Joining us now is someone who has spent their life during reconnaissance and surveillance. He is now into drones, and I think you're going to find this very interesting. We're going to talk about what happened in the Great Drone Mystery back in the I guess is about a year and a half ago back on the East Coast, as
well as what has recently happened with some drones. Scene of the military basis where Warpete and Rubio live and the threat really that it presents to all of us, and how it is completely upending really the military order, I think. So joining us now is John Ferguson, and he's got a couple of different places where you can find him. He's got Saxon Unmanned as his company, and they have Saxon Unmanned dot com. He also has a website about his personal story, John Bferguson dot Com, which
is very fascinating. We will try to talk a little bit about that as well. And he's also got another bus Java John's dot net just in case you're looking for some coffee. But thank you for joining us, John.
Well, thank you, it's very nice to be here. Thank you.
Let's begin with the Great Drone mystery. There was a lot of people trying to tie this into UFOs and stuff, and it's like, well, they've got lights on them, you know, I'll let you know. It's direction of the guard, so that might be a tip off. This is not something from another galaxy. But tell us, you know, when you look at this investigation, what was your take on all this stuff?
Well, you know, again, thank you for having me on you know, the whole drone thing back in twenty twenty four and twenty five. You know, I just remember common sense kind of a guy, and I just got really tired of hearing are the people that we elected to run this country and elect or run our states, We're out there saying that they're coming out of the water and they're running and flagships and all that stuff, And.
We had sheriffs who said, I can't catch them. It's like a supernatural or something.
I just thought, oh my gosh, this country is in so much trouble if these are the people that are running the country. So I just wanted to give a common sense approach, you know, and really just show America what as a manufacturer, a subject matter expert, And again I've been. I've been in unmanned system technology for over three decades, right, so I'm one of the few people in the United States that has not only sub surface subsea, but ocean surface and tactical robot crawlers and unmanned aerial
aircraft experience, right. So I'm really kind of a different person than most. So I just wanted to give a common sense approach. The thing is is that myself and two other gentlemen have been working for quite some time on trying to uncover the fact that some of the old Soviet era nuclear warheads had come up missing. One hundred and thirty two of them that came up missing,
and they were put into the black market. And the gentleman that I was working with had accidentally been exposed to one of these warheads and became very sick, and so from that point forward he was tracking these things to try to find out where they were. And so that's when they brought me in. And the information that we had is that they were here and that they were planning on using it as a false flag operation.
And so when all of these elected officials were out there saying that they're aliens or little Green men or whatever, and you know all this other stuff. I just felt compelled to just say, look, folks, I couldn't say at the time what exactly it was. I just said, look, I do believe that they're not looking for anything nefarious. Don't try to shoot them down or I'm sorry. I don't think they're nefarious drones. I don't think they're an
abstracal nations drones. I think they're looking for something very specific, and I believe that they're looking for the radioactive warhead
that we have been working on. We knew it was, yeah, and uh, you know, so I had some synthesist letters from the Biden administration, and of course I didn't cease and I didn't desist, but we we you know, we kept going with our investigation, and we proved that this is what they're looking for, right, and you know, they're flying there, they're respecting somewhat of our FAA guidelines on unmanned system flight operations. They had lights on, you know,
They're they're trying to to somewhat fly within our rules. Right, So I knew that they weren't in adversarial nations. And then what what what administration would allow huge large aircraft like that fly over our critical infrastructure without permission, like this aircraft behind me. It's fourteen foot wing aircraft, one hundred and fifty to uner grand at its base model. You know, could you imagine an an adversarial nation flying dozens and dozens of these over our critical infrastructure and
our country just gone. I don't know, so, you know, it just it didn't make sense to me. So that's why I did that video. And then still to this day, a lot of people had asked me, whatever happened did they find the nuke? And I was like, wow, I don't know. And so we had also recently uncovered that that is still out there and it is still in the hands of the bad guys, and they are planning
on using that thing September October of this year. So we met with the authorities to try to bring this to light and get these folks to investigate this, and every time we brought it to the authorities, we've been shut down. So it's all been dismissed. So we turned over all of the black and white, the emails, the photos,
the videos. You know, there was a Pentagon report that stated that they had thought in the nineties that one of these assets was brought up over So what we did is we proved to where it was processed, who owned it, who sold it, who they sold it to, how they packed it, how they shipped it, how they brought it over here, who received it over here in the United States, and then we lost track of it from there. So you know, these are acts. It's not conspiracy or anything.
And so who is this? Who are the bad actors that? Can? You say? Who they are?
You know, all of the bad guys that people speculate here in the United States are real, you know. Please, I don't want to seem like I'm a politician and dodging a question, but for my own safety, I sure I think I should leave it at that. But all of the bad actors that you know exist there. You're right, they're there.
Yeah, yeah, Well that's one of the things that really concerns me. When you look at Iran, for example, and the drones that they have. You know, who knows how many drones they've got. They were giving drones, selling drones to Russia in the Ukraine War, so they were making more than they thought they actually needed. So I imagine quite a few of them that are there, and it really has changed the face of warfare, hasn't it.
