Fifty of them took out something called alien Abduction Insurance, which promised to pay out if they were abducted, impregnated, or killed by aliens, and fifty of them insured themselves to a million dollars each.
I mean, that's such a great racket because the great thing about alien abductees is they can't prove it, So if you're the insurance company, you never have to pay out.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the world.
And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
Will break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible. Welcome to Mission Implausible. Where with both of our producers, Adam Davidson and John Stern.
Hey, guys, you know, since I'm here with the three of you. There's a question I get asked a ton, which is, how does Adam know these guys.
I don't remember the specifics, but I was, especially after twenty sixteen. I had gotten out of the agency and I'd worked in Moscow and on Russia issues and was writing some myself and going on TV at the time, because people seemed perplexed. They didn't understand or have experience with Russian intelligence and things seem so foreign to them.
I read your article where you were talking about the Russian what's called SYSTEMA where essentially the sort of mafia criminal culture that they all live in, where everybody's afraid to attack anybody else because they don't know what they
have on them. And you wrote an article in The New Yorker which I thought captured that really well, and I would often use that either in my pieces or when I was on TV talking, and I might have on Twitter, since we followed each other, I might have reached out to you, and.
I do honestly no joke. I'm very proud that you felt that way like that makes me feel very happy.
Geez.
If I had known the story about how you both met with so boring, I wouldn't.
Have asked.
Were two worldwide adventurers. Yeah, I tweeted.
Back, although I do remember the three of us talking and like you saying, we never talked to journalists. That wasn't part of our job.
I never spoke to a journalist, not a single time when I was at thirty years an agency. No me neither.
And I have a question for you about UFOs So. In Baghdad, I was talking to an Iraqi official who claimed that it was a conspiracy theory, perhaps spread by CIA and by people like you and the press, that Iraqi culture was not the greatest because we were claiming that aliens thousands of years ago had come and helped them build well the pyramids of course in Egypt, but
also the Ziggurats and gifted them this. And of course he said that that conspiracy theory that Aliens had come and helped start civilization, it was a conspiracy to destroy Iraq culture and Iraqi pride.
I mean, I've certainly know that there's a lot of people out there who think the Aliens did everything ancient.
I never heard the conspiracy theory part of it, although having spent a lot of time in Iraq, there's a lot of conspiracy theories in Iraq, in the Middle East in general, and I remember really coming to understand that when you live in a world where the official story is definitely untrue, like the one thing you know for one hundred percent certainty is whatever the official story is that's not true, it does create a fertile ground for imagining, well,
what could be true, maybe the opposite of the official story. And also it's a place where the fix really is in. There really are rooms where a handful of people get together and decide major events. And they might be people who on the surface or enemies like within a country
or across countries. So I am now, as you know, working on a project about ancient Mesopotamia, and I have learned that when you talk to academic archaeologists and you say you're a journalist, you have to very quickly say, I don't believe an alien.
Leads us in so well to the topic of today's episode UFOs, And that's the way podcasts are supposed to work, right, banter and then you get into the subject. But the reason I'm here to say that today is because I've dragged my good friend Michael ian Black in to speak about this because he has a long standing relationship to UFOs all right from television. You might know him from Michael and Michael have issues ed the State. A lot
of people say the State wet, hot American summer. I love the seventies, I love the eighties, I love the nineties.
What's next time is a flat circle, baby, We'll see where it ends up.
He's an actor, he's a stand up comedian. He's a writer of humor, kind of a David Sedaris type when it comes to your writing.
Sure, minus the success.
I actually think you're very successful compared to.
Some Yeah, I'm looking forward to a Chortal or two.
You'll be lucky if we get to two. If we get one Shortal, I will consider this podcast a success. Which didn't mention is that I have a long standing fascination with UFOs and related topics.
Can tell us a little bit about how that came about and where you are now.
