WTUFO
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WTUFO
S1E3: The Pentagon's Big Non-Denial
News writers have routinely reported on the Pentagon's careful statements as if they were broad denials. We dig into the details, talk about the legislation that established AARO, and consider how journalists can improve their coverage.
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Hi, welcome to Holding Space. I'm Caleb Mayo and this is my brother, john Mayo. What's up? And UFOs are real.
Speaker 1:So we're here to talk about that and we've got a few topics today, one kind of newsy and recent, and then three a little more big picture, and we'll end with something fun, or maybe two fun things.
Speaker 1:So the first thing to talk about is that semi-recently, as of the time of this recording, congress met with the Intelligence Community Inspector General, who is the person who kind of has the receipts of David Grush's whistleblower complaint. This is a figure that has only existed in a formal way for I think like 12-ish years or something in the intelligence community and it's sort of, as I understand it, like an ombudsman, which is like a figure to whom you report to kind of blow the whistle on internal malfeasance or shenanigans or other bad behavior, kind of. One fun, notable detail in this area is that David Grush has been legally represented in this process by the first intelligence community inspector general, a person whose name I do not remember right now, but I find that to be a relevant and intriguing data point. So would you like to talk about the hearing from the viewpoint of what we heard Congress people say coming out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, I guess I think that's a good place to start.
Speaker 2:I think something, just something small, that like clicked for me finally this week was the, the.
Speaker 2:I find it fascinating that these briefings are this briefing we're talking about was for the House Oversight Committee and that that's who held the, the hearings, not the intelligence committee, not even like a military committee, you know, but it's the, it's the.
Speaker 2:It's like a good government issue, you know, like it's like saying al capone on tax fraud or something, um, but maybe that's. I don't like that makes me, that makes me like hopeful and like I'm glad that it's the people who are whose job it is to like you know, oversee these agencies, and like military entities, because we know that they're going to, that they want to like protect their brief. You know their job is to oversee these things and they're not being allowed to do that. So I don't know, that's something that just like like hit for me this week. But yeah, so I don't know, coming out, I mean coming out of the hearings, to me there was just like this tenor of seriousness that I feel like I haven't really seen before. I mean, I guess a little bit last year with the public hearings as well, but like I don't know, what did you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, picking up on that S word, maybe we can drop this link. Specifically, garcia, a Californian rep I believe he's a Democrat came out and basically said to the camera this is serious, this is a serious issue, this is serious, this is a serious issue. And he also said something will maybe ping at the end of our conversation the media should cover this. Please do your jobs. Uh, and he wasn't joking, he wasn't making little green men comments. Uh, he wasn't flip. He also didn't say anything specifically, uh juicy, about the claims and their verification, but his whole vibe was there's a real thing going on here that actually matters. It was like not, I just wasted my time for 90 minutes and that energy feels like something. It hits. If you watch it, I would recommend it and we'll put this link down below for people to check out because it's short. It's like five minutes of comment.
Speaker 2:And then the day, I think, the day after the hearings or the Thursday after the hearings, Garcia introduced a bill with Glenn Grothman, republican from Wisconsin, to facilitate reporting of UAPs by civilian aviation personnel.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:Not something that exists currently, though there's. I mean so crazy.
Speaker 2:I'm curious, I know so, like I know, arrow now has a place where you can report something right, where, like, there's like a public reporting yeah right but I well ish, but go ahead okay, but I know that that the FAA has for years just directed people, directed civilian pilots to to like a, you know, private group like NICAP or MUFON and heavily discouraged internally from reporting things because pilots historically have been yoinked off the flight schedule and like sent to psychotherapy, yeah, which is obviously incredibly unhelpful.
Speaker 1:But one side tidbit I heard about this this week citation needed but uh, apparently that I read the claim somewhere that burchett and maybe some others tried to put a rule in the Defense Funding Authorization Act at the end of the year that would have required civilian air personnel to report, I believe to Arrow, when they saw these things, and apparently that was discouraged by the intelligence community, or at least that's what this article claimed. Which sort of thinking in good faith. You could maybe understand if the intelligence community is worried about some of our secret stuff up there getting reported on. We don't. They didn't maybe thrill them that there would suddenly be a massive reporting network of people who are calling in when they see drones because some of that stuff maybe is ours.
Speaker 1:It could also be the case that they're just like trying to cover up NHI and non-human UAPs UAP, by the way, this small thing. But there should be no S, right, you don't need an S. There's no S at the end of phenomena. So people say UAPs. It feels wrong to me. Ufos make sense. There's an S at the end of objects. Okay, so also Representative Luna and Representative Burchett commented on this. They're both a little more grothy at the mouth I should have thought of a more polite way to say that but they're like a little angrier about the subject, it seems to me. And they've both been people who are willing to go a little bit further in speculating what this might be and like bring up the idea of the extraterrestrial hypothesis or interdimensional hypothesis and, uh, they both felt like this information was still being squeezed. But birchhead at least suggested that he felt he was leaving this meeting with a new list of targets and some like potential follow-up actions. So that was kind kind of news that the committee feels like they have next places to look.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's especially interesting in the given that Grush has said Grush said in his public testimony that, like he could give you that he could provide names and locations for them to start looking. And then and Grush wasn't part of this briefing, that just happened. But Grush has also said that he gave those names and locations to the inspector general and the inspector general is the person who was giving this briefing. So they have that information. So, yeah, it's we don't know, but it's you know. Seems it seems that's we don't know, but it's you know seems.