It absolutely has. And you know that's she heat drone is. You know, it's a it's an adequate drone. And I try to impress upon people that a drone doesn't have to be this highly technologically advanced piece of equipment, right, I mean, my gosh, they're building drones out of cardboard. Oh yeah, and they're working, right, you know, they're building them out of balsa wood, which they've been doing for decades. Right, So the only thing a drone has to do is
do its job. I know that sounds very basic, but it just has to fly. You know, there's a five hundred dollars module in that aircraft, any aircraft, really a commercial aircraft, that tells the drone exactly what to do, when to do it, how much power to put out to wherever, and you can fly them completely one percent autonomously. You can. You can plug in the ordinance and tell it what to do and just letter rip and you can pack up and go home and and it'll just
go out there and just do the job. So it doesn't have to be technologically advanced. Again, it just has to carry a payload and do its job, and that's it.
It's really been an equalizer as and it's like the improvised side roadside bombs that we saw in a rock, except this is a lot more flexible, a lot more reach that we've seen.
Now.
The drones that you sell at Saxon, tell us a little bit about your product line. You know, you mentioned the large one behind you. What type of drones do you sell? How big are they, what are they capable of doing? They carry a payload of you know how much and so forth.
Yeah, you know, the drones that that we build. You know, I've developed a couple of different technologies that try to help save lives. I've built subs, power pack systems, tactical crawlers, and my drones are are kind of unique in the industry.
And the reason why is because I've managed projects overseas for submersible vehicles that have a cost of one point two to one point five million dollars a day costs and so you know, I've seen fifty cent parts drop a project for two weeks, so there's one four hundred and forty minutes in the day. And when you have a project that's one point five million dollars in value or in cost per day. You know, every minute has
a huge dollar sign attached to it. So I developed my tech my aircraft to be you know, modular, robust, you know, very rugged, very dependable, and it's designed to to save lives or to you know, provide intelligence that you know, our our war fighters wouldn't normally get in the battlefield with a high level of dependability. Right.
So, and of course you did that when you were in the Marines. You were doing recon and you were doing it in the water yourself, right, tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, I want to make sure that I don't over oversell what I did in the Marine Corps because of stolen valor and all that other stuff. But I mean I was a scout swimmer, you know. I wasn't like a Navy seal or a force ricon guy, you know, I was. I was low level reconnaissance scout swimmer guys. So they would drop us off in the water and we would swim in and attack the beach or the pier and do the reconnaissance and uh and then set in lanes for the boat company the raiders to come
in and attack the objectives. So so yeah, I've I've done a lot of reconnaissance types missions and and that's really how I developed my companies because I wanted to kind of be back in the Marine Corps have the follow orders.
Yeah, there was a guy that I worked with at Texas Instruments. I was a little bit older than I was, and I told you this as we were talking off air before the interview began, and they would do that to him in Vietnam. They would take him and way out and you know, behind enemy lines and drop them in the jungle and they'd have to find their way out to them several days and they're you know, trying to move at night and sleep during the day, and he'd wake up and there's spiders all over him and
enemy patrol just a few feet away. And he said it was a really harrowing experience, and you know, they would just work their way back and right about what they saw. And he said, what was really strange about that was then after you did that, they would fly you to Hawaii for a couple of week vacation. Then it was back into the jungle again. It's just like whips on them back and forth. These different experiences, So you were doing stuff kind of like that, I guess,
except in the water. And then now, as you point out, with the drones, they can do that kind of surveillance without endangering people's lives. So that's that's an important thing. But talk a little bit about what you know in terms of the drones we see that are happening in this Mid East war right now that's going on with Iran, and how that has changed the battlefield and the threats that presents to critical infrastructure here in the United States.
If probably not something that's difficult for somebody to get across the border with. And it's also we have to be concerned about cartel's as well as hostile nations attacking our infrastructure, don't we.
Yeah, And that's it's very serious. You've brought up a really good point. You know, again, from the beginning of warfare, we've always sent out reconnaissance teams to collect data, and you know, those folks have always given their lives to try to collect that data. And you know, you don't need a big drone like this to go collect information on an objective anymore, right, A two or three thousand dollars drone that you buy at Best Buyer, Amazon will
do all of that for you. So you know, these drones will fly over and they'll take pictures of critical infrastructure or the potential battlefield, and all of those images have Geotag images on them. So you can take all of those images and put them all together in this software and you can create a map. And this map
could be accurate down to less than an inch. Right, So every military map you'll ever see or pilot's map will always have you know, for the most part, they'll always have elevations on them, and that's very important for covering concealment, you know, depressions, et cetera. And so these drones can fly over a target and you can get the digital elevation model that tells you the elevations, right, you can get the altitudes or the height of buildings or vehicles, and you can build a three D map
off of these. And so anytime you're going to go an attack and objective that you will need to have that data because maybe you want to blow up a building, but you don't know how big of a missile you need to use or whatever, but that information will tell you, Okay, it's more information that you'll collect in minutes over what any human being can collect in the same amount of time. So that's very important, especially allowing drones to fly over
here domestically over our critical infrastructure. Now, the Ukraine and the Russians have done an amazing job, not that I agree with that whole war, but the Ukrainians and the Russians have done a fantastic job of revolutionizing the battlefield because you can take less than a thousand dollars drone and strap a grenade to it or some form of an explosive and you can set it out on its mission,
and that can absolutely devastate the battlefield. And so you know, the Iranian drones, I mean, these things are they're just adequate drones, and they're highly capable, and they're terrifying, and that's what they're used for now. The cartels, the Marine Corps has published a few years ago during the Biden administration, that the cartels were sending one hundred drones an hour, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week with fentanyl,
you know, coming into the United States. And I spent several years working on the border to combat and narco terrorism, human trafficking, and child sex trafficking. You know, I just volunteered a lot of my time to do that, but I also work south of the border doing the exact same thing, and so I got a different perspective on
the stuff coming into the United States than most people do. Right. So, with you know, all of this fentanyl and all these nasty drugs and weapons that the cartails are bringing in, they can just do it with drones. And the problem is is that our counter drone defense is great. There's a lot of great companies out there building it, but it needs to get better, and it needs to get better fast because you know a lot of these things can slip through the wire. But mostly it's pretty good.
