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00:00:01
Declassify UAP's Nick Gold
123 Plays3 months ago
I'm joined by Nick Gold, founder of Declassify UAP.
Isaiah:
UFOFocusPodcast@proton.me
https://bsky.app/profile/isaiahthompson.bsky.social
Timestamps: {Via ChatGPT}
- [00:00:02] Introduction - Nick introduces himself, detailing his background and interest in UAPs and UFOs, beginning from his childhood.
- [00:00:22] Professional Involvement - Nick discusses his work with the Galileo Project, the Scientific Coalition of UAP Studies, and his scientific and investigatory approach to UAPs.
- [00:20:32] Declassify UAP Initiative - Nick elaborates on founding the "Declassify UAP" organization, including its goals, branding, and initial efforts.
- [00:26:38] Drone Incidents - Discussion on the mysterious drone sightings, their implications, and how they are distinguished from UFO phenomena.
- [00:47:41] Grassroots Advocacy - Nick highlights efforts to involve stakeholders like first responders and police officers in transparency advocacy.
- [00:50:17] Government Perception - Insights into how elected officials and staff view the UAP phenomenon and its potential implications.
- [00:57:18] Intelligence Assessments - Call for transparency in intelligence assessments regarding UAPs to better understand official hypotheses and evidence.
- [01:08:39] Stakeholder Buy-In - Examination of defense contractors and governmental roles in UAP secrecy and how policy might shift.
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Transcript
Unidentified Objects in the Skies
00:00:00
Speaker
But what what is true, and i'm I'm actually being serious here, is is that ah there are there's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are.
Podcast Introduction and Holiday Delays
00:00:14
Speaker
We can't
00:00:33
Speaker
Hello, and welcome back to UFO Focus. I'm your host, Isaiah. And I know the last podcast I said I was going to have this next podcast out, like 24 hours, but, you know, the holidays hit. I took a little break, I guess, but i wouldn't really call it a break because I've been thinking a lot about the topic.
00:00:55
Speaker
I feel like I have lots of thoughts to share. One that I will share briefly and then I want to get to my interview with Nick Gold.
Mystery Drones in New Jersey
00:01:04
Speaker
But what just one I'll share briefly is New Jersey Drones. Guess what? People are still seeing them. And guess what? There's still been no explanation for what's happening. No identification of these mystery drones.
00:01:24
Speaker
It's absolutely incredible and really outrageous for the people who are seeing these things, reporting them, and you know rightfully worried about what the heck is going on ah around their own homes. And guess what? I spoke to one such person a few days ago. It's a friend of mine named Jenny who lives in New Jersey. Here's just a little snippet of that conversation.
Interview with Nick Gold on UFO Transparency
00:01:53
Speaker
I went outside and there were like two drones just sort of like hovering and then flying a short distance and then hovering and flying a different direction. And it was weird. And we'll hear more from that conversation with Jenny soon. But without further ado, I'd like to introduce my guest, Nick Gold.
00:02:19
Speaker
Nick is the founder and head of Declassify UAP, which is an organization that ah basically lobbies government for more transparency around UAP, UFOs, and also, I guess, um builds the helps build the grassroots effort for that transparency. Nick is a great guy, wicked smart, whose insights I've really appreciated, especially in recent months with with all the, we had two hearings, we had an Arrow report. we've There's been so much to analyze and I've really come to value ah Nick's thoughts and analysis and he's a fun guy and a creative thinker and I hope you enjoy our conversation.
00:03:08
Speaker
It is a bit of a long conversation. So just to ah help out, I put some notes in the show notes, ah what do you call them, timestamps for the conversation in case you want to skip around or revisit certain items we talked about.
00:03:25
Speaker
The only other thing I'll say is, um especially for people who are newer to this topic, but honestly, even people who aren't, you know, Nick knows a lot about this topic and there are several points in the conversation where both of us are, you know, talking about things that you might not know exactly what we're talking about. My advice is um don't sweat it, you know, kind of sit back, absorb the conversation. And it this is at least how I kind of learned about this topic was listening to these kinds of interviews and kind of sopping stuff in and or sopping stuff up. And ah a lot of the blanks just sort of began to fill in
Nick Gold's Journey and Declassify UAP
00:04:11
Speaker
as I learned more. So anyway, thank you so much for listening and I'll see you on the other side.
00:06:17
Speaker
Very good. Well, thanks again. I really appreciate your taking some time to join me. And um if if you would, why don't we just start off, why don't you introduce yourself, um say a little bit about who you are, how you came into this and what is to classify UAP.
00:06:33
Speaker
Well, thank you for having me, Isaiah. My name is Nick Gold. um You know, there's the declassify UAP. It's funny, like, trying to describe myself and starting with that. It's like, I don't know if it gives people a good impression. It's usually where I begin. But I'm like, then it's like, well, who is the guy who would do this? So I'll start with the declassify UAP and then maybe lead into a little bit deeper background so people have context for her declassify UAP guy, Nick Gold. Sure.
00:07:02
Speaker
I was motivated to get more directly involved in a topic that I had been pursuing since I was a little kid. Quite heavily, elementary school in the 80s was sort of when I got bitten by the bug. ah UFOs, or as UAP as we now call them, and associated topics, I'll put it that way, of which there are plenty probably. um And, you know, been following it very closely for many years.
00:07:27
Speaker
I had the opportunity to be part of the Harvard-led Galileo project that Avi Loeb and many others are associated with. um Started off by kind of getting in with a group of folks who were trying to help them out with public relations stuff and that side of it. I ended up getting invited to join the actual research team at Galileo and I was with that ah project for about a year.
00:07:51
Speaker
I'm now a member of the Scientific Coalition of UAP Studies, so I i kind of had a scientific and kind of investigatory interest in UAP. um you know i Those of us who are deeply into UFOs for decades have probably many layers of our relationship with the topic, but certainly one of them was kind of I don't put myself nearly in a category of researcher as some of the the big names, the the Dolan's, e etc. Like their encyclopedic knowledge of of the issues and individual cases by far exceeds my own. But I've been reading all that stuff since I was young. And again, it's really infused my thinking and
00:08:31
Speaker
you know I approached the topic again kind of ah rationally and kind of from a scientific mindset, even if I'm not a trained scientist. I think I'm ah one of those generalists who's pretty good at thinking about problems scientifically. So I had kind of had really interesting opportunities and can you continue to do so to work with some really great thinkers in that realm who are approaching the topic thus.
00:08:56
Speaker
ah It was a real honor to be a listed co-author on the Galileo Project's main paper that I think is like the first big scientific treatise on how to study UFOs or UAP scientifically, um the actual objects in the sky, so to speak. um And you know I contributed a little bit of thinking to that. It was great and it was lovely to see that in there. It had to really do with some of the lacking terminology that we use to describe this stuff, because it's all basically saying what it's not or what we don't understand about it. And those are the labels we use. So a little bit of the thinking in the intro to that paper that talks about kind of the problems that the labels themselves in inject. It was a little bit infused with with Nick Gold vibes. um So that was just a great opportunity. But
00:09:43
Speaker
What I started to see, and it was really funny, because I started this initiative in about June of 2023, I got started. I had been kind of thinking for the first half of 2023. I'll talk a little bit more about my professional career later, but I had kind of wrapped up a contract at the end of 2022 and really wanted to take almost a little bit of a professional breather and really figure out what I wanted to do in life at that point.
00:10:08
Speaker
um yeah My matt background had been in technology and very specifically a lot of media-oriented applications of information technology. And that's cool. That's part of who I am. I enjoyed doing that for 18, 19 years or whatever of my career. But um you know i I had this passion. I felt a little bit of a calling towards the did that thing, the UFO thing. And it just needed a little breather breather and break and all that. so Probably about, I think it was June, early June of 2023. I'd kind of been mulling things over for six months. A guy that I actually had worked for at one point, a good buddy of mine, yeah we were talking and he kind of like said, you know, just... Think about doing the Nick thing, whatever that is, you know, you have your passions, you're into these various topics, you know, there's people out there who, you know, you're a good communicator, you know, they have their YouTube channels, whether it's that or whatever, like, you know,
00:11:07
Speaker
be that be it be who you are kind of was sort of what he said to me and it was really funny because like it was like this key turning in a lock where i went from like six months of just kind of what what should i do and more generalized thinking to like i now know exactly what i'm supposed to do and i'm not saying it was like a divine mission or anything but like ah ah a plan formulated that was like it really just kind of unfolded and I knew what needed to go into it and I had kind of a professional background that allowed me to be like okay I'm going to need to learn some new things here but like I feel this is approachable I can engage with this this way so it all kind of like I started in LLC I was thinking do I want to start a nonprofit because some of what I was had been mulling over for months was like
00:11:55
Speaker
You know, for every other issue, and I think of UFOs as a political issue, as well as a scientific issue, as well as a philosophical issue, I mean, it covers, again, much territory.
Strategies for Political Engagement on UFOs
00:12:06
Speaker
ah But I really felt it was, and and you we were starting to see this online. There was conversation, a fellow I now work with, consider both a friend and collaborator, Ronak Patel, who works with Lester Naray of of ah UAP caucus, who you've talked to, Isaiah. um ah Ronak had started just on Reddit of his own volition putting like templates for emails that people could use who are interested in UFOs to communicate with their congressmen, their senator, other congresspeople who are associated with the topic. um And he was doing this and just this, I'm going to do it as an individual citizen, ah total grassroots, like a grass, grass, grassroots of the grassroots.