I remember being interested in this topic from like the ages of four, five, six, I mean Close Encounters had come out, and Star Wars was out and Star Trek was out, and I had a sighting when I was in high school coming back from the movies one night with my girlfriend at the time and my best friend, and we were driving back and we saw over the tree line. It didn't seem like it was particularly high above the tree line, maybe about the altitude of a small plane, and we saw a I guess you'd call
it something like a fireball. It was a sort of reddish orange, glowing ball of something sort of traveling slowly and soundlessly across the sky. At the time, I didn't know that that was a kind of common sighting. We didn't know what it was. I thought maybe it was a small player that was on fire. And so the next morning I checked the newspaper to see if there'd been a plane crash, and there hadn't been, or at
least nothing was reported, and that was it. Like we tried to follow it as we were driving, but it was in the woods, you know, so we couldn't. And then it disappeared. There was no mention of it in
the paper, and that was that. And so my interest remained but sort of waned over the years until twenty seventeen, which is when The New York Times published their now famous article about UFOs, written by Leslie Kane, Ralph Blumenfall, and Helena Cooper, which basically said, yeah, UFOs were real, the Pentagon's been studying them for years and we don't know what the hell they are, and so I've been following the story very closely since then.
Recently there was some talk of whistleblowers that have come out and talked to Congress, and of course different players in Congress over the last few years have been talking about declassifying or asking what the government knows about UAPs they call them now, And I don't know why they changed the name. I think UFO was a fine name.
But I love UFOs as an acronym. But I think there was a movement inside ufology, which is what you know, people who study this call themselves uphologists, to get a different name on it because UFO had so much stigma and baggage attached to it, so they went with UAP. But yes, so answer your question about whistleblowers. Yes, so famously last year a guy named David Grush came forward and he was sort of the laison between the sort of official channels of the government and the less official
channels of the government as represented by ARROW. I guess, which is the All Domain Anomalist Resolution Office, which was tasked by Congress. It's in the name resolving these cases of UFO slash UAP, and Grush was involved in that effort and ended up coming forward and telling the public this is real. These programs are real. We have in our possession, meaning the US many craft. The number that I keep hearing is something like a dozen, but who knows.
And there are existing reverse engineering programs to try to get as much tech from these things as we can. And that caused a huge firestorm, and he ended up testifying in front of Congress alongside Ryan Graves and David Freeber, who are both pilots who witnessed anomalost phenomena, the famous tic TAC incident and another incident. And there are allegedly forty whistleblowers who have testified to Congress. And what's key about these whistleblowers as opposed to David Grush is Grush
didn't have first hand evidence of these programs. He's a secondhand witness. But these whistleblowers who are allegedly coming forward are all first hand witnesses, meaning they have either touched the craft or communicating with quote unquote biologics or witness these biologics or handled meta materials or some such thing. So that's where we are.
Let me gently push back and let's have fun with this.
Wow, dare you?
I'm a guest on your podcast, So if Grush is your witness, you got to sort of look and take it as a whole. Gruss was a quarter to the media. Grush was committed to a mental health facility by his wife for alcoholism and suicide. And this was found by reporters who looked into them after he was making these statements.
It wasn't found by reporters. It was leaked to a reporter named Ken Klippenstein. His snout was led in that direction. But what you're saying is true. Grush was checked into a psychiatric facility, he did have troubled alcohol, he did have PTSD. All of that is exactly true. He has said as much. The piece that came out was clearly a hit piece for reasons that aren't clear unless there was some reason to unless there was some compelling reason for the government to push back. The government as an
entity has not disputed his claims. What they have said is through the Pentagon, they've basically said, we've seen no evidence of extraterrestrial technology or cracked. I'm paraphrasing, but that's basically what they're saying. It's a kind of non denial denial. But his claims were investigated by the Inspector General for Intelligence.
I don't know what you call that person. Those claims were found to be urgent and credible, and he was invited to testify in front of Congress, which he did under oath.
Okay, so there has been activity by by alien or non human technology and or beings that has caused harm to human I.
Can't get into the specifics in an open environment, but at least the activity that I personally witnessed. And not to be very careful here because you don't tell you never to acknowledge tradecraft, right, So what I personally witnessed myself and my wife was very disturbing.
You said that the government has alien bodies or alien species. Have you seen have you seen the spacecraft?
I have to be careful to describe what I've seen firsthand and not in this environment, but I could answer that question behind behind closed doors.