But you know, we we get those incursions.
And again, you know, if we're going to be starting wars everywhere with everybody, it's going to be not just drugs coming across, but it's going to be things like bombs and that that thing that's coming across as well. So the drones that you have, like the large one behind you, what would that be used for?
This is a great platform because it carries fifteen to twenty pounds, and you know that fifteen to twenty pounds can be a sensor, or it could be some form of a munition. Of course we don't do that, got to clarify that. But you know, it flies for eighteen plus hours, not that you would fly a drone for that long, but it's again it's very highly reliable. But a drone is really just a platform to give a sensor a ride, and give it a good ride, a
smooth ride. Right. So again you can put we can use this for agriculture, we can use it for construction, asset management, you can use it for search and rescue. It's largely built for ISR, which is intelligent surveillance reconnaissance. So you can put that little vault her at gimble there to go gimble in there. You can zoom thirty times zoom power down to a location, so you can really get a you can get a good sense of what's down there and if there's uh, you know, targets
of interest or whatever. You can loiter over a battlefield as a loitering munition, so you can you can stay aloft for many hours and wait for the bad guys to come through, you know, or you know, find people lost lost in the mountains, you know, so they're just there's nothing you can't do with these things. The only things that limit you on drones is your imagination.
Wow, well, in our area, we've got our own personal drone, but I can't fly it because it's got so many hawks around here. I look at these people, said, how are we going to defend the kind of stuff is like, Well, if it's really small drones, you just get a bunch of predatory birds, don't you know. But they wouldn't do too well against the one that's behind you.
But are very intelligent. I've done work with birds and drones, and their birds are so intelligent. You would never realize how intelligent they actually.
Are, you know. There was an interesting novel a few years ago by Daniel Suarez is called Kill Decision. I don't know if you're familiar with that or not, but
he was really ahead of his time. It's about a decade ago, and in it he was talking about drones and the use of warfare, and it was very interesting the way he constructed it because he had a confluence of some military industrial types along with some people who were entomologists insects, right, and so they came up with a kind of a way to signal with each other like, you know, mimicking insects. That was that allowed them to do swarm swarms of drones. Where are we in terms
of that? Do you think in terms of drone swarms? That's the thing that is really concerning, And of course you know when we look at warfare that that is a real issue. What about drones drone swarms and being able to lock onto a target and kind of have some communication between them in terms of artificial intelligence and that type of thing.
Yeah, that's again, that's a great question. You know, this aircraft behind me here, it can swarm. You know, that's just software, right, so you know the autopilots will actually, I mean again, the five hundred dollars autopilot will allow you to swarm this type of an aircraft. It's five
hundred dollars, right, So it's very insignificant. A lot of people say that the Shahed drone is a thirty forty or fifty thousand dollars drone, but I could I guarantee I could make that drone for less than twenty grand, right, But that drone can swarm. Swarm technology is wonderful and you get to see all kinds of pretty stuff on you know Super Bowl halftime shows and all that stuff.
It's wonderful. There is some technology issues that we have with with swarming drones and when you have the larger drones, the swarm. Yeah, that's a that's a problem. But is it likely that we're here domestically in the United States going to get hit with big drones like this in
a swarm. Not really, it's highly unlikely. But a lot of people have seen the videos where you got little bitty small drones that can acquire a target and have an explosive and you know, take take personnel out right and using AI it can choose who to take out. There are certain laws of physics that you can't overcome that you can't you know, your your battery life, your power consumption, and the power discharge from the battery to keep the thing in the air is really limiting on
your amount of flight time. So those little bitty drones, they only will get maybe three to five minutes of flight time, So you can't watch it find a target, acquire the target, then prosecute the target in three to five minutes. It's just it's just not going to work. So I don't think people need to be too concerned about that at this time. The battery technology is not
out there yet. But that's not saying that we should not be concerned about adversarial nations getting a hold of small drones and utilizing them here in the United States.
And of course that video that was done was part of a Ted talk thing I think somebody did work. They were talking about those assassination drones, determining ones which people are going to target, you know, and using that against politicians in Congress or something like that. But you know, that's something that is down the road. It's just incremental
increases in technology, I guess. But the other aspect of it, and you know, we've had a couple of things that have come out in the news recently that had some domestic connections. One of them was the fact there's drones flying over the House of Well, let's see if I got the clip here, which one of those is Atlance over the military basis here he got warpete and pointed to the drones because they're flying over the military bases
where these guys are living. Because we had a lot of Trump administration people have now moved on to military bases, and so they had these drones that were spotted over that military base. Talk a little bit about that, what was behind that.
Well, you know a lot of people around the United States are getting wrapped around the axles on this thing. And of course it's very ominous to think that an adversarial nation can fly drones over our most critical infrastructure. And are you know, executive leadership in our country right? This happens all the time. It's not new to have people who are ill equipped and ill informed to fly their aircraft over these bases when they're not allowed to.