Speaker 1:it seems plausible or likely that they have some new names in the mix here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, got to hope.
Speaker 1:Also learned this week from another congressman who was in this meeting that they're trying still to get a SCIF meeting with Grush, which is like a secure meeting where they could talk about classified information.
Speaker 1:I think this congressman claimed that Grush's security clearance had been revoked and that they were trying to get it back and that he this representative said he had directly asked people who were in a position to do that to please do it so that they could talk to him in a skiff and get more information directly from him. That seems like kind of low percentage from the outside. Watching from the stands, it seems like unlikely that the powers that be are going to let Grush testify with these Congress people because Grush wants to talk about it and the Congress people want to hear it, and the lurky, shadowy figures in the background seem uninterested in facilitating that conversation because they don't want to open a bandwidth of data between those two forces. But, as you mentioned, we might get a little bit more information from Crush as of this recording next month, in February. So if you're listening to this after that, maybe you know more than we do right now.
Speaker 2:One last quote that I thought was interesting is from Rep Roger Christian Mordy from Illinois. He said coming into that meeting unfortunately, I don't think that we're looking at the substance of Grush's claims. Instead, we're dancing around the procedural nature of his claims. What do you think that means?
Speaker 1:It sounded to me like it might mean something to do with the reprisal allegations that Grush has made. He is getting some confirmation from the Inspector General about the threats or the pressure that he's faced. I think he filed a separate complaint about that, if I'm not mistaken, but it could also have been included in his original whistleblower complaint. But, either way, he has formally reported this and there's an investigation, or there was, as of last year, an investigation ongoing into what that pressure looked like and whether it was legal or not, and like just to put details on that. Grush has, for example, said that military personnel of some kind maybe intelligence personnel have demonstrated to him that they know where he lives and can reach him at any time and just show up in his life, which is spooky and also sounds like the way that a program like this might operate. Like nice house, you got here, nice family, we know exactly where you are at all times and we can reach out and touch you Dot dot dot, because you wouldn't have to threaten somebody explicitly To freak them out, yeah, which is like obviously really shitty behavior. And I know we're all in the, we're wrapped up in the like the coverup part of the conversation right now and it's not always the most fun part of the conversation, though, like what is the phenomenon and what's going on with it is, like, more interesting on some level and easier to approach. But there is sort of a core governance issue here about how we're thinking about the military and intelligence operations, and so I think that makes a decent pivot into the next topic I'd like to talk about, which is this non-denial denial that the Pentagon issued last year After Grush went public with his claims. He made this whistleblower complaint. He filed it in late 2022, as I understand, and then in 2023, he does this interview with Colthart and he releases the article through the debrief with Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal, and that's when the informationumenthal and that's when the information goes public and that's when all the news organizations reach out to the Pentagon and say what's going on here. And the Pentagon issues this statement through spokesperson Susan Gough or Gough, I don't. I don't know how to pronounce her name. It could be Goff, it could be Gao, it's also, in some places, stu, not Susan, and that seems to be mixed, but she does exist. She's got a LinkedIn page. She's issued a lot of press releases. She's been working for the Defense Department for about 15 years. She's a retired colonel and her rank is pretty high. She lists her job on her LinkedIn page as senior strategic planner and spokesperson at the Department of Defense.
Speaker 1:Some outlets have reported that she is the mouthpiece for Arrow, but the program doesn't list her on their website as personnel. That said, in the last like 18 18 months, which is how long arrow has existed basically all of the search results about her name are associated with arrow, though not every single one, like there's one about israel in the last couple months. Um, so she still had this broader role in the dod, um, but she's also she seems to be covering arrow specifically, and also the things that I found from the last few years are all sort of space related from her, like advisory boards, including neil degrasse, tyson, and space security and personnel changes around one of the guys who made some weird comments about ufos, or I think he had some bad behavior. I'm getting off track here. Sex lies in UFOs is the name of that article. I can put it in the comments below, but anyway, that's all a diversion from what she actually said, so I'm going to just read her statement Basically this is one hop in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is from. This is from after the public hearings with Grush Fravor and Ryan Graves.
Speaker 1:That's a good question. I think it's before the hearings.
Speaker 2:So it's in response to Grush's. The article and the interview, the debrief article and the Colthart interview on NewsNation. Or the debrief article and the Colthart interview on NewsNation.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've got July dates for this quote, just to summarize this for myself, so I'm following you here.