It's not like Grush was the first guy to come forward. There have been dozens and dozens of these people. It's that Grush is probably the highest ranking or most credible to come forward. There have been other high ranking military officials. Did you remember this story that came out maybe five or six years ago. The head of Israeli intelligence was like, yeah, we've got this, We've got this treaty, this intergalactic treaty with all these other civilizations. Let me see if I
can find the exact quote. Okay, this is from NBC News twenty twenty. A former Israeli space security chief has sent eyebrow shooting heavenward by saying that Earthlings have been in contact with extraterrestrials from a quote unquote galactic federation. This is how I'm a shed former head of Israel's Defense Ministry Space Directorate.
Why is this a US government thing? It seems to me if it's other life forces or whatever coming to the States, why do we care that the US government is classifying something. You'd think anybody around the world could have seen this or done this, or scientists could be looking at this. But somehow we're talking about agencies in the US government holding things up Like it's hard to imagine why if somebody came to this planet, they would somehow just come to us.
It's a great question, and it's a question that comes up a lot. And the fact is this is a global phenomena. It has been since the beginning of time. And when I say the beginning of time, I literally mean the beginning of recorded human history. People have been seeing things like this in the skies. Russia has always had a big program, China has a big program, Brazil has had a big program, Mexico has a program all focused on this stuff. So this is a global phenomena.
It's just that we focus on the US because we're in the US, and also because the US has taken the lead on this from the beginning. The secrecy of it emerged because the UFO phenomena, its modern incarnation, began happening towards the tail end of World War Two, when Allied fighters in their planes we're seeing these objects following them, these little sort of round metallic spheres just kind of following them, and they didn't know what it was. They
thought it was some sort of German weapon. Well, the Germans were observing the same thing. They thought it was an Allied weapon. And that's what became known as Foo fighters, and that's where the band got the name.
We know how difficult it is to keep a secret. Some of the things I thought were the most secret things we had in CIA when I was on the inside. I pick up the New York Times and I'm like, holy shit, it's all out now. And not only that, I was sort of tangentially involved in this particular operation, and there's more facts in here than I knew, right
because I wasn't cleared into the entire thing. So the phenomenon of tens of thousands of people all knowing this and nobody saying it after all these years in Russia, the United States, Australia, except for like a few whistleblowers, I had trouble with that. So theoretically, I'm not like coming against anything you're saying. I just want to see the proof until i'm going to buy into it.
Yeah, I'm with you. I mean to me, the only thing that has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt in my mind is that there are anomalous things happening in our skies, in our space and in our seas.
All right, well, that's been some great stuff. Let's take a short break for a commercial. Moving back in just a moment, glad.
To have everybody back. Let's go back down the rabbit hole.
If the government is classifying this stuff, it seems to me there's two possible reasons, and one of them doesn't hold up. So one of them is we want to study it because we want to get a leg up on the Chinese or something like that. That means you assume that something from billions of miles away we would understand. The other one is, oh, it would scare people, and therefore we don't want to let it out. But then again, that assumes that we are the only ones that control
this thing, and people would go crazy. And I don't buy that piece at all.
As I said, before this phenomenon started happening towards the tail end of the Second World War, which means obviously the onset of the Cold War, America was already looking ahead to its main confrontation with the Soviet Union. Suddenly in Roswell in nineteen forty seven, something crashes that is indisputable. The Air Force at first says it's a flying saucer. We've got ourselves a genuin flying saucer that crashed here in Roswell. Then like a day later they said we
were mistaken. It's just a weather balloon. Decades later they said it wasn't a weather balloon, and then after that, I think they've come up with another story since then. So the secrecy begins almost immediately. At the same time that this was happening, the Russians were having their own experiences, the Chinese were having their own experiences. Like it was all happening kind of simultaneously at a very fraught time.
