestrial hypothesis, right and"
},
{
"end_time": 2861.408,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2842.978,
"text": " They said they thought these cases could best be explained through that hypothesis, and it was only an hypothesis. It couldn't be proven. But it was a sort of notion that we're being visited, as I said earlier, being visited from somewhere else. And so I think for the whole first 10 years of my, or maybe more,"
},
{
"end_time": 2890.606,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2861.681,
"text": " of my work on this, I kind of held in my mind that the ones that aren't explainable, I agree with those generals and admirals, they're most likely explainable through the extraterrestrial hypothesis. And that was sort of the way I viewed it, you know. And my next story was about aviation safety issues and about these objects flying around and impacting aircraft. But it was always about, they're physical objects that have come from somewhere else. It's fairly simple."
},
{
"end_time": 2919.189,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2890.896,
"text": " And then, you know, over time, I just learned more about the more, the more what they call high strangeness aspects of this related phenomenon, you know, things that affect people's minds. It's all kind of what I said before, Kurt. You know, Jacques Vallee has been writing about this for decades. I mean, Jacques Vallee, the famous UFO writer and researcher and investigator and scientist,"
},
{
"end_time": 2949.002,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2919.48,
"text": " has always had a theory about UFOs that was much broader and all-encompassing than the extraterrestrial hypothesis. And a lot of people didn't like him for that. And now I think it's, you know, we can see that he was really ahead of his time because now we're just more aware of the multi-dimensional complicated aspects of the way the phenomenon manifests itself. And I mean, books like Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, for instance,"
},
{
"end_time": 2972.619,
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"start_time": 2949.411,
"text": " which document some of the things that happened related to the skinwalker ranch and which you know one of the things that's always stuck with me was the description of this blue orb that went into the body of a man who was driving a car and his daughter was with him and it actually penetrated his body and then he became severely ill after that"
},
{
"end_time": 2997.022,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2973.507,
"text": " Now, something like that, that's not a physical craft that's come from another planet, right? It's something else. And these orbs are described by a lot of people. And so the phenomenon just takes on this broader umbrella. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock."
},
{
"end_time": 3028.37,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2999.838,
"text": " I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock. Over time. And I wasn't so aware of that earlier in my career. And it's harder to write about because"
},
{
"end_time": 3054.497,
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"start_time": 3029.104,
"text": " When I'm writing for the New York Times, I'm not going to go into that kind of stuff because it all has to happen in steps. You know, the members of Congress are not really interested in that. They just want to deal with the national security implications of these physical objects flying around our Navy ships, you know, but they did include in legislation, which was passed. You know, they had the legislation this year and legislation last year."
},
{
"end_time": 3083.592,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3055.094,
"text": " that they wanted psychological and medical effects on people to be studied and reported to Congress. So there is an acknowledgement on their part that they're aware of the broader, some of the broader implications of this and then how it, how it can affect people. And if it was just, yeah. So, I mean, it's hard for me to describe it, but I just, I have much more of a sense that it's really is difficult to explain what this thing is. And then it has so many more components to it."
},
{
"end_time": 3103.012,
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"start_time": 3084.548,
"text": " than I ever realized before and it's connected to consciousness and it's connected to other dimensions and it's uh manifests in all kinds of strange ways and some of the phenomena at Skinwalker Ranch you have to ask are those really UAP or are they something else?"
},
{
"end_time": 3130.333,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3103.012,
"text": " What is the borderline where it's not UAP anymore? That's something I was thinking. When we say that there's this phenomenon and then we keep talking about how it's so varied, what is the relationship between them all aside from it being anomalous, which by the way, someone knocks on my door and I open it and no one's there, that's anomalous. We wouldn't call that part of the phenomenon unless there was also a blue light associated with it or some orbit and so on. What is it that strings these together such that we can even put the label to categorize them as the phenomenon?"
},
{
"end_time": 3149.206,
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"start_time": 3131.152,
"text": " That's such a good question. It really is. I mean, I think sometimes maybe it's not clear. But I mean, I think as far as the Pentagon is concerned, I mean, they have their, their characteristics that relate to the way they behave, they have their physical, their data showing that the presence of some object"
},
{
"end_time": 3174.224,
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"start_time": 3149.684,
"text": " They're more focused on the physicality of it and the national security implications. So there's a whole universe that they can sort of wrap around that, you know, and not the rest of it doesn't really come into play. But for other people who are more interested in this in a bigger way, that's where those questions come into play. Where do you draw that long line? I don't know. You know, when is it a UAP and when is it something else?"
},
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"end_time": 3203.643,
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"start_time": 3174.684,
"text": " And I think probably people have their own ways of seeing that in terms of how they personally interpret what that term actually means. I don't think we have any set agreed upon definition of what characterizes an unidentified anomalous phenomenon and what doesn't. I mean just that term unidentified anomalous phenomenon"
},
{
"end_time": 3233.78,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3204.07,
"text": " Yeah, that's, you know, is so broad. We don't even have aerial in there anymore, you know? Yeah. So that it's partly because they wanted to be able to include the ones that go in the water, but it broadens it up to mean who knows what, right? Yeah. So, yeah, it's just a fascinating, fascinating question to ponder. And there's so many such a variety of experiences that people have had engaging with these things that you don't know even almost how to define it anymore."
},
{
"end_time": 3264.258,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3234.36,
"text": " It's not like what you're saying with physics. You can just get down to one equation, right? It's like the opposite is happening with this. It's like it just gets less that way over time. Although there's more data being collected at the same time, you know, but there's another dimension, I think, of the phenomenon that's not... You can't pin it down. It's just not something that... It's almost like science isn't the right tool sometimes to even try and capture this. It's beyond our capability at some level."
},
{
"end_time": 3282.329,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3264.753,
"text": " What is the connection between UAPs and consciousness? Does human consciousness in some way determine"
},
{
"end_time": 3307.193,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3283.677,
"text": " not just the presence of the UFO, but does it play a role in how a person perceives it or what kind of experience a person might have in connection to that phenomenon? I mean, for instance, there will be witnesses to the same phenomenon, but their experience of it is each person perceives it in a different way. They'll describe it differently. They'll have a different kind of experience."
},
{
"end_time": 3336.971,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3307.841,
"text": " what is that about is that because of the consciousness of the of the human being that's in the presence of this thing even though the thing itself was just something out there you know it's it's like um and also sometimes people have an encounter and then they develop these abilities you know such as clairvoyance or telepathy they develop kind of more psychic powers or however you want to describe it after that"
},
{
"end_time": 3366.869,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3337.329,
"text": " as if their consciousness has been impacted in some level that we don't understand. They're able to perceive more on the realm of the paranormal than they were before. And then there's questions about whether it's connected to what people consider to be the afterlife, where we go when we die. People are studying that question a lot."
},
{
"end_time": 3396.049,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3367.346,
"text": " It's mysterious. And then the whole question of time, how we define time comes into play. I mean, there's a series on Netflix called Dark. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's a German series, but it's really profoundly deals with the question of time travel. And it has a lot of messaging in that show that I think relates to how we perceive this phenomenon and what the deeper level of it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3426.271,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3396.886,
"text": " And so, you know, you can just keep going, peeling back the layers and peeling back the layers and you go to places with this that just expand your mind and you can't contain them in a certain way. Take us through your journey into the studies of afterlife then, please. Yeah, well, that's something I could spend three hours talking about, but I'll try. I have the time. I have the time, Leslie. The door is open. I would not put you through that."
},
{
"end_time": 3456.544,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3427.176,
"text": " So after my UFO book came out and then I did a series based on my book. I did a TV special for History Channel in 2011 based on the book. And after that, I kind of felt like I'm kind of ready to explore something else for a while. And I've always been interested in this question of survival past death. And so it just naturally evolved. My publisher came back to me and said, do you want to write about something else? Right at the moment where I was thinking about, I wanted to write about that."
},
{
"end_time": 3485.009,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3457.056,
"text": " And so it was just this synchronicity really. And I jumped into that book with some awareness of what I was going to write about. But it was really a journey for me in the way that the UFO book wasn't because I didn't know where that book was going to go. I knew the topics of research that I wanted to cover, but I learned a lot as I went along. And I also lost my younger brother during the process of writing the book."
},
{
"end_time": 3507.363,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3485.35,
"text": " And so it became a more personal journey for me because I was, for instance, one of the things I covered in the book was mediumship, which is, and you know, most people think it's completely bogus. You're just talking about people in, you know, have a sign in their window saying they can come in and they have a crystal ball or something like that. It's not like that. There's some very skilled individuals out there."
},
{
"end_time": 3530.026,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3507.961,
"text": " who can access information that appears to be coming from a deceased person. And so I had some profound experiences with some mediums in which my brother and my friend Bob Hopkins, who I had actually been with when he died in 2011, both seem to be communicating to me through this medium. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3542.91,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3530.503,
"text": " How do you separate that from cold reading?"
},
{
"end_time": 3570.503,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3543.507,
"text": " That's usually when you're physically with the person. So in these readings I had, one of them was on the phone. I couldn't even see it. The person couldn't even see me. And the second one was on Skype. She didn't know anything about me. She just saw me sitting in a room with a blank wall. But a cold reading, it's a way of manipulation. So like they'll get information from somebody in the room and then they'll assume certain things. They'll come back with other questions to kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 3593.746,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3571.067,
"text": " Trick people into certain kinds of answers. I mean, I wrote about it in my book. I don't remember all the details. It's just a way of kind of creating a phony perception that there is this dead person there. The thing about a cold reading is it doesn't have the kind of specific information that I was talking about in the readings that I had where"
},
{
"end_time": 3621.869,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3594.343,
"text": " just endless specific very very specific information is delivered that this medium couldn't possibly know that I'm not revealing hints about in any way and it's also the personality of the deceased person comes through you know none of these things happen with a cold reading they're they're just much more vague and it's just another order you know of experience I mean there's no there's no comparison and that's just one"
},
{
"end_time": 3642.688,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3622.466,
"text": " You want to know what the best evidence is for survival after death. I don't think it's something we can prove, but there are so many areas to draw from. One of them is young children who remember past lives. Very young children."