Speaker 2:Before or around the time that Grush drops his claims, sugoff makes this statement on behalf of the Pentagon and you feel that it and then that statement keeps getting like replayed and replayed by news outlets and you think it's being kind of misconstrued, as a like really full-throated denial and you think it's more common.
Speaker 1:I do. I do and I think I think you may be right that it might've been a response to the hearing, because I'm the first hit I'm finding on her statement is the 27th, which could be right after this hearing with Grush, fravor and Gra Graves, so it might be a response directly to the hearing. And what Susan Goff says in full is to date, aero, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently. Arrow is committed to following the data and its investigation wherever it leads. Okay, so far, so good. It seems like in some ways a pretty broad statement. Like she says uh, any programs have existed right or exist currently. That's like relatively broad. But what's narrow about it is that she's saying arrow has not discovered any verifiable information and arrow, at this point of that she's making a statement, is just barely a year old. It's about like a year and a week old at the date of this statement.
Speaker 1:I think I've also seen Ross Coulthart ping the word extraterrestrial in here as a potential avenue out, like maybe they know something else about the provenance of these materials and they're not ET, and so that's a get out of jail free card. But the question that I've been asking myself is why wouldn't the Pentagon say something much more thorough, like the United States does not have a program to retrieve and reverse engineer non-human craft, nor have we ever had such a program, either in the DOD, the intelligence community or private industry. Why would they not say community or private industry? Why would they not say we don't have this and we never have? Why would they instead say this office has not discovered any information that would prove that we have had such a program? Just why wouldn't you make the broader claim and I think this matters partially because reporters are reporting on Susan Goff's claim as if it were this broader claim. So the Associated Press, for example, says when they quote this, they cut the first part of the quote and instead of saying Arrow has not discovered, they say investigators have not discovered. And then NBC News says instead of Arrow has not discovered, they say the Department of Defense has not discovered. And then Time and NPR both, instead of saying Arrow has not discovered, say the Pentagon has not discovered. And then this becomes gradually in just the last week as of recording this, julian Barnes and Kayla Guo in the New York Times saying, quote the Pentagon has denied these allegations, which is not the same thing as saying the Pentagon says one small office in the Pentagon has not acquired verifiable proof that these allegations are true. I would also ping the word verifiable as kind of a potential loophole here, because if they have information but they can't prove it, they could still say well, we don't have verifiable information. And that's especially relevant because Arrow doesn't have subpoena power, so something might not be verifiable to them because they literally can't figure it out. They have no way to require anyone in the Department of Defense or the intelligence community, let alone private aerospace companies, to tell them anything at all. And we know that they don't have this power because Aero said they asked David Grush to come in and he wouldn't come in.
Speaker 1:This kind of gets to another really upsetting part. I'm sorry I'm running away with this now, but David Grush says no, they didn't. So the direct quotes are here. That well, I have a rough quote from Kirk Patrick, who's in like kind of exit interview mode when he says this because he's now the former director and he says we've reached out like four or five times to David Grush. We've asked him to come in. He hasn't come in. Then David Grush replies to this and says I have no emails or voicemails from these guys. That is a lie. So that is one of the most uncomfortable discombobulations in this whole thing for me the fact that we don't know which of their statements is true.
Speaker 1:But just before we dive into that, I want to linger on the fact that what that proves is that Arrow can't require people to come in, because if they had subpoena power they could have just subpoenaed David Grush and then if he'd refused to appear they would have pressed charges. So they don't have the subpoena power. Andush, and then if he'd refused to appear they would have pressed charges. So they don't have the subpoena power. And I'll put in the bottom notes the legislation that establishes Arrow, because it's very interesting, but it's a small part of a very, very large bill. So you have to kind of search and find the terms you're looking for, but I couldn't find subpoena power in it and summaries online can't point to any subpoena power. So it looks to me like Arrow does not have the power to require people to answer its questions. I'm sorry I lumped all that together. I'm going to take a breather now and see if you have any responses, if anything popped off in there for you.
Speaker 2:I mean, I guess. Well, I want to ask you, I guess, is it, are you more frustrated with the Pentagon or with the media?
Speaker 1:That's a good question. I guess I'm a little more annoyed by the media, honestly, because it just feels careless. And not everybody has been careless. A lot of outlets reported this correctly and just quoted the quote as the quote and said Arrow has not discovered, including Helene Cooper in her reporting on this hearing with Crush, in her reporting on this hearing with Crush. But it's gradually morphed into this bigger claim that we just don't have any information, Like they're treating her statement that Arrow hasn't found anything as if it were the statement there has never been any such program and the Pentagon hasn't made that statement.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious about why they haven't made the statement that way and I can think of some good faith reasons that they might not have made it.
Speaker 1:But even those good faith reasons sort of imply that they think it might exist.