And that's not coincidental. If you believe the UFO Lord, I don't know if I do or I don't, but UFOs are so strongly associated with nuclear weapons and nuclear testing. There are famous stories corroborated where UFOs will show up at I forget the name of the base here in the US, it was a missile base, and in nineteen sixty three, I believe, and they shut down the nukes, which should not be possible. The nukes are not connected to each other, and they're not connected to a central
relay point. Each one got shut down one by one and then they were offline, and then at some point they were brought back online. Russia or the Soviet Union had a different problem. The UFOs came and they actually activated the missiles to launch, and the Soviets didn't know what to do about it. They were like, our missiles are getting ready to launch right now, we're not controlling them, and then they shut it off. And UFOs have been
around missiles and missile testing facilities since the beginning. So it's not coincidental that all this stuff started happening around World War Two. If you believe the lore, people say, why don't they just land on the White House lawn in nineteen fifty two, they basically did. I'm reading off the Wikipedia page of it now. From July twelfth to July twenty nine, nineteen fifty two, a series of unidentified
flying object sightings were reported in Washington, DC. Later became known as the Washington Flap, made front page headlines and newspapers around the nation. A pilot and stewardess on a National Airlines flight observed lights above their plane within minutes both radar centers at National Airport and at Andrews Air Force Base. We're tracking more unknown objects.
It's just funny about nineteen fifty two, because the admittedly
little research I've done. The CIA did get involved with UFOs because there was concern that there were so many sidings that they thought that Soviets were behind it because at that time we could only have our missiles in so many places, and they were afraid that this was a Soviet trick that if everybody started reporting UFOs, that the Soviets could lost a missile strike and we wouldn't know what was real and what wasn't because of this spate of UFO sidings.
Well, my question is it sounds like, from what I understand, you're involved in this thing called the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance. Can you tell us a little bit about that and is it similar to the Stars Academy because we have a buddy, Jim Sen who's tied to that organization.
So, the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance is a new organization founded by a guy named Steve Bassett, and Steve Bassett has been the only full time UFO lobbyist in DC now for I feel like twenty five or thirty years. He's been the one dude that has been really pushing and advocating for what we call disclosure, having the government come out and say exactly what they know, go through the history of this thing, etc. At the moment, it's not
very much. It's people who are in show business who are interested in this topic, who maybe want a network and collaborate and work to advance disclosure. But I think it's important to note that, unlike the To the Stars Academy founded by Tom DeLong, the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance has no commercial stake in anything. They're not funding anything, they're
not taking a preprudasorial role in anything. They're basically just a tax exempt organization trying to get people who are interested in this to speak out, step forward, and so that's what I'm doing. It's interesting from a political perspective how the gang that's most interested in this right now are very right wing conservatives timber Chet, Paulina Luna, Matt Gates, and then there's a Democrat named Jared Moskowitz. They're on
this like a dog on a bone. And on the Senate side, Oddly, the one who's been most vocal is Marco Rubio, who has said I might be getting this wrong, but either he or his staff have spoken to some of these other whistleblowers aside from Grush, and they corroborate what has been said. So it's all this shadowy, weird, murky shit. And John, You're exactly right. You cannot separate fact from fiction. Like the government as a whole doesn't know what this is. Barack Obama said it on Colbert.
Actually that was James Corden, and here's a clip.
The truth is that when I came into office, I asked, right, I was like, all right, is there the lab somewhere where where cape the alien specimens in spaceship And you know they did a little bit of research and the answer was no. But what is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is is that there's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how they moved their trajectory.
They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.
The ironic part about this is people in this field who have been studying this have for decades been trying to get other people interested in it and interested in it in a serious way. So to have a comedian come on and talk about it, it's sort of like, am I cutting my own legs out from under? People making jokes about it, you know, like you're not going to hear me make any anal probe jokes, for example,
for exactly this reason. It's like we wanted to be taken seriously because we think there's something there.
You don't take anal probe seriously.
I take them very seriously. But on the context of ets, I'm.
Over fifty, I take them serious.
Right.
So there was this, if you remember, there was this quasi religious cult that was also into euphiology called Heaven's Gate. Thirty six of them committed suicide. They thought that their souls were going to go into an alien spaceship that is trailing the hail Bop common. But before they did, though, fifty of them took out something called alien Abduction Insurance, which promised to pay out if they were abducted, impregnated,
or killed by aliens. And fifty of them insured themselves to a million dollars each.
