Episode 01: Friendly Universe

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Thanks in beating all right over here, I know you're short on time. I'll just get right to it. Can you paint a picture for me? Starting with that first night?

I will do it.

December the twenty sixth, nineteen eighty five. I had a nice day with my family, went to bed, and in the middle of the night, became aware of the fact that there were noises around me. Felt like I was in a room full of people and I was supposed to be in my bedroom alone.

With my wife.

It was just something wrong.

I couldn't get up, couldn't rise off the bed, and then I realized I'm not on my bed. I saw these big black eyes peering at me from about two feet away.

I remembered those faces, and they weren't human.

This morning, I woke up, grabbed my phone before my eyes were even open. Notifications, texts alert, I should just go back to sleep, but I don't. Weather app says we're fine. The news app says we're doomed. Calendar app is already mad at me. Internal reminder, stand up, drink some water inhil for five seconds. Baks sale for seven. I need some coffee twenty three dollars to get it delivered.

Sure, why not? Time to shower. Business on top, sweatpants on the bottom.

I went to my office, which is also my house, which is also just my laptop. Now Zoom calls one with cameras on, one with cameras off. A few emails, a few written by me, a few written by machines. Auto reply Instagram TikTok nah, back to Instagram, Hey chat? Does this sound insane? Someone's launching a podcast, someone's quitting social media?

Me too.

I'll be back in an hour. Does she see my story? My iPhone tells me my screen time is concerning. Do not disturb stays on twenty four to seven. I'm in control of my own destiny. Lunchtime, nothing in the fridge. I'll just eat a big dinner. Pause to apply to a message, I'll forget the second I send it. Scroll again. Lol, is so funny. My algorithm is getting weird? Is anyone checking this stuff?

Back to work?

I have more tabs open than my brak and handle. I should really clean my desktop. This meeting should have been an email. This email should have been a thought. You kept to yourself, left the office which was my couch, picked up some dinner. Time for a phone call. That bartender does make a good Manhattan though. I'll have one time to go to sleep? Or should I browse Netflix for an hour? First started a movie, stopped at twelve minutes in. Now I'm annoyed and fully awake. How is

Good night.

We all have a version of this, A routine, a pattern, a loop if you're not careful, a hamster wheel with better WiFi, work, relationships, money, health, politics, algorithms deciding what we should care about today. But I do my own research, now you don't. There's always something filling the space, always, Noise, always, motion, always something new and always the same old thing. We're

Now I like the first one better.

That they don't know what they are, but they know they're not aliens. Wait, what disclosure didn't happen? It got pushed notifications instead, And somehow we're just bored now, one more headline, just another scroll.

It's not that the question isn't big enough.

It's that our brains are exhausted, even if aliens exist, even if we're not alone, even if the universe is crawling with something we can't see. Either way, my alarm set for tomorrow morning. And either way, I still have shit to do. This season isn't about asking you for a while, that questions tired and the answers are boring at this point. This season is about something bigger and stranger.

It's about why one.

Of the biggest revelations in human history lands like an item on a grocery list, A shrug a big whoopedee do because maybe the strangest thing now isn't what's out there, it's us.

Okay, let's do this.

Welcome to season two of High Strange.

The US Navy is finally acknowledged that video is appearing to show UFOs flying through the air Are real? Videos are talking about? Were recording years ago by fighter pilots. Then in twenty seventeen they were made public by The New York Times.

While refreshing our feeds. Something loud happened. Actually a lot of loud things happened.

Images of that rotating thing captured by US Navy aircraft sensors locking in on the target like a forty foot long tic tac, maneuvering rapidly and changing direction.

I never thought I'd get to the place where in now. I never thought twenty seventeen would ever happen. Then I'd be part of it? Are you kidding me?

This is Leslie keen Ja helped break the big New York Time story in twenty seventeen. That was nine years ago. This interview is from twenty twenty two. At the time, it almost sounded like she was getting ahead of herself, like she was talking things up. Listening back now, it's clear she wasn't predicting things. She was tracking it.