Speaker 1:Um, because I, I the one good faith version where it doesn't exist is, uh, they, they just kind of make a mistake and are focused on arrow, or like sugoff is focused on arrow and she's like thinking about these questions all through the lens of arrow and they just don't think to make the broader statement.
Speaker 1:Um, so that's like the the sort of least alien-y answer. Then there's this like mid-ground Sugov doesn't know whether these programs exist and maybe, like the Pentagon, doesn't know for sure, or maybe many people at the Pentagon don't know for sure. And so they're saying we don't know if these programs exist, but Arrow has not found any evidence that they exist. And then the most nefarious potential explanation is they know that these programs exist and they have chosen, instead of saying these programs do not exist, to say Arrow has not found evidence that these programs exist. And again, arrow is a year old and has no subpoena power and also reports directly to the Pentagon, so it doesn't seem like the kind of body that's especially well suited to do a thorough audit of the whole defense department, let alone the extremely tricksy cia or the defense contractors like lockheed and boeing yeah, it seems to me like, like, I wonder if part of it is just a desire to silo all the UFO shit into Arrow.
Speaker 2:And when they make a statement like that, it's coming from this desire to keep it separate.
Speaker 2:And it's maybe even coming from communications people at the Pentagon who are definitely not read in on this, who are probably not read in on the existence of this program or these programs, the header of arrow, and then you know, and then that gives us. It gives us, I don't know, it gives us some kind of framing that we can use to talk about this stuff. And also it gives us deniability If it turns out that what we're saying isn't true. And like I would imagine that, or I wonder I'm, I wonder if there's any element of personal reputation that somebody like Sue Hoff would consider in making a statement like this. I don't want to be, I don't want like I'm not, you know, totally making stuff up here, but like I'm not right into this program, I don't know anything about this program, I don't want to lie on behalf of um, some program that I'm, that I'm not even part of. So, yeah, I'll make a statement because we have to, but I'm not going to go further than I have to and like, risk her credibility.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Yeah, that also gets me near this point that we should make about the evidence that we have over the years that when they need to, intelligence and defense agencies can lie to the public. They I think the general idea is they prefer not to, but they clearly have protocols somewhere in their rule sets that say if it's really super duper important, we can lie. And then we know that because at the very least we know they did this about spy planes. We know this from now declassified material that proved that the CIA said things like that's a weather system or this was a lightning event or whatever, in response to people observing what was then secret technology. So they, they could well be doing that now.
Speaker 1:Um, and that's just to say my understanding slash guess about the situation is that they can lie if they have to, but they would prefer not to lie, and if they want to keep something secret, they would probably prefer to just shade their answers with careful wording rather than lie outright. There are probably rules on the book somewhere that say, unless you absolutely have to. Rules on the book somewhere that say, unless you absolutely have to, don't lie, but if you have to, you can lie. Uh, it still also seems like a really big lie here like to say this program has never existed. That's a big lie. That's different from, like, this particular thing that somebody saw is lightning versus is a youtube bomber or whatever. So I can imagine that they would maybe be skittish about, you know, issuing a full lie, but the point really there is that if they need to, they have the legal apparatus to deceive the public, and obviously they would prefer not to do that.
Speaker 2:I mean, it always makes you wonder if this isn't like one of the core purposes of arrow to begin with. You know it can serve these. You can serve like yeah, it can serve the purpose of like being a catch all for alien stuff or UFO stuff at the Pentagon. It can give like a shiny object for the media to to talk about. And it can like yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's well, that's really great, cause that's a good pivot into what I'd like to talk about next. Yeah, um, which is arrow more thoroughly, unless, yeah, let's go, let's go, let's talk about arrow more. I'm just I share your.
Speaker 2:I'm now pissed off at the media about this. Like that really is a. There really is an important distinction there, I think.
Speaker 1:It seems it. I also wanted to say one more thing around this, I guess, which is that I would like to be wrong and it's totally possible that I am like completely misreading this situation and that in fact there is no program, and that it's like perfectly logical for Sugaf to just say we don't know about that, Sue Goff to just say we don't know about that, and that it's even like careful and good faithy of her to say, as far as we know, there's no such program. You know, that's like it could be that we live in a world where she's just like being absolutely earnest and she really doesn't know about this program, and maybe the Pentagon doesn't know about it and maybe it doesn't exist. I think it probably exists. There's a lot of smoke to suggest that there's a real fire there, but I just wanted to say that I'm still holding space for that possibility, not all the way over the handlebars trying to see the whole landscape here and all the buckets of potential.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But getting to Arrow, I learned something in researching this in writing a little bit about it this week, which, once I started doing, I did for hours and days because it was very, very interesting and because I wanted to make broad, sweeping claims, and I couldn't do it without learning more about Arrow. So one thing that I learned about Arrow is that it came with a mandate to do a historic review. The main operation that Arrow is set up to conduct is to be a repository for government reports about UAP and to help facilitate research around UAP and like disclosure of events that are public or semi-public and, as I understand it, there's sort of like a classified version of their reports and there's a public version of their reports. But like the main mission of this organization is to codify and internalize as much data as it can from government apparati, to share and collate that data so that we have a sense of like how many of these things are spheres, what time of day are they happening, what's the elevation of these average sightings? And that makes sense because there's a lot of this stuff going on. We're finding out like it's thousands and thousands of events, like that's. So it's it's really important that we have a repository and it's great that it's public facing. So before we get to the like arrow bashing repository and it's great that it's public facing so before we get to the like arrow bashing, if we get to that, we should just say that it's really cool that this exists and it sounds like it was set up specifically to solve like a pretty big problem here, which is that there was no centralized internal reporting mechanism for the government and the military and the intelligence services to talk to each other about UAP. So that's really good and key.