I'm guessing they didn't pay out. I mean, that's such a great racket, because the great thing about alien adductees is they can't prove it. They can only so if you're the insurance company, you never have to pay out. There's aspects of it like we didn't even come close to touching. There's the extra temporal hypothesis, champion by guy named doctor Mike Masters, who thinks this is all about people from the future coming back and sight seeing essentially,
or trying to avert some sort of future crisis. There's the extra dimensional theory, where these things are just sort of living in our reality and we're just sort of bumping up against it dimensionally. A Gresh alluded to that in his testimony. I mean, it's just so crazy and so bizarre, and I love it so much because it's so weird. I mean, the universe is it's a pretty big place. Like you could add up three Californias together and you wouldn't even approach the size of the universe.
Michael, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you.
John Stern should have warned you. Michael's very serious when it comes to UFOs.
Michael, you're the guy I want to be abducted by aliens with.
Thank you.
Oh that's nice.
I've never had that offer before, and I'm going to take you up.
John Jerry. That was the famous Michael Lea and Black. Was he everything I promised?
That is more? As always, I was really impressed with the guy. I think he made some interesting arguments and can.
You believe he's also a performing comedian.
Well, that's what I respect about him.
The conspiracy theory business needs more more comedians.
But also there's more going on with these UFO reports recently, isn't there.
Yeah, well, there's been a lot of reports that we talked about today about UAPs and the Senate and whistleblowers. But there was a recent March eighth story in the Washington Post and it's entitled Pentagon report finds no evidence of alien visits or hidden spacecraft, and it says it claims about secret government programs reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology are
based on quote, circular reporting and hearsay. But it's very, very strongly suggests that the stuff that has been in all these other reports just isn't true, which.
Means that there's no evidence or they're all in on it. The Pentagon's in on it. How come they bring me and you in because they wanted to keep it secret. That's why they didn't bring us in on there.
And they brought us in on the Kennedy assassination. You think they would have brought us in on the UAP thing.
So John, who have we got teed up to give us the empirical scientific side of things, the no shit show me proofside.
So today we have Seth Shasteck. He's the lead astronomer at the SETI Institute, the host of the popular podcast Big Picture Science, and a prolific author who's written a number of books, one not too long ago called The Confessions of an Alien Hunter. And so Seth, tell us about yourself and the work that you've done related to UFOs or what they're now called UAP.
Well, my background, as you just heard, is astronomy, radio astronomy actually, and on that basis, In fact, I was hired maybe twenty or thirty years ago by the SETI Institute.
SETI it just means the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, and the idea here is to use instruments that are normally used for radio astronomy, in other words, big antennas, to try and eavesdrop on any signals that might be being produced by visitors to Earth, or perhaps by extraterrestrial intelligence that's not visiting birth Seth.
In light of recent claims by people in front of Congress, it seems to be there's an irony between the US government support for SETIO and claims that the government already knows about extraterrestrial life and is hiding it from the public. It seems like the US government is engaged in both looking for life and then try to hide it at the same time.
There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking. There seems to be an underlying belief that if aliens were actually visiting Earth, that the US government would try and keep that quiet. There's, of course no way in which they could keep it quiet, but a lot of people think they could and that the federal agencies are up to the task.
But there's been a lot of recent activity to include Congressional hearings and a lot of things that are supposed quote unquote will blowers and things lately. Why do you think that is and why now?
Well, I don't really know the answer to that. It isn't that the government suddenly took an interest in this. I testified to Congress myself twice about the whole UFO phenomenon. And keep in mind that Congress is made up of politicians, not scientists, so they ask questions that are from a science perspective somewhat elementary.
Let's take a breather and back in a moment, and we're back. Just sticking with Grush for a while. He's claiming that for the past seventy nine years, the federal government has kept this secret about space aliens, and that we've got materials. They keep using terms like biomass and so forth. I'm telling you that, having spent thirty three years inside of CIA, it would be virtually impossible to keep a secret like that from leaking out. People getting
drunk with each other, you know, or people getting married. NCIA. We'll stay with a job for three or four years, and then we'll move on to another one, So people would cycle through some of these offices, so there would literally be tens of thousands of people who would know this well.