},
{
"end_time": 3663.951,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3643.729,
"text": " Investigators are able to verify their memories by locating the actual person that they said they were because they provide enough details to be able to do that and this is you're talking two and three year olds who didn't you know have never been exposed to anything related to that previous person with all kinds of emotional reactivity and sometimes knowledge of"
},
{
"end_time": 3684.787,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3664.326,
"text": " of skills that that previous person had that a three-year-old would never otherwise know, you know, a lot of things like this. Very interesting and compelling cases that were studied by researchers at the University of Virginia for a long time. And then you have these near-death experiences which I think people know about where you go into, you know, you apparently don't have any"
},
{
"end_time": 3713.183,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3685.589,
"text": " you're not, you're basically clinically dead when these things happen and you leave your body and you go off into this afterlife realm and you come back and people's lives are forever to change because of that and there are certain characteristics of those experiences that are consistent throughout the world and those have been studied by many scientists, medical doctors, you know, and these are the people I drew from in my book to really get to the bottom of what those experiences are about"
},
{
"end_time": 3735.094,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3714.019,
"text": " And then there's things that happen to people at the very end of life, when they're dying, that seem to be communications with the other side, you know, there's investigators in the UK that have studied these cases, and then there's mediumship, and there's both mental and physical mediumship, they're two different things. After death communications, I'm sure a lot of people have experienced that, where you"
},
{
"end_time": 3756.459,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3735.674,
"text": " You've lost someone you love and you're probably grieving when these things happen and you sense, you have some kind of experience where you feel that you are getting a communication from that person. You don't need a medium for that. You can get a direct communication. It can come in many forms and it's absolutely unprovable. It's totally subjective."
},
{
"end_time": 3781.271,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3757.125,
"text": " but there's a sense of knowing when something like that happens and it's very meaningful to the person receiving it and I bet a lot of the listeners right now have had those kinds of experiences and most people don't talk about them or they do just among their family members or their close friends but it's it's very I had a number of these events happen to me when I lost my brother and it's just very very in some ways"
},
{
"end_time": 3809.65,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3781.715,
"text": " more compelling evidence for an individual than any of the research could ever be because it's your own experience of something. So that's another, and those have also been studied. There have been statistical studies on them and all kinds of studies by psychologists and people like that. Yeah. And then there's apparitions that are actually interactive. I'm not just talking about, you see a ghost somewhere, but I'm talking about something that appears to be conscious that doesn't have a body."
},
{
"end_time": 3837.756,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3810.265,
"text": " that's actually responsive to a human, the action of a human being, like if you wave to it, it waves back, something like that, which you're seeing this ghostly form and it responds to you and that suggests that there's an actual consciousness there. And then you can pick up, there's one case in my book where you're able, actually this young boy was able to actually pick up messages from that entity which was in their house and everybody in the family was seeing it."
},
{
"end_time": 3861.391,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3838.439,
"text": " and the entity revealed enough information about herself that they were able to confirm that she was the person who had previously lived in the house, and nobody knew anything about her when they moved in. So, you know, that's a very strong case of an apparition that's evidential. It's not just the same as somebody saying, oh, I was in a haunted house and I saw a ghost, you know. There's really a high level way you can study"
},
{
"end_time": 3890.247,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3862.125,
"text": " the best of the best when it comes to evidence for these kinds of things. And that's what I tried to bring together in my book called Surviving Death, a journalist investigates evidence for an afterlife, which came out in 2017. And there was a series on Netflix with the same title. It's actually there now. It came out in 2021, I think. It's a six part series on Netflix called Surviving Death, which also covers a lot of this stuff. And I think people might enjoy seeing that. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3917.278,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3890.776,
"text": " Yeah, so in my book I tried to bring together the best evidence from all these different areas and kind of consolidate them into one volume where you really only have to look at this if you want to get a sense of what's being done in all these very areas of research and also read direct testimonies of people who have had near-death experiences, people who have studied mediums. A lot of people wrote their own chapters in my book just like they did for my UFO book."
},
{
"end_time": 3947.432,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3917.671,
"text": " Anyway, I just think there's a lot of compelling evidence, but it's not provable because, you know, when you're dead, you're not, unless you can die and come back some way that you can actually prove it, which we can't do, but it's just suggestive and it's fascinating to ponder and think about. I mean, it depends on what your personal definition is of proof, right? Some people feel that if they've just had a certain kind of a dream of someone or they've felt like they've had a communication from someone, that's enough for them."
},
{
"end_time": 3965.23,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3948.507,
"text": " When people encounter UFOs and they develop some of these extraordinary psychic abilities, is that related to the hitchhiker effect?"
},
{
"end_time": 3993.643,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3966.118,
"text": " And I don't know, I don't know if people who have had the Hitchhiker effect have developed these other abilities. I actually don't know. Maybe they have. But it's not, the Hitchhiker effect is not something I would ever want to have happen to me, I'll tell you that. I wouldn't go near that ranch, that Skinwalker Ranch, if I were anybody out there. So I don't know. You'd have to, I mean, I'm sure that that information is probably out there. I don't know how they were affected by that."
},
{
"end_time": 4013.916,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3993.848,
"text": " Can you briefly outline Skinwalker, as it's been mentioned a couple times, and I know that several people may be new to this whole phenomenon. So briefly, if you can give an outline as to what Skinwalker is. Yeah, I mean, it's a large track of land in Utah that was purchased by Robert Bigelow back in the 90s, I believe, and was... Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 4040.947,
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"start_time": 4014.787,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the Internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 4090.265,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4066.988,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 4118.404,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4090.265,
"text": " Studied by his group, which was called NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science, and then eventually sold it, and now it's being studied by another team of people. But it was a location where a lot of paranormal stuff was going on."
},
{
"end_time": 4147.125,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4118.66,
"text": " And so the studies that NIDS did did, you know, extraordinarily, you know, accurate and detailed documentation of some of these events. And the documents are with the DIA right now. I don't think a lot or with Robert Bigelow, they haven't come out. But books have been written about it by George Knapp and Colin Callagher, who was involved, and Jim Lakatsky, three of them wrote the most recent book. And basically, there were just a lot of very weird"
},
{
"end_time": 4172.79,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4147.125,
"text": " phenomena that went on there such as animal mutilations and beings that seem to come through portals and you know that you mentioned the hitchhiker effect where people would have encounters with strange things when they were there and then they'd go home and the thing would seem to follow them home and they'd have events happening in their home that hadn't happened before which would end up involving their whole family so it's it's just"
},
{
"end_time": 4201.169,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4173.097,
"text": " and there were UFOs there too but there was a whole range of other strange things that are more like poltergeist kind of effects or you know weird portals and I mean those are things I think of animal mutilations very you know a lot of dark very unpleasant things going on there were I think it's come out that there was some nuclear waste buried near you're there and there are"
},
{
"end_time": 4228.968,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4201.749,
"text": " you know, things to do with the land around there that could be impacting this, but I think there's still, there's ongoing studies to try to figure out what's going on in that location. Do you happen to know if some of these studies are open to people who aren't a part of NIDS or the Bigelow Institute? For instance, I'm thinking as someone who has a background in math and physics, like say to the people in the physics or the math or the skeptic community, hey, James Randi or Penn and Teller or Michael Sherman or Neil deGrasteis,"
},
{
"end_time": 4252.944,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4228.968,
"text": " Hey, come here. Here's an open ticket. In fact, we'll pay for your flight and your hotel. The hotel is the Skinwalker. Come stay here. Bring whatever equipment you like. It's fairly reliable in that something occurs once a week or three times per week or whatever the frequency is. It's repeatable in that sense. Are you aware of any such invitations or studies that are conducted by people who don't own the ranch or aren't associated with the ranch?"
},
{
"end_time": 4270.333,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4254.053,
"text": " I don't know because I am not connected to it at all, but I don't know how they work. You'd have to get in touch with the people who are now there. It's no longer in the hands of Robert Bigelow and his team. There were physicists that were there, but"
},
{
"end_time": 4294.292,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4271.049,
"text": " It's a great question. I mean, if a skeptic wanted to go there with his equipment, I have no idea what they would say. I'm not going to speak for them. I believe the current owner is Fugl. Is that correct? Brandon Fugl. Correct. Brandon Fugl. Yeah. So yeah, all you skeptics out there. Yeah. See if you can get on that property. But I don't recommend it because then you might get some weirdness following you home. So, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4316.783,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4294.616,
"text": " Some people say they'd rather be the informed sufferer than the ignorant pig. I don't know about that. I think that's just a form of intellectual grandstanding. I think that people would beg for the rewind button. Yeah, I still wouldn't want those creepy things coming into my house, but I understand that approach too. Continuing on this thread of studies that have been done on the afterlife, they're catalogued in your book, correct?"
},
{
"end_time": 4339.155,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4317.637,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, the book covers them, and there are chapters written by some of the investigators themselves. There's great stories about people who have had amazing near-death experiences. Yeah, it's all there. And there's a huge list as an index in the back, so it references all kinds of papers and books and places where people can go to get more information."
},
{
"end_time": 4369.718,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4339.889,
"text": " And the most powerful kind of study is a peer-reviewed study. Sorry, that's not the most powerful kind, but that's something that is given plenty of credence. Are there peer-reviewed studies in that book? Yes. I mean, some, I think that the near, some of the near-death experiences, definitely there was one paper that was published, oh my God, by Pimba, Lomol and Thiem, in one of the major, I wish I could remember the name, but one of the major science journals. I don't think it was science, but one of the leading, Lancet or something, one of the leading medical journals."
},
{
"end_time": 4383.626,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4370.026,
"text": " I know there have been studies on mediumship that have been peer-reviewed."
},
{
"end_time": 4413.609,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4384.633,
"text": " I'm so happy speaking with you because when I ask you a question about evidence or studies, you don't even bat an eye. You don't take it as an offensive question. And there's some people who I've interviewed more in the UFO scene that they see that as an attack on their legitimacy. And I understand because it's such a contentious topic, but it's refreshing when someone says, oh, yeah, and here it is, or, oh, we can't prove and so on. So I appreciate that."