Speaker 1:But it also does come with this thing that I didn't know. It sounds like you maybe knew about this, but Congress did pass GARO with the job of rounding up a history of internal operations around UAP and there's very specific language in that bill about targeting this exact kind of program that Grush has alleged. I'm going to quote from the bill here the Congress specified that the historical review should include information about they mentioned the intelligence community and they said the intelligence community's involvement with quote any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress. So a couple things to say about this. One, that means that somebody thinks that those programs exist, and it's possible that Arrow was inspired by whistleblower testimony or just like whispers in the halls of Congress. The intelligence communities and other people who know a little bit more about this might have gotten the sense that such a program existed and decided that we should know that been told. Now Grush has told them since the formation of Arrow that there are programs like this that have been deliberately hidden from Congress, that they probably involve the intelligence community, and it makes sense, therefore, to pursue them and try to get a catalog. I want to quickly note that the intelligence community doesn't just mean the CIA. It means any agency that conducts intelligence, and there's a formal definition of this that includes like a specific list of agencies. A lot of them are military, like. Each of the branches has their intelligence operation, and the broad collection of all these intelligence agencies is known as the intelligence community.
Speaker 1:So Congress was targeting the intelligence community with this. Congress was targeting the intelligence community with this requirement for Arrow to conduct a historic review. But it really begs the question why would they not give them subpoena power in order to do this? Like did they get blocked along the way? Did they try to do that and get shut down because that feels really important. And it seems to leave us in a place where Arrow is conducting this historic review but has to rely on people who just come in to their office.
Speaker 1:And it does look you can see this on Arrow's homepage. It does look like they have really broad authority to receive information about UAP in a way that like overrides existing nondisclosure agreements and like can come from any part of the government or any part of the civilian infrastructure, like that. That part seems good, but what they're missing is a tool that would allow them to go get that information or require people to tell them where it is. So it seems from the outside like they have to conduct this historic review based entirely on volunteer whistleblowers or maybe just the good faith disclosure of officials who are conducting what might be like the highest, most clandestine operation ever conducted in the history of the American government. So that feels weird to me. Do you want to respond to any of that before we hit this Grush-geek Kirkpatrick thing?
Speaker 2:I just am. I wish I had more information about this, but I'm wondering how that part of Arrow's mission interacts with the component that survived from Schumer's amendment to the NDAA that directs the National Archives to conduct a review and gather documents from across the government.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it seems like it probably intersects.
Speaker 2:Right, like are they? Like good luck to the nerds in the archives department, like breaching the CIA, like I don't know that I feel like arrow maybe has a better chance of getting that stuff. But yeah, I just pulled up the text of the NDAA and that did make it through the records, the records collection section.
Speaker 1:Does that come with subpoena power?
Speaker 2:Great question. And I and I don't know, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:That's a trailhead we could maybe go down a little bit in future research. Certainly, if it doesn't, you would imagine that they would just hit wall after wall, and there are two problems here that I can easily imagine. One is that they might just get denied. But the other sort of harder problem is they might not know whom to ask, Like they might just not know what doors to knock on, like which offices to contact, and it sort of sounds like most of their interviews so far have been based on Grush's whistleblower account, Like in this exit interview with Kirkpatrick.
Speaker 1:He says we've talked to about 30 people. I believe we've talked to a lot of people, like 30 ish people. Grush says he talked to 40 people. So Kirkpatrick then says I think I've talked to most of these people who may have spoken to Grush, but I'm not sure and I can't find out because Grush won't talk to me. And meanwhile Grush says that's bullshit, is the direct quote he told news nation is I have zero emails or calls from them. That is a lie. So, uh, I don't really know what to make of this and I don't like it.
Speaker 1:This is actually one of the parts of considering the coverup that has upset me the most like, maybe the single most, because I really don't like that. There are directly conflicting accounts from two people that I am trying to trust here. Like one of these, I can only think of three potential explanations. One of these people is lying, or there's just a miscommunication, or there's some shady malfeasance that created that miscommunication. So some like intercepting authority that like deleted those voicemails and emails before they got to Grush. That feels like a reach, you know, not impossible necessarily like the mischief fairies of the intelligence community or actual mischief fairies fairies of the intelligence community or actual mischief fairies, given the topic that we're covering that have reached out and like intercepted that information and massaged it. Or one of these guys is just straight up not telling the truth, which is just like so uncomfortable. I really I don't like that. Do you have any emotional response to it or intellectual response?