00:12:49
Speaker
and the real roots, you know, Ronak doing and this thing and others who were starting to put those feelings out there. But that kind of motivated me and I've since learned some others at or at least I kind of got us thinking that like this is ready to emerge more as a political issue. And just to kind of hint a little bit at my professional career, I dealt with many, many, many types of organizations around the United States ah through my professional career, not just in the media industry, but because everyone uses media. And I'm based here in Baltimore and very close to DC. It also kind of had its intersection with the realms of DC, government, federal agencies, some of the contractors that do business with the feds through those agencies.
00:13:34
Speaker
That was sort of my professional career for many years. And in that, I kind of like had many opportunities to work with the kinds of orgs that exist around DC, right, for every other issue. You have PACs, nonprofits, lobbying firms. I mean, all these buildings in DC are devoted to groups of people essentially trying to get the government to do something a certain way around one or a multiple sets of issues. And it's like, I just didn't see it for UFOs.
00:14:03
Speaker
But it's like the eminently political issue, weirdly, because it involves law and regulation and you know even constitutional issues between the branches of our government and big defense contractors. And it's like it's it should I was like, it should be that kind of an issue that has that kind of a presence, given who all the stakeholders are and how it works and all of it.
00:14:24
Speaker
um yet that presence didn't really exist in any shape or form. So I had been thinking even in that first half of 2023, like, is there a shot at kind of standing up a nonprofit around the topic and kind of doing, kind of representing the grassroots public interest around more transparency and kind of being leveled with and all of the stuff that I felt very passionately about?
00:14:47
Speaker
And, you know, again I again I've been kind of trying to figure out what the particular form was and for some reason when my buddy kind of like encouraged me in this way.
00:15:00
Speaker
ah it It kind of came together. I was like, I need to, you know, again, I did figure out, I didn't want to really necessarily do like a 501 nonprofits, you know, C3 or C4. The C4 allows you to do lobbying in a way that a C3 does not, at least to a greater extent. And this was kind of, it's, even if it was going to sort of largely, at least initially be about lobbying on the public's behalf, just the public interest.
00:15:26
Speaker
I kind of wanted to do it in a very like tease crossed, I just dotted kind of way, like play the game by the rules and register and you have to go through processes to register as a lobbyist. And I was like, well, I don't really want to do a 501c4 because you need several board members or people in the org. It it can't be really a one man shop. And I was like, no, I i feel OK about doing this. It's sort of like a one man org.
00:15:52
Speaker
And I came to learn that many lobbying firms are LLCs. I was like, it's so easy to throw together an LLC. And it does sort of what I think it needs to do for me here, because I i wanted an actual organization to exist. I started in Oregon. You know, it's funny, even the name, I was like, I was thinking about names, I was brainstorming. I was like,
00:16:15
Speaker
shouldn't it be something like like save the whales or like whatever? like Why not have the org kind of be the call? right like We have that again for other issues. ah Environmental groups like Conservation International or whatever. and Again, I had worked with many of these types of firms. and um I was like, what do we want to do?
00:16:42
Speaker
I was like, declassify UAP. It makes sense. It's sort of the call to action. It's what we want it. And it's like, it kind of was the save the wills because it's just literally the statement, right?
00:16:55
Speaker
And interestingly, like not a lot of people had strung those two words together in that way before. Like the the phrase itself, like the words will often be surrounding one another contextually as people discuss the topic, right? But like the phrase itself in such a simplistic form didn't really exist more or less.
00:17:17
Speaker
certainly as kind of a hashtag, a call to action, an org running by that name, a logo, you know with that that image in your head that you get. So I was able to like get an LC in that name. I was able to get like every social media handle and every variation of it, because no one had ever registered, declassified UAP in that way before. And it started to like give a flavor, a personality to this organization, which was going to be at least initially the Nick Show. I didn't know how that might grow. um But I was like, yeah, that's it. And I happened to know a guy online through internet communities devoted to the UFO topic who's a web designer, has done that for other people in the UFO world. And so
00:18:02
Speaker
ah this guy Michael Resil, I reached out to and I was like, is there a chance you can help me with a website? I kind of have a vision of what I want it to look like. It's going to have very grounded information. I'm already negotiating with firms that give you the little like voter engagement interface, that that that form that every other issue has a website where you encouraged members of the public to fill out a little form with a few pieces of info and hit a button and it sends a message to their representatives.
00:18:30
Speaker
I you know support blah, blah, blah organization's call for this bill to pass. did it dode So he was able to help me out. you know It just so happened he had availability. We got the logo and I used kind of the theme of the unredacted, the strike through mark that we're now seeing through and it says declassify UAP in a real like typewriter type font. I was like, it just It's kind of cliched, but at the same time, it like sort of fits again what we're talking about here. And it it it embodies visually sort of what we're talking about in a very literal form. We want to get behind those redaction marks. So,
00:19:12
Speaker
Like, it was all coming together. I cut a contract with Voter Voice, which which is like I had filled out issue forms on their using their platform before. And, you know, we we kind of welded that onto the website and made that the action center. I actually because of my media industry background, there was a DC firm ah that made all sorts of great political advertising um you know for various campaigns and organizations, but a lot of candidates.
00:19:39
Speaker
um I went to visit them. Interestingly, they're like literally next to the Pentagon now. So their office building is like practically throw a bottle and hit the side of the Pentagon. um I thought that was just lovely and ironic. I like that. um So like I talked to them about doing like ah an issue ad that has a call to action. Go to the website. I want it to look really professional. You guys can do this. Like, can you give me a friends and family rate? And um you I kind of wrote and produced it, essentially. I had a good vision of what I wanted that to look like, one of their fantastic video editor graphics guys and their sound guy. And again, I've known these guys for 15 years, that you know buddies, done business with them. But we worked together to create the video. That's kind of the the Declassify UAP campaign video. And I was thrilled with how that came out. Because I wanted it to have a really professional-looking ad. It's longer than an ad. It's about a minute and a half or so. but like
00:20:36
Speaker
That look and feel of a very serious, down-to-earth organization, here's the website, fill out the form, this is the story. And luckily the story is like the government's kind of told us this stuff is real. And there's all these reports and hearings and whatever that says it. The the debate is now about opening up about a lot more, that have dovetails, that basic acknowledgement, we're not there yet.
Scientific Approach to UFOs and Public Perception
00:20:58
Speaker
So it was very easy to tell a story, essentially, that just is rooted in sort of the official sources of knowledge without having to do a whole lot of um hypothesizing. And it doesn't even force someone to adhere to a very particular view about what this phenomenon represents. it's kind of I wanted it to be you backed by a fundamental open-mindedness but also like let's treat this seriously, let's be discerning, let's kind of go through official sources of knowledge so we don't have to like fold in the whole UFO mythology that's developed over 75 years, and we can kind of keep it clean and pristine as sort of a political issue in this capsule. Yeah, there's a lot of rabbit hole stuff that we can go down, but no one says you have to start there. We've been mired in that for decades,
00:21:50
Speaker
being mired in that set of facets of the issue hasn't actually really moved things along very much. What's moved things along is like working through the political process, having whistleblowers take advantage of whistleblower legislation ah regulations, new laws being passed, new government offices being stood up, you know,
00:22:06
Speaker
The UAP task force was like a naval intelligence, but interagency, like official intelligence agency program to look into UFOs. And that was kind of more like i have a normal set of programs and these potential legacy programs or whatever. We had this whole framework just sort of sitting out there that we could do this like without having to be so wed to that 75 plus years of the history and be really focused on just making progress. Like that's really the only thing I care about, um which means transparency around the topic within reasons. Because I think there are all sorts of things that we need to be thoughtful about as we look into this kind of thing. The technology, the ramifications, so societal impact, all of these things are important and need to really be thought about.
00:22:54
Speaker
I don't know if the mode we had been in for so long was really getting us there. So yeah this all infused this kind of grassroots activist lobbying org. I stood it up. We had the LLC, had the website launch. Ross Coltert was able to kind of mention it in a tweet and kind of got it started and the public was coming in to use it. And it just so happened that like probably about a month or so, it was about a month after I had like just kicked off the notion and was like doing the very earliest stages of it.
00:23:25
Speaker
Schumer and Rounds revealed this UAP Disclosure Act, and I was like, I am ready to go to like make the call to action to support this piece of legislation like the central focus. like They've just handed it to me on a frickin' platter.
00:23:41
Speaker
Like I have a bill, we can say support bill number da da da and put it in this act and did it. Like I was like, holy cow, the timing for this just worked out perfect. And so we just kind of ran on that. and And I'll just wrap with this. Like I always wanted to make a big part of it, getting the public to just engage around this, like a typical political issue, right? But, you know, I wanted to be able to parlay that at some point into like maybe some relationships with some of these congressional offices and help them because I think I can be helpful with this topic, and I want to talk a little bit more about this today. um Like, I want to help this along, and I think I'm in a really unique position to potentially at least be a part of that. And I've come to work with a number of wonderful collaborators like Lester and Ronak, and so many others, and the UAP Disclosure Fund, and some of these whistleblowers themselves, and the politicians. But I've now gotten to know some of these political offices,
00:24:36
Speaker
I'm able to kind of interact with them. yeah that They're receiving feedback from me, um first name basis. like They respond pretty quickly and consistently. So you know that layer of it has really kicked in over the last several months.