You know, the Chinese have of course, the administration is working on getting the Chinese spy drones out of here. But they have a soft where built a software packet that's integrated into the system where that it won't allow you to fly into a no fly zone and those are clearly marked on the maps. When you plan your route, you can bypass that, but you are electing to bypass that, and if you break the law, then you know that's
on you. And we also have what we call remote ID, what's a little module that is in every aircraft sold here in the United States that shows law enforcement of you know, who owns the aircraft and then I believe it shows the location of the pilot's ground station. I'm not sure if that's correct, but you know, these people can fly drones over military bases, and I think it's just people doing stupid stuff. Again, I'll go back to
one of my original statements. Do you honestly think that this administration or any other administration would allow this large of a drone to fly over the base without permission?
Yeah, because we just had that situation done Tomar a Lago. You had somebody who was sounded like they were kind of out of it. There's no fly area there, and they sent up jets dinner scept them and they said, you know, this guy, we kind of wake him up. You know, basically, it's not any attention. But what was really alarming to me was I saw these comments like just blow him out of the sky. You know, this guy doesn't deserve to live, and is like, WHOA, let's
back up a little bit here. But but yeah, they're very quick to scramble the jets for things like that. And of course, even if it's flying over the homes of politicians, high level politicians like that, there's going to be pretty hardened targets what's not hardened, I think are the utotally power plants or things like oil refineries here
in this country. There's so many issues with that. They immediately started talking about, well, we got to worry about our AI data centers, So we're going to have some automatic guns that are maybe driven by AI that are going to shoot these things down. It's like, well, yeah, they don't ever talk about it for us though, you know,
they're worried about our high ranking officials. They're worried about the artificial intelligence it's going to be used to spy and surveil us, but they're not really worried about whether or not we can turn the lights on. That seems to be the common thread with all this stuff.
Well, I would challenge you to go back in our two hundred and fifty year history and find any administration that gives a damn about the American people.
Right, that's right.
But you know you can shoot these drones down. The problem is that we trip over our own bureaucracy here in the United States where other countries don't. You know, you can disrupt the frequency with these drones and they have frequency hopping, so typically we use two point four or five point eight or nine hundred, you know frequency here to fly our aircraft. That's pretty common, right, There's
a lot of other bands. But you know, when you hit a drone with some sort of frequency disruptor, you know, they can frequency hop and they can switch to a different preak and continue on. So those are difficult. You can shoot them with lasers, you can shoot them with microwave pulses, or you can just shoot them with bullets.
The problem is, okay, if you've identified the drone and you're going to make that decision to take that drone down, but what about the family of four that's in the cessna that's ten thousand feet you know, just because you shoot some form of an energy weapon or whatever frequency disruption weapon you know, at the drone, it doesn't stop
at the drone. Right, So they don't want to drop a manned aircraft over, you know, because of a drone, right, right, So what I propose is things that we do on accident, we should be able to do on purpose, and that's crash one drone into another, right. You know, you if you can take an unmanned aircraft like our smaller one and you can fly that into a drone, that needs to be taken down. You have more control and their software that will you know, select that target and then
you can automatically engage that target using another aircraft. That way, it's just going to have a less of a probability of having you know, adverse effects on the civilians you know, in the area. And that's that's what I propose. But we have to really shore up our defensive posture here in America regarding Unmann systems.
Well, you know, there's something that we've had this debate for a long time. It began a long time ago with EMP, you know, electromagnetic pults. You know what if somebody flies a new can expose it in the atmosphere, takes out all kinds of electronics and maybe takes out some of these big unique transformers that have a very long lead time to get them replaced, and only made a couple of places in the world, you know, incredibly expensive,
difficult to replace. And so there's some very simple things that could be done to protect against DMP, but they don't do that. So I imagine they're not going to do much to protect the infrastructure against drone attacks either. And there's so many critical places of critical infrastructures we're seeing with this situation with Iran. You know, you've got a refinery, it's very you don't need much of an
explosive to get that thing going. And so when you look at these vulnerable infrastructures like you know, power generation, power transformers that are that can be taken out and cause massive cascading effects, and nobody's really doing anything about that, are they.
Yeah, well, you know, all of the reconnaissance on America is pretty much done, right. So, you know, the company DGI, they build an amazing aircraft. I mean, everybody loves the aircraft. They're easy, they're dependable, you know, they're they're just good aircraft. But the problem is is that they got caught spying on on well through their drones. So pretty much every country in the world has had those DGI drones uh
flying everywhere. So all of our all of that data you know, goes back has gone back to China, right, And that's why the Biden and Trump administration was working on getting them kicked out of the United States and you know, critical infrastructure now you cannot use those types of Chinese drones because they were caught collecting our data.
So all of our power lines and refineries and you know, sewer plans and construction sites and hospitals and every single thing you could ever possibly imagine has already been mapped, right, And so there's no requirement anymore really to select targets to map because they've mostly all been mapped, right. And so there's nothing that the government can do now about that other than just you know, stop the spying. They just there's nothing else you can do. It's all been mapped.
So what these drones have done is they have really tested our weaknesses here in the United States, and the media has done a great job of telling everybody in the world, you know, what our weaknesses are. And that's why I've said a couple of times on this show, is that we've got to really beef up our defensive posture here in the United States regarding unmanned aircraft because you know, almost every nation in the world has suffered some form of an invasion at one point or another
right throughout history. You know, I think we're probably past due for another one. And and I think I don't want to I don't want to strike fear into Americans, but I do want Americans to understand that this war that we're fighting, this environment that we're in, the technology that is being utilized, and couple that with AI that I do believe that we are going to really get hit with drones as some form of a drone attack very soon. I don't know when I agree.