Nothing really shifting, and then all of a sudden, major shift happens. I'm waiting for the moment where they would be willing to say it's not from planet Earth, it's not made by human hands. They have not been willing to shut that door, tell the world that this is something not made by humans, which they know. They're not saying it like that. I mean, that might sound pretty weird to people, but I've been setting it for twenty two years, and I've watched the whole evolution what people

Protection is for people.

If there is going to be something released regarding materials that they might have parts of a crashed saucer or who knows what. These people now can reveal things that they've had to keep secret in the past.

In the years that followed, everything she hinted at all started happening. Legal protections were passed, whistleblowers were cleared to testify.

I don't have any evidence or proof the government has some UFO materials in their custody.

But enough people from that world the.

Pentagon intelligence agencies say they've heard.

About this stuff.

This is Brian Bender, who also helped break the massive twenty seventeen UFO story.

I even asked the question in a Pentagon briefing. Some of US reporters were brought in, and my question was, are you also looking to see whether there might have been secret programs in the past, multiple layers of secrecy that might reveal things about UFOs crash materials that even people in the Pentagon today might not have any idea about.

I'm just really interested in seeing what happens. I just want to watch it all happen.

These are questions worth asking.

And then something crazy happened.

A public Congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

The Subcommittee Hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAPs will come to order, welcome everyone without objection.

The share may declare a recess at any time. I flew to the Capitol and was there in person.

Security was tight, phones were checked, badges everywhere.

The whole vibe of the room felt heavier than it should have do. I absolutely the UFOs are.

Good morning and welcome to the most exciting subcommittee in Congress this week, the Subcommittee on National Security of the Border in Foreign Affairs for discussion of Unidentified Anomalist Phenomenon. I like to thank the witnesses on the panel today for sharing their stories on how they've engaged UAPs, which has brought attention to this matter.

Mister Chairman, Ranking members and Congressmen, thank you. I'm happy to be here. This is an important issue and I'm grateful for your time. My name is David Charles Grush.

Entered David Grush. This is when the tone took a sharp turn. This wasn't a podcaster, This wasn't some guide chasing attention.

I was an intelligence officer for fourteen years. I was my agency's co lead and Unidentified Anomalist Phenomena trans Medium Object Analysis, as well as reporting to the UAP Task Force through a PPD nineteen Urgent Concern filing. I became a whistleblower following concerning reports from multiple esteems and credential current and former military and Intelligence community individuals that the US government is operating with secrecy above congressional oversights with

A whistleblower who formerly worked on the Defense Department's UAP Task Force, David Grutch, claims he has denied access to information on a government UFO crash retrieval program.

I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program.

Mister Grist, do you believe that our government is in possession of UAPs?

Absolutely? Based on interviewing over forty witnesses over.

Four years, did you have any personal knowledge if people had been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal these extraterrestrial technology.

Yes, personally, it was very brutal and very unfortunate some of the tactics they used to hurt me, both professionally and personally.

To be quite frank, have anyone been murdered that you know of or have heard of? I have to be careful asking that question. I directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities. In the last couple of years, have you had incidences that have caused you to be in fear for your life for addressing these issues?

Yes, personally, Okay, I just.

Want everyone to note that he's coming forward in fear of his life.

To put in perspective if they were really not scared about this information coming out, why would someone be intimidated like that?

As a yes, government become aware of actual evidence of extra dress or otherwise unexplained forms of intelligence, And if so, when do you think this first occurred.

I'll like to use the term non human outlate to denote origin, certainly previously in nineteen thirties.

I'm pretty skeptical. I don't trust anything in this town, and I think that's because I'm from Missouri.

You've got to show me.

With that being said, there's been a lot of things that have been said, and so I want to get down to some specifics. At one point, you had said that there has been harmful activity or progressive activity. Has any of the activity been aggressive and hostile?

I know of multiple colleagues of mine that got physically injured.