I've worked for the federal government in the past. I even had secret clearance, actually, and I don't believe that the federal government could keep something like this quiet for decades. But you don't have to believe that. I think that the real point is not so much whether the government is keeping things quiet, but the fact that if we were being visited, it wouldn't just be the federal government
that would have the evidence. This is a mistake that the public generally makes that only the military or the agencies inside the government would know if aliens were visiting Earth. If aliens are visiting Earth, everybody would know. They're like eight hundred satellites around our planet these days, and most of them have cameras that are looking down. If there were aliens spacecraft buzzing around, they would see that. And those are not all American spacecraft. The Europeans have lots
of them in Japanese. Why is it that do you think the government would get this secret? And I've never gotten an answer to that other than that, well, you know, it would disquiet the public. The public couldn't handle the news, which is kind of nonsense, because one after another surveys of the public's attitudes on these subjects show that the majority of them believe that this is happening, and they don't seem to be riding in the streets about it. Now.
That's one of the other things. In one of your recent writings, I noticed you were talking about this sort of group of recent quote unquote whistleblowers. And one of the things you say, which I tend to agree with, is whenever this kind of extraordinary claim is made, there's never any follow up or evidence, and they just say that, well,
that material is classified. And it's quite handy to say something that's really out there and just say, well that's classified, so therefore and so, just to get to the overclassification issue, it seems like Senator Schumer recently has tried to push a bill on forcing the government to disclose the Congress
what it knows about these type of things. And as you know, Harry Read one of the previous has the Senate too also was very interested in this issue and wanted to pushed towards either declassifying or including the Congress in these type of things.
You know, these statements. I watched this fellow, David Grush claim that the federal government had teams of people that were routinely going out and recovering crash debris from alien spacecraft. And if it were true, at least a science community would have access to these materials. I mean, what could be more interesting than to study materials that had been brought to Earth by another species?
Right?
And why would you keep that classified in the first place. There's really no reason to do so, it's something you would want, as many scientists as possible to study. When they say things like well it's all classified, that's very convenient, but it's hard to believe that the Aliens have arranged things that only one federal agency has proof of their visits.
So set the last couple of days, I've talked to some friends of mine who were formerly in CIA but in the S and T director the Science and Technology Directorate, and I got some interesting response and let me outline a scenario for you and have you like address it. So the Russians have a satellite, or the Chinese or the North Koreans and say that satellite was to crash in the Gobi Desert or in Kazakhstan, and we wanted to get a hold of that to understand the latest
Russian technology or whatever. It is conceivable that working with special forces, it would be CIA because we have a presence. Let's just run with Mongolia, Gobi Desert. I'm just completely making this up. We probably wouldn't want to tell the Mongolian government that that's there because it would leap back to the Russians, and we might want to use the CIA presence in Mongolia if there is one, to bring in a special forces team to go to the site in the middle of nowhere, find a way cover way
to get out there. And if there was a site, the craft would really be debris, right, and we would be interested in acquiring the materials to see what are the Russians using, what are the polymers on this and so forth. They would acquire this material, bring it back, and yet it probably would go to some element inside a CIA. He's claiming it's this thing called OGA Office of Global Access and it would be shared with the
scientific community inside of CIAS and grush. If you look at his actual whistleblower complaint, it says that he was denied access to programs that they didn't want to read him into. If we were acquiring a Russian satellite or bits of it, that would be a program we probably wouldn't tell about because it's not a UAP. It's completely identified.
We know what it is, and we know where it was, and we know what we got, and so that really doesn't fall into his Bailey Wick ause a UAP, and of course we would try to keep that very controlled.
Well.
I guess I would come back Jerry to what I said before. I'm not disputing the fact that a government agency like the CIA could keep something secret. I certainly hope they can keep something secret, to be honest, but it's not clear to me why alien spacecraft would be something they'd want to keep secret. You would want every scientist with any expertise in the matter to be studying this. There's obviously no security threat. The aliens are not blowing
up our cities or anything like that. It's an American tendency. I've lived in other parts of the world, and it isn't the same there to want to think that the government is keeping stuff from them. Americans like that idea. It's an idea that's fairly unknown in Europe at least, but here it's very commonplace that we like to think that the government doesn't play straight with us. But in the case of alien visitation, that isn't really so much a government thing as it is a science thing.