Yeah, And when you look at it, you talk about how everything is already mapped out. A good example of that, I think is the fact that we have these very sophisticated systems in the Gulf States that were there, and some of the very first ones that got taken out there was I believe it was a billion dollar radar facility that was kind of the nerve center, the eyes and ears of these anti ballistic missile systems, and that was one of the first things that they targeted. They
knew that we operate in an environment. Now, as you point out, everybody knows everything about everybody. All the stuff is exposed, and they know where the targets are and it's not that difficult. As you were pointing out, you got some get some very inexpensive devices to drive the drone and you've already got it mapped out as to where it is. And that's what they did at the opening rounds of the retaliation strikes from Iran, they went right after a lot of very high value targets and
radar targets and things like that. And so that's something that's very different. As you point out, you know, in America, we've gone through a couple of world wars without anything happening on our soil. So we think, well, we're we don't have anything to worry about. But now there's this asymmetry to the warfare that I think is really going to bite us.
I think, yeah, well, you know, there's some information that was just quietly released about Iran taking delivery of over five hundred what do they call that, my gosh, starts with an S season missile or whatever they just took over from China, from North Korea, of North Korea. And these are hypersonic type missile that you can't you can't
really shoot down. And they have taken over five hundred of these, right, they've taken delivery of all of these, and and there's and they can reach you know, here in the United States and most definitely Israel. Right, So you know, this this whole conflict with Iran, you know, I I hope and pray that this will be you know, this will be ending very very very soon. But we we do have a very high probability of this thing, you know, escalating out.
Of looks like it's are you doing that in terms of reports carg Island getting hit?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah absolutely. So. One of the things that I really just absolutely despise is, uh, you know, on the mainstream media and a lot of shows, you know, you have these old generals and old retired senators and you know, people of authority who are very respectable people, but they're they're going out on the news and they're saying, well, the Trump's administration is going to do this, and this is going to happen, This is going to happen, This
is going to happen. I was never a high level, you know person in the military. I mean I I was mischievous and I always got in trouble, so you know, I bounced off rank structure like a yo yo. So. But but I was a good marine. Right. But again, I just close my ears when I hear all this stuff because nobody knows the decisions that are being made inside the administration, right, I get that. It's a lot
of fun to talk about it and speculate. But for these people that go up and just say, well, we're going to do this and this and this, yeah, I just yeah, I just I can't listen to it because nobody really knows. But if we're speculating, you, you know, this truly does with all of the things that are happening, and there's a lot of things that we don't know that's happening behind closed doors, especially in Iran, that I
do speculate that this could get very messy. And I'm hoping what is it tonight at eight o'clock?
Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, we're recording this on Tuesday, and so yeah, Tuesday, but of course earlier this morning, they already attacked carg Island. So I mean he's kicking stuff off and escalating.
I'm anticipating, yeah, yeah, I'm anticipating that they're not going to have an agreement by eight o'clock tonight.
That's right. Yeah, That's what I'm concerned about. And again, the other thing that is concerning is that as you watch government officials, and I know maybe part of it is they're trying to project confidence or whatever, but what comes across is kind of a detached Hubris that thinks that we can't be touched, and that really is disturbing
because that is an invitation for disaster. I think, whether we're talking about, you know, civil defense, and of course you point out the American government doesn't do anything about civil defense. So it's a great book about that a few years ago called Raven Rock The Plan to Save Themselves and let the rest of us die, not about how there was no civil defense plan ever really during the during the Cold War for people, and of course I don't really think there is now at this point either.
You see other countries like Germany as they're trying to escalate the war, and it seems to me like Germany and France and these different European countries want to escalate the war and so but they are at least doing civil defense drills and drills about how to do mass evacuations and things like that. Not in the American government. They're not going to do anything like that.
Well, you know, we discussed at the beginning of this show that there are at least one, maybe two nuclear warheads here in the United States. Act. Okay, fact, so we also have enough or carfentel in the United States to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet ten times over. And you've got to let that sink in, right, And I always said that it was just in the United States. There's enough phenol in the United States to kill every man, woman, a child in the United States
ten times over. Well, the news, the mainstream media had done like a really quick blurb on that and said it's enough in the whole world. Right. So you know that we also let over thirty million people into this country in the Biden administration and there were some that were bad, right, So to say that we can't be touched is not something that I would get on board with because everything that we need to be touched is
already here. And you know, we found doing the border work that I've done, we found that China was bringing shipping containers in through the cartels with you know, millions of rounds of ammunition and small arms, and the uh Iran and truck drivers were distributing those containers all around the United States. So, you know, again fact, not conspiracy or speculation or anything like, Like, I did the work, right, So, so everything that they need to do some form of
nefarious assault on this country is already here. So are they going to you know, pull up a container ship and launch a bunch of drones out of a container ship? You know, one hundred percent intent, zero percent probability. You know, we have those big gray things off the coast the Navy that won't let that happen, right, So.
Yeah, well, just so many different I mean, we saw in so a tax i. Forget it was a Ukrainian. I think it's Ukrainians doing it to the Russians when they destroyed so many of those very high value planes on the ground. The way they did that was they had some semi trailers that had like a false ceiling in it, right, and they opened that up and these things, you know, they park them not too far away from the airport and then fly all those drones in that
were hidden and concealed in the eighteen wheelers. So, I know, there's a lot of different ways that you can do things like that. Right.
You think the Ukrainians did that by themselves?
Yeah, that's right. They really resourcel aren't they.
I'm curious. Yeah, there's a lot to read between the lines there.