},
{
"end_time": 4441.271,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4414.36,
"text": " Well, thanks. I mean, yeah, I don't see why that would be. I mean, obviously, I'm I want I'm not my my interest is for the general public for the, you know, to become more aware of all of this. So, yeah, it's a natural question to ask. Well, what's the evidence? And then it's natural to want to share that. And I'm sure there's things I didn't think of. I mean, part of it for me is I don't have everything in my brain because I've been at this for so long."
},
{
"end_time": 4450.589,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4441.647,
"text": " and so i can't i'm sure like afterwards i'll think oh i wish i said that or that i'm sure there's things i'm not thinking of but um yeah i mean that's what it's all about"
},
{
"end_time": 4480.299,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4451.049,
"text": " If there's enough time, if you can get your book Surviving Death and find two or three studies just to say aloud because some people are driving listening to this so that they can look it up later and say, oh, I would like to look at the study by so and so. OK, I think there's I think the realm of the near death experience is one of the ones that has the most published peer review papers. But there's in other fields there are two. But the one I mentioned to you is December 2001 in The Lancet, which I think is, you know, one of the leading medical journals."
},
{
"end_time": 4506.63,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4480.657,
"text": " I mean, I know it is. It's one of the leading medical journals. And it's, you know, there's four authors to it. I can give you their names and you want it's called. OK, Pim van Lommel, he's probably the lead author and he wrote a chapter in my book. He's been setting near-death experiences forever. He's a medical doctor and from the Netherlands. And then the second one is Ruud van Wees, Vincent Myers and Ingrid Elferich. Elferich."
},
{
"end_time": 4528.131,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4507.108,
"text": " Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest. A prospective study in the Netherlands is the title. It's in the Lancet 358 and then, you know, in 2001 and I've got the name of the, you know, the reference numbers that you need to access it. And then there's some other studies here. Here's another one."
},
{
"end_time": 4558.012,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4529.087,
"text": " A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidents features an etiology of near-death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors. That's in a journal called Resuscitation. It has one, two, three, four authors, one of them being Sam Parnia, who's the lead author. He's very well known. He's a resuscitation expert. That's his field, and he's done a lot of work on this."
},
{
"end_time": 4587.961,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4558.677,
"text": " And then there's another one, a prospectively studied near-death experience with corroborated out-of-body perception and unexplained healing in the Journal of Near-Death Studies. I don't know if that's peer review, but I think it is. Another one by Bruce Grayson, incidents and correlates of near-death experiences in a cardiac care unit. It's in the journal called the General Hospital Psychiatry. Okay, that's enough and I will put some of the links in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 4611.783,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4588.677,
"text": " Thank you for that. What does disclosure mean to you? When people say we, I want disclosure. Some people, by the way, say disclosure has occurred. In which case I say, by man, you have such a disconnect from the people who are clamoring for more evidence and it's just such a removal of yourself from the community that I feel like I don't know if we're speaking the same language when we say disclosure has occurred. But some people say that and I'm sure they have their reasons."
},
{
"end_time": 4637.244,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4612.568,
"text": " Yeah, and I think I think the fact that people do have different perceptions of it means that we don't really know what it means. I mean, it means I've always thought that that term I never quite, you know, was on the disclosure wagon for all the years that that term has been tossed around. I never I think people have different perceptions of what it means. But my perception is that it would mean an official statement"
},
{
"end_time": 4662.619,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4638.08,
"text": " Basically saying that we're not alone in whatever form that statement might take. An acknowledgement of the fact that, I mean, and some people think it means an acknowledgement of the fact that we've known about this since 1947. I mean, I don't know. It's not a term that I use or that I identify with very much. So it's really up to those who use that term to tell you what it means."
},
{
"end_time": 4692.79,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4663.131,
"text": " I find it so tricky because even if the government did quote-unquote disclose some fact or set of facts, it's not as if we would believe it. Even if they say, hey, we're not alone. We would say, well, prove it. Or we have bodies. Show me. Or we don't have bodies. Prove that. We don't believe you. You've lied to us so much. And further, even if they disclose to me, like Lou mentioned, what we know is 10%, a partial truth can be a lie. In some sense, a partial disclosure is worse than no disclosure."
},
{
"end_time": 4720.128,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4692.79,
"text": " There are several cases you can convince yourself of that telling a bit of a truth is much more misleading than saying nothing at all. It's just a tricky word for me, disclosure. To me, disclosure would be that the scientific community has access to some of the data, or all of the data. It has to come through, otherwise it's just we're believing them. Well, maybe disclosure will be when the Galileo project, led by Avi Loeb at Harvard, actually gets some data. Maybe it'll be the scientists that'll make it happen. People think of it as being"
},
{
"end_time": 4744.036,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4720.657,
"text": " up to the government to make it happen, but you just raise an interesting point. It's like, where are the scientists in this? And so the Galileo project is, you know, they're going to set up their own means of capturing data that may disclose, may be able to be proven to be technology from somewhere else or an object from somewhere else. You know, so"
},
{
"end_time": 4774.65,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4744.65,
"text": " We don't really know what it means, I think, and what form it might take, and maybe it's a process that happens in stages, which is why some people think it's already happened, because certain stages of it have happened. I mean, if step one was for the government to acknowledge that UFOs are real objects, they've done that, and they had not done that before, you know, June of 21, or maybe they did a little earlier, but certainly not before 2017. They had not acknowledged any of that."
},
{
"end_time": 4802.466,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4775.52,
"text": " You know, since the close of Blue Book, it was like silence and it was ignoring cases that no, ignore events that happen. And if you can't ignore them, you make up something or you try to say something to make them go away. And that was been the approach of the government in all those decades. So, you know, even that is a level of disclosure. And maybe that's what people are talking about when they say it's already happened. Some people feel that the government documents released in the 1970s,"
},
{
"end_time": 4830.213,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4803.353,
"text": " our disclosure that basically they show that UFOs are real and a lot of the documents from the fifties describe the perception that they were not from earth that they were interplanetary or whatever you know so how do you define it I think that's I think I mean my perception has always been that the real disclosure people are talking about some massively dramatic"
},
{
"end_time": 4857.108,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4830.589,
"text": " official government statement that takes us to another level than where we've been so far. I don't know if that's going to happen. But, you know, I mean, I think one thing people think about is if some of these witnesses who are coming forward now to Congress and to Arrow do come up with information about crashed objects or even debris that has been that have been studied enough to prove that they're not from here."
},
{
"end_time": 4886.254,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4857.944,
"text": " If that was ever to be released, perhaps that's a form of disclosure, perhaps that's a form of proof. The question is, will that happen? And if they do report these things to Congress, first of all, Congress or ARRO or everybody involved with this investigation will have to track it down and make sure it's accurate and verified for themselves. Then the question becomes, do we make this public or not? What are the risks in doing that? Maybe it won't be made public, you know, so"
},
{
"end_time": 4896.34,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4886.852,
"text": " But I think we get closer and closer to something like that happening the more time that passes. And a lot of people have expectations that this"
},
{
"end_time": 4927.261,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4897.261,
"text": " The process that's underway now, people are already involved with it. That maybe it will lead to something like that."
},
{
"end_time": 4947.432,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4927.261,
"text": " Let's jump off the speculative end and say what would be some of the reasons that the government would not tell the citizens of something extraordinary occurring other than wanting the technology so that they can outpace China or Russia. For instance, one reason would be panic, but what would be some other reasons?"
},
{
"end_time": 4964.036,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4948.336,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, panic is a broad term, but it could be this sort of the destabilization of a society that might occur if people were really freaked out about it. I mean, I think that protecting technology is the number one, protecting data that we don't want our adversaries to have."
},
{
"end_time": 4990.742,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4964.65,
"text": " But number two, yeah, could be the impact on society. Number three could be concerns about, you know, going after people who, you know, trying to convict people or going after people who have been involved with keeping the secret over so many years, trying to take them to court or whatever, you know, kind of a vendetta going on. A lot of anger that we haven't been told sooner."
},
{
"end_time": 5014.445,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4991.22,
"text": " You know, it's loaded. I think if something like this does come out, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some kind of amnesty for those from the past who were doing what they thought they needed to do and were told to do. But then, you know, there's questions of crimes that may have been committed, of people who were harmed or even killed."
},
{
"end_time": 5037.227,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5014.667,
"text": " To keep them quiet, I mean, you know, it opens up such a can of worms. And maybe there's a way for something to come out in which the past is not dragged along with it, which I personally think would make a lot more sense and be cleaner and for us to just focus on the present, what we know now,"
},
{
"end_time": 5062.142,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5038.029,
"text": " and not get bogged down in digging through the past and all the misdeeds that occurred for all kinds of complicated reasons. And I don't know, some people might not like me saying that, but I don't think it's productive personally. So, and then there, you know, there could be other reasons. I mean, maybe the explanations that our government is withholding for us are much"
},
{
"end_time": 5085.93,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5062.824,
"text": " scarier than we might think, or there's a acknowledgement that has to be made of a lack of power that we might have, or our military might have, a lack of ability to control this phenomenon, to keep people safe. That, of course, is connected to what you're saying about panic, but, you know, the implications that it might have"
},
{
"end_time": 5106.664,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5086.476,
"text": " The fact that it's a gradual unfoldment probably makes a lot of sense. You don't want to shock people. You don't want to disrupt the structures that we have in society that could be impacted by this. And some people believe, Kurt, that"
},
{
"end_time": 5134.804,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5107.944,
"text": " It really isn't going to be a big deal for if this announcement were made some people believe and if you know people have pie levels that who have been involved with this thing for a long time that it really won't be a big deal and then most people just won't be that concerned about it. I mean we have to remember that the people who are interested in this topic are a very small number. We kind of get we're so involved that we think it's it's reality it's life right but there's so many people that are just concerned about"
},
{
"end_time": 5157.875,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5135.299,
"text": " paying their bills and doing their jobs and raising their kids. And the question for them would be, well, yeah, that's kind of interesting, but it doesn't affect my life. And if it's not anything that I have to worry about or be scared of, for me and my family, then I don't really care that much. And I'm just going to go about my life, you know, it's not necessarily going to affect everyone."