Speaker 2:I guess not. No, I'm just rabbit holing into the, the national archives, shit. I should do that later, but it's pretty interesting and like toothy I don't know, like it's a lot of like within 80 days, within 300 days, stuff transmitted to the public. There's language in there about how much they're going to charge you to make a photocopy of it it directs.
Speaker 1:You should look on the back of the constitution just to make sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it directs on the back of the constitution, just to make sure. Yeah, it directs the head of each head of a government office shall review, identify and organize each unidentified anomalous phenomena record in the custody or possession of the office for disclosure to the public and transmission of the archivist.
Speaker 1:Okay, but this is all probably under that heading of unless it involves national security, right? Unless you don't want to, yeah, unless you really really don't feel like it.
Speaker 2:And it also kind of sounds like it's on the heads of the agencies to send it to the archivist and not the archive national archives to go out and get it, which is an important distinction, I think that's interesting and I do want to follow up on that question.
Speaker 1:Maybe not right now, like we can't resolve this right now, but the the loophole that got added to this NDAA was this stuff should be revealed and released unless it threatens national security or, you know, you have a bad day or whatever. So there's like a giant ass loophole. But important question does that apply to this archival transfer? Like, do they? Where does that kick in? Like does the cia get to decide that it affects national security before they transmit this stuff to the archive, or does the archive decide whether it affects national security before it releases it publicly? I don't know and I don't know what the CIA might do, but I would imagine they would interpret their power broadly and the archive's power narrowly.
Speaker 2:Well, we're, like those congressmen, coming out of the briefing with more questions than we went in with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess there's probably not that much more jawboning to do about this. I would just note that the historical review is due in June of 2024. Chat GPT did the math of that. For me. It's like it's a weird number. It's like no later than 540 days after this legislation is passed. You owe us a historic review. So we will get some kind of thing in, uh, in june of 2024, and that'll be at least a broader vision of what arrow thinks is true or what it's been able to confirm. But in the meantime, you know, if we, if, if they don't have subpoena power, then that's going to limit their findings pretty starkly.
Speaker 1:So maybe the last big thing that I wanted to talk about is just how journalists should think about this, because it seems like they don't want to, it seems like they're avoiding it. And, uh, I have one piece I've been thinking about a lot in the last few weeks. Is Ross Coulthard's piece in the times. Like God bless him for writing it. I really appreciate that. I genuinely do, um, but what his piece essentially says is I wish they could show us some documentary evidence. Uh, and from what I understand about not Colthard doubt, oh, doubt it, sorry, thank you for that catch, cause Colthard's the good one. No offense doubt it. Sorry, thank you for that catch, because colts are it's the good one. No offense to doubt that I did. She seems fine also in some other ways. We have different politics. But I respect his intelligence, uh, and I respect that he's interested in talking about this, but I do wish he'd examine his own position because it's crazy. It's like somebody summed it up on line by saying do crimes or I won't believe you. And I think that's like a perfect summary, like you have to steal documents or I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do. And from what I've heard about the reasoning behind the New York Times passing on what eventually became the debrief article featuring Grush's claims, is they wanted documentary evidence and they couldn't have it. And so they said because we can't paper trail this, there's nothing we can do. And that guy, garrett Graff, who wrote that UFO book that kind of blew up at the end of last year, made similar points again and again just where is the piece of paper that tells me that this exists? And I think there's some pretty good reason to believe that that piece of paper is just heavily protected and that if you were working at one of these agencies. A you might not even know. And, b if you took that piece of paper or the data from a server, you might be arrested and put in jail before you ever got to talk to the New York Times. So it's unreasonable for reporters to say bring us this document or we won't not only believe you but cover you at all.
Speaker 1:And this is where I have like a sort of pitch for them. It's a two pronged pitch. One is I think journalists should talk to way more people about this. I think they should be aggressively trying to flesh out that this denial, instead of just repeating one denial from a year ago when Sukoff said one thing they should get this denial from Jake Sullivan, they should get it from John Kirby, they should get it from Lloyd Austin, they should get it from Ron Moultrie, avril Haines, william Burns, general Nakasone, nakasone, nakas I don't know that guy's name Chuck Schumer, mike Rounds, joe Biden, donald Trump, thomas Monheim. They should talk to all of these people and say does this thing exist or not? And then tally up all their shrugs or denials or non-denial denials and just get us toward more information. They should ask more questions of more people. And then the second prong of my point is they should not be afraid of reasoning like deductive and inductive reasoning. I meant to look that up. I forgot what the difference is. Do you know about the difference between the reasoning? They should do logical reasoning. Okay, well, they should do logic.