Yeah, yeah, there is, there is, isn't there. Well, again, things have changed so much and we don't really really understand it. And I thought it was interesting when you're talking about how a little tiny part can completely scuttle the whole mission of a substandard. We certainly have seen that with the aircraft carrier, haven't we the gerald Ford class that they had the toilet issue. Yeah, I guess they had not an Achilles heel, but they had Achilles
something or the other right that caused a problem. And now we got the same situation with the spacecraft the Artemis. They were seeing their toilets aren't working. So we are looking at an SHTF kind of scenario with so many different areas, and it seems to be always the really complicated, sophisticated systems that they build that seem to be taken down by the very very simple bug that's in it somewhere right.
Yeah, you know, I was managing a project over in West Africa and our cost, I think our cost was like one point two million dollars a day. And there's these little fuses called Pico fuses. We had some Peko fuses go out in one of our subs and that dropped the whole entire project for about two weeks. So if you can imagine fifty cent part dropping one point two million dollar project. And boy, I'll tell you what some heads rolled over that one.
Yeah, well, well it certainly is interesting. Talk to you. Tell us a little bit about your personal story. You've got a website, John B. Ferguson dot com. What's that about.
Yeah, that should be going live, I hope here in the next couple of hours. But you know, I have somewhat of an interesting story. You know, it came from Kansas, and I had a lot of sorry, my let me get out of here. So sorry about that.
That's all right, So kind of like Dorothy got swept up in the air with the not a tornado but a drone. Right.
Yeah, well, you know, coming from a small town in Kansas, you know, I had lived under a stepfather that was very abusive and actually he tortured me, and and you know, I suffered through many years of that and it's interesting, but I have this story about all of this abuse, you know, growing up and and you know, my father rescuing me and and and that had affected me considerably and still, you know, even still to this day, you know,
you suffer those you know, those effects, right. So one of the things that.
You know how old were you when that was happening.
Third grade, third grade when the divorce happened. And in my fourth grade year, I was an angry child because I was retaliating against this divorce and a kid was picking on me, so I broke his nose. So they took a box and they put it in the auditorium
and they put the desk in the box. And for the whole entire year, I had to stay at that desk in that box and the auditorium and not you know, communicate with other and they would funnel all of the children in during the lunch hour next to the box, and they would all ridicule me, you know, for they did this for the entire year because you know, when they were going to have lunch in the auditorium, right, And so I missed out on my fourth grade year.
And I always was you know, left left behind academically, right, And then you know, coming home, uh, you know every night to being tortured by my stepfather was you know, it was a it was a really ungodly uh situation for me, and I can't believe I actually survived the whole thing. But but then, you know, I was always
kind of not really taken serious. And so when I got into my high school years, I had retaliated and I joined the Marine Corps, and the Marine Corps whipped me into shape and taught me how to set goals. And so I came from you know this, uh this, you know, tortured young child and who shouldn't have ever survived all the way through high school and into the Marine Corps and then became a deep sea diver and
ailating summerciable vehicles. And now you know, I get a meet with presidents and kings and queens and sovereign councils, and you know, I've tried to achieve and I try to do this and be very humble, uh you know, and not narcissistic, because those are big keywords for me. But now I've traveled to eighty seven countries around the world, and I've got to go and meet some of the
most amazing people in the world. And I've been asked to take my story and get in front of those who who may need to hear the story of my survival, but not only my survival, but my abilities to achieve goals. And they try to become somebody and and here in the state of Kansas. You know, God willing, I you'll probably run for office here Burundi and South Sudan, have you know, asked if I could be an ambassador, the US ambassador to their countries, which certainly is a possibility.
But I want to make sure that it's not about me, but it's about the survival, and it's about the willingness to really focus and try to achieve and try to get out of that nasty situation.
So yeah, that really is amazing. That story about what happened here in the fourth grade is amazing. My wife was a elementary school teacher and they had an open classroom situation, so she could hear couldn't avoid hearing what was going on the next room. And there was a very abusive teacher in the adjacent room, and there was this little kid who she just picked on him and make him stand in the trash can. Said you're nothing but a piece of trash. What happened to you is
way beyond that. I mean, she saw that, and she said she went to the principal. She said, you've got to do something about this. You've got to stop her, and he goes. I know, she's very abusive, but there's nothing we can do about it. She's got tenure, and so carry got out of it was.
That, Yeah, step Daddy, you know, you would put aluminum foil over the bens in my room, which was the size of a closet, And during the summers, I couldn't get any air, and my sheets were sticking to my back because I'd sweat, and I'd stick my face out through the screen just try to get air. And I'd chew ice all night just to lower my court temperature down. And I in the same during the winter, but I was always kicked out of the house during the day,
so I was never allowed to come back in. They would lock the refrigerator so I couldn't get food, you know. I mean, I was whipped with a gite fishing rod and the hook had hooked into my leg and gripped my leg out, and I mean just all of this just horrible stuff that But I think it made me the person that I am today. And that's not necessarily like a good thing, right, but it's given me the
strength with the Marine Corps. It's given me the strength to fight through it and not become a serial killer or.
Well, its the Rain's not to fund a biopic for you.
You know, I don't know, I don't know. But the big thing is that, you know, I never really ever thought that I would stand on a stage and talk to people about my story, but uh, you know, I've been asked to do that by the Mexicans, you know, come up and talk about what they're fighting down south and the border, and you know this story, and you know, I've I've I've been in a situation I was smuggled into China because I was dying. I've I've flatlined, I've
crossed over twice. And so I'm writing this book called nine Lives in County because of all of the different countries I've been to. I've been in situations where I've stood at the the edge of death and and I've I've tripped over that line a couple of times. And just recently, I just came back from an African nation trying to help stop some genocide over in an African nation that I won't mention, and I got dysentery and almost didn't make it there either. So this was just
a couple of months ago. Wow, the hell of a diet program for me, though, I lost thirty pounds.