},
{
"end_time": 5181.288,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5158.541,
"text": " Some people don't have a curiosity about stuff either. They're just focused on their daily lives and they're struggling to survive every day. So it's so hard to predict how it might impact people, I think. Tom DeLonge has intimated that it could be that the government is benevolent and that they're withholding for a positive reason, not something that is a power struggle."
},
{
"end_time": 5211.101,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5181.544,
"text": " or because they're trying to increase their influence and dominance and so on. I don't recall his reasoning for that, but do you remember? You mean positive, what he's saying is that it's a good thing it's being withheld. Yeah, that when we find out, we'll thank them, something like that. Could be. I mean, it could be. That's what I mean about if it's something frightening, you know, maybe every element of that is not going to be helpful for people to know about. I mean, I can understand the thinking along those lines."
},
{
"end_time": 5241.544,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5211.664,
"text": " Right? What's it gonna... Do you want to terrify and depress everybody in the society when they learn, you know, about what's going on that they never even imagined was going on? I mean, it's a valid question. What good would it do? Would you want to learn it some truth if it was terrifying and depressing? I definitely do. I want to know the truth. And part of it is because I've been involved with this for a long time. And I already think things look pretty dire in the world anyway. So, you know, I always want to know"
},
{
"end_time": 5258.268,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5241.971,
"text": " I think the majority of the people in the comments section agree with you. Have you read the Dark Forest or heard of the remembrance of Earth's past? I haven't."
},
{
"end_time": 5288.336,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5258.336,
"text": " Okay, I'll give a two-minute explanation. See, here's something that I think about frequently. I think that if you haven't found the bounds that could be revealed to you, such as you would want to rewind time and you would wish, oh my gosh, I wish I didn't know, I wish I didn't investigate, I wish I didn't fly too close to the sun. For instance, in AI, if the people who are behind the development of machine learning, like open AI people, can't see how their technology can go terribly, terribly wrong, if they haven't thought about that, then they shouldn't be developing it. And same with the people who are developing the nuclear bomb, like Richard Feynman and so on. He said if we were just having fun as physicists,"
},
{
"end_time": 5298.131,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5288.336,
"text": " And Einstein even said, later, I wish I could burn my hands. I would never have signed off on this had I thought about the implications. So, in The Dark Forest, it's a book series that's called The Remembrance of Earth's Past."
},
{
"end_time": 5324.65,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5298.404,
"text": " There's this Chinese scientist who found a way to communicate with other galaxies and she says to respond to us if we're not alone, something like that. Someone answers back from a different galaxy and says, if you know what's good for you, do not send out any more messages. The universe is a hostile, hostile place. Anyway, I'm not going to go more into the book, but she doesn't listen and there are dire consequences. So what frightens you about this phenomenon? Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 5356.049,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5326.613,
"text": " I mean, I can't really say that I'm frightened personally, but I'm more, I don't know, I'm not totally comfortable responding to that. How would I respond to what frightens me? I mean, I think the reality is, and you know, if you talk to someone like Jim Semivan or people that have actually encountered it, which I haven't, that it has complete power over us, right? It's way more advanced than we are, so"
},
{
"end_time": 5381.988,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5356.63,
"text": " It can do whatever it wants. And I'm not saying that it has done anything harmful, but it's something more advanced than we are. And we're not so basically we're not at the top of the food chain, right? Even though we've always thought of ourselves as being at the top of the food chain, you know, we are the most intelligent, advanced species on the planet Earth. And really, that's not true."
},
{
"end_time": 5411.203,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5382.722,
"text": " There's another species, there's another life form or entity or consciousness, non-human consciousness, however you want to describe it, that is more advanced than we are. And it's a shock in our thinking to come to terms with that. I don't think most people are aware of that, but that's reality. And so you can be afraid of it because, you know, you're not in control. And"
},
{
"end_time": 5434.974,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5411.852,
"text": " What if this, whatever this is, decides that it doesn't want human beings around anymore? It wants to use the planet for something else? There's nothing we can do about it. What keeps you up at night, Leslie? Nothing except maybe the trucks on the street of New York City. I mean, no. No, I"
},
{
"end_time": 5462.637,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5435.52,
"text": " I'm not, I'm not really kept up. I'm not anxious. I mean, I'm just always trying to learn more. Um, so I wouldn't say I'm kept up at night. I'm a good sleeper. Can you tell us about the case in Brazil? The Farinha, I believe it's called for people who are unaware. Yeah. Virginia is how it's pronounced. I mean, people may have seen James Fox's film called moment of contact."
},
{
"end_time": 5490.691,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5463.217,
"text": " which just came out this past year. It's really worth seeing, but it's basically a fascinating case because it involved the capture of creatures. How are you going to describe them? Non-human creatures. There's a lot of interviews that James has done. We know that there are videos and pictures of these creatures that exist. They were in the hospital."
},
{
"end_time": 5521.152,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5491.442,
"text": " They died. Their bodies and debris from the incident were taken to the United States, apparently. It's a very, very involved case, which people have been looking into for years. And the people, the witnesses and people involved have been terrified to talk about it because of the threats that they've received. So I've been doing a little work on the medical. There was one police officer, military police officer, who actually was the one who grabbed"
},
{
"end_time": 5545.043,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5521.903,
"text": " this entity when they were trying"
},
{
"end_time": 5566.698,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5545.623,
"text": " documenting because he was in the hospital. He was treated by a bunch of doctors. There's all kinds of records about what happened to him. And so I have talked to some of the doctors that were involved and I've gotten some documents translated, which were autopsy reports done on him that are interesting, but it's an ongoing investigation. It's not, I don't have a whole lot to share about it yet."
},
{
"end_time": 5589.94,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5567.449,
"text": " And I hope to keep going with that, but it's really fascinating. And, you know, what's the potential in that case is so what's so explosive about it is that if we could actually document the reality of these entities, if they're, you know, and we know that the proof of that is there, it's just not coming out. But think how that if you talk about disclosure,"
},
{
"end_time": 5614.923,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5590.981,
"text": " You know, think about that. If there could be proof, and this is in another country, so America, I'm sure America has a lot of control over what comes out, but maybe not complete control. And you just don't know if some of the people in Brazil that are sitting on this information might feel they can release it. So far, they haven't, and it's because they're terrified."
},
{
"end_time": 5633.251,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5615.794,
"text": " so the doctors they remember this person you just say hey do you recall a case from a few years ago about so-and-so no i mean this case was hugely famous it was covered you know by media and they all know about it so you know you know you just mentioned the name of the person who died and they know exactly who you're talking about"
},
{
"end_time": 5660.759,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5633.677,
"text": " This is known throughout the world and it's been investigated for so long. It took place in the 1990s, so it was a while ago, but they definitely know what this is about, the people you talk to. Do you think that private corporations have more information on the phenomenon than the government? I don't know about more, but I think some of the aerospace companies who are contracted with the government probably have"
},
{
"end_time": 5690.811,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5661.135,
"text": " Sure. Can you expand on how some private aerospace companies may have material? How do they come in possession of that? What do they do with it?"
},
{
"end_time": 5721.988,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5692.5,
"text": " Well, I wish I knew more. Again, this is all super sensitive stuff, so I don't know that much about it, but I mean, I have been told by sources that aerospace companies definitely are involved. Harry Reid certainly strongly implied this in my one interview I did with him. And others have told me this, too. And, you know, but how it happens and what they know and all of those details, I don't know. That's all. I forget what your exact question was."
},
{
"end_time": 5749.206,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5722.841,
"text": " I just believe, and again another thing is the Wilson memo, that famous memo written by Eric Davis references aerospace companies being involved too. You can find it throughout, and I'm sure researchers who document all this stuff to people like Richard Dolan and others probably have a lot of information. They probably have it all organized in terms of every time it's been referenced."
},
{
"end_time": 5765.503,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5749.838,
"text": " What do you make of the Wilson memos and can you outline what they are for people who are unfamiliar?"
},
{
"end_time": 5784.531,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5766.903,
"text": " Well, the Wilson document, or the Eric Davis memo, however you want to refer to it, was a series of notes recorded by Eric Davis, who's a physicist, with an absolute, unbelievable memory. And I've talked to that guy, the details that are in his brain."
},
{
"end_time": 5814.889,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5784.974,
"text": " are phenomenal. So it's conceivable that he could remember such a meeting. So he had a meeting with a man named Admiral Tom Wilson back in the 1990s. Again, I just don't remember the exact year, but and it was in a car. And then after the meeting was over, he made these notes about what happened in that meeting. And it's in that meeting, Admiral Wilson described how he had tried to get access to some of these special, he was"
},
{
"end_time": 5840.947,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5814.889,
"text": " I think he was a Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Again, if I had known we were going to talk about this, I would have refreshed my memory before I came on. But he was very high level and he believed that he should if there were such a program which was looking into crashed objects of non-human origin that he would know. So he went banging on doors trying to find the location of these programs. And he was telling Eric Davis at this meeting that he had found one"
},
{
"end_time": 5870.538,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5841.715,
"text": " And they acknowledged that they had a crashed object not made by human hands was the way they described it. These people in this program, but they were not going to allow him access. He was not on the bigot list of people who had access. And they basically told him to go away. And then he was told to keep his mouth shut by people about it and not to pursue this any further. And that's basically what I mean. I encourage it's fascinating to read this memo."
},
{
"end_time": 5900.06,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5871.015,
"text": " You have to go on and read it. And so Wilson has denied that the meeting ever happened and Eric cannot comment on it. So he doesn't say one way or the other. Exactly. Yeah, he's not going to comment on it. My colleague Ralph Blumenthal and I tried to dig into this and it's very hard to get any definitive on the record sources that could verify"
},
{
"end_time": 5922.602,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5901.237,
"text": " anything around that memo, even though there's a lot of names in there and stuff like that. It's just impossible. I mean, there's been some great research done on it. I'm not the one who's done it by various people in the UFO research world and fantastic documents and long reports on this, which I'm trying to trouble naming right now. But"
},
{
"end_time": 5937.602,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5923.712,
"text": " There's a lot of information out there about it. Yeah. And do you take Eric Davis's no comment as an admission of its veracity? Because if it was false, he would just say, no, it's false. Does he always say no comment no matter what?"