00:24:51
Speaker
um And I think there's a lot more to now be done there, especially because as we've learned in just this week, I think, it doesn't look like provisions of the UAP Disclosure Act, any additional provisions, because one of them passed last year, the the records collection at at NARA. But you know no other elements of the UAPDA itself are passing.
00:25:12
Speaker
There seems to be probably some reasons behind that. I've been doing a lot of thinking about that and how to kind of move through it potentially. And there's a lot of ways to approach it. um But I really was like, I think I can help a little bit here. And it's just been a real pleasure to be able to do that. And again,
00:25:28
Speaker
I think my background and the fact that I was able to work with so many different types of people to get business done that met people's needs, both me as a provider of of goods and services, but also my very, very diverse set of clients and learn to work and understand how different types of organizations work. Because again, I was putting certain types of media management and storage systems and archive systems. um But um having to learn about, you know, government agencies that are doing that private sector organizations that are doing that major major news organizations that I worked with that do that kind of stuff, you know, pure entertainment organizations comedy organizations all these channels like I really got to see it all.
00:26:16
Speaker
and figure out how to like people get business done. And my whole new thing is like, we got to look at this as a business problem. And we got to really think through who the actual stakeholders are. And we got to figure out how to like, make those stakeholders feel that an outcome is going to make them look good to their orgs, to everyone else.
00:26:37
Speaker
you You get business done by making everyone at the table walk away feeling like they've gotten something. And and that outcome being transparency,
00:26:49
Speaker
transparency ah declassification, is that right? Yeah, so when I put together declassify UAP, I thought one of the very important things we needed to do was to articulate what that meant. Because we could ah declassify, was that to classify everything? well Everything could be everything. Like, you know, who knows where this rabbit hole ends? Like, we got to be specific. We got to articulate this. And again, having worked in some interesting realms surrounding the federal government and such, I have it like at least a cursory notion of how that realm works.
00:27:23
Speaker
And it's like, well, we know there are media collections that involve this topic, rich media that's been recorded. There's data that's been collected. there are This is a big one that I never really saw many people talking about. There are inevitably intelligence assessments that have been created that are like, what the hell might we be doing here? Because now to generate such assessments is literally like the central thing in many ways the intelligence community does. They also then have to act on them potentially, but like, you know, figuring out what the hell we might be dealing with is sort of like what they do. And for us to act like they hadn't done that around this topic, especially when we knew there was OS apps and ATIPs and interagency task force, then the UAP task force, then the AOM SIG and then Arrow,
00:28:10
Speaker
like We're naive if we think no one in even that set of programs had ever reformalized a little bit what the possibilities for especially the true outliers that they've now acknowledged are absolutely a thing. Things that look like UFOs and behave like UFOs are a thing.
00:28:27
Speaker
ah We don't really fully understand them. That's what they're all saying now. So it's like, yeah we have to lay it out. So I laid out these declassification targets, and it kind of formalized what at least I thought an achievable set of asks was, that again, I programmed it in a way where I was like,
00:28:47
Speaker
I don't want it to have to rely on, like, we've gotten full disclosure and have learned every single thing that every legacy program has ever collected and, like, they're bringing out the frickin' vats with the grays in it and da-da-da-da-da. Like, if you're trying to start the process there, it's never gonna get done.
00:29:05
Speaker
And that's where UFO World has been at with this very developed set of ideas and mythologies and maybe even evidence and this and that. And it's like, really, you're going to fix it by kind of having to take it all on at once, including stuff that's like tougher politically and for a variety of reasons for orgs to want to take on.
00:29:27
Speaker
Like, why don't we start with stuff that probably we could get just based on the more open and properly, you know, ah quote, unquote, managed programs like OSAP, ATIP, the UAP task force. Like, they have all of the stuff we need for a lot of the disclosure process to take place.
00:29:46
Speaker
So it's like, why not formulate these declassification targets in a way that doesn't at least initially like require going there to the deep, deep stuff? Let's just use what we think is probably lower hanging fruit that like we can formalize our asks around.
00:30:05
Speaker
And we have the benefit now, we're like, UAP task force briefing documents on frickin' UFOs are now at least declassified, they're heavily, heavily, heavily redacted, including like two of the three things we think they might be, and most of the imagery and all the data, it's like all black marks on these documents.
00:30:22
Speaker
But we know the documents are there. And that's not secret legacy programs, shenanigans, stuff that we have to touch. We can put those documents in front of our elected officials and say, this needs to be reviewed or yeah work with this organization I learned about ah you know this year, the Public Interested Declassification Board, which is kind of a quasi-governmental watchdog body that ostensibly looks out for the public's interest around declassification issues associated with government records. It's like,
00:30:49
Speaker
Well, yeah if we don't have the records review board from the UAPDA, let's use the classification review board we do have. And let's start to make some relationships there. And I was able to get an introduction and be, frankly, even introduced to the reality of that group through a colleague of mine, um Dr. Julia Mossbridge, who I've met through SCU.
00:31:11
Speaker
It's like, you know I think we can get some real progress done by kind of playing the game at least for now in this way. And yeah, I think you get a few more key wins there. It creates huge amounts of momentum for additional layers of disclosure of just what the hell is going on.
00:31:28
Speaker
ah to occur, again, in a thoughtful, intelligent, maybe not all-at-once kind of way, but it just, this this is what came to me. And so, you know, it's not everyone loves it, it's not everyone's bag, but this is very much kind of the Nick way of looking at this topic and what I thought I had to throw into the ring and, you know,
00:31:50
Speaker
We'll, we'll see. Again, I have some sort of new thinking that I think I want to start to try to inject into the mix. Maybe it'll, it'll help with some kind of a, you know, moving on to the next step of the process. We'll see. Yeah. Um, I want to, in a very soon, I want to zoom out and talk about what that game is that you mentioned, because one of the things that I'm trying to understand and trying to um bring to my listeners is is a better sense of to the extent anybody can figure it out, you know, sort of what, what is the game being played. um Who, who are that, who are the players.
00:32:31
Speaker
um What are their motivations? But before we do that, um I have to ask you, and it's totally fine if your answer is like, I gotta ask you about this drone business that has been. Do you have any insight or thoughts about this mysterious rash of so-called drones? drones yeah many and I've been sharing them profusely on X, that's for sure. um and And I think some people like my views on it and some people don't.
00:33:01
Speaker
Well, let's just quickly kind of get this out of the way, and we could probably talk about it for 90 minutes. But um I think it's there's something going on. People are reporting things that they're calling drones. Much of the video does look like some kind of mechanical aircraft that conforms to what we sort of generally think of in that way.
00:33:20
Speaker
Right. um Some eyewitness reports are saying I saw the drones like it was clearly a drone I it looked like a drone it had the float flashing lights of a drone like it was drones and we saw bunches of them flying right over our house and I know what those look like like. So you know UFOs don't get reported that way typically.
00:33:39
Speaker
Like the things that make UFOs are now UAP interesting is that they have anomalies. It's what the A now kind of officially means in the term UAP, right?
Confusion Between Drones and UFOs
00:33:48
Speaker
um And these things aren't really anomalous in that way. The activity is anomalous in some ways, but the devices that people are seeing, and I know people are making claims or I saw orbs or this or that, but but I have to go off of more of the signal that we have and like the videos and the actual accounts of some of the people news orgs are interviewing and or talking to the FBI and stuff. And like they're all talking about drones. And when people report UFOs, there's there's other elements that make them kind of stand apart from those descriptors. And the other thing that a lot of people just like it's like it's something we know, but it's like it hasn't fully settled on us like AI and UFOs and other stuff.
00:34:30
Speaker
Like drones are this very interesting thing that like drone technology has been in development since like the 40s or 50s or maybe even before that. Like we've used drones. It's such a broad category like UFO, right? A drone is everything between like practically a kid's toy these days.
00:34:48
Speaker
And aircraft size, super sophisticated stealth vehicles that we haven't even seen yet from the government, like the RQ-180 that's only been hinted at, like some of the most cutting edge examples, we know that they're working on potentially drone versions of the new SR-72 Hypersonic, you know, aerospace vehicle, like, like do We have drone things in space. We're flying around a drone space plane. I mean, the word drone is so effing generic, and it's such an old set of technologies at this point, decades and decades and decades old. Yeah, we had a Mach 3.3 drone that used to pop off the back of the SR-71 spy plane, and this was 1962 technology.
00:35:34
Speaker
Like, you know, it's like drones has been a thing, but there has been this coalescing over the past five-ish years, maybe going far as back as 10, with both their prevalence in the consumer space at relatively low price points for pretty high levels of sophistication. A certain level of really um both maturity of the technology, lowing of cost, and wide distribution of drone technology at the kind of governmental and military state level of things like whole wars are being not whole wars but like large components of wars are being fought using drones that are sophisticated fly-in packs of dozens if not hundreds at a time are pre-programmed in advance are the size of vehicles
00:36:20
Speaker
have heavy, you you know, all sorts of sensor systems on them, but also have like big explosives that are strapped to them. And like Ukraine is, you know, getting these all the time from Russia, and it's being supplied by Iran. And then, you know, Ukraine uses drone boats to blow up Russian naval ships in the Black Sea. And you have Ukraine sending drones back to Moscow over hundreds and hundreds of miles. You have a lot of Middle East conflict right now, or Middle Eastern countries are sending drones to Israel and launching attacks or Iran is using drones across countries, across countries. So like, we know this, I don't think I just said a lot that a lot of your listeners wouldn't know. I mean, I'll throw in things like those crazy ass drone light shows.
00:37:04
Speaker
where they put up thousands of drones now in this amazing synchronous you know synchronous displays. They treat each a drone like a voxel, a 3D pixel, and they can draw all of these intricate, animated, crazy-ass things, including they do spaceships and UFOs and stuff. um In the sky, and you can like you know cut a contract with one of those drone services to have that be part of your celebration in your city or whatever. like That's a thing in our world.
00:37:32
Speaker
So there's a lot of tendency among UFO people to want to call this a UFO flap. It doesn't have those hallmarks to me and when we say UFO to mean truly anomalous object, because to me, that's a big part of it.
00:37:48
Speaker
and you know one of the debunker lines for many years has been, well, technically anything in the sky that you can't identify is a UFO. And that's a distraction, because UFOs are these actual things that people see and record and interact with, and you have strange experiences around, and they have all of these outlier anomalous, you know, characteristics associated with them. There's the so-called five to six observables, but like, you know, there's a handful of categories But those categories have largely been consistent from Project Sign in 1948, 1949, up through the freaking shapes and characteristics charts that Arrow has put out in the last two years. So it's not like it's really changing dramatically the collection of things when we're talking about the actual outliers these UFOs are. So I don't like calling anything up in the sky that that you know we haven't fully identified a UFO. like
00:38:45
Speaker
I sit here in my living room right now and I see the sky. I have a lot of air traffic here in Baltimore City. And one of the things I see are distant planes, yes, miles away, but I can see specs of them on their approach path to BWI Airport, you know, here in Baltimore area. And like when I just see them as a spec in the distance,
00:39:04
Speaker
They're not UFOs because I haven't fully resolved and identified. It looks like a spec, but I can, you know, it's not doing anything anomalous. It's on the flight path of BWI. It kind of looks like what all those airplanes are. I can cross-reference that on a flight tracker app now and see, yep, it's an airplane. I don't call it a UFO just because I can't immediately identify exactly which flight it is, model of aircraft, et cetera.
00:39:27
Speaker
so When people are reporting drones and describing drones and taking video of things that do seem like they might be drones and they're making drone noises, which is something that UFOs don't tend to do, make large buzzing helicopter and propeller blade type sounds like not really what they do.
00:39:44
Speaker
ah There are, haven't been a lot of UFO waves where dozens of UFOs fly over someone's house and then that happens for weeks and weeks at a time. That's not, that's quite a bit more intense than a typical UFO wave. That's not what UFO wave has typically meant. And people are trying to use that term and saying, oh, it's a UFO flap.
00:40:03
Speaker
Well, this would be quite a flap if it was a UFO flap. um and And, you know, there's been these drone slash ambiguous UFO things like in Colorado a few years ago when people were seeing these things. And it was hard, I think, harder then to know were we dealing with drones? Was it adversarial? I mean, people were having all these conversations about what might be going on. And and still, a lot of the conversation was about drones and a lot of the people reporting them used drone language, even though some were like it seemed unidentified and kind of weird and not like normal aircraft we see.
00:40:33
Speaker
Again, they weren't using the sets of descriptors we normally hear when people have these like holy cow UFO sightings, right? um So you know it was a little ambiguous then, but I think now we're seeing accumulating sets of evidence that people are having UAP conversations and they're having these drone incident conversations about Langley, about the British bases, just like a week or two ago that were essentially happening at the same time as these New Jersey sightings, yeah which is showing us that things are now going on in waves simultaneously in different points around the world that are affecting our infrastructure, our bases, things like that. So something is afoot, and it's got a fairly broad presence at this point. um But because of the fact that I've been a geek for, among many other things, drone technology since the 90s, and following it as a military tech enthusiast and stuff like that, and reading cyberpunk, and having drones be involved in cyberpunk novel plot lines, and that's just been in my head for 35 years now.
00:41:31
Speaker
I was actually waiting for more of these types of things to start happening ah using quote-unquote very broad definition drone technology. Like there's going to be points because this technology is so cheap, so superfluous, so sophisticated, like drone incidents will start to occur. If the technology exists and it's affordable and you can do things that you might want to do with it, people are going to use it at some point.
00:41:54
Speaker
And ah now we're seeing these drone flaps over a few years now. I think it's concerning. I think because of its inherent ambiguities between it as a phenomenon and whatever possible overlap that has with UAP, maybe that's just a matter of like how some people might interpret it or how it loosely presents. But here's the problem. When they tell us that these highly anomalous UAP are real now, and that's the official line, but they don't really tell us much of anything about them,
00:42:23
Speaker
And now they're calling, well, these drone flaps are happening. FBI is saying, I don't even know if it's really dangerous or not, like it might be. We don't really know what we're dealing with, which I think they know a lot more than they're saying. But let's say that's just the official line. And I think we should assume we get about as much real information from them on these drone incidents as we get it from them on the UAP incidents. We shouldn't assume they're telling us everything at face value about these drone incidents when we assume the exact opposite about what they're telling us about UFOs.
00:42:50
Speaker
Like we should assume that if they're willing to not give us the full story on UFOs, it probably means they're also willing to not give us the full story on these incidents. Right. But or or vice ver vice versa, right. Which is that um but that's sort of my mind has been going in a similar direction, um but almost in the opposite way, which is that I'm assuming until I see some sort of, you know, evidence otherwise that these are in fact drones i of somebodies. I mean, it's um that raises a whole lot of questions by itself but um I agree with you that it seems unrealistic that there is as little information about these drones as has been presented to the public so far and I wonder if that doesn't in some some way open a little bit of a door which we'll see how this all plays out but to say like yeah you know
00:43:45
Speaker
You remember, you know, to people who are who are very still remain skeptical, not not just skeptical of UFOs, but who who don't necessarily, you know, most people have almost no background on the subject, right? So like, most people, I think, still don't know that, you know, the government has, as as you've said, it has acknowledged the reality. You're right. You're completely right. Most people don't know that as it as a factoid in their life. And so, you know, I wonder if there isn't a door opening here where where we might be able to say in a few months, like, remember how there was these waves of drones and
00:44:25
Speaker
No one was getting any information and the official line seemed to be that we don't know, you know, but no one really believes that. um Well. Now let's imagine that same dynamic, you know.
00:44:40
Speaker
you know, to imagine that dynamic also plays out with, with genuine. So what you're, what you're describing and like, I guess we could call it the like silver lining or potential utility of these like kind of information poor, you know, simultaneous, ambiguous information environments around kind of generally overlapping sets of phenomena. Like I think they're like, you've you're saying the exact things that I've been thinking a lot about recently that like this could I don't love how people respond to things on a personal level all the time about this kind of a drone or whatever it is flap, right? Or wave or set of incidents. But I also am willing to kind of sit back, zoom out a little bit and say, yeah.
00:45:22
Speaker
this could actually be tactically useful. And frankly, I've already started saying this to some of my congressional contacts, where I'm like, this information environment is not a healthy one, where highly anomalous UAP are real, but we're not really going to share much information with you about it. These drone swarms are real. They might even represent some kind of a threat or state actor, but we're not really going to tell you anything about it.
00:45:46
Speaker
And it leads to ah kind of some overreactions. It leads to conflations of those topics, where if they if they are not conflated, you kind of want them to be treated in their own way that's appropriate for that particular topic. Although there are overlaps in how you would investigate these things, certainly. like They still might fall into different buckets if you think it might be Iran or Russia or China or whomever, or a terrorist group, or or even just pranksters or whatever. it might like Something you think might be frickin space aliens probably shouldn't be dealt with in the exact same way, you know, it's just as a hypothesis or ah just a logical statement right those are kind of different things and you would want to sort of tease them apart and treat them as different things.
Government's Role in Drone and UFO Transparency
00:46:26
Speaker
um so the fact that the public has plenty of reason to be confused and find these things ambiguous and because of that ambiguity both alone as issues but also when there's this confluence and now shit's flying over people's houses and they're kind of freaking out a little bit and there's also this backdrop of the UFO stuff and we we don't know is it that like yeah we can give proof on the internet people are conflating these things and kind of treating it like you know aliens are invading New Jersey Which, funny enough, wasn't that War of the Worlds? Are we seeing like... Because I was about to say that, yeah. 2024 War of the Worlds event right here. There is a very real historical example of people fearing aliens and invading New Jersey. Yeah. So here we are, right? We've arrived. And it allows me to frame out a very cogent, specific, bullet pointy summary for a staff member of an elected official. It says, this is no bueno.
00:47:22
Speaker
yeah You got to get a little more on both of these things because people are overwhelming you local law enforcement, they're dialing up the switchboards. As someone said on ah an X space last night, like because people could start taking shots at these things.
00:47:39
Speaker
like Americans are armed last time I checked. At some point, someone's going to be like, you know F having this little drone or dozens of them flying over my house. I'm going to start taking potshots. That's not good for a lot of reasons. It's probably what holds the government back from taking more kinetic action against these things, even if that's radio waves and knocking them out of the sky and not shooting missiles at them. That's still things coming down over America. it It starts to look like a war is happening in the skies of America. They don't want to put that vibe out right now and freak people out a hundred times as much. ah Even if it is shooting a radio wave or having one other drone deploy a net to capture one of these things, it still looks like drone wars in Ukraine has come to America. And the government has a lot of reasons for not wanting to like make that the headline, right?
00:48:29
Speaker
That's interesting. Yeah. So um I understand, and they have so many mechanisms, Isaiah, to like keep an eye on things without having to be super obvious about that. We think about the the UAP shootdowns in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon from 2023. What were they spotting when they tweaked the filters supposedly on the NORAD system? Automobile sized metallic objects or whatever started to pop up on radar.
00:48:58
Speaker
So one has to surmise there's at least a possibility there is some observational capability that doesn't require being there immediately, not not to mention stuff lying around way up in the atmosphere. It's out in outer space or whatever, right?
00:49:13
Speaker
Like, they don't have to look like that they're tracking these things, and thus they don't have to acknowledge that they're tracking these things. And if they are putting a lot of energies and maybe even have a lot of information about these drone things, why would they want to tip their cards to a potential adversary and then say, oh, by the way, this is everything we know about you and what you're doing with us? That's not how, like, I think about the cop attitude.
00:49:35
Speaker
like the investigator. That's not how they work. It's always like, yeah, we're going to keep an eye on the little guy and we're going to follow him up the chain and we're going to bust the big guy, but we're going to kind of sit on it and we're going to play the game. I mean, I'm just thinking back to like every fucking cop show I've watched over the decades, right? But that's like, that is how you do things. And we've seen, frankly, major national security issues arise from people sitting on operations a little too long.
00:50:01
Speaker
This is my sense, my personal sense that I've gotten from the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing. Like this guy was known, they were on him. You could even look at Lee Harvey Oswald that way. he was no the What we've learned from the JFK papers is that the CIA and the American Intelligence Apparatus and Military Apparatus knew all about Lee Harvey Oswald and was tracking that guy. and had yeah was It was a not some random dude off the street.
00:50:31
Speaker
um So, um you know, we learn that they will sit on things and watch them and take this low key approach. And that might serve some of their purposes some of the time, but sometimes like they've let out the leash a little too far or whatever, and it leads to a situation arising and then having to kind of elicit an overreaction. But like to me, that's like what these investigators do. So to think that they would be not sharing all the information about the drones, even though they're probably gathering a bunch And they don't want to start like war over American streets in New Jersey. and you know And maybe, by the way, because we can't tell you the specifics of what they are. Yeah, feel free to imagine we're now having wars with alien drones over the skies. right like They don't want to feed into that. ah But they are through the lack of information. So you know maybe to land this.
00:51:21
Speaker
ah I agree with you that despite the kind of like unsavoriness of how we're currently where we're currently at, and the fact that it's this information vacuum and it just doesn't seem like a good situation, ah these drones, the questions around them, possible relationships to UAP, other not great looking scenarios if they're not UAP, that's still a whole bunch of not wonderful situations to have to contend with.
00:51:50
Speaker
um you know Let's make the most of the situation and use it to focus our messaging so when people, including the people listening right now, you know do outreach to their elected officials, ah their own you know as constituents, but also some of the key reps who have involved themselves with UAP legislation and all that stuff, both on the House and on the Senate side,
00:52:15
Speaker
and incorporate this, you know, set of circumstances into some of your messaging. And so, you know, between all of the UFO unknowns and all of the drone unknowns, and clearly it's leading to people kind of freaking out, you this doesn't seem good. I need you to really fight for getting me a little more information. And you know what, he even really be better.
00:52:35
Speaker
I had a several hour conversation with, I'll leave it a little general, but a California police officer, administrator, and doing ah kind of some work around what they call threat casting, which you don't have to take super ominously, right? It's just like, they look at different situations going on. And he decided to look into UAP as something they should kind of think about now that this is getting acknowledged, but there's all these opportunities to overreact. and yeah We talked about the drone thing of the other day, and I was like, you know you guys just broadly, first responders and police, etc., getting kind of overwhelmed based on this. it's like you know It creates a circumstance where first responders themselves can now get in on this transparency, advocacy.
00:53:24
Speaker
because they're having to deal with the consequences on the ground when the switchboard lights up and people are calling them and they're deploying police officers everywhere and they themselves aren't getting the information they need out of the feds. And it's all just craziness all around. right It's like, now we, there are advocates for transparency. And when you start getting a lot of people with badges on their chests as your advocates for something like this, I think it sends a signal that like, this isn't just,
00:53:49
Speaker
quote unquote UFO geeks or whatever, like myself. I mean, Americans for civil society. Exactly. Like, ah it just gets more and more real stakeholders.
00:54:01
Speaker
you know, in into the conversation at the table, looking to walk away with some sets of gains. Yeah. All right. Let's get to let's jump into some meaty stuff here. The situation, the situation, the situation. What the hell is going on? What? Well, yeah, what is going on? And I guess what something that i'm I'm really eager to ask you is,
00:54:23
Speaker
as someone who does interface with elected officials and people in government, what is your understanding of their understanding? And and I realize they is a big range of people, probably with a big range of different understandings, beliefs, etc. But like, you know, when when when I talk to people who, you know, are
00:54:52
Speaker
skeptical or, you know, more often it's just sort of like, don't have any information about UFOs and are sort of like, why on earth should I take the subject seriously? One of the first things that I say nowadays is I say like, look, you know, very powerful people in in our government are taking it seriously. Chuck, you know, might my my go-to phrase is Chuck effing Schumer. You know, like, you think that guy's messing around? I don't think so. um Sponsored this massive UFO, UAP,
00:55:19
Speaker
legislation um along with Senator Rounds. But what's totally bizarre, and I mean, you touched on this when you were talking about the recent um Senate arrow briefing um with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and the other senator whose name I can't remember. um ah You know, you touched on your frustration that, you know, why isn't Gillibrand asking more pointed questions, um really trying to get it at at at the meat of like like, what's the deal? What's the deal with these anomalous cases that you have, et cetera? So my question is going sort of long, but I guess what I'm asking is like, what is what do you think
00:56:06
Speaker
What do you know that it some of these officials themselves believe is going on? What do they think is going on? And then the sort of follow up to that is like, do they believe there's an ET presence? If so, why don't they tell us that directly? Maybe they don't believe that. I don't know.
00:56:28
Speaker
Well, there's i mean a lot there to unpack, and it it does actually kind of fold into, I think, possibly, I guess that's the best I can do there, with kind of my my intelligence assessment, the NIC intelligence assessment on just what the heck is going on and what people think and and how what others think about it might relate to that, right? So I guess I'll start a little broader.
00:56:50
Speaker
When we're talking to some staff members, whether it's some in-person meetings like we had during our Hill Day or I've had a couple since then, you know, from September that I did with the UAP caucus and some others that we brought in and had like a dozen or so meetings and they we're interfacing directly with these staffs and a lot of key offices, including, you know, again, folks associated with the topic that we've been developing relationships with, ah you have particular you know, particular elected officials whose names, you know, people know.
00:57:16
Speaker
ah Like, it's funny. We don't cram like talking about space aliens down the throats and making it the center of the conversations. um It just doesn't need to be the focus. um I guess I'll put it this way. Like, I don't get the impression, the ones who kind of know a little bit about the topic or are getting pulled into it by their their boss, the elected official themselves or whatever. Like, I think they're generally getting the impression that there is like something to this.
00:57:49
Speaker
like I do think that is predominantly the attitude in all of these conversations. I don't want to speak for them individually as both offices and individuals, but I think if you look at like what specifically was intoned by Schumer and Rounds when they gave that colloquy after the first you know time they tried to get the full UAPDA passed, they're saying point blank. The American people are not being told about non-human intelligence, UAP, technologies of unknown origin, blah, bla blah, blah. They're the ones using that language.
00:58:17
Speaker
So I think like their staffers are are realizing like there there is something to this. There is definitely signal amongst the noise. um And it's hard to avoid like the set of possibilities that that intones are, yeah, you know what.
00:58:36
Speaker
But like we don't have to dwell on the you-know-what, because that's ah like almost a harder part of the conversation to have and to have to like meld into the more tactical conversations of like how
Policy vs. Conspiracy in UFO Secrecy
00:58:47
Speaker
do we move this along and and kind of come to some conclusions and figure out reasonable ways of sharing information. And so like I kind of think that like a lot of them, indeed, get the sense that, like yeah,
00:59:01
Speaker
Yeah, as as John Kozlowski of arrow is saying, and as all these former high level officials, most recently, Lloyd Austin is now in on it of saying, yeah, these, we are seeing these things in the skies, etc, that do things that we don't really fully have our heads wrapped around this sort of the message. Obama said it, multiple DNS have said it, like we have this whole body of folks who have said it.
00:59:28
Speaker
Like, yeah, like people are on the page of that being the situation. What that entails, like all of the rabbit hole, you can then spend the rest of your life exploring like I have. Like, you know, we can get there and that's sort of going on and it's probably part of the thinking for people, um you know, yet.
00:59:48
Speaker
ah Because a lot of them are coming at it from a skeptical but kind of open-minded attitude themselves and might not be experts in the topic. One told me recently a staffer like, you know, assume some of us have had like a kind of a few months now to ramp on this topic. You know, it's like they're not lifelong experts and researchers and haven't been involved with UAP science programs and it like work we're actually having to educate them around facets of the issue in a way that we find is useful um for them to then be part of the moving it along from their particular perspective. So, but like, I don't think anyone thinks we're talking about misidentified balloons or even drones, even though again that has overlaps that we've discussed.
01:00:29
Speaker
um you know Seagulls, glints on lenses, like everyone knows and they are admitting it. The DOD has the data that says these highly anomalous, so in some cases they have called them in their own literature, advanced aerospace or aerial vehicles. They're real. like That part of disclosure happened.
01:00:52
Speaker
Like sometimes I'm like, you know, we might not get the full story. I'm glad we got there in my lifetime in a more concrete way than we've seen over the decades. They've said that thing too over the decades. They even said that during the Blue Book era. It's what the sign report kind of says. It's like, that also hasn't changed very much, but it's like, you didn't have the Lloyd Austin of the time saying it when asked about that by a journalist. And, you know, I mean, it's just a little more out there and part of the official story now.
01:01:21
Speaker
ah So now it's like, yeah what do you really know about them, and what more can you tell us about them, even if some of that is hypotheses and intelligence assessments that might not be fully fleshed out? Because how the hell could you ever come to know this kind of a topic entirely, or certainly certainty, with certain certainty? And you know, they always use that that phrase, well, we found no verifiable evidence of an extraterrestrial connection.
01:01:45
Speaker
Well, define that because a lot of people, maybe even myself, would argue it would not necessarily be possible to absolutely verifiably prove that even a freaking gray in a spaceship or whatever was absolutely an extraterrestrial visitor. I mean, maybe he comes from the inner earth and sometimes flies around in space and then he comes back to earth for a while. like They can basically say, we're not going to tell you anything ever if they have that undefined, verifiable sort of attached to it, which is why I talk a lot about, well, give us the hypotheses. Give us the official thinking on what the hypotheses you feel are really on the table for what we might be dealing with all of the intelligence assessments at all of the confidence levels, like they did with COVID eventually and its origin.
01:02:30
Speaker
ODNI put out a report that said, oh, and yeah, actually it turns out a good chunk of the intelligence community. Even though we said this was not a lab leak, this was not a lab leak, there's no reason to believe that. Well, that's not actually what the full set of agencies and people at the intelligence community really thought. In fact, it's kind of on the table.
01:02:49
Speaker
Like that would be nice to get relate like the the analog to that. Well, you know, there's a lot of unknowns. We're not going to give you all the gory details, but these things are real and yeah, these are at least a handful and they're like we feel they're being honest with us and they're laying it out in black and white because they've also said extraterrestrial is still on the table. They haven't ruled that out.
01:03:09
Speaker
But I want to see the list of things they've said officially are the thinking, and this is what represents the intelligence assessments. There's probably multiple ones from over decades and a variety of agencies. They probably don't all agree, and I bet they all have a bunch of options, and they're probably all low confidence. yeah But like, tell us that in a highly summarized form.
01:03:29
Speaker
Yeah, no, I really like your thinking about the, and i've i've I've heard you bring this up on previous podcasts. And as soon as you said, I was like, yes, intelligence assessments, that's a great idea. We should, you know, let's see if we can get some of those. One thing that, um you know, i I was thinking a lot about your critique of the recent Senate briefing, the Arrow Senate briefing, and um your critique, which I completely agree with, which is um that You know, you basically had weak questions and weak answers, disappointing questions and disappoint. There was no probing. It was all a very surface level. Right. So I guess my one of my questions is, you know. Is that because something that I took away from that briefing was I found it somewhat remarkable. That Senator Gillibrand
01:04:25
Speaker
seemed so if if um if arrow was kind of throwing water on the et hypothesis or you know et or whatever non-human intelligence hypothesis um senator jillibrand wasn't in the sense that um it seemed to me that she kind of walked right up to the line. She emphasized the ongoing mystery. She emphasized that the Arrow Historical Report for all its flaws um did reinforce sort of the, you know, the history of serious government interest in this subject. And it seemed to me that she was sort of trying to communicate like
01:05:08
Speaker
No, no, no. This this really is an important image. Yeah, there's a there there. Like clearly this shows that the government for decades has thought there's a there there. There's a there there. But I guess what I wonder is, is is the reason that she didn't push and say, well, wait a minute, I don't want to hear about what you I want to hear about what you haven't solved. I want to know how it's behaving. I mean, here's all right. One explanation. She is getting that information just in the closed briefings that we don't get to see. Another explanation though to me is that she and her colleagues, folks like Schumer, who are willing to put non-human intelligence into legislation, but not particularly eager to talk about it in public, um that they are worried about
01:05:58
Speaker
it seems to be possible that they believe that this UAP do represent non-human intelligence and they're kind of worried about that getting out there. So let me answer in this way. And again, i one of the reasons i I just, I think we get along is because we look at these and analyze them and in in a similar way. So um this is what I've come to believe and it's part of the Nick Gold UFO intelligence assessment.
01:06:25
Speaker
You know, it's again for decades that the notion of the secrecy has been these, you know, Baroque conspiracies and secret programs and bajillions of dollars getting siphoned off and secret miracle technologies being withheld and the yeah power overlord elite of the mega corporations wants to hoard it. Just that's, you know, good chunk of the UFO mythology, right? Yeah.
01:06:50
Speaker
But that might not be true in a sense. yeah that's right there there or There could be elements of that, right but what's at the core of the secrecy? like What if it's just a matter of policy?
01:07:03
Speaker
Like let's just, him like maybe the President of the United States and various administrations at the executive level, both throughout the agencies and the DOD and the IC, but like even to some degree getting the buy-in of various presidential administrations to probably various degrees, not all of them probably knew as much about it.
01:07:21
Speaker
Some might not have shown any interest and then thus might not have heard anything about it. Some might have poked a little bit and gotten a little bit back. like I assume there's a variety, right? it's Obama sounds like a guy who knows more than he can say. He does. but yeahp i mean you know Trump even sounds like a guy who knows more than he can say. Biden kind of seems that way because he doesn't want to talk about it really at all. like they like They're getting more. like We have to assume the presidents are like maybe know more about UFOs than you and I do.
01:07:48
Speaker
and just get through that basic acknowledgement instead of acting like this isn't just a matter of government policy. And unfortunately, the policy has been the one that withholds more information than should be from the American people. I mean, when you have the DNI, Avril Haines, the current DNI doing a speaking tour on that, you can watch talks she's given on over classification. This is the one who runs the intelligence community ostensibly.
01:08:13
Speaker
um And the dangers to democracy that that entails like, you know, there's there's things that they know about that are probably concrete examples of what they're alluding to and it wouldn't shock me if UFOs was one of them. But let's assume it's more centrally a matter of an existing policy that makes it happen this way or doesn't happen this way. And that the thing that needs to change is the policy and that throwaway statement that they always keep saying there is no verifiable evidence. Saying that phrase is a matter of maintaining the existing policy that's in place.
01:08:56
Speaker
And like when the policy changes, that sentence will probably either go away or be replaced by a new sentence. And that's what we're trying to help along, a sentence that we feel like makes more effing sense based on the set of facts that we have available to us.
01:09:10
Speaker
So let's assume it's a matter of policy that is keeping the status quo where it is. You don't think at this point in the game, she created the DOD Aero Office, practically. She was a big part of the drafting of it, right? She's a jailer brand. She takes responsibility for it. She loves to play on that credit. It's it's her base. You don't think she's figured out at this point in the game that that's the policy, if indeed this hypothesis is correct. You don't think Chuck Schumer and Rounds got a sense by this point that this is the policy and that's why it's being treated this way and they have to be very thoughtful is how they like we kind of unwind this policy and they've taken a stab at it in the form of the UAPDA and other things again they're talking around it they're forging relationships through their offices with people like myself and Lester and other people who are involved in these conversations and the UAP disclosure fund people and you know a lot of people who are having these conversations with them now and encouraging this. um You don't think they've gotten wind of the policy. So it's like the reason they're not pushing is because they know they're not the person who gets to make the ultimate decision about the policy change.
01:10:16
Speaker
whatever regime has led up to it being handled in the way it is where it is probably I think of all issues a person could ever imagine that probably like maybe would be a good reason to fall back on the unitary executive theory of the presidency which I don't personally agree with but like if any one issue was going to justify it I could see it being this one right we're like we're just This has to be a top-down whole of government decision to change the policy that's been you know reiterated and reiterated decade after decade. I joke. like you know The DOD gatekeepers from an information and comms perspective, we we know their names. They loom in the corner of the hearing video. right yeahp they make They make gloomy dour faces at us.
01:11:09
Speaker
yeah we We incorporate them into our memes or whatever. like I joke that they get this three, when they sign up for this, they and they get read in, and we're going to have you do comms on this UAP thing and run with it. They get this like dusty binder from 1952. It's got the playbook in it. There's a few like laminated pages that are in the end, like seven of them that are like from 1997. And they're like, how to adapt this policy for the internet era?
01:11:37
Speaker
And that's like what they've been going off probably all this time. And it's it's largely self-perpetuating at this point. like every Every UFO person who freaks out about an alien invasion in New Jersey when there's some kind of adversarial drone thing going on, again, I'm just postulating. but like That would be an example, hypothetically, of the community sort of perpetuating its own mythos that maybe gets in the way of just getting to the meat of the matter, possibly. So like you don't probably have to put a whole bunch of new inputs into the system that exists to kind of keep the status quo going from like how the public is dealing with it, unless people start changing their tune and take more proactive approaches and think tactically and look for silver linings and work within the system and build relationships and treat it the way that we've started to see over the last several years.
Aligning Stakeholder Incentives with Transparency
01:12:22
Speaker
um But it's like they don't have to do much um for the policy to just sort of keep maintaining until it's decided that the policy needs to change. And this is this is at the heart of the thinking that I want to bring into 2025.
01:12:39
Speaker
Oops, like ignore my my. Oh, no worries. So just me stroking my beard has turned into a thumb. Yeah, I know. We get all of these little pop up emojis now on our cameras and everything because the A.I. thinks it wants to emote for us instead of us and da-dada our times. Right. This this world of 2024, 2025, the future trademark.
01:13:01
Speaker
um So. two You know, going into 2025, we just had another year where no additional provisions of the UAP Disclosure Act passed. We got a little bit of like a um the ah Congressional Oversight Office or whatever, GAO, a Government Oversight Office, doing a little bit of a review, not an investigation, a little review of the Arrow Office.
01:13:24
Speaker
you kick the tires a little bit make sure the money isn't getting wasted. Are you actually following the mandate of the legislation? Yada, yada. So that that got passed, or it will be getting passed shortly, it looks like. ah But you know beyond what was passed last year from the records collection stuff from UAPDA, no additional UAPDA provisions were passed, no records review board, no like both national and international quasi-organized disclosure process, working with our allies, you know, none of those statements about, you know, this legislation is important because of these reasons, like no additional stuff passed.
01:13:59
Speaker
So here's my way of looking at it, Isaiah, having frankly been a business person, having dealt with many, many types of organizations and having to sit around the table and shake hands and close deals. And again, walk away knowing that to walk away with a successful deal being made, the people at the table who are all stakeholders need to kind of find buy-in and put their stamp of approval on it.
01:14:26
Speaker
and um and and walk away feeling like they got something good out of it and they're not going to look like an asshole certainly for having gone about it that way. No one wants to cut a deal and put in a new system or change a policy when like a big part of it inherently is, oh, and by the way, you're going to be the asshole.
01:14:43
Speaker
Who wants to buy into that? why is that why Why should we think a stakeholder is going to be attracted to that way of framing it? In other words, in other words, why would the the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, whatever, why would they sort of, I think this is what you're saying, why would they engage in a deal in which the result is they look like liars?
01:15:09
Speaker
And let's not let's not forget the defense contractors, because let's feed let's continue my hypothesis that this is centrally. Yes, there's probably like all of this stuff that's developed because of this being a policy that that involves both private sector and public sector entities.
01:15:27
Speaker
ah but But what if fundamentally the secrecy is a matter of government policy? It starts to reframe the role of the defense contractors as stakeholders in this. but Instead of being the ones behind the secrecy, the villains, the ones who are holding out on us, like I'll tell you, having worked with the government and the feds and some of these types of agencies and their contractors,
01:15:52
Speaker
I'll tell you, it is like it feels more likely to me that any legacy programs were probably relatively small, probably underfunded. There's a really good chance the defense contractors like didn't want to play the game this way, but Uncle Sam came along and said actually this is how we're gonna play the game and we have these like secret executive orders that say that we can do it this way, so don't worry about that. You're not going to get busted. We're going to have some memos of understanding with you guys. We're going to have you do some stuff for us around this topic. And the contractor's like, are you going to keep buying F-35 fighter jets from us if we do this? And they're like, yeah, yeah, we love that shit. Just do this favor for us and treat it in this way.
01:16:32
Speaker
Okay, fine. like That's just as likely, if not a more plausible scenario to me in my head than like, oh yes, the greedy defense contractors are making most of their profit off of this stuff. like They're not. They they they like sell aircraft carriers to the US government and battleships or whatever. that like They make money mostly selling stuff, not doing like research and development. like that's Usually you're looking to sell a product. And guess what secrecy holds back? Productizing things. Even if you haven't figured out how to do it yet, the secrecy itself would prevent you from like eventually carbon copying it into a productized form and selling X number of units to the federal government, because that's where they make their money, typically.
01:17:15
Speaker
So the secrecy doesn't work for you as a contractor. Again, i like who knows? Maybe we'll find out someday. But it it wouldn't shock me if this wasn't the ideal setup from the point of view of at least a decent number of people in those organizations. And I think the fact that people from those organizations who have come forward You know, ah people have had, say, long careers as deputy chief technology officers and one of the big three defense contractors who's now kind of one of these officials who's saying things about this topic in a public way. Like, to me that's representative of the fact that we're seeing the tip of the iceberg.
01:17:53
Speaker
That probably means there's an increasing culture of people in these orgs who are open to this. Like, Lou Elizondo isn't just Lou Elizondo, I don't think. It's like Lou is a representative of a new tendency that's arisen to want to treat this in a different way. He's done ah an immense part and so have the other names and people and fighter pilots and all of them deserve all the credit. But like, we shouldn't assume it's just them. They are representative of the trend or a growing trend.
01:18:23
Speaker
So it's like maybe if we treat the stakeholders as legitimate stakeholders in the topic and think about this from their own set of incentives and motivations and reward systems, because here's the thing. And let's let's look at the UAPDA. This is really, I've been mulling this over the last couple of days. The UAPDA, they say, we have heard again and again, was framed on the JFK Records Act.
01:18:52
Speaker
The JFK Records Act was put together, largely essentially around one of the crimes of the 20th century. like one of the most traumatic incidents of the 20th century, the assassination of JFK, no one could really say that's not a crime, a coverup, clearly like people were lost their crap over it. It was a bad time and people were very, fat America, people argue that's left a lasting mark in American psyche that has led to a lot of distrust of government. Oh, we finally had a good one in the office and they killed him. I mean, there's just so much that that has led to. So that JFK Records Act
01:19:31
Speaker
was kind of framed around that as an operating principle. There needs to be an investigation. A crime has occurred. Something very wrong happened. We need to get to the bottom of it. like That's all true, and there's probably truths relating to those statements in the UAP topic.
01:19:50
Speaker
But are you really going to get the buy-in of all of the stakeholders if that's how you framed it from the very beginning? Are they going to walk away from that deal if you're looking at it as a deal to be done? Are they going to walk away from that deal feeling good about it? Or are they going to walk away from it? Like, why did you make me the asshole here?
01:20:08
Speaker
right Like why was it framed around like we were the villain and we'd like, especially if it was the government who told the contractors like, you know, we want you to do it this way. We're going to play some games and this is how we've decided to do it. Okay. It's like, I don't know that that is what they would want. one I don't know that that is there what they think would represent a path to you know getting the most funding around the topic, being able to you know get contracts eventually based on all of the work they've put into it. So why not think about it at least not as like a crime and that needs to be investigated as far as how we put together the legislation itself?
01:20:54
Speaker
But like what if we think of the legislation more as a contract to cut a deal that gets all the right stakeholders on board and incentivizes them in all the right ways to make it happen? And instead of, like I don't know that this has been going on, but people surmise that certain congressional representatives who hold certain key positions on certain committees that are involved with approving certain pieces of legislation, and like the NDAA and the Associated UAP Disclosure Act,
01:21:21
Speaker
like some finger is is resting on the weight, so to speak, that's keeping this from happening. And we see that and evidenced by the fact that the UAPDA elements are not passing. And people like know the name of the rep that is supposedly the one holding that back and because it's the contractors or whatever. Well,
01:21:40
Speaker
Let's just flip it around a little bit. like Let's just take a few deep breaths. Let's not think it has to be in us versus them. like We can come back to that at any time, but let's just clear our heads a little bit.
01:21:53
Speaker
if my hypothesis is correct and this has been a matter of policy of doing it this way and the contractors have largely just kind of gone along with it and that's fine and maybe that's done well for them in certain circumstances and hasn't in others or whatever. But again, I can imagine it being almost grudging in a sense. um you know What incentivizes them? ah Probably not making them out to be someone who looks like the criminal, probably not you know having the
01:22:24
Speaker
Let's say certain things were transferred to certain contractors as has been asserted. And we have in the the declassified Kona Blue documents, which was sort of the pitch to continue OSAP as an SAP held within DHS. It didn't get approved, but they were sort of pitching, moving the program.
01:22:43
Speaker
It talks specifically, there's references to memos of understanding that took place between the government and its key contractors to move certain things to their you know possession. Well, if you were them,
01:22:58
Speaker
And then the government was drafting legislation and it said, oh, and by the way, we have eminent domain over everything. Like I believe in that. I think the US federal government has eminent domain over things like crashed fricking ships from time and space and whatever the heck, right?
01:23:15
Speaker
Like, and I think most people probably just take that for granted. The US government if we could shoot down a Chinese spy balloon and we could have probably done it over the continental US we probably didn't for a variety of reasons, but like, no one questions whether the US government would have eminent domain over the Chinese spy blimp we shoot down.
01:23:33
Speaker
So of course like the US government has eminent domain over something significantly more exotic and potentially dangerous or whatever. it's like It's like, yes. The whole thing our country is framed on is that instead of eminent domain falling within a human sovereign and their family and their bloodline, the state is the sovereign. That's what we fought the revolution for. Not for there to be no sovereign entity,
01:23:56
Speaker
Not for it to be anarchy. That's not what the US was framed around. It was framed around for this thing that we have this ability to manipulate through our votes and elected officials and the frameworks that we have and the legal system, ah you know, to be the sovereign. And I think, like, no one would really be surprised if we just thought about it. Like, yeah, could the US swoop in at any time and claim things? Probably. I don't think they're going to start a war with one of their main contractors. It's just, is there silly scenarios that people bandy around?
01:24:25
Speaker
But if you were that person who had cut a deal previously, maybe decades and decades ago with the government, are you going to walk away from that deal by having it suddenly get totally renegotiated and just having the other party that you cut a deal with long ago, maybe under some memo of understanding, come along and say, oh, and by the way, scratch all that. We just have total eminent domain he and i'd be and treat you almost like a criminal or something. when I'd be like, what about those What about those agreements we had?
01:24:54
Speaker
Right. Yeah. like Are you going to like we do a lot of good things for you, Uncle Sam, you're really going to treat us like the a-holes here, like I because I assume there were agreements of various sorts that have been made if such things occurred. And again, Kona Blue refers to that specifically in the form of like memos of understanding and such.
01:25:13
Speaker
What if it was more a reassertion of any previous agreements that have been made and a like requirement to make sure that Gang of Eight is read in on those legacy agreements and that you know, etc. Like, it's just a very inverted way of looking at how you could kind of try to get to the outcome you're looking for, but do it in a way where the stakeholder feels like their needs are being met as an actual stakeholder who's at the table, especially if they have kind of, you know, maybe helped Uncle Sam out with this, you know, over the years, and it's like, oh, you're gonna stab us in the back, and like, again, you can agree with it, disagree with it, but I understand why from their point of view as a stakeholder,
01:25:59
Speaker
you wouldn't want to sign that deal. You'd want a better version of that deal to walk away from. Like you'd probably want to like continue to operate under the deal that you had. Let's look at the contracts. Let's look at like the notion that monetary games were played to fund this stuff. Cause probably uncle Sam wanted to do it that way and yeah be able to kind of wrap it in more secrecy because things were being done that way that falls outside of the FAR, the Federal Acquisition Regulations, right? um You know, what what sounds better to you? I mean, again, forget where your loyalties are, what you believe is right or wrong, just what sounds better? um We're gonna strip all that away from you? Like, sorry, bye-bye. Or we're gonna grandfather that in and even give you an opportunity to get more rewards. Like, which of those just sounds better, right? yeah It's pretty obvious.
01:26:56
Speaker
Yeah. um Okay. I have to go in five minutes. So I'm going to ah ask you, what do you think
Non-human Intelligence Hypothesis
01:27:10
Speaker
is going on. Do you think ah UFOs represent non-human intelligence? Here's here's the nickeled quick intelligence assessment. it's something it's like I treat all this probabilistically. I don't have the ultimate answers. I've had my own experiences around this topic, visceral personal experiences that tell me this is real. like People see these things like very viscerally, not a confused object. like These things are real.
01:27:32
Speaker
And people have other kinds of interesting outlier experiences. I think that's real. What that ultimately represents is very difficult to say, but I think things are going on. That people, so not everyone who makes those claims is having those experiences or seeing those things, but like generally and broadly that's happening. so And the military and government know it, and and like they've known it. like The way I frame it is,
01:27:56
Speaker
By the early 1950s, because of advances in radar technology, aerospace technology, and increased human technological presence around every corner of the world, aircraft in the skies at all times in large quantities, including World War II, by the 1950s or maybe even end of the 1940s, especially if certain things were recovered in the late 40s or mid-40s even, ah the US government had pretty much figured out that Earth is not just all alone.
01:28:26
Speaker
possibly in space. And even here on Earth, there are presences we might not fully have our heads wrapped around. And this just became the emerging picture, largely through advancements in technology. ah And um even though we couldn't, with verifiable evidence necessarily, you know come to an ultimate conclusion about the specific nature of it, both in specific cases or even more broadly,
01:28:55
Speaker
What we could say is they're like, you know, the the answer to the Fermi paradox seem to be that, like, no, indeed, things have arrived. listen Like, like, yeah, space is big, but time is really, really long. And iing yes, and it's and it's not a matter of they necessarily came here to visit us. Like, that's a paradigm we got to just get out of our heads. Completely agree.
01:29:21
Speaker
Earth falls into broader sets of domains that things have have the ability to navigate within, that Earth falls within in space, but is also more than Earth, might be broader than our solar system. It could go out between star systems. So I just think you know they they figured out some of it maybe seemed like it was a little more localized. Some of it seemed like it kind of came and went a little bit more.
01:29:49
Speaker
I think at least a hypothesis for what was observed at the tic-tac incident, and it's a jav definitely a hypothesis. Sure. But like you had things coming down from 80,000 feet hovering over the ocean, some implication that maybe there was something under the water. That's not a certainty. The water could have been getting manipulated through other means for other reasons, but let's just go on that notion that something was under the water.
01:30:10
Speaker
Are things that are more rooted here maybe in our oceans or with that that set of orientations like though the water connection, the ocean connection, are they so in touch with the things that come and go a little bit more? Is that like this whole other strata that has both a localized and, ah you know, you know, transitory presence. And, like, I think, like, we don't have to answer it more specifically than that. Let's just hypothesize, you know, by the late 40s, early 1950s, they kind of figured out that was the situation. And they kind of figured out that at least some percentage of these things about the military and civilians we're seeing
01:30:46
Speaker
which fell into the this broad category, very broad category. I mean, it could be time travelers or inner earth people or whatever, but like, forget that. It's just they figured out something was real and like we're not the only game in town as far as intelligent, capable species. And in fact, there's things that seem like they have more agency and more domain than we do.
01:31:09
Speaker
like greater agency and broader domain, even if that broader domain includes the depths of the oceans and whatnot, but also space and the, the you know, ah aerial environment, etc. So I think given post war, the rise of the Cold War, the development of nuclear energy, they're like, this might make nukes look like
Cultural Paradigms and Realizations of Not Being Alone
01:31:30
Speaker
a joke. for all we know given the performance characteristics we're seeing it could even revolutionize nuclear warfare like there's just so much at play plus all the societal stuff having to deal with like yeah we're not alone and by the way this probably means we never have been and whatever the hell that means
01:31:47
Speaker
When we think about our cultures, our backgrounds, you know, we won't even get into this topic today, but like pretty much every human culture has been oriented like almost as a centrally organizing principle. The notion that we're not alone and they're these more capable with broader domain entities that we sometimes interact with and they sometimes tell us things like run your society this way or this or that, use the Ten Commandments, buth blah, blah, blah. Whether or not that directly connects, those set of notions have been with us for thousands and thousands of years as kind of a central set of paradigms. So it doesn't really misalign with that. As as ah you know Carl Nell said at one point, one of the shockers of this
01:32:29
Speaker
isn't so much learning something net new. It's more when your beliefs start to turn into something you know more, like it's a a known fact, and something shifts from being belief to known. And we keep those categories. Usually our beliefs are these inner things. They're very intimate. They they almost can't be proven by definition. They're they a belief. They require faith. Religion is a faith-based thing. It's not something we have evidence for. It's like,
01:32:58
Speaker
You know, so there's just a lot of Pandora's box action going on when you start to crack that lid here with something like this, given the history of the human species. And I can see why they were like, yeah, now's not the time to to get into this with the public. Yeah. And I mean, not to mention, speaking of Pandora's box, not to mention the question of sort of our modern understanding of power and authority
Modern Authority and Other Entities
01:33:21
Speaker
in the world. I mean, ah sovereignty, core sovereignty issues, who's in charge anyway, if these guys are running around, right? That's right. Yeah. Okay. and That's a big one. Nick, I have to jump on to another call. But thank you so much. I love talking with you. And well it's been a real pleasure. And again, I think just to end that theme,
01:33:41
Speaker
Of like if that's the status quo and that's been the sort of self perpetuating status quo for a long time. And we're now seeing evidence that like maybe a lot of the stakeholders are looking for ways out of the status quo and now enough people are open minded about that to make something happen.
01:33:57
Speaker
Let's be willing to look at the deal that we want to cut with more of a truth and reconciliation and moving forward oriented approach than a crime has been committed. We need to find you know the bad guys, override previous agreements.
01:34:13
Speaker
like Let's just work through that pattern that has been perpetuating and make everyone walk away feeling happy. I think that's the path forward, man. Okay. Thanks again, Nick. Look forward to talking some more and I'll see you on the internet. It's been a real pleasure, Isaiah. Have a great afternoon. Take care. You too. Bye-bye. And that was Nick Gold from Declassify UAP.
01:34:37
Speaker
If you've made it this far, I doubly appreciate your listening to the podcast. Please help share it. um Good reviews are helpful. And ah I'll see you next time. Bye.