Yeah, I bet that's one way to do it, isn't it. But you said you flat lined a couple of times and crossed over. You have a near death experience. You want to talk about that?
Yeah, yeah, a few times, a few times. And that's why the book is called nine Lives in Counting, because I've been in those situations where I've I've crossed over into you know, I've crossed I've stepped over that line several times.
Wow.
And and you know I've left my body. I turned around, I looked, I saw my body laying there, and I just remember this. It's crystal clear as it as if it just happened fifteen minutes ago. And you know, I just said the Lord's prayer and and I just said, Lord, please, not here, not now. And you know I have a family. I can't leave. I can't leave, not here, not in China, you know. And uh and and I clearly I survived.
And a lot of people said, well, did you see the white lad And I said no, but I smelled a lot of sulfur. That's a that's a joke. That's a joke, okay, But it was a it was a very wonderful feeling to you know, it's kind of like yet it's kind of like you were laying there and somebody were stacking rocks on your chest and being crushed, and then all of a sudden, somebody just started lifting those rocks off of you.
You know.
But I I knew that that God had I knew he had other plans for me, you know.
So, yeah, there's an interesting, interesting book by a pastor in Austin and he said, uh, he thinks this is something you know, the medical equipment that we've got now, he said, he thinks that is something that is really he sees it as an evangelism opportunity because he said, even though you got a lot of people interpret it differently.
He said, if you look at what they're saying, there's some amazing experiences that some people have had, and some people who are different religion, they weren't projecting what they came across. They weren't projecting that from what they expected for example. And he said, if you if you look at it, the common experiences that are they said, they really line up with the Bible. And so he sees it as an evangelical tool, you know, to talk to people.
Of course, you know, it's it's not sufficient, but it is interesting and it is something that we're seeing happening more and more, I guess because of the ability to revive people of the medical technology that we've got we used to not have.
Yeah, you know, I never made it to the point to where I saw family members or I saw God, or I saw Jesus or you know anything like that. You know, I you know what. Everything that I experienced was what I felt, and you know, I felt a huge presence, you know, I knew and it gives me shivers just talking about it now. But but you know, I know that that there's a God, you know, and uh, I don't have to worry about that. I know what
I know. And you know, people can listen to listen to my story and they can choose to believe me or not. And that's okay because I know in my heart, in my mind that there is something so much larger out there and it's and it's peaceful, it's it's not it's not anything other than just warmth, love and peace, and that's all I That's all I know about it. And I know and I have this this feeling in my mind that that I'm meant to do something, you know,
here in this life. Maybe I've already done it. Maybe I haven't done it yet. Maybe I'm doing it now. I don't know. But you know when I when I ultimately decide to check out, I will I will know if I've accomplished because I'm sure he'll let me know. I'm sure he'll let me know if I've accomplished the mission.
That's right. Well, it certainly is interesting to talk to you. And drones are one of those things that are really exploding in terms of their influence in our lives, and I hope it's going to be a positive one. Of course, you know, we already have a lot of the one
of the things that I find really fascinating. You see a lot of YouTube videos of course, people flying over volcanoes are going really fast with the really super fast drums that they can fly through obstacles and stuff like that, so it can make some very interesting video of that's there. But it is something that has completely changed the calculus for UH, for war and UH and also for terrorism, and it's something we should really pay attention to. Thank
you so much for joining us again. John Ferguson before we go, tell us briefly a little bit about the coffee Java, John's dot net or Java, is it John or John's. I think it's John.
It's Java, John's with an sky.
That's something about that.
Piloting submersible vehicles, traveling around the world two thousand and two was kind of a different time, somewhat different than it is now. But I wanted to just stop traveling as much and get home. So I started a coffee roastery, and my wife and I ran it, and it's still
in operation today. So we roast fresh coffee daily. And I actually consider myself one of the first Patriots coffee companies because during the war, my platoon commander, he was on his sixth tour in Iraq and he had suffered a traumatic brain injury, and he started the Wounded Warriors Regiment, not the Wounded Warriors nonprofit, but the regiment. So he was helping injured men and women come home. So I
wanted to do the same. So we decided to build a chopper, a motorcycle called the Chopper of Honor in honor of all of those men and women who have you know, been injured or killed in the war, and I would take their story and I would put their picture and their story on the coffee bag, and we would sell those coffee bags and the proceeds would go to those families. So and I still do that today.
But yeah, we've we've been roasting coffee since two thousand and two, and I'm starting to scale the company now, you know, along with Saxon, the you know, the drone company. But I think it's important that we just do our part. We try to create jobs, growth and help those that need it.
Well, that's pretty good track record you've got there. You've gone for twenty four years, I guess, and so that's pretty good for a business. A lot of businesses don't make it that long. You know, the first five years
is really critical. Tell me a little bit about since you got a small business and you're doing coffee and you've got to import that, how are the tariffs affecting you and you know, and what what do you think is what are you looking for in your business in terms of you know, we're going to see I think
transportation costs explode here in the next few months. Yeah, what what are you thinking about as a small businessman when you look at all this economic chaos that's being unleashed on the world right now.