By UAPs or by people within the federal gop cove. Okay, so there has been activity by alien or non human technology and or beings that has caused harm to humans.

I can't get into the specifics in an open environment, at least the activity that I personally witnessed not to be very careful here, what I personally witnessed myself and my wife is very disturbing.

My view has been that we are billions of light years away from any other system, and the concept that an alien species that's technologically advanced enough to travel billions of the light years gets here and somehow is incompetent enough to not survive Earth or crashes is something that I find a little bit far fetched. You have mentioned that there's interdimensional the potential. Could you expeand on that.

I answer your first question, and young, here is a fact. What is an expert? But I will give you a theoretical framework and WEAST will work off regardless of you know your level of sentience right, you know, planes crash, cars crash, and number of sorties however high a small percentage you're going to end and you know mission failure fool, as we say in the Air Force. And then in

Things showing up at certain areas and disabling our capabilities, which is disheartening.

And for us.

I mean, like I said, it completely disabled to rate OAR in the aircraft when I try to do and the only way we could see it as passively, which is how you got that image. So I think that's a concern on what are these doing, not only how they operate, but their capabilities inside to do things like this.

You've said that the.

Government is a possession of potentially non human.

Spacecraft based on your experience and extensive conversations with experts, do you believe our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.

Something I can't discuss a bublbic setting. And do you believe we have crashed craft?

Do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft.

As I've stated publicly already in my New Station interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries.

Yeah, where they I guess human or non human?

Biologics non human.

And that was the assessment of people with rect knowledge on the program I talk to that are currently still in program.

This was a former intelligence officer speaking under penalty of law information was being hidden above Congressional oversight. When he said the words crash retrieval program, the room went quiet, and the questions shifted not just about what these things are, but whether people have been hurt.

Congress's job is going to be to see what it can do with the information and what it can verify a lot of these raight sensitive programs. There's no paper trail over the next year or two. How is that going to play out? How many people will come forward? And will there be repercussions against them for coming forward? Under the law they're protected. You know, you just don't know what might happen to them, because certainly there are some people within the defense world who don't want people

And just hope it works out.

The government is notorious for reinventing the wheel.

I've been a reporter long enough to come across a lot of stories where I'm like, why does this sound familiar? Where there might have been a program, there might have been a report, there might have been something, but it was twenty thirty years ago. It's because they tried the same damn thing twenty thirty years ago. You know, you can't discount some of that in this topic too. The guy who was in charge of that retired and didn't pass it along to the next guy or gal.

It doesn't exist anymore.

It's going to be really hard for anyone in the government to hide the stuff anymore.

In Washington, ghost like objects darted across the radar screen at the CAAA Traffic Controls and Dirett National Airport for several hours.

General Sandford, Air Force Intelligence.

Director confirms of the objects are not secret American weapons and reiterates the Air Force's obligation to investigate.

Incredible observers of relatively incredible thing.

Even if you remove aliens altogether and just look at this objectively, if even a fraction of this is true, then something unknown is interacting with humans and causing actual harm. Under oath, David Grush claimed people were physically injured, intimidated, feared for their lives. This for me, is when the whole thing stops being a belief debate. That's not a conspiracy question. That's a science problem. And science is exactly where I went next.

Flying saucers have in dated off planet. The whole world is under attack, Hannant survived.

I knew from the moment I was thinking anything that I wanted to be a scientists before, I guess I evenknew what a scientist was.

This is Gary Nolan. He's not a UFO guy.

He's a data guy, a real scientist who lives in results, measurements and what can and cannot be explained, being able.

To take things and put them together in ways that people hadn't thought of before and make something new. I look for a need, I say, okay, well that's what we can't do today, and that's what we want to do. You see this, and you see that and you put it together and go, oh, I can make this tinkering Today retrospect, I generally call it the inevitable. If I were to take your blood, there's neutrophils, macrophages, and K cells.

T cells, B cells.

You could only look at a few cell types at a time. So the field was crying out for an ability to do more data. This guy at the University of Toronto had invented this instrument called CyTOF.

His name was Scott Tanner.

He was a developer of an instrument but didn't know exactly how to apply it. He came to me and said, look, I know that you're good at turning ideas into reality. Can you help me turn this into a tool for immunologists. That instrument still sits at the top of the food chain, reading multiple events per sell. But even then I was already thinking, maybe there's another way I can do something get more data. So what I had done was found a way to scale up the numbers of things you

When he talks about the brain, he's not speculating. One day, many years ago, Gary's life and career would take a very bizarre turn.

I'm sitting in my office to a knock on the door, and I opened the door and he shook guys. There were men, guys in suits and ties, military personnel. One of them presented his credentials and said, hey, we're with the CIA, and we have a whole bunch patients that are having some problems in my office. They laid out all of these MRIs and they wanted to know whether or not I could detect in the blood any evidence of the inflammatory events.

He's describing damage the MRIs didn't lie in the timelines, didn't make sense. These injuries, whatever they were, should not exist the way they do.

They had white matter disease in the brain. Inarguable, they didn't have it one day, two weeks later they did something like multiple sclerosis develops over years to get to the level of what I was seeing.

They didn't have it. One day, two weeks later they did.

What had happened was across the military these medical events. The Army is pretty organized and the services are pretty well organized. Despite what some people often think. There is a channel for unexplained events that go up the chain for review. There are analysts who said, okay, well this is weird. We don't know what it is. And it went over into what was they called the guys who came into my office.

The weird bucket.

When enough things in the weird bucket started adding up, actually showing similarities, that's where I got involved. They laid out all of these MRIs. They said, some of these people said that they'd gotten close to UFOs, that they got close to a UFO.

So where they told you this? Did they literally say like they came in contact with the UFO.

They said, They said some of these people said that they got close to a UFO and that something about the energy general by the object had harmed them. I literally looked around. I thought, this is candid camera. What's going on?

For him?

It wasn't the fantastical stories. It was the actual data that's what hooked them. And once you accept that the injuries are real, even if you don't know the cause, you're forced to widen the lens. If something like this is happening, now, whatever it is, how long has it been happening.

Some of the stories were pretty spectacular. I said, before I get involved, you're going to have to fly me out to meet these people face to face. I need to see their body language. I need to read what they're saying. Here's how they explained it. The harm that had come to the vast majority of them, the ones who said that they'd been close to UFOs or beings or things, the UFO events energy generate by the object

There's a story here.

That all seems to make sense.

But the other thing that is pretty clear is that it's probably not one thing. There's something here that needs to be explained, and that there's a level of reality we don't appreciate. People use the word paranormal, but then you immediately think of ghosts. Immediately, yes, And I think if paranormal, all science is paranormal explained. There's something here that is interacting with us. That's my belief.

Albert Einstein once said, the most important decision we make is whether we believe the universe is hostile or friendly. If you believe the universe is hostile, you move through it bracing for impact. You assume friction means danger. You read uncertainty as a warning. You protect yourself first and explain it later. If you believe the universe is friendly, you don't become naive. You become grounded. You assume that challenges are part of the terrain, not proof that you're

I've heard some weird stories.

Some people have been telling their story for decades, never changed, never backed down, stuck with the same script for nearly fifty years. Whitley Strieber has been telling this story since the nineteen eighties, not once, not twice, for the rest of his life. Whatever you end up thinking about his experience, the consistency is impossible to ignore. What makes his story different isn't what he claims happened. It's how physically real. It actually was.

Nice to me right over here. I know you're short on time. I'll just get right to it. Can you paint a picture for me starting with that first night?

I will do it.

December the twenty sixth, nineteen eighty five, I had a nice.

Day with my family.

It was me, my wife, and our son, who was then six. Beautiful afternoon, right after Christmas. We'd had a wonderful Christmas little country house we'd bought a year before.

Went to bed.

And in the middle of the night became aware of the fact that there were noises around me, movement, felt like I was in a room full of people and I was supposed to be in my bedroom alone with my wife.