},
{
"end_time": 5961.903,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5939.309,
"text": " well you have to look and again there are documents out there that have have everything eric has ever said about this written down you know so you can look and decide for yourself i personally know him i believe he's an honest individual he would not make so i don't believe personally he would make this up so i don't believe he did make it up and i know he has an extraordinary memory and"
},
{
"end_time": 5991.664,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5962.995,
"text": " You know, I'll leave it at that. And if you want to analyze the way he's responded to questions about it, again, you can look. I bet there's somebody who could put in the chat right now the exact document I'm talking about. It came out within the last six months, I think this long detailed analysis under a pseudonym by somebody who analyzed that document in incredible detail. Somebody could probably put that in the chat right now. I just can't."
},
{
"end_time": 6022.21,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5992.278,
"text": " Who is Stuart Alexander and why is he important to the development of your work? Stuart Alexander is a physical medium who lives in the UK who I got involved studying his mediumship when I was writing my book Surviving Death and then I ended up having a lot of experiences with him that were really interesting and both from a you know journalistic perspective and from a personal perspective and I'm still very involved with this group that work with him and physical mediumship is a very strange"
},
{
"end_time": 6048.746,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6022.961,
"text": " How long would that take? Five minutes to do that or much longer? I don't know. You want to try? Do you want to start? And then feel like, ah, no."
},
{
"end_time": 6078.2,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6049.65,
"text": " I mean, I can, I'll give a little synopsis, but I would. Yeah, because that's way too much of a teaser. Everyone's like, no, it's true. I would hope that people would. I mean, I'm not trying to sell my book, but I spent so much time in my book building up to talk. His mediumship was the very end of the book. Right. And I spent many chapters contextualizing it, showing the history, showing scientific studies that have been done on people similar to him in the past that were absolutely, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6104.292,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6078.933,
"text": " irrefutable in terms of documenting the abilities, the same abilities he has that have been documented in other people by scientists in published books and papers. I mean, I just had to set the context for this because it's too weird if you just dump it on somebody. Yeah, it's all there if you want to read about it. And the other thing is that Stuart Alexander, if you go to my website, which is LeslieKane.com and go under surviving death,"
},
{
"end_time": 6124.906,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6105.776,
"text": " I think it's called book materials or something like that. There is a video of Stuart, a two part, fairly lengthy video of him describing his whole development and journey as a physical medium. And I would encourage anybody who's curious to go listen to him and you get a real sense of who he is as a person."
},
{
"end_time": 6138.404,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6125.35,
"text": " and how sincere and genuine he is."
},
{
"end_time": 6160.572,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6138.916,
"text": " But in a nutshell, what physical meetingship is, and I'm going to base that around what I've experienced with Stuart Alexander, is that he goes into a room with a group of people who he works with regularly every week. And I've sort of become part of this group, only I do a lot of it through the computer here in New York. I'd link into their meetings."
},
{
"end_time": 6190.23,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6160.572,
"text": " But I've been inside that group many, many times and experienced all these things myself. And the initial thing is you, of course, eliminate any possibility of there being trickery. And I'm not going to spend time describing how I did that, but I scrutinized everything that was going on to make sure there were no ways that this could be done through cheating or trickery. And what happens is he goes into a trance state where he basically leaves. He's unconscious."
},
{
"end_time": 6209.787,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6190.623,
"text": " And then these entities who are supposedly beings from the afterlife come into his body and make use of his vocal cords basically to communicate with people in the room and they perform all these physical miraculous physical things that you can witness that everybody in the group can witness at the same time. So it's objective."
},
{
"end_time": 6238.439,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6210.623,
"text": " And it's in the dark, but things are lit up enough. Some things are not in the dark so that you can, you know, you can see enough of what's going on depending on what the actual experiment is. They call them experiments. And the dark is important? The dark is important because again, this is the thing that could make us go on for half an hour about this, you know, and I do go into a lot of this to my book and I know people find it suspicious that it has to be in the dark, but it's been the it's just the way he developed and a lot of mediums develop."
},
{
"end_time": 6266.118,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6238.985,
"text": " Because there's a substance that is used, that is exuded from his body to make these physical phenomena happen, that is extremely sensitive to light. And that's just the way it is. People can say, oh, it's just so that they can fake things in the dark, you know, but it's just not the way it is. And the physical substance, is that something that you can capture and then you could measure that? It's more like an energy substance. I mean, people have tried to capture it and take it into a lab."
},
{
"end_time": 6293.968,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6267.261,
"text": " But it kind of disintegrates. It's basically all that's left is some of the saliva from the medium because it's exuded from his mouth or it can be exuded from other parts of his body. But, you know, it's more energy, but it can solidify. I mean, it all sounds like magic and it's like magic. This stuff that's emitted can solidify into something solid. And what it does is it can move. So then what you witness as a person in the room is an object"
},
{
"end_time": 6316.032,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6294.462,
"text": " moving around the room you witness all kinds of levitation and physical objects moving around the room because this substance is attaching themselves to it but you don't see the substance so you're witnessing there's this thing called a trumpet which is a cone shaped object which is a tradition they use in physical mediumship and it's got this illuminated band around the end of it so that even though you're in the dark you can see it"
},
{
"end_time": 6344.957,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6316.8,
"text": " And you can watch this thing go up into the sky and fly all over the room and bang on the walls and go to the ceiling and touch you right in a perfect spot in your forehead. Answer, you know, respond to requests and move around. And that's one thing is this levitation of this object. The trumpet responds to requests. It will respond like if you say it'll it'll. Yeah. And sometimes a voice will speak through the trumpet. A disembodied voice. I've heard that numerous times."
},
{
"end_time": 6369.48,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6345.418,
"text": " I mean, you cannot wrap your mind around this. Yeah, I see why you're saying now that several chapters lead up to this. Exactly, because it's like people think this is completely nuts. And it's very hard for me to talk about because of that. It's so sensitive. And I know that it's real because I've done my due diligence and I've been involved with it for seven years or something. And I know everybody in that group very well. And I know Stuart very well."
},
{
"end_time": 6396.903,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6370.026,
"text": " And I you know, there's absolutely it's real that's without question. It's been witnessed by hundreds of people not just me Over the years, you know, so but it's very I find it hard to talk about and I gave a I was invited to give a talk about this a Rice University Last year at their archives of the impossible conference news held by Jeffrey Kreipel a professor there and I talked about this because he asked me to he asked me to talk about this and"
},
{
"end_time": 6427.073,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6397.398,
"text": " Because Stuart Alexander's archives are now with the Rice University collection. All his archives have been donated with my help to Rice. And it was very, very difficult for me to talk about this. And if people want, they can go and look at the talk I gave. And that's another way you can get a sense of the seriousness of this and the history of it. I was so nervous doing it, Kurt. It's so sensitive. It's very personal and very strange and hard for people to accept as real for good reason."
},
{
"end_time": 6454.531,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6427.824,
"text": " So I just find it hard to talk about that, you know, for that reason. But I, you'll see that when I, if you watch this talk I gave that I was pretty nervous about it and I acknowledge that. But, you know, there's also things like the materializations of things happen. So, you know, I have experienced numerous times, as have others, in the light, you can see this, a hand materialized out of nothing on a table."
},
{
"end_time": 6482.125,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6454.821,
"text": " And I was able to touch this materialized hand. And then, you know, what do you want to make of that? And what is the hand supposed to represent? Someone who is no longer with us? Yeah, it's one of the spirit people. That's what we call them, for lack of a better word. The spirit people who works through Stuart is actually materializing his own hand by"
},
{
"end_time": 6512.09,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6483.183,
"text": " the spirit has a high vibration they slow it down and they use"
},
{
"end_time": 6540.418,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6512.585,
"text": " a substance to slow themselves down or a substance is given off as a result. To put their etheric hand into it. I mean, this is how, you know, again, again, I'm just telling you what I was... So they have to lower, they have to lower their vibration to just be in our physical world and manifest physically, to manifest this hand. So they, somehow there's an etheric hand, there's a non-physical hand that exists and that non-physical, etheric hand is placed inside this"
},
{
"end_time": 6561.442,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6541.135,
"text": " Materials stuff called ectoplasm and then by slowing it by by Somehow he's able to materialize that hand. I mean, I don't know how I sure sure sure all I know is I've witnessed it numerous times and so have many other people and it's One of it is probably the most mind-blowing experience I've ever had in my life"
},
{
"end_time": 6590.043,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6562.875,
"text": " You know, and, but it's documented, it's been written in about, but you know, it's, it's not, it would never satisfy a scientist unless they went in that room and experience it for themselves. You know, a scientist is hearing me say that is going to think it's ridiculous. But if they go in that room and experience it for themselves and have, and you know, can, can satisfy themselves that there's no trickery going on. You're stuck with this. How does it happen?"
},
{
"end_time": 6619.48,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6590.862,
"text": " You said something interesting that is one of the most interesting or mind-blowing experiences of your life. I'm like, that's one of the most? That would be top. Absolute. Bar none. Can you give me two others that you haven't named so far? You're really putting me on the spot here, Kurt. This is not the kind of stuff I usually talk about and I hope... You don't get asked these sorts of questions often? Yeah, but I, you know, I'm hesitant to talk about them too much. I'm a, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6646.067,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6620.247,
"text": " Yeah, whatever you're comfortable with, we'll come back to that. I'm going to give you some time to get comfortable and I'll ask you one more time. The hand, were you able to see the color of the hand? Was it more like a dead hand? Was it a white person's hand? Was it a brown person's hand? Were the nails grown or are they manicured? I'll explain it. So what happens is the light, it's actually a silhouette that you see. So there's a table that has a light underneath it."
},
{
"end_time": 6667.329,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6646.408,
"text": " with a red cloth over it so there's a red light that's coming up from the table and so the hand is on top of the table so what you you can see is the out you know the it's like a silhouette and you see the physical hand you see it actually form and it makes a fist and bangs on the table right when it forms so you know it's physical because you can hear that bang"
},
{
"end_time": 6683.148,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6667.995,
"text": " And you can't see all the details of it because it's a silhouette. Because if there's too much light, they won't be able to do it. But when you touch the hand, yeah, there has to be a certain amount of darkness, but there's enough light here that you can see it."
},
{
"end_time": 6710.179,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6683.677,
"text": " Um, and then when you touch it, if you feel everything, I mean, it's exactly, you feel the fingernails, the knuckles, even the warmth of a hand or no. Yeah. So the way I would describe it to what I experienced when I held that hand was that it was way softer than a normal man's hand. The skin felt like a baby skin. It was very, very soft and it was also very, very warm."
},
{
"end_time": 6737.278,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6710.776,
"text": " Warmer than you would normally experience a hand and look pretty large too But I have a small hand so comparison of my hand It was pretty large but the the warmth of it and the softness of the skin were really striking to me But everything else the way it moved the way it felt the fingernails that knuckles all the features of our normal It felt just like a human hand. I mean it it was um, you know materialized hand and it was physical and"
},
{
"end_time": 6765.145,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6737.619,
"text": " And, you know, so, but I couldn't actually see the color of it because of the silhouette effect. Yeah. So about the, let's just say one other incident in your life that's more on the extraordinary end that you're comfortable speaking about. I'd rather have people read it just because it's so hard to talk about out of context. I, you know, I did witness an apparition that then I write about in my book that I"
},
{
"end_time": 6789.531,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6765.589,
"text": " Were you scared? It was basically a black shape of a person"
},
{
"end_time": 6817.295,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6790.094,
"text": " That was very close to my bed. I could have touched it. You know, it was during the night. It was a full moon. So there was enough light coming in the room that I could see it. I was and I was so afraid that I really couldn't move. At first, I thought it was an intruder in the room. And then I thought maybe it was one of my family members. But then I knew it was I just went through these things in my mind. And then I watched it kind of disintegrate. It just"
},
{
"end_time": 6846.766,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6818.319,
"text": " turned into these little silver particles and disappeared. And yeah, I mean, it was so clearly something otherworldly that it was just mind blowing. I was absolutely convincing, convinced that this was something otherworldly. It was like, there's no other way to explain it because I watched it turn into silver particles and then dissolve before my eyes. And I know it was solid because the pictures on the wall behind it were blocked out."
},
{
"end_time": 6869.343,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6847.176,
"text": " by the shape of this thing. But it was very frightening to me. Very frightening. Afterward, I imagined you just turned on the lights and you weren't able to sleep for a while. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's exactly what I write about that, too. I mean, I think I lay in that bed for like 40 minutes before I could even move. OK, I was just so shocked."
},
{
"end_time": 6891.852,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6869.753,
"text": " Yeah. I don't know. You know, looking back at me, I'm thinking, why was I so frightened? I wish I had like, number one, tried to communicate with it, or number two, grabbed my phone, you know, and taken a picture. I don't know. I regret that I was so afraid. But it's just a shocking thing to see somebody, some form standing right by your bed and very close, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6922.705,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6892.79,
"text": " Uh, so I kind of wish I'd handle it differently, but I just was kind of frozen with the shock of it. And then I did put on the light. And as I recall, I went into another room to sleep and I don't think I really slept much the whole night. Yeah. I mean, that was different because in the Stuart Alexander seance room, it's a controlled environment where you're with other people and you're choosing for these, these manifestations, you know, they're going to happen and you want them to happen and everything's safe and predictable."
},
{
"end_time": 6946.374,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6924.189,
"text": " And so, you know, you go in and over and over again, you can witness the same things at a designated time and place. But this was something that just came out of the blue. And so that's why it was so much worse. It was shocking, you know, I wasn't asking for it, although I was always looking for proof of some kind of afterlife at that time."
},
{
"end_time": 6960.555,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6946.732,
"text": " But anyway, that was a shocking experience. And you know, again, it's hard to talk about out of context, but I'm doing it anyway, Kurt, because you're asking interesting questions. What can I do?"
},
{
"end_time": 6989.94,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6961.032,
"text": " Yeah, I appreciate your candor. I appreciate that even when I ask a question that I know or hope that you can sense that I'm asking it from a place of curiosity and not a place of disregard or discounting or repudiation. So if I say like, oh, what color was the hand? I'm not trying to trip you up at all. I didn't feel that way. If I felt that way, I wouldn't, I wouldn't respond. So no, I feel your curiosity and I'm hoping that the listeners will come from that same place."
},
{
"end_time": 7020.316,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6990.503,
"text": " And, you know, if they feel skeptical, which is completely understandable, I again encourage them to look at my book or look at the video of Stuart Alexander on my website. It's a very well produced video. It's really fascinating. And so met my, you know, for those that are interested. And I just can't deny my own experience. I mean, I, you know, I'm talking about it because it's in my book. So it's there already. So, you know, were there experiences you had to leave out of the book?"
},
{
"end_time": 7046.92,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7020.572,
"text": " I would say at the time, I mean, I thought carefully about whether I should even include my own personal experiences in this book. Should it just be a more sort of sciency, journalistic, researchy book, you know? And I knew that it was really risky for me to do that. But I thought it's not honest if I don't, because these experiences impacted my perception of what"
},
{
"end_time": 7076.305,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7047.193,
"text": " I was writing about and they were part of the journey and I thought they'd be interesting to people. And so I just felt like, and I talk about this in the beginning of my book, that it wouldn't have been honest for me to pretend none of these things happened to me. And so I just decided I'm going to jump off that cliff and do it. At this point, you know, I think of all the people who have come out talking about their UFO abduction experiences or paranormal encounters they've had with things, they've all taken a risk."
},
{
"end_time": 7103.831,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7076.988,
"text": " Um, people who, you know, I've written research books, like someone like Robert Hastings, who wrote the book UFOs and nukes, and nobody would have ever imagined that he was an experiencer himself. So, you know, I, I people do that people have done that, and then I'm not going to be any different. Um, so I decided to do it. And sorry, why would it have been risky for you to include some of your own personal testimony?"
},
{
"end_time": 7133.899,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7104.002,
"text": " just because you know people think they don't I don't know it's good because it's strange stuff you know and they might not believe it or they might think I'm I've lost my mind or I'm okay so they would think that you're biased well not so much biased as that I'm just sort of wacky you know they're nothing just not going to be able to believe this and they're going to think well she's I mean she's really lost it you know I thought she was like this journalist"
},
{
"end_time": 7155.794,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7134.445,
"text": " um but i'm also a human being who's had experiences because when you really dive into something you're you might end up having experiences you know i wanted to originally i wanted to test mediumship right i wanted to see is there anything to me is there anything as a medium that can really do what they say they can do i wanted to"
},
{
"end_time": 7179.923,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7156.476,
"text": " Study that for my book as a journalist. So I found out who some of the absolute best mediums were and I'm not talking about Stuart I'm talking about mental medium shit. We talked about earlier Yeah, and I take the session not knowing for a second if any of it would mean anything. I thought it might be complete baloney, you know, and I was so shocked by what happened and"
},
{
"end_time": 7210.179,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7180.606,
"text": " You know, so it turned out to be a personal experience for me, right? But it was kind of built into my exploration and desire to study it. And sometimes you can't separate them out, you know, you can't separate it. And so I tried to be as analytical as I could about those readings that I had, but they were, I'm not going to pretend that they didn't have a profoundly personal impact on me. And so same, you know, same thing when I'm writing about after death communications,"
},
{
"end_time": 7237.534,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7211.084,
"text": " Studies that have done on them, I have some other very, very credible people in the book who had amazing after-death communications, way more evidential than mine, who I write about. They're willing to put themselves on the line. But I think it was more a fear that I just wouldn't be taken seriously by people. But there are a lot of people that feel the opposite way."
},
{
"end_time": 7252.841,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7238.063,
"text": " And a lot of people who watch the series on Netflix are very grateful because they feel that this material opens a door for them to feel safe to talk about things they never felt safe to talk about before. And if I can do that for somebody, it's all worth it."
},
{
"end_time": 7281.544,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7253.097,
"text": " And I've done that for a lot of people in this situation. Great. Is there something about the skeptic mindset, like let's say the Randy James or James Randi, is there something about their mindset that would make it such that the phenomenon, and maybe I shouldn't call it that, apparitions or mediumship, physical medium, is less likely to occur in their presence? I mean, that's a good question. I don't know if that would be true with mental mediumship. I mean, if they lost someone they loved and they were grieving,"
},
{
"end_time": 7308.473,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7282.005,
"text": " And they felt a genuine desire to contact that person. I, you know, but if I just don't know, I mean, it'd be an interesting experiment if they went into a reading with, you know, hostility and doubt and disbelief and a desire to prove that it was all fake. Maybe nothing would happen for them. I don't know. I think in the situation with Stuart, it would have an impact. And he's talked about that."
},
{
"end_time": 7333.541,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7309.036,
"text": " When somebody is in there with a very negative attitude it can impact, it's a very sensitive environment all about energies of people and the energies that come and play in that room and there's a harmony among everybody sitting in that room that's really profound and that there's a peace and a love and a harmony. You feel like you're entering into another world when you go in there. If there were people in there that were"
},
{
"end_time": 7360.486,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7334.019,
"text": " the opposite, who are hostile and, you know, out to prove that this was funny. I don't know if that would affect the energy of the room and affect the ability of Stuart to perform what he does. It's not really him. It's the beings that come through him. But it's a really interesting question. I've thought about that before. If the skeptic could pretend, you know, that they were totally into this,"
},
{
"end_time": 7387.722,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7361.22,
"text": " but weren't really, I don't know what would happen. I would hope that maybe they get to go in there and see that hand materialize and have their lives changed. And they would have to pretend that they're into it in order to be allowed into the room to begin with? I would think. I mean, if, and it's very hard, it's hard. I mean, Stuart does do guest sittings where people can come in, you know, it's, but normally he works with the same group every week, but"
},
{
"end_time": 7392.892,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7388.285,
"text": " There have been plenty of guests that have come in."
},
{
"end_time": 7420.742,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7393.985,
"text": " I don't know. It would depend on the sense. I mean, Stuart is not interested in being studied scientifically. It's just not something he's interested in. He's not interested in trying to prove anything. He feels that that would be very disruptive to the weekly process that he's involved in, which for him is really about the experiments that go on. It's about continuing to develop. It's about showing people that life doesn't end with death."