Oh my gosh. You know, I'm an optimistic individual, but I'm only optimistic in til it affects my checkbook. But you know, coffee prices have gone up, you know, considerably. Where I'm being affected more is we were manufacturing our our drones in Poland. But then we've we've we've fell out of love with those folks because they were selling our aircraft behind our backs, and you know, they were
they were doing us pretty dirty. So we and then of course when President Trump got back in office, and of course we are really undergoing the Made in America initiative, we decided it was just a good time for us to repatriate our manufacturing back here to the United States. And that's why we're absolutely we're doing that right now. So everything's just gone up. The transportation prices are just un bearable, you know, this the fuel price and everything.
And what about being able to get components, you know, and it turns even things like aluminum that's being affected by what's happening in the Gulf right now.
Are you having any shortage chet everything? Well, you know, again, it's the tariffs are a huge issue. But right now, you know, we're getting requests for drones, for very inexpensive drones. We're not getting a request for like two or three or five or ten. We're getting requests for fourteen hundred, five thousand, seven ten thousand drones at a whack.
Right, what are people doing with that many drones?
Were sending them to the battlefield or.
Okay, so it's the government that's doing that, right.
Yeah, yeah, or or interceptor type drones so that you know, they can intercept drone on drone, which is literally what I was saying at the beginning of our interview here. But the problem is that the we have this thing is nda compliant. They have to be made in America. And that's okay, that's that's wonderful, but it's more expensive.
The problem is that all of the lithium batteries that we use, all of the lithium cells are they're manufactured in in China, right, All of the most is the copper, the windings, the magnets, you know, those are all manufactured in China. So we're really being stifled by not only the disruption in the relationship between China and the United
States right now. But also all of these conflict that are happening around the world are there's this massive influx of requirements for drones, and these manufacturing companies that are
manufacturing these components they can't keep up. So it's a great industry to be in because you're busy, but it's not great when you can't fulfill the requirements that you have here in the United States, right So, it doesn't do any good to get in order for five thousand drones and get them delivered in a month or two or three or six when you can't get them.
It doesn't do any good to have domestic drones if you don't have any source of domestic batteries to run them with. That was my whole issue with the tariff stuff. It's like, okay, well your goal is this, but you don't even have a way to get there. You're just going to slam the door shut on what's coming in right now without having prepared to make sure that you got the raw materials, to make sure that you've got the components that are not manufactured here. I mean, you
can't do it all at once. Well, I've said so many times, we need to send a copy of Leonard Reid's eye pencil to the White House.
You know, the Chinese, they subsidize their drone technology. I mean, they've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of really smart engineers just sitting around thinking up, you know, cool stuff to do, right, And that's why they're leading in the drone industry on the commercial side, not so much the
military side, the commercial side. And you know, with all of the tariff stuff that Trump's doing, and all of the investment that he's bringing back into the country, and all of the dose stuff, and there's all there's all this money that's supposed to be coming into the United States. You know, why don't we just shave off two or three you know, billion of that and invest that into our drone manufacturing facilities that are manufacturing American made drones
here in America. You're creating jobs, you're creating growth, you're creating sustainability, you're making people happy, and you have you would be building one of the most incredible defensive defensive technologies in the United States. So why don't we do that? I mean, that's what I would do, But I'm not in the White House.
Well, I'm not in the White House. Either, my approach would be just to get the government off of our back. And I think we kind of figured out ourselves that seemed to always be the advantage that Americans had over planned economies where the government's going to decide, because usually what happens with the government, we see with our own is a malinvestment. I mean, you can see malinvestment with China in terms of the housing market and the real
estate market that they did there. But so yeah, my instinct is always go back to the free market. How about if we get freer rather than more subsidized. That's kind of my bias as I look at it.
You know, I'm sorry. I again, I have been working in these Central African nations for many, many, many years. You know, I got sick and tired of dealing with the United States bureaucracy. Right when the drone stuff came out, the FAA had a very challenging job, and that's how to integrate these into our airspace. And I knew that the FAA was going to have to stifle drone growth
in America. Right, so I went overseas, and we have this thing called bb loss beyond visual line of sight and everybody was like, oh my gosh, I want to do bb loss. You know, well, I've been doing it for years overseas because I wasn't going to be stifled by the FAA, right, And again, nothing bad about the FAA. They have to do it right or they're going to
cause you know, loss of life. Right. So here in the United States, I go and work in these Central African nations to try to you know, build relationships between these African nations and the United States and US because I don't want to rely specifically on our economy. I want to merge two economies so we can all grow together. And like, we get African water machines that make water out of humidity. So there's African villages out there that have never had a clean glass of drinking water their
entire lives. So we bring these water machines over there and they get to have a clean glass of water, something that we take advantage of here in America. Right.
Yeah.
So I try to think outside the box and not just specifically in our own economy. I like to create multiple, many economies and that way everyone gets to benefit.
And I think this was missing with this Fortress America approach. That is there. You know, we just can't understand how when we interconnect with things and we have free trade and we have freedom to do things, what a powerful thing that is. But if you're going to shut it down, and if you're going to get territorial and tribal about things and you're going to regulate everything, you're going to regulate it to death. And that's what I'm afraid we're
seeing right now. But we're way over time, so I'm gonna need to cut this off. But it's been really fascinating talking to you, John Ferguson, and again the website so Or he's got Java John's dot net, saxons Onmann dot com where you can see the kinds of drones that they manufacture there and if you want to hear his life story, he's working on John Bferguson dot com. I'll be checking that out. Thank you so much, John, it's fascinating talking to you.
It's been wonderful. Thank you.
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