Speaker 1:Basically, and as I've been thinking about this, I've been wondering if logic is kind of like a blind spot for journalism, because we we have this sort of classic bifurcation between the hard news just the facts, uh, report on things that definitely happened, uh, or that you know I got an actual quote about or opinion where you say the way things should be, what people should do, how you feel about the vibe of the country, right, and there's this like middle area that seems to be missing, which is like if a, then b, c or d, uh, and if d, then e, f or h, g, all the letters in whatever order you like, um. But that's a real thing. And there's a real profession. It's called philosophy, it's called logic, and people actually do this. Like you can build logical proofs, and logic professors and logic enthusiasts will tell you that, like, logical systems aren't perfect in any language, but nonetheless they exist and they're a thing that you can try, and it feels to me like if it's anywhere, it's more in the opinion section, but it's like an underutilized tool.
Speaker 1:One good example of somebody doing this really well somebody wrote an op-ed for the Hill citation needed. I don't remember this guy's name, but he basically said this is a big deal, this cover-up allegation is a big deal, and it implies that we only have about three things we can really believe about this. This is like the bucket methodology I talk about, like what. You only have certain choices, what you must believe. You must believe that either the cover-up is real, or there's some kind of psyop, or there's a massive confusion at play. So there's a big miscommunication, they're deceiving you, or this is actually happening and that's it. You don't have other options and that's the kind of thing that logic can do. Another really great example is the simulation hypothesis. It's like these are the five things you have to believe about whether the world might be a simulation. Anyway, that's a diversion, but it's an example of an actual skill that actual people actually have, and reporters should do more. What do you think of that take?
Speaker 2:I think it's a great take. I would like to see more of that and I strongly agree that they should just talk to more people. It's concerning to me that there is such a short list of like really reputable mainstream journalists that that would get called. But you know, like, like I mean Elaine Cooper's done some stuff on a side, blumenfeld and Leslie Kane, and like Coulthard too, but he's just like a little more like mustard on it. You know he comes from like the TV world, so it's a little more razzle dazzle and yeah, I think that's a problem. Um, and yeah, I think that's a problem.
Speaker 2:Uh, one article from this week that I thought was good, as in the guardian um by Stuart Clark. Did you read that one yet? No, it's worth checking out. The headline is it only takes one to be real and it changes humanity forever. What if we've been lied to about ufos? Cool and yeah, delves into the um. Uh, the like potential psychological fallout from a revelation like this, and actually has just like some fun. Um other little like bits of reporting in it, like about these um stars that appeared on a plate dated July 19th 1952, that have since vanished, and I don't know, I don't know. He's like out there pulling some weird things in. Yeah, I guess I just, I guess some like small stuff. I would like for us to stop seeing like b-roll from 1950s sci-fi movies accompanying every TV news report about this stuff. And yeah, I would really like it if, like Jeremy Korbel, wasn't like the Walter Cronkite of our time, just like by default. Like the Walter Cronkite of our time, just like by default, like the Walter Cronkite of the UAP, the disclosure movement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, he's doing great work, but I'm sure he would want that too he would like for other people, which is why he reached out to George Knapp, who has more like actual journalism experience and probably like helped him get into that world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it would just also just another small thing and I guess, of a piece with the B B roll from 50 sci-fi movies, just like just try to write it straight, just write it more straight when you do these pieces. Like the New York times article about these hearings is like very winky, winky.
Speaker 1:I don't know it's subtle, but there's like, you know, there's just there's just like a little bit of like uh-huh, like these people are crazy on it, like or this is titillating, or like yeah, I don't know, I don't know here's that phrase about what at one point that article says an unnamed government official told me aliens have not visited planet earth, or something, which is like an example of the spin you're talking about. Just like sending it up a little bit. It's like it's embarrassed, is what it is. It's like, yeah, shirky and like awkward, like sorry to be reporting on this. Guys, I'm still real.
Speaker 1:Um, I sort of feel like there's been a reduction in that vibe. I think it's gone down over time. Certainly in the outlets that cover this really heavily, they don't have time for that vibe anymore because they're just like churning out their 768th piece about this. So they're like out of X-Files references and they're just spitting the most recent facts. Like the Hill at this point has done a lot of coverage, news nation has done a lot of coverage.
Speaker 1:I wish bigger outlets were doing it like it's. It's a giant bummer that these narrower places, um are the ones who are really running with the football and they're sort of like open to the accusation that they're just in it for the clicks man. But yeah, like that's how news works. They're telling people information that they're interested to find out. Um, it does it sort of feel like in some of these reporters cases they're building long-term relationships with intelligence and defense officials that they're using to report on lots of other issues, so like war and diplomacy and trade and all those other things like those those are built up. The keys to good information about all that stuff lie in the relationships that these reporters form with these defense officials, and so for a lot of them it's hard to ask these big people stuff that they don't want to talk to them about.
Speaker 2:Probably yeah, I do think that, that I feel like there will probably be a like damn break moment or just a. You know, it'll be like a, a look like very gradually, and then all at once, journalists, every journalist is going to want to cover this, and there's so many different angles also from which to from which to cover this, not just the government, so many different angles also from which to cover this, not just the government cover-up angle of it, which is mainly what we get.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and again I want to apologize for focusing on that basically entirely today. Well, maybe that's a good way to pivot out of it and talk about a story or something on our way out.
Speaker 2:Sure, I mean I don't have a specific story I want to share, but I do want to plug this website that I came across a while ago but just rediscovered last night and it's really good, I think, for the frustrating project of talking to skeptics. This is like a very useful arrow in the quiver. It's uapguide. It's a really simple little website, um, that is just built around uh quotes, mainly um, and you just like it's built around quotes and uh, divided into just a handful of little sections. So it just opens with, like, so the sections are uap, exist, and then it's just like a string of quotes about that from rubio Obama, uh, deputy director of naval intelligence, senators, um, just like little hits, and then links to those Um, and then the next section is real objects, quotes from people who would know, then these things are moving too fast to be human.
Speaker 2:A bunch of quotes about that. So it's just, it's really. It's like really simple and clear and dry. And then it has, like you know, links to the 60 minutes piece or in plain sight, or you know, leslie Kane's show on the history channel, um, unidentified, or uh, uh, what the heck is that called UFOs, investigating the unknown? Um, yeah, just a really good arrow in your quiver for talking to skeptics.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic, thank you. I'm totally going to play around with it and I'm really grateful that somebody set that up, and I would love to talk to them sometime. Good on them. Yeah, what do you got?
Speaker 2:You been reading anything recently or heard any scary stories that you want to share? Obviously, the jellyfish was this week also, or I guess that was last week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which I wanted to mention, is great because it nudges the fifties scary movies off the screen. The more actual footage of real things we have, the less they have to cut to the day the earth stood still or something Cause then you just like keep playing the gimbal and the jellyfish and, uh, go fast. And that's fantastic and it's I think it's facilitated a lot of video reporting on this, just like having stuff that they can show us, even if it's body cam in vegas with no aliens. Um, now there's the like thing in miami. That was uh kind of a crazy beat in the last couple weeks.
Speaker 1:People said maybe there were monsters in a mall. Uh, I heard a story recently about a guy whose car got moved on. He lost a night and uh, this was like a military employee whose friend spent all night looking for him and just found him somewhere where he wasn't before. I also heard one about a kid abducted from a tent on a hiking trip who turned up in his sleeping bag under their RV. But that was a particularly weird one. The parents were very scared and they don't know how we got there. Uh, but I kind of liked the idea. There's like a slight comedic shade to that of just like somebody abducting this child and like poking and prodding him and then putting him back and being like it was here right under this thing. I think this is the thing it was under and just like putting him under something oh, I got
Speaker 2:one other car this is not a story, but it's a fun take from my my boy, bryce zabel, at the need to know podcast um that he hosts with with ross colthart. Uh, the cola was asking him like what, do you think this is going to be an election issue? Which I super think it won't be an election issue.
Speaker 2:No, but, Zabel had the one way that maybe it would, I think, which is that Trump just like says some shit. Trump just like offhandedly says that Roswell was a UFO crash or something Like. That seems to me like the, the, the, the potential black swan way that it could be an election issue, and I don't think it would.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I think the like ego argument for that is he would want to prove that he still has the goods, like that's probably why he stole all those top secret documents, right, like he wants to cling to this power and if, maybe, if you could hit him with the right question, he could like be ego cajoled into you need me on that wall? There's aliens, uh, something like that. And also, I actually think biden is like pretty susceptible to that too. I think both of those guys are they're like not all the way on the bottom of the list of places this could come from if, like, reporters keep hitting them with the right questions. Like biden has famously just like blurted out stuff about china, like he's a dictator, dictator, um, or like the the the 2011 moment where he like comes out for gay marriage, yeah, it's another example of him like just sort of surprising us.
Speaker 1:And yeah, trump's like unpredictable, unpredictable and crazy, and will be at a lot of public events. So if I were a reporter, I would try lobbing fastballs at those guys and see if I could shake something loose. But I would also really want to talk to some of the more serious guys, like John Kirby, who, like looks like he made is made of wax, but like is very high up the chain and is also like an official spokesperson. The only thing he said about this, after being asked directly if it was true, uh, is I have no information on you for that, for you, on that one way or the other, which is you know nothing.
Speaker 1:That's nothing so jake sullivan, john kirby, also high on that list, uh, um, I think we can probably put a pin in it If that sounds good to you. Yeah, wide ranging and shaggy. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it. Thank you everybody for your time and, uh, good luck processing all your feelings and thoughts about this and, as always, please reach out if you would like to talk. We'd love to talk to you, all right? Thanks, sean.
Speaker 2:Thanks, dude See ya.
Speaker 1:Bye.