Secretly recovering a Russian satellite that has crashed somewhere.
We do do that, Jerry, if if a satellite crashes, or a drone or a nuclear weapon goes astray, the SAA is involved in trying to go coach.
And if we would try to keep that quiet and people could draw conclusions from that, it's much sexier to say, oh, if they're not telling us what it is, it must be an alien satellite, as opposed to like a North and craft that crashed.
I think these conspiracy theories have moved to the place where they've created this really strong notion that there's this deep state that's working somehow against the interests of regular people. And what's frustrating to me, who spend almost thirty years in the CIA, is everybody I know, they're the good
and the bad, and the smart and the dumb. Everybody believe they're working on behalf of the American people and took that job really, really seriously, and believe that they had to inform the Congress and had to inform the political leaders, and they took that job incredibly serious. So this notion that there's this sort of evil Cabala people hiding things from the American public. We're hiding things because we're trying to do things on behalf of the American public.
And it's hard to imagine how hiding UFOs would be part of that process.
It sounds right to me now that we all walk around with cameras right on our cell phones. How come, there's no great photographs now of UFO, of UAPs whizz't around, right, We've got all these from the nineteen fifties, these grainy pictures. But now that everybody but he's got like one of these things, and when they see it, they can be geolocated and they can take pictures of it. Thousands of people can take pictures of it. They seem to have like disappeared sort of.
It was noted by somebody who was writing for I think Skeptic magazine or whatever that with every improvement in the camera technology that we carry around in our pocket and every improvement of that, the alien stepped back a little a little bit to make sure that the photos plan.
I have heard several times people throw out, in a dish gallop the robertsond panel as if like, ah, that proves it. So I went and I took a look at what this is, and yeah, there's actually a touch of truth in it that the robertsid panel set. In nineteen fifty two, apparently there was this huge spate of UFO sightings and people were calling it in and CIA
did get involved. The concern was that it was overloading our ability At the time to protect our ourselves from incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, like we were only able to protect ourselves so much, and this was actually interfering with our ability to protect ourselves, they said at the time, and CIA apparently and it's been completely declassified, he as
he can go read it. But CIA at the time recommended that in order to protect ourselves from a nuclear attack, it would be good if there weren't quite so many false reports, and that maybe there should be a program to inform the American public, like how to deal with these and to debunk some of these claims these were experimental aircraft and so forth, and that this might be
a good thing to do. And this then has morphed into the CIA as early as fifty two saying that we had to lie and engage in a disinformation campaign against American people, when actually what the statement was at
the time was completely the opposite. And this comes into what Grussia is saying, saying that the US government is involved in murder of people wanting to talk about this, that he's personally worried that the agency, the CIA is involved with this huge campaign of disinformation against the American people, that we're illegally for the last eighty years have been withholding information from Congress, which gets pretty awful and destructive
to our body politic. Part of what Grush and so others are asserting is that we have these crafts we being the US government, the scientific community, I assume, and that we have been reverse engineering the technology and materials. So how would that even work?
I think you've already stumbled up on what the true answer is, because, look, you could liken this to giving Neanderthals a laptop. Somebody could argue, Okay, these Neanderthals are going to reverse engineer that, and they'll be making their
own laptops soon enough. They're probably never going to be able to reverse engineer it, right, you know, I don't think we would be able to reverse engineer alien technology because it would be at least thousands of years more advanced than where we are, and we just wouldn't have the basic understandings of that technology to allow us to reverse engineer.
And the people who would look at it running with this scenario, they'd all be the top scientists and none of these guys are going to keep their mouth shut.
But none of you guys worked on the Kennedy assassination like I did. You don't understand how we can.
That was just a low level functionary in Dallas.
Well if we can, if we can take these things and re engineer them for weapons use, then we better hurry up and give it to the goddamn Ukrainians.