It was just something wrong.

Finally I woke up, opened my eyes.

I couldn't get up, couldn't rise off the bed, Alice, I'm not wrong in my bed, I mean somewhere else.

This room with an arch door and a little black window in it. It was really weird.

How the hell is that?

Just do somebody.

Such?

Somebody?

I don't think I like that.

I saw these big black eyes peering at me from about two feet away.

It looks.

It's got eyes of two eyes.

With sod eyes.

I found myself in a room full of what looked like gigantic insects.

It was horrifying.

I saw something that looked like it had a hood on it near the corner, and I am deadrew.

I don't want it to be that.

The head of the New York State Department of Psychiatry, doctor Donald Lyne, who he had solved many criminal cases with hypnosis, the world's best forensic hypnotist. He was the real deal.

The memory began to come back under hypnosis.

Pete comfortable the last state, so paying attention to my voice, but you remain the strate, the comfort Baker state.

They would move very slowly and then very quickly. They were not of this world at all. That was when I thought, I'm having a nightmare.

I don't want.

They didn't go away, Thinking God, this is real, I became crazed. I was on a little hot and I couldn't get off of it. I couldn't move, and I kept trying to imagine my bed. I couldn't do that either. We're so vivid. It was like real life. I remembered those faces and they weren't human.

It was sticking into my mind.

It would make a noise like a voice.

I don't know where it came from, but it was a mechanical voice clearly, and it would repeat.

What can we do to help you stop screaming?

I'm hearing this voice. What can we do to help you stop screaming?

I can help me? Oh shit, I'm sorry.

Gigantic insects very scary. They were not silly looking at all.

Ever, when you were a kid, maybe watch a praying madness. How it creeps so gracefully and smoothly.

Along, and then that gets a little little flyer that's after. That's how they moved. One of them was about five feet tall, the others were all very small.

That showed me a needle. They're going to put it in the side of my head.

To explain it.

I realized then this was physical.

Relax you to stay the last man.

I don't remember it ending. I don't remember when it ended. I remember waking up in the morning. I thought I'd been assaulted criminally. I was sure I had been assaulted. As this became more clear in my mind, I was thinking, you're crazy, You've had some kind of psychotic break.

I woke up, I felt awful. I wake up and I felt like I'd been beaten up.

Tired.

I was unbelievably tired. I felt dirty. I took a shower, went downstairs. My wife told me that I was acting strangely. Over the course of the next week, I really struggled with it. The memory began to come back. The more I remembered, the weirder it got. Went to my doctor. I described what I remembered. He says, what you're telling me, you think you were taking aboard a flying saucer by little men. And I thought, holy fuck, that is what I'm saying. I've gone crazy. He said, well, why aren't

I want to figure out what's going on. I went back to him. That was when he said I had a rectal tear. Someone did this. I was scared to death.

It was really painful. It was a very bad tear. Something has physically happened to me. Stuck this thing inside me, and I fought so much. It tore my internals. Who would be creeping into my house in the middle of the night, grabbing me and doing that. The MRI scan showed that I was under a lot of stress, but I was a normal person. It was not a haad trip at all. It was very physical. The physical injuries were real. I didn't tell anyone about this. I don't

I'd like to believe we live in a friendly universe, not a safe one, not a gentle one, just friendly, because darkness, hostility, and fear are all very real. And some encounters don't leave when the night ends. They follow you, they change you, and they stay forever.

About a year later, one of my neighbors came over to the house. He was a retired state trooper. He shows up and he says, Huddle, I saw that happen, and I nearly dropped my teeth. He said to me, I'm just so embarrassed, ashamed the fact that I ran. And I said to him, if you tried to help me, god knows what would have happened to you.

Hi.

Strange is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with my Heart Podcasts, created, hosted, and edited by myself, Payne Lindsay executive producers or myself in Donald Albright, Editing by Mike, Cooper Skinner and myself. Original scorer by Makeup and Vanity Set, Sound design, mixing.

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