},
{
"end_time": 7449.394,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7420.742,
"text": " which is basically how he and the beings that work through him, if you're willing to accept that they exist, all that's their purpose for doing what they do. And he's not interested in subjecting himself to the kind of studies that many mediums of the past did subject themselves to. And that's why we have documentation for the validity of this, because of some of the past studies, but those mediums were also"
},
{
"end_time": 7472.432,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7450.606,
"text": " really tortured and tormented and you know it was very very difficult for them to go through what they went through and basically he just wants to keep sitting every week you know uh and he he doesn't want the kind of public attention that would come from scientific scrutiny and the disruption to the process that he's involved with he just doesn't"
},
{
"end_time": 7501.476,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7472.773,
"text": " doesn't care about trying to prove it. They were tortured, you said? They were just put through such the wringer so much that they, you know, one, they'd be asked to do one thing, they'd be asked to do something more, you know, they'd be put under these very incredible physical restraints or, you know, be forced to, they'd eat certain things that might affect this ectoplasmic energy, you know, dyes and things like that. I mean, a lot of them were photographed and"
},
{
"end_time": 7530.828,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7501.749,
"text": " They don't like certain types of food, like food with dyes and processed food. No, I'm just saying that it was one of the experiment. One of the ways they would do studies was that the they try to. I mean, again, this is really kind of off topic, but, you know, they they give them something to eat that might color the stuff coming out of their mouths if that was fake. So if they were regurgitating something that they might have eaten before they went in the room to produce a fake substance, for instance."
},
{
"end_time": 7558.456,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7531.271,
"text": " the dye from whatever they ate would show up in that you know things like that but I mean they weren't they weren't horrible but you know they would go on and on and on and there was never enough and there was always doubt no matter what these individuals were able to show to the scientists and sometimes people disrespect the rules of the room there were cases where were investigators or just skeptics would flip the light switch on"
},
{
"end_time": 7585.759,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7559.121,
"text": " in the middle of an event where there was this sensitivity, this sensitive energy in the room and the medium was severely injured because of that or died even or wasn't able to die. Yeah, there was one very famous medium who was injured and then just was never able to practice again and eventually died. I mean, it's so sensitive the state that they get into and the substance that is exuded from them"
},
{
"end_time": 7610.964,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7586.288,
"text": " If the light suddenly comes on, it rushes back into their bodies. I mean, again, out of context, this is all going to sound insane to people. We probably shouldn't talk about it too much. We'll finish this and then we probably shouldn't talk about it anymore. You know, but it rushes back into their bodies and can cause a lot of injury, physical injury to their bodies. And that's why they have to be extremely careful about who's allowed into the room."
},
{
"end_time": 7626.954,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7611.493,
"text": " Because this has happened in a number of cases where somebody has put the light on and it's been has severe consequences. And it can it's the protection of the medium that's really the number one priority. So anyway, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 7655.759,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7628.097,
"text": " I know people probably think it's it's very hard to comprehend all this, but I've studied a lot of it. I've studied it. Well, I think most of the people listening and watching are much more open than you would think. And I think as soon as you said, oh, we should move on, they're like, what? No, this is right when it started to get good. OK. I mean, there are books and documents and papers about all of this. And these these mediums of the past were research. And I have the best the best research is in my book. So and all the references are there."
},
{
"end_time": 7685.418,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7656.152,
"text": " for people who want to find out more about how this could possibly be true. It's, you know, I would recommend looking at some of the historical documentation. And if anybody gets a chance to sit with Stuart Alexander, fantastic. And I wish everyone could. And maybe the problem is that during COVID, there was such an interruption because they couldn't sit together for I don't know how long, a long time, because they can't, you know, during COVID, they couldn't go in this small, dark room."
},
{
"end_time": 7704.292,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7686.067,
"text": " for an hour every week. Everybody's quarantining, right? And so now the energies, I mean, it's happening again, but Stuart hasn't done any guest circles yet since COVID ended. But I hope you will. And then people can come and sit and then experience this for themselves."
},
{
"end_time": 7732.005,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7704.582,
"text": " We're going to end with just a couple more questions. Firstly, I want to know what you make of the Pentagon reports. So getting back to the UFO topic, what do you make of them? Even if it's null, that's still something. And secondly, in the same way that you read aloud three references for some of the peer-reviewed studies from before, you mentioned that there's some documentation, maybe not peer-reviewed studies, but there's some documentation. If you could also read a couple of them for people who are driving who want to listen and be like, okay, I want to look up that resource."
},
{
"end_time": 7760.64,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7732.005,
"text": " Okay, you mean on the physical mediumship? Yes. This is one of my favorites. It's a book called Clairvoyance and Materialization, a Record of Experiments, and it was published in 1927, and I actually have an original edition of this book, which is really precious to me, written by Gustave Gillet, who was a French investigator. And within that book, he studied this medium named Franek Kluski,"
},
{
"end_time": 7787.466,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7761.766,
"text": " who also materialized hands and these hands, he was able to make these plaster molds of the hands and I talk about this in the talk I gave at Rice University and I also write, I've got pictures of them in my book, but basically his hands materialized, they dipped themselves into hot wax. The hand came out of the wax, the hand dematerializes and then you're left with this wax glove."
},
{
"end_time": 7810.64,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7788.422,
"text": " right? And the only way the hand could extract from that glove is to dematerialize because there's no brakes or and some of them are like this. Some of them are two hands that are linked. So there's no way you could like slide your hand out of the glove if you were like a human being. So the only way that can happen is they do and people in the room were actually able to see this because there were there was enough light in the room. And again,"
},
{
"end_time": 7837.654,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7811.135,
"text": " How do you believe this? Well, it was documented by these scientists in these papers, and they have pictures and records of all the experiments they did to get these molds that still exist. And I've actually seen them. I went to Paris where they're housed. I was able to see these amazing molds with these hands. And it meant a huge amount to me to see them. I mean, maybe I can show you"
},
{
"end_time": 7867.193,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7837.944,
"text": " Here's a picture of some of them. I don't know how well you can see that. Yeah, these are from what year? 1927, you said? Yeah, the 1920s. Yep. You know, they're not all perfect, but this one on top is too. And again, in my lecture at Rice, I've got a lot more pictures that are better than these because I took them myself when I was there. They're better. But"
},
{
"end_time": 7894.053,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7867.739,
"text": " You know, it's just, and when you read the documentation of these two, and it wasn't just Chalet, he was partnered with another, oh my God, I'm blanking out on his name, a name I know very, very well, but I'm blanking out on it right now because we've been talking so much, Kurt, my brain's like... I appreciate you taking all this time. Yeah, it's all documented in the book, very detailed, meticulous documentation of everything that they did. And these were two scientists who were not"
},
{
"end_time": 7918.712,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7895.145,
"text": " going to risk their careers by making this stuff up. And there were witnesses to it and studies done on all kinds of stuff. But it's phenomenal, right? How do you explain the materialization of living hands? And this is something that's been documented and there are other studies that have documented it too with other mediums. So what was amazing to me that I had studied these documents,"
},
{
"end_time": 7945.026,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7919.855,
"text": " and I was fascinated by it and then suddenly I found this medium who can do the same thing now. And it allowed me to be much more accepting of it to realize if it could be done then as was well documented by numerous mediums and sort of what we call the golden age of physical mediumship which was mainly 1920s, 30s or even the end of the 1800s. And why couldn't it happen now if it happened then, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 7975.145,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7945.776,
"text": " And so, even though Stuart does not want these scientists coming in and filming it and documenting it and all that, nonetheless, it's happening now on the planet, the same thing. And so that's why for me to discover that and to be able to experience it myself, after being so interested in this, was amazing. I don't know how to describe it, but it was really, really profound that that ever happened to me. So, Leslie,"
},
{
"end_time": 8004.155,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7975.538,
"text": " What's next for you? I've got another writing project in the wings, but it's not a book. It's another type form of writing, which I don't really want to talk about because I don't like to until I know something's really going to happen. Let's see. I'm helping get the current series. I'm dealing with a lot of communications and responses to that and hoping interviews to try to get"
},
{
"end_time": 8033.37,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8005.418,
"text": " The word out to the American public. The series being the Netflix Hulu one. Yeah, it's not Netflix. It's it's Nat Geo and Hulu. For people who are listening once more to UFOs investigating the unknown. Is that correct? Yes. And if we just go to Hulu, it's right there. And it was just released a couple days ago. The first two episodes, the next two episodes are next Monday on Nat Geo and then Tuesday on Hulu. And then the fifth episode is the following Monday on Nat Geo and then on Hulu."
},
{
"end_time": 8054.428,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8034.189,
"text": " so in two weeks all episodes will be on hulu but you can watch them gradually as they as they're released yeah to be clear this is february 2023 so if you're listening to this much later all episodes may be released yeah depends um so i think the last date i don't have my calendar in front of me is two weeks from"
},
{
"end_time": 8083.456,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8054.753,
"text": " The previous Monday, you're all be out there. Anyway, I'm always hoping to be able to do more reporting for the New York Times as well with my colleague Ralph Blumenthal. And we're always digging and talking to people and, you know, seeing what we can come up with on that score. And it takes way more time than you might imagine, because not everything pans out. You have to spend a lot of time talking to sources to get maybe a nugget that would lead to a story."
},
{
"end_time": 8113.234,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8084.582,
"text": " So, yeah, and I never know where my path will go. You know, there might be other projects I'll do with Breakthrough Films, which is the company that made this current series and also made Surviving Death, the series we just talked about on Netflix. This amazing independent film company in New York who I've worked with for years and years, so we may end up doing another series or documentary or something together. I don't know yet, but"
},
{
"end_time": 8142.551,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8113.882,
"text": " Do you have a dream project? Kind of, but I don't know. I can't talk. I don't want to talk about it. You don't have to talk about it, but one that is not in the works right now that you're thinking, I'm working up to that. I would say yes. I'm similar in that I don't like to talk about what's embryonic. How many years is that away in your best case scenario? I don't know. It depends how much focus is put on it."