For CHRISTI I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, So s with SETI. You're actually involved in a scientific, peer reviewed, provable science to look for extraterrestrial life, whatever that is, or signs of it. So what is the government and what are you doing in SETI doing to actually look for signs of life at a more serious level.
If you're talking about life beyond Earth. What we're doing is we're continuing to build bacecraft to crawl around or just sit on the surface of Mars, for example, because Mars seems to be the most likely place in our Solar system to have produced life. We send a lot of hardware to Mars. We also send hardware to Venus, which is slightly closer, but you know, Venus, it doesn't have an appealing environment for life, so Venus gets a little less attention than Mars. But we're trying to find
that out. And the question we're trying to answer is not whether aliens are planting hardware on Mars. We're trying to find out whether life in fact can't get started on a world like Mars, and whether it has. Okay, that's just a purely science question. It isn't going to
affect your plans for the weekend. So maybe a better scheme is to do what is awful being done, and that's SETI, of course, where we just use big antennas to try and see if there's any radio traffic bouncing around our part of the galaxy.
Have you found anything?
If we had, you'd know it.
Seth, it's been really great talking with you. When we find intelligent life, we'll have you on along with the alien hopefully. And said, do you know why aliens don't come at Christmas time?
Oh?
Here goes.
I can't say I do.
They don't want to give away their presence. I'm sorry. You got three kids.
They love that stuff. Yeah, I bet they do. Now let's speak with our producer, Adam Davidson and try to sort this all out together.
Welcome back, Adam, fresh off your spaceship.
Fresh off the spaceship. I'm out here in the countryside. It has been a weird couple of years for the alien curious. Can we really think this through? If you were at CIA right now and you were in a meeting and someone said, okay, we just got irrefutable proof if our satellites picked up something in Kazakhstan or whatever, would the instinct be all right, we got to keep this hush hush.
Well, we'd probably talk about it over beers with some of our friends in Vienna, Virginia, the Vienna Inn. We'd all have beers about it, and we wouldn't say aliens, but we would like probably allude to it. Right, It's not something that we would keep secret among ourselves.
But the much more specific question is has anyone come here? And is it being covered up?
And why are they such bad drivers that they keep crashing right right right?
So what do you think? Do you think aliens have come to Earth?
It's sort of like religion, Like you know, I can't prove it. I'm skeptical, but I also do want to say that it would be wrong for me to say there's not things that are larger than me or that I can never understand, And so I just think we have to keep an open mind look at these things. Take our time, assume that there's always things that we're not going to be able to figure out right away.
The bird to proof is still on the people making the assertions without definitive evidence, and as intelligence officers, I want the definitive evidence and then I'll believe it. I'll be happy about it.
Well, what, it's interesting even within the government. So Jerry and I both worked for thirty years in the government in this secret side, right, neither of us know anything about this. So somehow, if there's this thing happened, and it's a certain part of the CIA and intelligence agencies found this out out and have been able to keep it from the rest of us. And so I had never heard anything about any of this when I was inside. Now, obviously they probably didn't want to tell me because I
would blather it to somebody else. But if it's true, it's unusual how well it's been kept secret.
And it gets even more difficult if some of the assertions are that it has been so for the last seventy years, that in seventy years no one has said anything, and I find that highly implausible. I find it highly implausible that that Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden that all of them would look at this and go, well, I'm not saying anything because I don't know why.
Right after they saw what we did to Kennedy, I think they know.
To keep.
So, guys, this is John Stern. I've been listening the whole time, and I have a question, very practical question. If I came across evidence of a UFO, or I saw one and I got a great photo of it, what should I do?
Who should I call?
That's a great question. You should call Davidson, and it should be journalists should look into this. If I saw something, I wouldn't automatically go to the government.
Frankly, how about Juliani? Should I give it to him first?
Yeah, give it to his Russian handlers.
But don't give it to the government because they'll cover it up.
You're saying just like you already did. That's what I'm hearing. Like I didn't believe in it, but now I do, because you said exactly what you would have said if you were sworn to secrecy.
All right, Well, I don't know that we've solved this one. This is a biggie and you may come back to pieces of this later, but thank you all, and we'll see you next time on Mission Implausible.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible. It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeartMedia B