WTUFO

S1E10: 19 Mass UFO Sightings

May 26, 2024 Spacefare Season 1 Episode 10

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We go through some of the biggest sightings of UFOs in history, from objects above cities to waves of reports in one location over several years. 

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Speaker 1:

What's up? Welcome to what the UFO. I'm John, and with me, as always, is my brother, caleb. Hi, what the UFO. How are you doing today, man? Good, amped up, how about you? Okay, so today we are going to be counting down 19 of the most compelling mass sightings of UFOs and just kind of taking you through what happened in each one and then picking them apart a little bit and trying to I don't know, trying to draw some conclusions. Um, yeah, what do you think, caleb? You want to just jump right into it, or is there anything else you wanted to talk about first?

Speaker 2:

I want to say we're being a little fuzzy about it, where we didn't pick a specific number of people at which to start the threshold. So some of them are not super mass, others are the most gigantic and we're going to do them roughly in order from least compelling to most compelling. So we're going to be a little breezier about the first ones and as we get toward the top 10 and top five and top three, we're going to take a little more time diving in because they get even more fun. So we are sort of building up classic top 10 list style. And the other thing is that we're hoping that these keywords and years and places can be trailheads for you if you're interested in researching these things more yourself. Totally.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and we've got of the 19,. 18 of them are from the 20th or 21st centuries. We've just got one really fun one that you and I both like a lot from, uh, from the 1500s. Um, I guess, before we start the list, let's like talk a little bit about why we want to talk about mass sightings and like what's so interesting, um, about them. And I'll start and I don't know, two things.

Speaker 1:

One is that it's very interesting to me that there has not been one in quite a while I think the most recent one we have on our list is like 2008 that could be considered like a true mass sighting, like hundreds or more people seeing, seeing these things.

Speaker 1:

That's interesting to me because I do feel like it would change the narrative here If we were to have something akin to some of these sightings we're going to talk about happened today. I also, for me personally, something akin to some of these sightings we're going to talk about happened today, also for me personally. This was a turning point for me reading about some of these mass sightings and specifically the Belgium wave from 1989. I didn't realize when I was first diving into this world in more depth that there were sightings like this, where there are like hundreds of witnesses concurrently and sightings that go on for a really long time, in some cases like several minutes, um, and that like persist and come back. I just I didn't really know that that kind of sighting happened. So when I read about the belgium wave, it was a, it was like a, a holy shit moment for me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, same. Also, when you get a mass group of people, you have naturally a wide swath of different kinds of witnesses. So you have like total randos, but you also almost all of these cases are going to have authority figures of some kind, a lot of police, a lot of pilots and then a fair amount of military professionals too. So that kind of like cuts through the bullshit of like could we really trust that report? And gets to this like yeah, everybody sees this simultaneously and people of all kind. And then it usually comes with other sorts of signals like radar or radar, like radar or radar, a lot of times like jet fighters are scrambled.

Speaker 1:

I think something else that's so interesting about these and that's fun about the list that we have here, is that they're all over the world. They're not just focused in America, and a bunch of these cases take place in countries that are way more transparent and open about researching UFOs, like like France and we got Brazil in here as well and Tehran and New Zealand, and that was like another light switch moment for me was like just seeing how other countries how many other countries have looked at in such a professional, organized manner at these things and for how long.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and how they handle it is interesting. And then one other fun thing about it being a mass lighting is almost all these mass lightings get investigated by the feds. The feds of one or more countries produce some kind of report which at some point gets released when it's declassified, usually like 30 years later. The only exception to that is our fun one from the middle ages, but every other event on here was investigated formally by a federal body. So people write things about it and they have like documented findings, and that also means that all of these come with hilarious wrong explanations for what they could be. So not in every single case, but in many of these we'll say here's what they proposed, it might be if it wasn't UFOs, and those answers are always ridiculous.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, okay, great, I guess that then. One last thing that I think we both like about talking about mass sightings is that we were talking when we talked about the DC wave a couple of weeks ago. We were building around this question of like how the how the hell do we lose the thread on this? Like why, you know, how is it possible that hundreds of people, or thousands of people, can see these things over a course of like months, or you know, one crazy night even, and then, and then we just like move on as a society. That question is, I don't know, we're not gonna like come up with an answer for it today, but like it's maddening and it's like a scab that I'm always gonna want to be picking at.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, in general it feels like people in every generation lose the history that came before. So we're like we are living that viscerally ourselves because we weren't around for most of these settings and we weren't like cognizant of world events in the eighties really, and so a lot of people coming online who were like 20 now have not heard of something from 1997. Even so, it's, every generation has to like relearn all this conventional wisdom and it's therefore difficult for the ufo movement to like build momentum and switch everybody over into this oh well, obviously place where we obviously should be all right.

Speaker 1:

Let's jump into the list now, starting with your number 19, paris 1990. The day is November 5th. Witnesses from Paris and other areas around Paris say they saw strange flashing lights moving quickly through the sky. At least a thousand people saw this. It was investigated by French officials. It was investigated by French officials and they did come up with what seems like a reasonably compelling prosaic explanation, which was fragments of a Soviet satellite reentering the atmosphere. The sightings were brief, between 7 and 7.15 in the evening, which further seems to lend some plausibility to this idea that it was something burning up in the atmosphere.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we sort of threw this one in here so we could chuck it under the bus. Not all mass sightings are actually UFOs, but the rest of them almost certainly are, so this one sounds like it might not be. It's a good little warm-up of a lot of people seeing something crazy that probably turns out to be just normal stuff. It was fast, they were flashing, but we didn't. I couldn't find any particular quotes of somebody saying that these lights like change direction or ascended rapidly or hovered in midair, which you hear a lot of times in other reports.

Speaker 1:

And you know this is probably a uh, an example of like a foreign country having a country other than america, like the benefits of having a public reporting process and like a public-facing investigatory body. Um, even though we have arrow now, uh, what it's worth in the united states, at the time, france had, uh and still still does have, guy pan, which is their investigative body, which has a really dope website, which you should totally go and check out sometime because you can get really detailed information about all these different sightings that they've investigated. So, okay, let's Mont Blanc Gaipan. Yeah, we'll come back to France, I think, later in this list. Why don't you take us on?

Speaker 2:

Number 18,. Stay in Europe. But moving back in time to the 1560s, we got Nuremberg 1561, because how could we not? The celestial event in Nuremberg is what you should Google if you want to read Wikipedia about this. So it's April 14th.

Speaker 2:

Witnesses in what at the time was probably a town of 10,000 people or something I didn't look that up Saw a vast array of strange celestial objects in the sky above Nuremberg. They described them as spherical, disk-like, cylindrical, I think. There's a cross in there, there's a giant triangle, and they were said to be engaged in dramatic aerial battle, moving in complex patterns, apparently engaged in combat somehow, and some emitting smoke and fire. So this is all written up in a broadsheet, which was not a newspaper, I learned, but was a one-off publication, basically like a pamphlet that was printed on one side with a wood printing and then it would have been like widely distributed, oh, thank, um and uh, hung up in public places like taverns, um, and apparently this is the method that they used before newspapers existed to get like important events on record and distributed through the community. Um, so this one page comes with a bunch of text which you can read the translation of online. The whole last paragraph is like repent, repent. You're not repenting hard enough.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, god is very angry at us.

Speaker 2:

And a lot of people reached that conclusion. They were very scared that this was a sign of divine wrath and like the apocalypse was upon them. And we should say that there are a few other events. I don't, off the top of my head, have years for these, but there are other prints out there that look strikingly similar to this, so this might not have been a totally isolated incident.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, dude, it's so crazy. The illustration is bananas. The description in the broadsheet is so like odd that it just I don't know it's so. It's hard to imagine somebody just making it up, because it's like so specific and and strange. Um, I like especially that the cylinders are like shooting out the spheres. At some point, a bunch of the spheres land on the ground and then sort of like burn and like desiccate and disappear, according to the report. And then one detail from this that keeps coming up in other sightings that I think is really interesting is that they describe it as these lights coming out of the sun that like it, or these chips, or originate like in the sun or like in the path of the sun, and then they sort of like grow and come out of the sun. And that's a. That's something that I've heard in like lots of other UFO reports. Have you, have you noticed that also?

Speaker 2:

No, not really, I see like objects that separate and then come back together, but I haven't seen this thing coming from the sun a lot. It's something I've come across a bunch of times, and this is one of them. Um, well, we should say then that the skeptical uh read on this is that it might have been some kind of solar flare event, um, or like sundog like thing, a solar storm, you know, which sort of sounds plausible, until you get to the smoking balls that fall on the ground, which makes them pretty important part of the story. I think I think so too, and you can see in the broad sheet. The illustration includes some plumes of smoke coming up where these things hit the earth. So it's, it's really fucking crazy. It's also kind of fun to imagine aliens agreeing to have a. It's really fucking crazy. It's also kind of fun to imagine aliens agreeing to have a star fight on a planet where nobody was advanced enough to bother them yet yeah, let's talk about that for a minute and then we should move on.

Speaker 1:

But that's one of the other things that's so intriguing and just num-num-num about this particular sighting. What they're describing is a battle. They're describing a space battle or a dogfight. So what they're describing is a battle. They're describing like a space battle, you know, or like a dog fight. So like, let's just like riff for a minute, like what is going on, what could possibly be going on?

Speaker 2:

there? Yeah, and why would they come here? Like, were they both here, maybe, and it was a turf war, like we would like to control this area, and we would like to control this area, and we would like to control this area, and so let's like meet over nuremberg and hash it out. Do they want to, just like, were they testing some technology and wanted to like see how humans might respond? Um, maybe like to see if we had the capability to send up anything into the sky? Just like, do a bunch of shit and see if we do anything.

Speaker 2:

There's this idea from uh. I finally watched that boyd bushman uh video, uh, which is like probably debunked because the thing is a toy. Probably, um, I mean, definitely was a toy, but like, was it a cia toy anyway? Um, uh, he, he mentions this idea of like wrestlers and wranglers, like basically good guys and bad guys, of UFOs, that there are like aliens out there who, like are generally benevolent, and then there are some that are like just here to steal shit and mess you up, and maybe, maybe this was a case of, like the local alien governance uh encountering some like wrestlers who wanted to fuck shit up and, uh, the alien cops protecting us with their heavenly auras.

Speaker 1:

Okay, what do you think the reaction would be like today If this happened in?

Speaker 2:

just like so great. I mean like fucking insane, which is another thing that makes you think that like they almost would have had to choose on purpose to do this at a place where there wasn't technology uh, because, like we didn't have any f19s to get in the way. What's weird is like why would have they, why would they have a fight on a planet? Right, space is big like if they're having a broad scale war, you would expect them to do that somewhere else. So that suggests that somebody was interested in this location and wanted to protect it or take it from someone else.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let's move on to your number 17,. Tehran 1976. Tehran, 1976. So this is one of the stories that's written up extensively in the Leslie Kane book. It's chapter nine. It's written by General Parvez Jafari, who's a retired member of the Iranian Air Force and, I believe, is the pilot who goes up right.

Speaker 2:

He's one of the two guys, maybe maybe the second. I think that's right. We should say maybe this is low on the list only because we don't know how many people saw it really. Yeah, I couldn't get an actual number, but because it's over Tehran, which is a big-ass city, and this was 1976, it was very populated you have to imagine that a lot of people saw this of an unknown object over Tehran at low altitude.

Speaker 1:

It looked similar to a star, but bigger and brighter. Some called the air traffic control tower at Mehrabad Airport, where Hussein Perosi was the night supervisor in charge. After receiving four calls, he went outside and he looked through his binoculars in the direction people had reported and he saw this big, bright object flashing color lights, changing positions at about 6,000 feet and it also appeared to be changing shapes. So Iranian Air Force radars pick it up and track it. Then the Air Force sends out an F-4 Phantom jet to investigate that pilot, gets close to it and his instruments black out. Close to it and his instruments blackout and so returns to his base. And then a second jet goes up and also suffers malfunctions of instruments and comms. When it gets close to the object, he tries to shoot it. Right, I think? I believe. Yeah, what he? He engages his missiles and then they shut off. Um, which is wild, and I think maybe he also shoots it, doesn't he shoot it with his gun? Like a gun? Oh, like a gun. Here's how he describes it, and this is General Parvez Jafari.

Speaker 1:

We kept it locked on with radar. The size on the radar scope was comparable to that of a 707 tanker. At this moment I thought this was my chance to fire at it. Locked on with radar, the size on the radar scope was comparable to that of a 707 tanker. At this moment I thought this was my chance to fire at it, but when it, whatever it was, was close to me, my weapons jammed and my radio communications were garbled. We got closer to 25 miles at our 12 o'clock position. All of a sudden it jumped back to 27 miles in an instant. I wondered what it was. I was still seeing that giant, brilliant diamond shape with pulsating colored lights.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's pretty unusual Pulsating colored lights and the diamond shape. That's not like most of the other objects that we have here.

Speaker 2:

And so another thing that's unusual is that both militaries get in on the action pretty quickly, like one of the rare times that iran and the us are just like in a room cooperating on something and the us dia compiles a classified report which later gets foiled. So we have a bunch of like official documents that verify jafari's story and the story that civilians were reporting this. I didn't see. Oh yeah, we, it was tracked by air force radar as well. So we've got visual and radar data on this one, visual from the ground and visual from the planes. Yeah, and they're flying F4 phantoms. That's kind of fun. I think you said that already, but I like knowing the names of the machines we send to investigate these things I like, uh.

Speaker 1:

One last detail from the pilot's write-up. As he says, one of his regrets is that he did not, in all the excitement, did not think to just try to radio them and ask who are you? What's going on?

Speaker 2:

yeah, that is totally the kind of thing you wish you did later yeah, so this is another great sighting.

Speaker 1:

You've got civilians on the ground and then you've got like multiple military uh, witnesses, radar operators, pilots, uh yeah, studying it from like different, different perspectives over a prolonged period of time. Right, it's gotta be like, I don't know, it's several minutes, right, I mean it's gotta be an hour or something. I'm not sure exactly what it is.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, to scramble jets and chase it. Yeah, this should be higher on our list. It's an accident of history that it's this low, but um, it's, it's worth checking out more.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, I mean, it's not. You know, when we talk about mass sightings, there are some that are, like you know, hundreds of thousands or thousands of people that see it.

Speaker 2:

So right, right, yeah, this is. This is a high quality sighting, but it's not necessarily a mass observation. So this one, this next one, is reported by at least hundreds of people. It's new to me. It's Canary Islands sighting, June 22nd 1976.

Speaker 2:

Multiple UFOs reported by hundreds of witnesses across the Canary Islands Large spherical objects or objects emitting bright white light. Actually, two reports that I read had conflicting answers about whether there were multiple UFOs or one UFO. So citation needed or do your own research. Apparently, Hynek was interested in this one. He was around at the time and looked into it. You had physical and electromagnetic effects on this one, as in like radio and TV waves got disrupted and a lot of people noticed that. The Spanish Air Force investigated and then released a declassified report. Eventually they rated it unexplained and they acknowledged that the reliable witnesses, including several Air Force officials, were describing something that they couldn't identify. So the sightings were corroborated by both civilian and military personnel, including pilots and air traffic controllers. Witnesses described an array of lights performing extraordinary maneuvers and this is notable for the number and credibility of the witnesses and its official investigation. Canary Islands, 76.

Speaker 1:

Very cool. I also had not heard of this one and then, when I just searched, it are the Nordics involved in this maybe, oh, I don't know.

Speaker 2:

I didn't see anything about uh beings in this one, okay, but there were adjacent sightings other times in the canaries, nearby or you know, like within the the range of a couple years, because a lot of this stuff um the, the, a lot of the remaining sightings, are part of events that sprawl out over like a few weeks or months or years, and there's, there tends to be a tale of like people seeing these things over a wide uh area and for a long time um, okay, cool, very interesting, and, yeah, I you know, the wikipedia on this says that it is one of few accounts to include a report from two witnesses detailing occupants inside a craft.

Speaker 1:

oh shit, yeah, um yeah, although, uh, there was some some dirt kicked on that theory by the military judge who wrote the Spanish government report and interviewed the witnesses, so it sounds like that's up for grabs. But what's not up for grabs is hundreds of people seeing this.

Speaker 2:

Can't be. Therefore, it isn't yeah, but hundreds of people see it. That counts as a mass sighting.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, totally Okay, cool, let's move on. Number 15 level and, uh, level in texas, november 2nd 1957. Um, so do you have any idea where level in texas is? I don't, it's in the flat part. Oh, the flat part, okay, great. So at least 15 motorists, including a police officer, reported encounters with an oval-shaped object that caused their vehicle engines to stall and headlights to fail as the object approached and disappearance. This incidence, what incident, was investigated by the air force under project blue book, but no satisfactory explanation was ever officially provided. Um, they floated ball lightning as a possible explanation, but it was a clear, calm night, so that seems unlikely.

Speaker 2:

Um, cool, this is another one I had not really heard of before yeah, it was news to me and it sounds like the kind of thing that probably inspired that scene in Close Encounters. Although it doesn't feature any of the like super hyper lights that come through the car, it does turn off a bunch of cars and I think that's one of the main reasons people took it so seriously. It's like a whole bunch of cars turned off and one of them happened to be a cop car so they couldn't immediately ignore that person.

Speaker 2:

That is really wild.

Speaker 1:

Also, that's not something like the Tehran incident we just talked about. They turn off an airplane but, like you don't hear, I have not heard a lot of accounts where they're turning cars off or like making their headlights malfunction. Is that something?

Speaker 2:

you've heard. I feel like it comes up a fair amount, but usually in isolated cases. I feel like I've heard a bunch. I can't point to any specific ones, but I've never heard one that's this many cars at a time. I've heard like people, individual vehicles like flicker and stutter or stop and start, but 15 cars fully stopping as an orb floats over them. Cars fully stopping as an orb floats over them. Yeah, that's that sounds like a really weird event and also just like super, unlike any human technology.

Speaker 2:

It sounds like teenagers to me that's a pretty fun alien teenager night would do that. It would definitely go for that ride. Yeah, you're not hurting anybody, you're just like confusing and scaring them. God damn, all right, one thing to talk about for 70 years, that's 1957. Again November in Leveland, texas. Love it.

Speaker 2:

Number 14, the Kaikoura Lights in 1978. This event is December. It's off the coast of Kaikoura in 1978. This event is December. It's off the coast of Kaikoura, which is in New Zealand. A cargo airplane crew witnesses unusual lights. Here the lights are following the aircraft. This is unusual and fun because the lights get filmed, because there's a television crew on the aircraft, and so they grab their cameras and start rolling tape. And so they grab their cameras and start rolling tape, and so you get both ground and airborne radar confirming the presence of the objects, which they couldn't explain as an aircraft or atmospheric phenomenon, and then you get visual and radar and filmed data about it. So then, because they film it, they air it on TV and there's like a big debate and skeptics suggest squid boats, planets or stars, but none of these match up with the radar data or the dynamic movement of the objects.

Speaker 1:

Really interesting, cool. And another, yeah, just multi-source sighting. I love that there were just TV cameras nearby. That's wonderful. Um, this is also, um, just a couple months after, uh, the frederick valentich sighting or encounter in new zealand. Um, this is the pilot, young pilot, who's flying um over the water and like calls into the radio, calls into radio tower, and says that there's like a massive craft above him. And then, um, have you not read this?

Speaker 2:

one or heard about the sad one yeah, he, yeah, his.

Speaker 1:

Eventually he's like talking to them and being like you guys, is there an airplane up there? And they're like no dude, and you can read the transcript of this and, um, he says. Then it gets like right over him and then there's like metallic noises come over the radio and it cuts out and he's never heard from again. Fuck.

Speaker 2:

So they don't, he doesn't crash and they find the plane, they just lose him they just lose him.

Speaker 1:

They never find a plane, they never find a body. Wow, um, you know plausibility, just crashed into the ocean, but what he's saying is that there is some kind of craft um above him is this a story where he's following it to higher altitudes?

Speaker 1:

um, no, no, this guy's just like trying to get go about his day, um, and he says it's hovering over on top of me and it's not an aircraft. Actually he says that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me. Again, it is hovering and it's not an aircraft, and that's that's the last thing he says. Um, anyway, sorry that's kind of off topic, but but it is from October and this is December, so there's some other UFO activity happening in New Zealand in 1978. 1978.

Speaker 2:

Well, lovely place to visit if you're UFOs. This is unfortunately kind of a thing. There aren't a ton of these, but there are stories of pilots following these things like too high up and getting lost or crashing. I've only heard like two or three of these stories but, um, obviously they're very sad. Um, the the main line. I bet there's tv out there somewhere of this, the like on tv debate about this footage and, uh, people trying to say it's boats or planets. That's another one, that's. It's probably not seen by hundreds or thousands of people, but the video sets it apart and makes it a little more interesting because you've got multiple sort of eyes on this subject. Even though it doesn't sound like it's super duper clear, it was like it sounds like weird lights, basically unusual lights, as opposed to like a big or over triangle want to take it nearby to, uh, your your former stomping ground.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, number 13, salem, massachusetts, spooky, uh nice, work there. Um. So this is, this is a sighting that is on a street that I used to live on um so 1952, it's july 16th. We talked about this a little bit in the dc wave episode again, because it's right around that time and it's the same week as the dc event, I think, if I'm not mistaken I think that's right.

Speaker 1:

It's also the uh. It's also the lead image in the New Yorker piece that is an on-ramp for a lot of people into the UFO discourse. So July 16th witnesses saw a strange disc-shaped object with bright light hovering over the Salem power plant and performing extraordinary maneuvers. Coast Guard photographer Shel Alpert took a picture which looks like multiple craft um, unclear if any witnesses saw more than one object um, but he talks about having seen uh them flying in formation um, in a sort of v formation. Uh, and the official explanation of celestial objects like stars or planets or some dumb shit like that did not did not satisfy witnesses who were not fucking idiots. That's good copy. Thanks, chat. Gbt did not write that, I think. Yeah, I don't know. What do you like about this one Great picture.

Speaker 2:

Good, like sort of scale, because you've got the power plant and the uh formation. Uh, it's sort of like gets at the higher tech feeling because they look like techno angels. They're just like bright lights in the shape of ships. Um, I couldn't get a number on how many people saw this, but you kind of have to figure there was a crowd standing around um, this this is just like a random coast guard dude with a, with a camera, right, uh, although on the other hand it could have been fast. I don't know how long this went on for um, so maybe it was quite quick. But yeah, you, just looking at it, you sort of have to imagine that a bunch of people saw that in Salem, because it's not a small town, it's not humongous, but there would have been like 10,000 people there, right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, oh yeah, at least I mean. Salem was at one point the one of the biggest cities in the in the colonies. It's also interesting that it's daytime when this happens. This photograph was taken at 935 in the morning, which is nice, which is yeah, that's pretty unusual on the mass sighting list. Okay, cool.

Speaker 2:

Great, moving on, let's do it. Broadhaven, wales, 1977. Not even going to try a Wales accent, would love to sometime. Number 12, 1977, broadhaven, wales. It's the kids, it's the children's. We're going to do two kids in a row, maybe three kids in a row here.

Speaker 2:

February, a group of children at the Broadhaven Primary School reported a silver, cigar-shaped object with a dome on top land in a field near the school and a humanoid figure in a silver suit emerging from the craft. First humanoid Yay Well, I guess, unless you count those Nordics in the dome that the judge threw out. Adults nearby also reported similar sightings. At the same time, numerous additional sightings of objects and lights were reported after the children's sighting, including disc-shaped and triangular craft, as well as more strange humanoid beings. Ministry of defense investigated, uh, and the kids teacher all had them all draw what they saw and the pictures were remarkably similar. You can see a doc about this in netflix encounters episode two.

Speaker 2:

Cute welch accents in that and adorable kids. So yeah, they're children, but there are a lot of them and they're. They corroborate each other's stories and a lot of adults nearby see similar stuff and we're into cigar shaped objects, which is like very standard ufo affair. Uh, silvery suit. That's also like fairly common. They don't say how big this creature was. Uh, it does get a formal investigation from the ministry of defense. Um, I didn't see what they came up with. Uh, we should also maybe say that this is in the. This is in like a triangle of weird stuff. Uh, in wales there's like a sort of a mystic triangle, I forget it. It might even be called the Broadhaven Triangle.

Speaker 1:

I forget.

Speaker 2:

Sorry, but it's like an area where a lot of other weird shit happens and that goes way, way back to like folklore and magic and fairies and demons or mystical mischievous creatures. Stuff comes out of the sea, weird beings appear. Stuff comes out of the sea, weird beings appear. There are a bunch of other cool stories in that Encounters episode of like very tall, creepy beings who like follow people. Or there's one where like a woman sees one at like the second story window of her house and it's like a spooky giant. There's a Men in Black story from around this area of two like weird humanoids showing up and trying to talk to people Seeming like eerie non-human twins. So a lot of strange stuff happens In this area.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's really interesting and also interesting that was seen by so many kids and that none of them have ever recanted and said that they made it up.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, to our knowledge, knowledge, and that's getting closer to this time.

Speaker 1:

These kids are, like, basically my age, um, yeah, so we should find one of them sometime very interesting and the, as you said, the encounters episode about it is is really good and features that bit where a woman says she saw a cigar-shaped ufo disappear into an island where, like yeah, a rectangular door opened up in this island and the ufo flew into it.

Speaker 2:

She said I spent some time trying to find that island on google maps. They probably scrubbed it because they work for the spooks, but I looked you can look, it's like a famous spirit island Uh-huh.

Speaker 1:

To my knowledge.

Speaker 2:

they don't have like a tourist business around that, but they probably should. Yeah, All right. So the next one is also kids, but it's kids on the other side of the world.

Speaker 1:

Crikey. Okay, your number 11, westall, australia, 1966. April 6th, 200 students and teachers reported seeing an unexplained flying object descend into a nearby open field, then take off over houses and disappear. The event remains one of the most well-documented school-based mass UFO sightings. School-based mass UFO sightings Is this also covered in Encounters, or am I thinking of the New Zealand one or the Zimbabwe one? The Zimbabwe one.

Speaker 2:

I don't remember this being in Encounters but I could have my accent scrambled.

Speaker 1:

All right, I've just read a bunch about this one elsewhere, so okay, so large silver, disc-shaped hovering were moving in controlled manner, some claiming it landed in a paddock. Some witnesses said that it was accompanied by several smaller silvery objects flying in formation around it, and that the main object emitted a bright glow and a humming or buzzing sound. The sighting lasted for several minutes in front of hundreds of people, students and also some teachers at the school, and then it disappeared from view. Later, some witnesses claimed that military vehicles arrived, but the Australian military did not issue a statement, and in 2010, australian department of defense released a batch of ufo documents, some of which referenced westall in correspondence between officials and civilians but it sounds like no official explanation of what went on in that paddock.

Speaker 2:

They seem to like fields and paddocks.

Speaker 1:

I presume paddock is like a field, but with animals I believe a paddock is a, isn't it a like fenced in area in which horses can probably get abducted and mutilated and stuff.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that sounds right. Um so again interesting for the sheer number of people 200 kids also with their teachers. Um. So it was even more convincing, I think, than just like one class of 15 kindergartners or something seeing something. This is like a couple hundred people watching something at the same time. Also kind of mysterious that the DOD doesn't issue a statement and it doesn't seem like anybody even tried to explain this at the time.

Speaker 1:

Let's see, I've got some explanation here. Nope, nevermind, that's a dead link from Wikipedia actually. Um, yeah, I got nothing. Um, but according to at least, at least there's some article here that they're trying to link to in the Herald sun, um, from Melbourne, westall UFO incident was actually government. Radiation testing reports reveal Reveal. Interesting, yeah. Okay, looks like this article is no longer on the internet, though, but at least some attempt at an official explanation.

Speaker 2:

Slash disinformation. This was what it was a cigar-shaped. No, it was disc. Okay, large silver disc. Yeah, controlled manner Testing radiation on your nearby pedics. Living right along then Into our top ten.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, let's do it, let's get into our top ten.

Speaker 2:

Number ten Night of UFOs, brazil 1986. May 19thth, air traffic controllers and pilots observed more than 20 unidentified objects on radar and visually brazilian air force scrambled jets from santa cruz airbase in rio de janeiro and annapolis airbase in goias. The objects demonstrated superior speed and maneuverability, evading the pursuing military craft. Classic Brazilian AF held a press conference and head of AF Defense Command issued a statement. He went on later in his life to call for disclosure and said in 2002, this is the head at the time of the Air Force Defense Command in Brazil went on to call for disclosure and in 2002, he said every year the Brazilian Air Force collects a book's worth of UFO encounters. At the time it was like 90. That year over 90, he said but they can't release them and he would like them to do that. Or he said that he would like them to do that at the time and we can link to this interview he gave in 2008, still beating that drum and saying there's no reason not to tell people about all this shit. We're seeing that we don't know what it is. So that's notable because it's a whole bunch of objects.

Speaker 2:

It got a lot of news. It's also notable because this guy held a press conference. So nice, like right turn from the Australian Department of Defense apparently saying nothing to the British Brazilian defense, just like holding a press conference and saying this happened and we chased a bunch of stuff, which makes sense because apparently a lot of people, presumably a lot of people, were reporting this. But I think this one happens at night. So I appreciate this, this general's candor. I don't know if he was a general, sorry, I don't. One happens at night. Uh, so I appreciate this. Uh, this general's candor. I don't know if he was a general, sorry, I don't have his name yet.

Speaker 1:

Um, it's brigadier general Jose Carlos Pereira. Okay, nice, um, and he also writes a chapter in the Leslie Kane book. Oh, great, um, yeah, and just as some context here, like Brazil, really large country, has a deep history of UFO sightings and also UFO research happening, both within the Air Force and, like other parts of the government. There's like declassified records that show that Brazil has been looking at this stuff for a long time. And, yeah, just flipping through a little bit, they scrambled its most experienced pilots, uh, the air force's most experienced pilots, in f5 and f103 jets to try to intercept the objects. Um, he goes out of his way to point that everything was spotted by both aircraft radars and the radars on the ground. Uh, which is interesting. So this is another like, this is another chase, kind of right yeah, sounds like it um.

Speaker 2:

Pursuing military craft are evaded by these objects with superior speed, maneuverability, super classic, and that's at this point in 1986, that's been happening for 40 years.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's really interesting. Did you get any? Was there anything about like civilian sightings of this too, when you were doing?

Speaker 2:

your research. I didn't see anything that specifically said that More than 20 objects. You kind of have to figure. But I don't want to go out on a limb and just guess that we are going to roll right into another Brazil sighting in the next one. Oh great, if you want to do that, we can just pick it up.

Speaker 1:

Sure, let's do it. We'll go back in time for number nine, back to 1977 in Colares, brazil. So this is another prolonged set of sightings, numerous sightings over several months. The Brazilian Air Force investigated secretly at the time under codename Operation Saucer, and released the files in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So residents reported bright lights and flying objects, mostly at night, again at 77, over a period of months Numerous locals experienced injuries from lights emitted by these objects, including burns that were examined by local healthcare providers. The military investigation was led by Captain Jurange Bolivar Soares Noguera de Holanda, lima Captain Holanda, who gave interviews about the events later and described advanced, silent flying crafts capable of rapid maneuvers. Sadly the captain died by suicide in 1997.

Speaker 2:

So this one definitely does have public sightings. It happens in a bunch of different places in Brazil and civilians are seeing it, um, and civilians are seeing it and military members are seeing it. Um, probably before the the more open approach of the late 80s, they kept a little quieter, um, and maybe they didn't want to scare people, because this is, I think, it's the only one on our list where people get hurt. Yeah, um, kind of I don't know much about the recent brazil sightings here in the early 2020s, but, um, it kind of seems like ufos are dicks in brazil. It sort of seems like that a little bit. Maybe there's a different kind of vibe going on with whoever's down there. So they described beings coming out of these things and hitting them and burning them, and people were very scared. I didn't see any reports of deaths, but a fair amount of injuries. I don't have a number.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, jacques Vallée says that there were deaths. Oh jeez, yeah, according to Jacques Vallée and I'm doing the terrible thing of just reading from Wikipedia now, just the worst kind of content. But according to Vallée, a number of individuals were reportedly killed as a result of the lights fired upon them by the UFOs and that injuries were consistent with radiation effects from microwaves. Other ufologists Wow, okay, and that's from Valet's book Confrontations and then other ufologists claimed that the lights from the UFO sucked blood from 400 people. You ever heard about that before?

Speaker 2:

The lights sucking blood. Nope, that's total news You're breaking for me right now.

Speaker 1:

Very interesting. Um, okay, cool.

Speaker 2:

What.

Speaker 1:

Rabbit hole. Yeah, really Like we could do a whole episode about blood. Okay, let's do it. Okay, Uh, wow, very strange. All right, should we just roll on?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I guess I I just want to put a pin in. I didn't investigate, uh, I I the the death of the captain. Um, it appears he hanged himself using a belt of his bathrobe. Um, there was some indication that he might have been like overwhelmed and stressed about this particular incident and that it, uh, it made him really sad and and upset. Uh, I don't, I haven't heard any like conspiracy bunny holes about that, but he did give interviews, it sounds like, so maybe those there might be audio or video out there to find of him talking about this uh and these craft. I didn't see from anyone else a description of the craft. Um, so the whole source of silent flying crafts capable of rapid maneuvers is captain holanda, as far as I understand, but I haven't read the valet um, apparently there's a 2 000 page military report um that was compiled.

Speaker 1:

that featured 500 photographs and 16 hours of film. Whoa air force reportedly uh that the brazilian air force saw with their own eyes. And ufologist Daniel Rabiso Geis claimed in his book Vampiros Extraterrestres na Amazonia let's do the translation there that several military personnel suffered nervous breakdowns while others went completely insane during the course of the investigation. Cool, Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. These aliens sound like assholes. These particular visitors are not chill, insane during the course of the investigation.

Speaker 2:

Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. These aliens sound like assholes. These particular visitors are not chill and sound bad yeah, wow, okay cool they're out there space chaser, now the next one is the next one.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think we're. We're taking it down a notch with tinley Tinley, illinois, 2004. 20 years ago today, not quite today, august 21st it's a series of sightings but there's a large number of witnesses on this one and they report strange lights, a formation moving slowly and silently, just silently, lowly and silently, just silently, and they describe it as orange or amber in color, which comes up a fair amount in the sphere discourse, although it's not a color that we're going to see in the rest of this list. But they do mention a triangular or boomerang shaped formation which does sound familiar, like, recalls Salem, and then it pings some other things we're about to talk about, and then they maintain a consistent formation which also sounds similar to some other sightings. And then many witnesses said the lights were attached to a large dark object that blocked the stars as it passed overhead. So that sort of sounds like a couple of these other things that we're going to get into. So that sort of sounds like a couple of these other things that we're going to get into, which are big dark triangles with rows of lights that look like an object, multiple objects, flying in formation. So possible also that the Salem object was a large object with lights flying in formation.

Speaker 2:

Maybe it's even possible that, like Captain Rainier's sighting or Captain, what's his name, I don't know that original guy at Mount Rainier maybe that was attached to a big V. I remember that the pilots in the commercial pilots in DC in 52 said they saw a formation, but they felt strongly that it was not attached to one object, that it was different objects that were keeping up with each other at varied paces. So it seems like there there might genuinely be two kind of things here, like ufos that fly in formation like a v and uh big ufos that look like smaller ufos flying in formation. And then there are the even weirder ones that seem to like detach and come back together. Yeah, so I don't know very much about this, but it's recent um, which is one of the reasons that it's high on the list um uh, illinois 2004. So presumably there are a bunch of people out there who saw this stuff and are still talking about it or could still answer questions yeah, for sure you can find news stories about this, you.

Speaker 1:

You don't have to look hard to find them. Reports from the time. Okay, number seven. I'm glad I have this one also, because it's somewhere else that I've been Fiorentina Stadium outside of Florence, 1954.

Speaker 2:

This one's so fun yeah, it is. It's like maybe the single most fun UFO sighting.

Speaker 1:

Mamma mia, what a spicy UFO sighting. That's racist. Allora, October 27th Football match With 10,000 spectators 10,000 spectators At this soccer stadium, Good lord. So I'm actually just gonna. Spectators 10,000 spectators at this soccer stadium, Good Lord so, and I'm going to. I'm actually just going to pull from a this great BBC article about this.

Speaker 2:

Okay, let me try to say the stadio, stadio Artemio Franchi, did I say it?

Speaker 1:

right.

Speaker 2:

Did I say it? Right? That's not, I don't know. Fantastic, it means good time. Right, that's not? I don't know.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic, it means good time, right, allura? Yeah, so, okay. So what happens is it's just after halftime, they're playing a match and then, like, the stadium gets very, very quiet and the players realize that the spectators are no longer watching them play soccer, and then there's like an uproar happening, an uproar from the crowd. The refs stop the game and above the stadium Okay, above the stadium is a cigar shaped, an egg shaped or cigar shaped object zipping around above the stadium and, uh, angel hair falling from the sky, also just described as glitter. Um, angel hair also is just a fun search term. If you've never come across that, it's a, it's a wild. Wikipedia read also Um, so, okay, one of the footballers on the pitch, artico Maggini uh, it, I guess a very popular player at the time and had played at the World Cup says I remember everything from A to Z. Excuse me, is that not okay?

Speaker 1:

It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter. Uh, we were astonished. We'd never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked. So, uh, another, what? Another thing that makes this sighting really fun is that they get the glitter. They collect some samples of the, the angel hair um and uh, and study it, for they check the chemical composition and find boron and silicon not typical of spider silk. And I guess this was also part of a larger wave that was happening in Europe around this time in 1954.

Speaker 2:

Fabulous. I don't remember if they finish the game. Do you remember the ufo eventually leaves? It's like so yeah.

Speaker 1:

So another fan who was there, uh, gg boney, says um, uh, they were moving very fast and then they just stopped. It all lasted a couple of minutes. Um, I would like to describe them as being like cub cigars. They reminded me of Cuban cigars.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's interesting. He said they and he said moving very fast, whereas that first player said slowly, slowly slowly.

Speaker 1:

It is interesting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and they both say that they remember very clearly. We've heard egg, by the way, in other places, places, and I also wanted to point out that, um, people describe like droplet shaped things sometimes, which kind of sounds like an egg. Uh, so that could be one of the more common shapes. It also just like feels super non-human. It's very much not how we build flying machines, yeah um, this is cool.

Speaker 1:

I've never, like I'm aware of the angel hair thing, um, and actually kind of the closest thing that I have to a personal ufo sighting involves that also, um, last year, but yeah, but I had not heard of anybody like cat actually getting it and then sampling some of it. Okay, so this guy though, um, uh, bettini, giorgio Bettini, um, who's a journalist, uh, he took some of this stuff, um, rolled it up with a matchstick and took it to the Institute of chemical Analysis at the University of Florence. When he got there, he found that other people had done the same thing. The lab was run by a respected scientist and they did spectrographic analysis and concluded it contained boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium and that it was not radioactive. It did not, you know, just didn't yield any sort of like conclusive proof about what this stuff was yield any sort of like conclusive proof about what this stuff was um.

Speaker 2:

But that's great, because the closest thing to an explanation floated by skeptics, debunker types, um was like it's migrating spiders, just like a cloud of migrating spiders uh that's great.

Speaker 2:

So stupid um, but it's nice to have some chemical evidence that says no, it wasn't that. So it's really fun to imagine a giant crowd of people seeing something so obviously weird um, and it also, uh, made me think that this is the kind of thing which, if it happened today, would be like a book shut or like doors open, like total game changer. This would be like because it's it's broad daylight, it's a giant crowd and in 10 000 people, like there would be 3 000 video feeds that went up immediately all over the world. Um, so this is the kind of thing that we need. We just, we just need a one more sparkly egg to come goo all over 10 000 people at a football match.

Speaker 2:

That would be great, and now that would like that would do it, I think yeah, maybe more than even more than some of the rest of these arguably more compelling or as compelling, uh events that we're going to get to later.

Speaker 1:

Uh, last thing I'll say about this is just, I think think the discrepancy in the shape and the way people describe the shape is also pretty common in UFO sightings and I feel like it's explainable by just perspective. You know, monochromatic, maybe some kind of strange substance, um, and disc shaped, you know. If you see it sort of head on, it's going to be kind of cigar Like. If you see it at a tilt, it might appear egg, like that's a good point, or like from another angle, yeah, they're moving around and sort of shifting um positions and tilt. It's very easy to imagine this appearing like different shapes.

Speaker 2:

It's probably. It's a little too bad that this is long enough ago that there aren't tons of people talking about it. Still 1954. There are probably survivors, but but this doesn't get a lot of contemporary play. So if you want to look it up, fiorentina stadium Mass Sighting 1954. Hang on.

Speaker 1:

Just really quick before we move on. I just opened the website of Italy's National UFO Center and you just got to see what it looks like. Just one second Frankie is spelled C-H. Not trying to dunk on anybody, that's just. Oh, my goodness, so 19, geez. It's got comic fans and like a papyrus, like script. Oh, it's so good, wow, okay.

Speaker 2:

This looks like quite good for 1998.

Speaker 1:

Oh my God, wow, all right, thank you for watching that. Thank you.

Speaker 2:

All right, I'm hopping us back into the nearer times with the aerial school incident of 1994. There are contemporary survivors of this aerial school incident of 1994. There are contemporary survivors of this. Another thing that you can see in the Netflix encounters show, episode four not an affiliate September 16th it's Rua, zimbabwe.

Speaker 2:

Approximately 62 students from five to 12 years old report seeing one or more UFOs hovering above school grounds. They say they're silver craft with lights. Some of them say there are multiple objects, some of them say the craft emits a beam of light toward the ground and some of them say it lands in a nearby field. They really like fields, these things. Several students said small beings came out of the craft about one meter tall, large eyes, long, black hair strikes me as weird tight-fitting black suits. Some kids claim to have communicated telepathically and received messages about the environment and Earth's future.

Speaker 2:

So this is widely covered in the news. It gets a lot of interview attention. There's some stuff about the teacher that I don't remember right now, but it's covered in the Netflix bit. You can also Google John Mack and Ariel School and see some interesting interviews with him. This is the Harvard psychiatrist who's been interviewing abductees, experiencers, contactees, and so he flies to Zimbabwe to talk to these kids and probably to help evaluate them psychologically. So the news I read said psychological researchers, possibly including him, concluded that the kids were not likely making this up. And I think if you watch the Netflix encounters show and see them as adults, you'll probably reach the same conclusion. They seem grounded and normal and they seem like they remember it clearly and it's not like a hazy. I don't know what was it Like. It was so dark. It's like yeah, I saw this weird thing and I saw it with 60 of my friends, except for that one weird kid who sort of decided it was a psyop or just like doesn't want it to be true.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, man, yeah, I mean this one's wild. It's rightly very high on our list. Um, yeah, it's also another and it's the. The encounters episode is totally worth a watch. I've I've uh like a few people who are like ufo curious that I've shown it to have been like pretty blown away by this episode. Um, yeah, I think it's really interesting that the kids have never recanted it and also it's got. It's an example of except yeah, except that one guy. It's another example of like people like having their lives screwed up by seeing a UFO and like it's really not something that people like want to have happen to them. And what I really like about those interviews that they do on encounters, it's like that really comes through the just like psychological toll that it took on these people to have seen this and to then be bullied because of it. Or, in one case, one of the witnesses has never told her husband about it until she agrees to take part in this documentary about um, about it, um, because she didn't want to think that she's crazy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah yeah, yeah, that is a good thread to pick up on because it's it's something that experiencers and contactees have in a degree that I can't imagine, but as people who are interested in the subject have a lighter version of this, which is like what you've sort of cheekily called alienation it's. It's like a weird disjointed sense that, like accepted conventional garden variety, reality is not the reality you're living in, and there's like a very powerful dissonance to that, presumably more powerful the more you know about the thing. So, like, the closer you get to actual experience, the harder it is to sort of justify that or connect it to a world that doesn't seem very interested in that idea and lending it any credibility.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I that you know the the being taken seriously by somebody. Um is is a theme that comes through in this story, because the kids are, you know, everybody's being skeptical. And then John Mack comes from Harvard and just like wants to talk to them and just like wants to hear what their experience is and like how they felt about it. Um, and this is this is the first time, like my first exposure to john mack and he's a really remarkable dude, same yeah he's got like a vibe about him that is different than just sort of egghead professor like he's.

Speaker 2:

He's got a charisma, um, he's a good looking guy but also he's like very attentive person and I like your point about being listened to there. I bet he's a good looking guy but also he's like very attentive person and I like your point about being listened to there. I bet he was really good at that.

Speaker 1:

And he's a psychologist too, you know, yeah, and another thing that uh about this case that is so wild is that the the headmaster of the school, doesn't say anything about it at the time. But while John Mack is there interviewing the kids, she's having abduction experiences and she, she lives at the school on the grounds and he's there to talk to the kids about what they saw. But like the night before she was like abducted from her room, like put on a table and brought aboard a ship and like had tests done on her and had conversations. Oh my god, I completely forgot that, yeah, and then she says that they had come back one more time and are like, hey, you want to get out of here with us? And she says like no, I'm quite happy here and decides to stay, uh, on earth.

Speaker 2:

And her impression is that they were offering like an exit, like a, like a relocation. Yeah, you like to come with us?

Speaker 1:

I love that. It's crazy. She's an amazing character and again encounters just does really good job of the human touch. Like the human element of this, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And this is a very human story. There's a ton of video of these kids processing what they just saw, explaining it to adults and then explaining it as adults.

Speaker 1:

You want to deliver a message about the environment. You're trying to, like help earth in raising awareness of. You know the environment and technological, like runaway tech. Why do you go talk to kids Like how can you be so smart and advanced? And then come and try to have this conversation with children?

Speaker 2:

Okay, so what? What if? What if it's because they're one meter tall? What if, on quintonia or wherever they're from, the people in charge are all short and they come to earth and they assume that these, like large groups of short people, are like convening important meetings where they decide the fate of their species maybe, yeah, um, I guess they describe him, yeah, as only being about a meter tall, so that's, that's fairly short.

Speaker 1:

Um, and this is in the, this is in the like sort of the fairly narrow category when it comes to, uh, encountering beings, fairly narrow category of like human ish, like mostly human, but bigger eyes and kind of offset eyes not great long black hair that's certainly not a gray, unless it's wearing a wig really interesting. I love this one. It it's so crazy yeah and pretty recent, so people are out there processing this still.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I don't know as much about this next one, oh, but it's in your court. It's an odd number, so you have to deal with it.

Speaker 1:

It's also actually, I believe this is episode one of Encounters. So this is Stephenville, texas, 2008. So this is Stephenville, texas, 2008. A series of sightings in January in this town, about 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth, texas. At least dozens, maybe hundreds of witnesses, including residents, pilots, police and radar operators, witnessed these objects, radar-clocked objects, at over 2,000 miles per hour making abrupt turns and altitude changes. Some people reported points of light, others triangles or elongated ovals. Many people said they were larger than typical aircraft. Um, though, one witness, uh, um, one witness who is interviewed in encounters but then also is a Texas businessman, steve Allen, says that the first thing he saw, which, when he was up, he was up to some buddies lighting a campfire and he said he saw an object the size of a Walmart. Great point of reference. Yeah, so, okay, so let's see. This one was more about Denny's yes, described only in the size of Texas change. Some people reported a Wawa, others Okay.

Speaker 1:

So many people said they were larger than typical aircraft. Some said they saw them fly in formation or split into multiple small objects. Some witnesses reported low altitudes, sometimes just above tree level. Some said they saw them fly in formation or split into multiple small objects. Some witnesses reported low altitudes, sometimes just above tree level. Police and pilots reported unusual aircraft or lights moving at high speed and making unusual maneuvers sudden acceleration, changes of directions, hovering, all the usual kind of stuff. The US Air Force said at first that it might have been military and then retracted this and said that there were no exercises underway.

Speaker 1:

So this guy, steve Allen, who is lighting a campfire I find this quote really interesting. When he's describing it he says so, it's very bright light. The speed, the lights was so bright, unlike anything I'd ever seen. It was almost blinding to look at them. And what amazed me is there was no wind noise, no engine noise, it was silence. And then he says when it came past us, I developed the most peaceful, easy feeling I think I've ever had in my life. Whoa cool. It was almost like a religious experience, like I was at one with whatever it was.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's so interesting and it reminds me of the giant sighting that was in World War II, those pilots that saw like a super foo fighter, that looked like it had like a row of portholes. We talked about it maybe being like a pleasure cruise, because everybody that saw it felt this like wave of just feeling good sweep over them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Um and he then says he saw two F 16 fighters come screaming after it.

Speaker 2:

Um right, so presumably he did not feel at one fighters come screaming after it, right, so presumably he did not feel at one with the F-16s. Yeah, and that's lends credence to this idea that it's probably not a an exercise because they were chasing it clearly. Also, I remember from the Netflix episode that somebody gets uh like data, I don't remember from whom, like maybe from the faa or something, or from norad or somebody that, like uh, that was tracking some of this movement, um, and I think after he gets this data, they stop releasing data like this. So you, you can't get that now for similar sightings, but he, he uses that in a way to sort of like to map the movement of these things. We could also say this is the most recent of our sightings, of the whole list. This is the thing that happened the most recently 2008, it's shortly after the advent of the smartphone but to my knowledge, there's no photo or video of this. Did you see anything about that?

Speaker 1:

I have not. No. So this guy, he, he, Steve Allen, reports it. He's a great like just grumpy Texas dude and he's like I don't care if anybody thinks I'm crazy, I don't know what I saw and he like goes to the newspaper and he reports it and then that causes a whole bunch more people to come forward and after just a few months they had 300 locals around Stephenville reporting a large Delta shaped UFO and it became a national international news story. It's covered by NPR, CBC, New York times, LA, CBS news, so very, very widely covered. And the and you know, if you, if you want to go deep on this, the encounters episode pulls witnesses from around town to other people.

Speaker 2:

Cool, recent, probably. People still alive Everybody, hopefully almost everybody, is still alive. Everybody hopefully almost everybody is still alive who saw this, so we might hear more in the days to come. It's also recent enough that we might still be in sort of like classified territory on some of the military information about this and maybe in the next 10 years we'll get a declassification. All right, let's move.

Speaker 2:

But the radar operators felt very confident that it was not that that they would know what that looks like. Um, reasonable to expect, because it's dc that like at least hundreds, maybe thousands of people saw these bright lights above both the capitol building and the white house, uh, which again is a super weird place to be not likely to be experimental tech. They do scramble. Uh, some fighters to go chase them, probably lockheed f9 starfighters, um ff94, f94 starfighters, I think, um star fires, excuse me, I've enjoyed looking that up. It's a goofy looking plane with a very cool name a starfire. Uh.

Speaker 2:

One of the controllers at andrews air force base described seeing an orange ball of fire trailing a tail, and it's not a fleeting glimpse he gets of this. He watches it make abrupt changes in direction and altitude and the Air Force after telling the public in the largest press conference since World War II that this was probably nothing to worry about and just temperature inversions. Then behind the scenes, tells the FBI that they think these might be crap from other planets. So that's all just fantastic. It's number four on our list because it's the capital of America. It's seen on radar and with eyes. Then planes go chase these things and they can't keep up. So you've got multiple angles on these objects. I don't have a ton about civilians seeing him, seeing him from the ground. I think that it's nighttime and it doesn't. I haven't seen anything other than that fireball. About the shape of these things they're mostly just described as lights in the with the star fires. Do you have anything to add about DC?

Speaker 1:

I don't, I guess I don't. We talked about it so much I went like half insane reading old newspaper articles about it.

Speaker 2:

So the thing I guess to take away is that it's the moment that the security state starts coming up with a plan to diffuse all this attention about UFOs because, like 1952 is a huge year for UFOs in America. There are like hundreds of sightings, um, and it's getting to the point where it's very distracting for the air force, but also, uh, they're freaking out internally about like controlling public anxiety around this subject and so like. After 1952, you see them start convening panels and like assembling plans to more aggressively debunk and like minimize sightings, and they start passing these laws or like internal codes that make it illegal or like punishable by whatever internal mechanisms they have in the military and intelligence communities, to tell Americans that they've got unidentified sightings. They basically never volunteer that information. After this they will only talk about sightings that they have identified, and then it becomes standard policy, if something isn't identified, to say we could probably identify this if we had enough data. And that line continues right up to the arrow report released like a couple months ago. They are still fucking saying that if we just had a little more information, we're confident we could explain this, which means we have no fucking idea what this is, and even the best scientists who have studied it um end up concluding that the like higher value the information they have coming in about the sightings, the less likely it is that they're going to be able to explain it.

Speaker 2:

Like the unexplained rate goes up the better the data is. And that comes from the Battelle study, which is is that the same thing as the Condon report? Do you know? I forget? No, I don't, sorry. All right, the Battelle panel, or like study of this, basically breaks all the sightings down into like low quality, medium quality and very high quality in terms of witnesses and what kind of data they have. And the higher quality they get, the higher the unexplained rate. So the the highest quality sightings have like a 33% unexplained rate and then, like all of the groups who've tried to explain these things over the years, have been stuck between like 5% and 20% unexplained, and then to get it below 5% you really have to get into the shitty chicanery that the CIA obviously loves to conduct. All right, that's enough. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1:

I'm de-soapboxing.

Speaker 2:

It's kind of a hot hot spot.

Speaker 1:

Rant, great. Okay, now moving on to your number three Hudson Valley, new York, early eighties. By the masses Sorry, what?

Speaker 2:

My bad Hudson Valley.

Speaker 1:

You were saying yeah, hudson Valley, new York, Beginning in December of 1982, lasting for a few years. Thousands of reports in this period of time. Many witnesses described large V-shaped arrays of lights moving slowly and silently. Some said they saw a craft. That were larger than a football field. Some described a red light at the center of these they reported to hover, moved against the wind in some cases.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to share right now a selection of illustrations. These are drawings made by independent witnesses in different parts of New York and Connecticut in 1983 and 1984. These are all from UFOs by Leslie Kane. We're going to talk about the Belgium wave in a bit, but there are a lot of similarities between these. So you know, this is another sighting where you've got hundreds of witnesses over a prolonged period of time, people seeing the same kinds of shapes from different perspectives. We've got police, we've got Air Force jets being scrambled and we just kind of moved on from it and the US government, as far as we know, never conducted a super deep investigation of this and the FAA just like waved people away when they called in reporting these objects. What else stands out to you about this?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thousands of people, years and years, slow, giant triangles. It really should probably actually be number two. We're going to do Phoenix Lights next, but, spoiler alert, it's also a triangle. In fact, our top three is very triangle heavy, so we moved from like egg shape and cigar shaped into the territory of triangles.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean this is just another like again when I was like first really getting UFO pill. This is just another like, staggering. You know like we could pull some specific anecdotes from this, but the main what's so overwhelming and convincing about it is just how many reports and how many different people and all sorts of different kinds of people and qualified people, trained observers all saying very similar accounts over a prolonged period of time. And yeah, it's just mind-blowing over a prolonged period of time and like, yeah, it's just mind-blowing.

Speaker 2:

I guess I do have one thing to say. That sort of falls in a more skeptical quadrant than I usually land. I'm not skeptical about this, but it does look more like human military than an egg, for example or a cigar.

Speaker 2:

Those drawings look a lot like some of our flying machines and, um, it is definitely weird that they move slowly and silently. Um, but they do look like much bigger versions of, like, b2 bombers or like a bunch of other things we like to build. They would have to probably be like Avengers airship sized versions of those things, and they would have to be a technology that we didn't know existed. But we could say that the CIA has done that before, like the military has had technology that we didn't know about for decades at a time. So, um, I don't know anything about the military investigation of the Hudson Valley wave. Um, I don't have any stories about these things. Getting chased by F-16s Doesn't mean it won't happen. You got something.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so Hynek actually looked into this. He died in 1986, but the Hudson wave was something he was looking at very strongly, very strongly at the end of his life. And just UFOs, uh. So in a 1985 essay, heineck described hundreds of largely professional affluent people in suburban areas um, whose statements he and others recorded on cassette tapes, as astonished, awestruck and often frightened by the bizarre things. Uh, when flying over the Taconic Parkway or cruising low over streets and houses and an utterly strange and possibly menacing object constituted a serious hazard that should have been concerning to the FAA, he wrote.

Speaker 2:

And probably we'll find out someday. It was Like behind the scenes. There must have been investigation and we're close enough in time to the present that that might not have been declassified yet, because this is the 80s and it peaks in like 83 to 86. But it goes through the decades, so it could be that that stuff is sort of still behind the veil.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you'll like this. Hynek says of this the impossible reality. Quote overheats the human mental circuits and blows the fuses in a protective mechanism for the mind. When a collective breaking point is reached, the mind must openly disregard the patent evidence of the senses. It can no longer encompass such evidence within its normal borders, that is great, you're right, I do really like that yeah, yeah. Uh. With apathy goes the ability to accept even the most inane explanations, anything whatever, to stave off the necessity to think about the unthinkable so this one is kind of back off.

Speaker 2:

it seems like, yeah, that reminds me of this feeling that I had early in my ufo journey and I described you as like a jellyfish on the windshield, like this like weird blobby thing that keeps landing on your consciousness and you keep like swiping it away because it's just so strange and also because, because, because it's so weird, it like slides off your ability to focus on it and that kind of sounds like what he's talking about, this like no, no, no, it's just too strange, it's just too strange to process.

Speaker 2:

I can't keep this in my attention. Um, and I wanted to say the positive aspect of that, I think, is that, uh, we can deal with it, like we can, we do sort of shut down, but, like, if you've ever been actually in a moment of like extreme tragedy in your life, you might find that, like, your emotions can be very extreme, but they also can sort of hit a ceiling and there's like a fail safe switch that can go off in you, um, which can like surprise you with your resilience or your ability to deal with very difficult things. And, um, and I think we have that about ufos, I think ufos like trigger that in some way in like a broader societal sense and I'd like to loop around to that point after our last uh two. So you want to move into phoenix?

Speaker 2:

yeah all that all right so 1997, still pretty recent kurt russell's landing in an airport and calls in some crazy lights, hilarious and uh, and they say they don't have anything um he's kurt russell what was that, yes, that kurt russell?

Speaker 2:

that kurt russell uh presumably has a machine gun strapped to his chest. He's landing with his son at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and he calls them to say yo, there's a bunch of lights in the sky and they say we don't know anything about that. Kurt, get out of here. So what does happen is that thousands of people report an extremely large V-shaped formation of lights or triangular object. It moves slowly over like 300 miles of Arizona and at some point it, or something like it, hovers over Phoenix for a prolonged period. I don't have an exact number of minutes. Some witnesses describe this one as being several football fields long, phoenix, for a prolonged period. I don't have an exact number of minutes. Some witnesses described this one as being several football fields long. Uh, they say like, conservatively, three football fields long. Others thought it was longer, maybe as much as a mile long.

Speaker 2:

Very, very big flying object which actually sounds like the giant black triangle at the bottom of the 1561 nuremberg print. Just like big, spooky static machine. Um, also like the airship in eternals, um, if we're comparing these things to mcu. Uh, some witnesses describe it as football fields. Okay, some, some people say it's very low in the sky, like some people say they see it at roof level, which is also really strange, like nobody's flying avengers, ships at roof levels. Um, tons of people saw this, probably tens of thousands.

Speaker 2:

It was a clear night for several hours in a highly populated area. The air force tries out a batshit stupid explanation of uh craning flares from an a-10 warthog, but that just doesn't hold water and it can't explain the stationary lights which hover over the phoenix area, because those flares would be moving in the sky. The governor of arizona initially holds a very stupid, goofy press conference with a dude in an alien costume, but later he describes seeing the object himself and he calls it enormous and otherworldly. That's the list of facts on Phoenix and lots of people have written books about this. There are documentaries. It's very high on the list for a reason. It's like very much still in the zeitgeist. It's kind of in America, like the last really big mass sighting.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Are there. Did you find any photographs of this one or video?

Speaker 2:

I think there are photographs and video of this. I didn't see anything that was like super slim donkey, but yeah, I'm pretty sure those things exist.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I watched a video of it's like a husband and wife, I think, or up on a hilltop like outside of Phoenix video camera when this is happening and they're just like freaking out watching this like sort of line of lights, slowly, like twinkle on um in the sky over Phoenix. I don't know, it's not, you know, obviously not dispositive, but it's interesting.

Speaker 2:

There's another story about a husband and wife team up on a mountain. I don't know if it's the same one, but there's a guy who goes up to take like Valentine's day pictures, I think, and he's like blocking out some shots above Phoenix and he catches these like six or seven sort of like ghostly UFO shapes, kind of by accident, because he's just taking a bunch of pictures in a row and then they kind of like come together toward one big thing. I guess I want to like play with this military idea, with this military idea, like if this were a military object, then what it would be doing, I think, would be testing the response of a local population to see if they could check out other city areas. It seems like not. What you would do with a super secret piece of technology is like show it to 20 000 people, yeah, but maybe you would try to test it.

Speaker 2:

Also hard to imagine like a giant row of super visible lights being a part of a secret tech object, like mostly when we build secret tech it's for hiding right. It's like designed to evade radar and like go take a bunch of pictures of a place where we're not allowed to fly, like russia or china and, uh, this does not seem like a good way to do that, like you wouldn't. Wouldn't you want to test it without the row of creepy giant lights?

Speaker 1:

yeah, and also the things we're describing are are gigantic here. You know, like I, I don't know.

Speaker 2:

I don't think it's credible that the idea that this could be human tech or some secret us tech that they're testing on civilians I will say one more point in this column, that the flares from an A-10 Warthog explanation sounds a lot like the bullshit that they used to hide the U-2 spy plane, which is, like they said, like meteorological stuff, like oh, those are crystal formations.

Speaker 2:

And there's a sort of cheekily titled New York Times article from 20 years ago called the CIA Admits it Lied About UFOs, and what the article is about is the CIA giving out bullshit meteorological explanations for its secret spy planes because they didn't want people to know that they were spy planes would call in ufo reports and then the the announcement would come down that this was in fact meteorological um, because we couldn't tell people what it was. So that that kind of sounds the same to me. Them giving it's like such a bad explanation the a10 warthog flares that it sort of sounds like they're trying to cover something up. Like why why not just say we don't know what this was? I guess they don't want to scare people. Yeah, um, do you have any like recommended things for people to watch or read about this.

Speaker 1:

I don't actually, honestly. I mean I think they, yeah, I mean I know it's been covered extensively.

Speaker 2:

I'm not sure, though I don't have like a immediate one video to send you to go watch the only reason I really put it above the hudson valley wave is that it I think it like got in the public psyche more. I mean, it's 10 years more recent, so it's still like echoing a little bit. But it also like, because it was a singular event, I think it had more of like a resonant impact on culture and I think more people have like thought and talked about it since then as a result. Yeah, the phoenix lights also has a great name, right, probably the best name on the list yeah, um, okay.

Speaker 1:

Well, that brings us to the last one on our list, which we've been talking around belgium 1989. Uh, let's just do this one together. But this is the. This is the one that like, really broke my brain, um, when reading about it, um, so we'll start. I'll just give you the the overview of it.

Speaker 1:

Cool, november 29th, starting at 5 pm, two federal police officers in a town called Eupen, which is near the German border, followed a triangular craft that they found illuminating a field nearby.

Speaker 1:

That they said was so bright that they were able to read a newspaper in the car, while they were still kind of far away from it. They estimated to be about 30 meters per side. It had a flashing red light in the center, um, the bottom center, and it was totally silent. It hovered over the city and then it hovered over the lake, and what happens here, uh, is like a cat and mouse evening, where these cops are like driving around following this, uh, this gigantic triangular um craft so slowly eating belgian donuts, two beams of light extended down, um, slowing at the end, um, like they slowed down when they reached the end. I don't know, actually, what that means. My understanding is that they also, then they shoot out. So it's got like white lights on the three tips and then in the center a red light and it's like shooting out a red ball that comes out from the light and then like hovers in the sky for a while, like it's scanning or something.

Speaker 1:

And then it comes back in. So these the officers, this, this repeat, rip, repeated several times. And then the officers saw any second triangular craft that tilted toward the ground. This time they were able to see some rectangular windows along the top. Two other officers also saw the craft. Said it was about 75 meters above the ground and made a hissing sound as it dimmed its lights. Said it was about 75 meters above the ground and made a hissing sound as it dimmed its lights. They saw it deploy a red ball from its center which flew off behind some trees. The red ball thing is also happens in the hudson valley wave. Oh, I didn't know that. It was a few years earlier. Yeah, that's that rhyme and important.

Speaker 1:

So there's also a couple um that are driving and the husband stops the car and sees one of these craft and then flashes his car headlights at it and the craft flashes back, which really freaks out his wife. So Belgian air staff received 143 reports that night, of whom 13 were police officers, people seeing the same or different UFOs at eight different locations. They estimate the Belgian air staff estimates that maybe 10 times more people saw something. So they think around 1400 people just this first night. And that's just the beginning of the wave.

Speaker 1:

Then, from 1989 to 1991, belgium recorded about 2000 UFO sightings. Of those 2,000 reported cases, 650 of them were investigated by the Belgian Air Force. Of those 650, 500 remain unexplained. In over 300 cases witnesses saw a craft at less than 1,000 feet distance. 200 over 200 of the sightings lasted longer than five minutes. So research ufologists. Uh, often I think the the heuristic is that one in ten people who see something are going to report it. Um. So they estimate that maybe 20 000 people saw a UFO during this wave and you can read all about it from the Belgian Air Force general who was in charge of the investigation. What else stands out to you about Belgium?

Speaker 2:

That Belgian Air Force general being so transparent was part of like a broader response from belgium and it leads to a really important takeaway from me, uh, which other people have noted. That's very positive, I think, which is that the air force was very open about this process and nobody freaked out. So, over multiple years, thousands of sightings by tens of thousands of people, lots of public engagement from the military, didn't terrify everybody. We didn't dissolve, devolve into like panicky cannibals. Um, the Belgian civic society did not crumble into war. We were fine, it was fine. Everything was basically chill.

Speaker 2:

I don't know I've never seen any numbers about like how many Belgians believe in UFOs, believe that UFOs are extraterrestrial, versus how many Americans or French or Chinese believe that. But, um, I wouldn't be surprised if it was high. I am a little curious about that. That seems very positive and it's here at the top of our list because of the sheer number of sightings, combined with the persistence of the appearances and the depth of the research. So a lot of these Air Force investigations involved. I think F-16s is that right that they scrambled.

Speaker 1:

I'm not sure what kind of jets they were.

Speaker 2:

And none of them got anywhere close to these things, which is also weird because the triangles are described as being pretty slow.

Speaker 1:

Some of them are triangles, some of them are rectangular, and there's a few sightings where people say what it? Uh? It appeared to be an aircraft carrier, turned upside down, just massive, massive objects also, which was another thing that blew my mind in reading about these. It's like they're not all little flying saucers some of them are humongous, ginormous.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it sounds like an armada. That's what we're describing here. Yeah, um, go ahead. Well, one of the other things that stands out to me about the belgian wave is that's what we're describing here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, go ahead. Well, one of the other things that stands out to me about the Belgian wave is that there's a really good picture, there's one really good photograph, and it is taken by a guy. So a woman notices it and tells her partner. He runs outside with a camera, he manages to snap these two pictures of a triangle, of a triangular thing. It's nighttime, um, but with these lights on it. He then throws out one of the, then, because it doesn't, you know, you can't really see anything in it.

Speaker 1:

And then, um, and then this photograph, the, the original negative, and the photograph then gets um, reviewed and studied by, studied by specialists in satellite imagery with the French National Space Research Center, as well as a former senior scientist with NASA and finally, a doctor in nuclear physics and a professor at the University of Paris South, and they study these carefully and they find no effect of infrared radiation, no indication of any tampering with the slide. They can tell that the camera was stable but the craft was moving slowly, and they can tell that the middle light is very different from the other three lights and basically, when they overexpose the frame, they find this triangular shape. And then, furthermore, they in doing some other analyses on it. Um, they find, uh, they find evidence of like electromagnetic, like halo effect, um happening around the ship. Um, which is also really interesting. So I only have those, actually that that picture is on wikipedia.

Speaker 2:

Um, one of them is, anyways and there are a lot of thought pieces about. Like 20, 30 years after the belgian wave, where are we? We still don't know what it was. We've still never gotten any answers from the air force which has been the most transparent air force in the world. Yeah, I vaguely remember something from the kane book about, uh, that general contacting america. Do you remember that or have any details about it? I remember that the air force. My memory is that the air force reached out and said could this possibly be american craft?

Speaker 1:

because it's super weird and no hey, I just have to correct myself, because the picture that's up on wikipedia frustratingly is a, is a debunked, like hoax um image, which is very lame, uh, but it's is very similar to a, a to the real image that I was just describing on the real set of images wikipedia kind of sucks on ufos, quite, quite skeptical. Has like behind the culture native. Uh, skepticism there, which is fair because it's unbelievable, but like yeah they should be more neutral, though they they're.

Speaker 2:

They, I will say they have some good pages about like just lists of sightings. Um, reported ufo sightings is a pretty decent wikipedia page, but uh, but they lean pretty heavily toward hoax explanations. The roswell page is not great, it's. It's like this was project mogul. Yeah, so belgium doesn't get a whole lot better. Yeah, people, years and years, giant triangles, super slow debunkers have suggested maybe very quiet helicopters for giant triangles and squares, and anybody who saw this was just like no, that's ridiculous. That's absolutely not what I saw. As is so often the case, people coming up with these explanations clearly just weren't there. Yeah, grasping at straws.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that's so interesting about this one to me is that there's this concurrent investigation happening, Like while the wave is going on. They're like trying to figure it out and trying to like capture footage or imagery of it, or they're you know, it's not like an event that is then researched after the fact. This guy, Colonel DeBrewer, is like in charge of this ongoing investigation. That's happening live.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, which is one of the reasons he makes such a fantastic writer. Another really great reason to read the Leslie Kane book is basically after her introduction. That guy is the first chapter, just describing what he went through and what this was and uh, and what it was like and uh, it's gotta be the the most sourced public large scale sighting we've ever had.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, hey, all right. Well, that's it. We've gone through our entire list of 19 mass sightings. Let's, let's like just yeah, great job, way to go. Let's, let's try to draw a few conclusions and then and then wrap this thing up. I mean, you know, ufos are, um, and we should be talking about it more. That's like a main conclusion, um, what?

Speaker 2:

else, what else for you, ufos are real. Yeah, the other really big one that I think we can take away is, uh, we are not going to freak out when we hear this stuff, like people, all the people who saw this stuff, they went on to live their lives and like, to the extent that they have psychological distress, it's less about the idea of aliens than about the problem that the rest of the world is not caught up to speed on this. It seems to me, um, and and except maybe with the exception of like aliens who were zapping blood out of people's bodies with space rays, that's, it seems like it would induce some reasonable concern. Uh, but that's another big takeaway. Uh, and the countries that were more transparent, but it just seems like a better way to run a business, like we should not be hiding so much of this and we should not be so scared that people can't take it, because we clearly can take it, we're ready.

Speaker 2:

And then, uh, the the other point that I made at the very beginning I think is worth saying which is like it's it's worth doing stuff like this because, generation by generation, we only have like one big thing at a time and we lose sight of this like drumbeat of repeated occurrences and they don't add up to enough for us. So we don't, because we don't condense these all and like list them off, we don't get this like overwhelming sense that it's obviously real and people really need that. Because, as you said before, any individual sighting you can kind of bat away or shrug off. But when you look at a giant list, even just of individual sightings, but can kind of bat away or shrug off, but when you look at a giant list, even just of individual sightings, but let alone a giant list of things seen by tens, hundreds, thousands of people, it should become impossible to ignore.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I guess we just have to hope for another mass sighting sometime soon, huh sighting sometime soon.

Speaker 2:

Huh, it does seem like, if it happens when, when it happens next, uh, we will get more information about it. If it's, if it's just like a row of lights, that's going to be tough, though I think it. I think it kind of needs to be like the stadium thing where we see an egg. And something I've been thinking about a lot that is kind of a giant bummer is that we're so kind of hyped up on our military tech. Now it's going to be really hard to convince people that whatever they're seeing isn't secret government tech, and even if we don't have an obvious explanation, a lot of people are going to say, yeah, this is obviously secret and they're not telling us about it because the government keeps things secret. So I found myself wondering would even a mass sighting be enough at this point, or do we need basically like public interaction on some level, which is, you know, kind of hard to imagine, because these things always happen in small groups of some kind?

Speaker 2:

yeah so it would have to be like a combined mass sighting with a being experience, like if there were. If there were, like a football match where something landed and then did that aerial school bit but tried to tell the footballers to protect the environment and like everybody in the stadium saw these little things get out and then like get back in and fly away. Like that would probably be a slam dunk. What do you think?

Speaker 1:

yeah, I mean I. I guess I share your skepticism that even a mass sighting would um not other than the kind you're describing there would persuade people.

Speaker 2:

Another thing I've been thinking about unless you have something, well I don't know.

Speaker 1:

I'm also just struck by how brazen Belgium, phoenix and the Hudson Valley waves are. Beings flying, these things, yeah, man, like they're just. Yeah, I mean assuming that they're real, that these are real, you know, extraterrestrial craft, uh, non-human craft, like why so gutsy? Why so just just just brazen, you know, and they're unusual, they're outliers in that sense. So like what's going on there? Is it different? Yeah, I don't know it. They're unusual, they're outliers in that sense. So like what's going on there? Is it different?

Speaker 2:

yeah, I don't know it does seem like they could be different people. I mean different beings, because they're. They're the like morphology of the ships is so different from the little egg cigar things. Yeah, they're not. They're like distinctly different from the saucers. So maybe there's like a curvy inclined alien and a triangular or rectilinear squares and rectangles alien.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but unfortunately, as is so it's always the case with the phenomenon, it's it's more complicated than that, and actually people did see cigars and eggs and diamonds also in Belgium, okay.

Speaker 2:

Are there? Do we know anything about contactee experiences in this belgian window? There must be some, right? Yeah, that is something that kane basically keeps her oars dry on. She just sort of doesn't go there in her book and uh. So if there is any, she probably just push that off to the side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's that's a good question to follow up on. We will be looking for Belgian sightings and if you have any, you should let us know. But I had one more thing about the like the convincing of everyone, which is I've just been thinking about a lot lately, and that's that we don't need to get to a hundred percent of the population. We are probably already in a majority. This like next nut that we have to crack is like getting a bunch of the serious media people to like really get on like a visceral level that this is probably real.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point so 80 would probably do it with. Some 20 of humans are going to believe whatever they want, forever and always. You're not going to get to a hundred on anything, but we do really need to flip this, this point and I've been trying to write a little bit lately and maybe next time, while you're traveling, I'll do a little essay about just like the project of humility and ufos. Yeah, we've got a puppy. Yeah, my dogs are telling me it's time for dinner all right.

Speaker 1:

Well, thank you for talking about this, caleb. Thank you to our viewer um.

Speaker 2:

This was fun yeah, thank you, this was great. See you next time. All right, bye, bye, bye.