},
{
"end_time": 8153.729,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8142.892,
"text": " Okay, I'm going to hold you to that within a decade. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 8177.159,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8154.292,
"text": " Oh, definitely. Yeah, it better happen before that. I don't think we're going to be in any shape in a decade to be doing very much of anything, so I'm not hopeful for the future direction that we're moving in. And the future direction climate-wise, AI-wise? Climate-wise and geopolitical-wise. You know, the whole thing, I think, is going to kind of come. I think things are going to be pretty difficult starting in a few years."
},
{
"end_time": 8207.159,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8177.756,
"text": " And from what I've been told by sources. What does that mean? It's going to be difficult. It's just, I mean, I can't say specifically, I don't know that much yet. And I can't really say, but just that a lot of what we take for granted now in life, I don't think is going to be, you know, we're not going to have it. A lot of things we have now that makes our lives as wonderful as they are. Like electricity? I don't know. I don't know. Just the access to all the things we have access to now that are that are dependent on"
},
{
"end_time": 8236.408,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8208.029,
"text": " The globalization basically, which just aren't sustainable. A lot of the things we have aren't sustainable. The populations are growing and I think the climate issues are major as well. And that's just my opinion. But I have studied quite a bit about the climate change problem and I take it really seriously. Is there something about the geopolitical situation? Because you just referenced population and climate change. It's not that simple. I just don't feel qualified to talk about it."
},
{
"end_time": 8266.544,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8237.005,
"text": " But I just don't think things as they are now are sustainable. And I'm not qualified to really talk about that. I'm just concerned, that's all. So I don't think 10 years in the future. I only think three or four years into the future. It's too uncertain past that point. I would say so. I would say so, yeah. OK."
},
{
"end_time": 8288.063,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8268.2,
"text": " I'm going to check with the audience just a moment. Do we have some questions from the audience? Someone said, you're working on disclosure. Kind of, I think so, yeah. Yeah, of a sort, huh? Right. If I can report new information, it kind of moves the ball towards greater disclosure."
},
{
"end_time": 8312.415,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8288.575,
"text": " While we're talking about that, I get probably as frustrated as you do, and as anyone who's listening to this, watching interviews with the supposed UFO bigwigs. We're hoping, we're watching them thinking, please slip up, say something that crosses your NDA. There's such a lack of information, it's constantly disappointing, or there's equivocation, and we just want more answers, more answers. And you mentioned there are some necessary preconditions for further disclosure."
},
{
"end_time": 8333.592,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8312.415,
"text": " I think one of them is destigmatization and I think part of that is also people watching. In a sense, if you're watching, when you're hearing this, you're listening to this, you're a part of a necessary precondition for disclosure. So it's not all lost. I know I can get dismayed when I watch interviews or read transcripts and so on and I'm thinking like, come on, I just want to hear the answers, hear the answers. You're gonna mess up lapsus lingui somewhere."
},
{
"end_time": 8359.855,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8334.019,
"text": " Right. They're so careful not to because they don't want to get in trouble. But there is this process now that people can go through with this with information like that to reveal it to the authorities and to Congress that maybe will eventually become available for us. So people with that information now have something they can do with it and they don't just sit on it anymore. So we'll see what happens."
},
{
"end_time": 8386.664,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8360.572,
"text": " So I'll read some of the comments. Many, many plaudits toward you saying, appreciate all of your time. Leslie, thank you. Leslie, your 2017 article was a paradigm shift. This is my favorite interview yet. Great. Wow, people like the weird stuff. I think they like honesty more than anything else. I do feel very, I almost feel vulnerable talking about all that stuff and I hope people will understand that it's very personal and it's also out of context when you're hearing it."
},
{
"end_time": 8407.039,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8387.142,
"text": " Grant me that. Yeah. What's been your experience with the phenomenon as in the more UFO, UAP related phenomena? I would say nothing. I mean, I may have seen some things in the sky that I thought wonder what that is, but you know, nothing dramatic at all. That's really all the people I've talked to who are witnesses rather than me being a witness."
},
{
"end_time": 8437.637,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8407.841,
"text": " How do you think the world would change if they knew what you knew? That is to say, there are some pieces of information that were given to you that you can't disclose because it was told to you off the record or for whatever other reason. Given that, you can't say what it is, but how do you think the world would change if people had access to the same knowledge? I don't think I have access to that much more than most people, but I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 8466.391,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8440.265,
"text": " I don't know if I can say without revealing what that knowledge is, you know? It's just think about if, I mean we talked about it earlier, if people become convinced that there is something here that's not human and it's an intelligence and it has power, how would they react? I mean that's kind of, when we talked about it earlier."
},
{
"end_time": 8470.708,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8469.07,
"text": " You know, I don't know what else I can say"
},
{
"end_time": 8500.64,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8471.783,
"text": " With regard to the UAPs, what convinces you that there's something intelligent behind it? I'll preface this with. The way it moves in the sky doesn't, to me, indicate intelligence per se, because it could be some advanced drone. If it's even extraterrestrial, extraterrestrials sent something unmanned or sent a biological robot. And it doesn't necessarily mean creativity or intelligence or intention. What convinces you that there's intelligence behind the UAPs? Well, I mean, there are some cases where they're responsive."
},
{
"end_time": 8520.674,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8501.442,
"text": " So there are cases, I remember in the study by Richard Haynes that I wrote about in 2001, it goes way back, documenting all these cases of aviation safety issues with commercial airplanes. There were many cases where the UFOs appeared to respond to the actions of the pilot or the movements of the airplane."
},
{
"end_time": 8542.602,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8521.067,
"text": " even in the tic tac event right you know the the way that tic tac was responding to the to dave fravor and kind of interacting with him other another case is the peruvian case of 1980 where oscar santamaria was sent out to shoot down something that they thought with us it's funny about bringing this up now they thought it was a spy balloon"
},
{
"end_time": 8565.589,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8543.592,
"text": " Uh, and, um, this thing kind of got involved in it. He realized it wasn't a balloon. It was a, he tried to shoot it down and he couldn't shoot it down, but then it started to maneuver along with his plane and it would interact with him. I mean, I won't go into the details, but there was sort of this cat and mouse game going on. So lots of times there seems to be interactions that are occurring."
},
{
"end_time": 8595.657,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8566.067,
"text": " So that's where I think the intelligence comes in. And a lot of the military people, I mean, the famous phrase of Charles Holt from the Rendlesian incident is he said so many times that they appear to be under intelligent control. It's just a phrase I've heard a lot of them use. And I think when the pilots are in the air and observing them, if there's any sense of responsiveness to their presence, that would indicate there's some consciousness there, there's some awareness of them, which implies intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 8621.817,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8596.135,
"text": " So you have to look at the cases when there's more of an interaction. Because you're right, if they're just flying around up there doing their own thing, it doesn't show particularly intelligence. It's when they're responding to something that's happening around them in the moment that they couldn't predict. Unless there's some kind of technology where they can do that without intelligence. It depends on how you define intelligence, I guess."
},
{
"end_time": 8651.886,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8622.193,
"text": " I mean, maybe they're just sophisticated technology that can adapt and respond to what's going on around them. So, I don't know, but I've heard so many military witnesses and military experts use that phrase that they appear to be under intelligent control that I just kind of, in many cases, it appears to me that way too. Have you heard anything credible or anything interesting with regard to the time traveling humans hypothesis?"
},
{
"end_time": 8679.906,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8653.08,
"text": " Yeah, I find it really interesting, Kurt. It's funny you raise that question because I have this little thing in front of me. I was thinking about reading. It's a little it's sent to me by a colleague who is very interested in that question. And it kind of relates to the show called Dark that I mentioned earlier, which I would encourage everyone to watch because it deals with that question and it's metaphorical."
},
{
"end_time": 8708.951,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8680.367,
"text": " It deals with humans involved with time travel, but you have to look at the deeper layers of it and it really speaks to the question of that that you bring up. And I just want to, I want to just read, I was really affected by these few lines that this friend sent to me. And it says, what he wrote was, we trust that time is linear, that it proceeds eternally, uniformly into infinity. But the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion."
},
{
"end_time": 8736.323,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8709.701,
"text": " Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are not consecutive. They are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected. We exist within a spiral galaxy, after all. Ultimately, what we know is a drop. What we don't know is an ocean. Maybe that doesn't really relate to time travel, but it sort of does, because time travel is connected with time."
},
{
"end_time": 8764.753,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8737.807,
"text": " the nature of time and what is time and some of the lines from this text actually came from the show dark and so I would yeah that's about you know I'm I'm still trying to figure all this out I don't know but I would encourage people to watch that and see what they think of it because I learned a lot from that show about time and time travel and"
},
{
"end_time": 8795.503,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8766.049,
"text": " It all relates to the ultimate nature of the phenomenon we're dealing with, which is something vast and big and defies time. Yeah, so can it be connected to time travel? Yes, I'd say so. Leslie, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate you spending three hours at least with me. Well, Kurt, it went really fast because I'm blabbing away and talking a lot. But I think you asked fantastic questions."
},
{
"end_time": 8825.674,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8796.135,
"text": " I appreciate the respect and curiosity you have for these strange things that happen to, and I'm not the only one they happen to, they happen to lots of people. So I want people to realize that they're not weird. And I appreciate your putting this information out because it's important that people understand that life isn't what they think it is. And they don't have to feel weird if they have anomalous experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 8830.742,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8827.5,
"text": " Thank you, Leslie. Thank you so much, Kurt. Appreciate it very much."
},
{
"end_time": 8859.309,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8831.544,
"text": " Don't go anywhere, one of the best videos on Toe was just released and I can say that confidently because it's technically not ours but instead yours. It's the list of winners and runner-ups for the physics and explication contest recently launched on Toe. Visit the link in the description. Thank you to all of the winners and congratulations to everyone. That video covers various explanations to reality, to advanced physics techniques and concepts put forward by several of the people in the Theories of Everything community."
},
{
"end_time": 8880.811,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8859.94,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 8907.773,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8880.811,
"text": " It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 8945.845,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8933.899,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network, is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 8963.968,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8946.323,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
}
]
}No transcript available.