WTUFO
What the UFO? We're processing the emerging scientific revolution around this fascinating subject.
We talk about what the UFO/UAP phenomenon might be, explore historical sightings, track new developments, and generally feel our way through this wild, exciting territory.
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WTUFO
S1E4: Why UFOs Are Probably Nonhuman
To some people, this is obvious. To others, it seems unbelievable. In this episode, we explain why we lean heavily toward non-human explanations for UFOs.
Brand Note: We called this show Holding Space for the first 6 episodes. Now we call it WTUFO. It's better, right? We hope you enjoy.
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Hi, welcome to Holding Space. I'm Caleb Mayo.
Speaker 2:This is my brother John.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hi, Nice to see you guys. Ufos are real, so we're processing thoughts and feelings about that here and today. We want to dive into why we're pretty sure these things aren't human tech, because this is like a big topic that comes up in simple conversations, introductory conversations, and because it's kind of a beginner topic. We're going to cover that first before we pivot into some news and maybe stories and any other shaggy stuff. We feel we still have time or mental oxygen for at the end of this establishing logic. But we did want to do this kind of early in our show because we think it's an important sort of rock to lay down on the path toward wilder adventures and if you're already deep in the UFO subject, you probably already feel like this is true. Anything to add, John.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons I want to talk about this is because it's the easiest and first thing that people say to brush it off.
Speaker 2:You know, like it's China or it's Russia, because it's the easiest and first thing that people say to brush it off. Uh, you know, like it's china or it's russia or it's us, and we're testing stuff against ourselves and you know, and so I'm like very I really want to, uh, I really want to have a strong like argument against that. So I'm kind of hoping to sort of build that live with you here and I guess, like you know, I think our priors here for both of us, based on all the reading and listening that we've done, is that, like these are, these are not adversarial tech and they're not our tech. So I don't know, that's our prior and that's maybe our blind spot and I guess, like I'm hoping to, I'm hoping to leave this feeling like we've convinced ourselves, you know, or like have an argument, have arguments that that feel like they hold up. So, um, let's see if we can do that.
Speaker 1:Okay, that sounds great.
Speaker 1:Uh, I'd love to start with my hip pocket argument and then we'll see if it holds up at the end of our longer dive.
Speaker 1:My very short answer to this cocktail party elevator pitch style is we think they're not human tech because our pilots are telling us they look like no technology that we have or we're developing, and our pilots have been telling us that for decades, going all the way back to at least the 40s and probably before, and so I want to dive into the details of that. I just wanted to say at a top level, that's, I think, the short answer why we think they're not human tech. And, if you want, like a great direct example of this, the David Fravor statement, I think maybe at the beginning of his testimony to Congress, sums up really nicely his feeling that he saw a piece of technology that was way more advanced than anything we currently have or anything that we're developing as in over the next couple of decades might have available. And I probably should have said that David Fravor was the lead pilot in the encounter off the Nimitz, uh with the famous Tic Tac UFO. So, uh, do you have a thing to bounce off from that?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think we have the same. We have the same top line. Let's, let's start digging into it a little bit.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, okay. So the first main reason that we are convinced that this is not human technology is that our trained observers, meaning like radar operators and pilots, say that this stuff is way beyond our capabilities, and they've said this stuff publicly. And then I guess you can tack on to that, just like the. You know the, the multitude of reports, hundreds, if not thousands of reports that contain, you know, details about ships doing things that are currently impossible to us. Do you want to maybe talk a little bit about? What are the behaviors that we hear commonly?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds good. So, for one thing, they're coming down from 80,000 feet and descending in a matter of seconds. It sounds like Fravor says to Congress and they had been doing that for a while I think is the implication of his testimony, as in, like the Nimitz have been tracking that maybe for days. They do weird things like maintain their position in intense winds, which is super difficult. They can fly back up to those 80,000 feet, they can stay aloft for a really long time, hours and hours, and they can sometimes move at speed that would kill humans If there were humans in that craft and we didn't understand, like anti-gravity technology.
Speaker 1:There's also this detail from a former director of national intelligence, john ratcliffe, who told fox news that some reports describe objects quote traveling at speed, at speeds that exceed the sound barrier, without a sonic boom, which is very unusual, although humans in the 2020s are developing quiet supersonic technology. Um, that's still very unusual. But so like. Something that happens again and again in these reports is people will describe this thing kind of hovering there or like making weird motions and then just blasting off like from standstill, suddenly rapidly accelerating, like at the blink of an eye, a crazy amount of distance and in fravor and dietrich's case, it blasts off a crazy speed and distance and then goes to their cap point, which is, I forget, the meeting point or the starting point of an aerial mission. Um, so that in itself is weird and feels like communication of some kind. Um, also another like resilient recurrent report from people seeing these things is that they feel intelligent, and so I wanted to pull at least one quote.
Speaker 2:This is so interesting. This thing that you get when you read a lot of encounters is just this people who see them being convinced that they are intelligently controlled, and I think that this is I think in part it's like a you know, when you see it, kind of it's, it's like something that experiencers just just can relate to, that people like me who has not seen a UFO, it's harder for me to relate to it. But I also think that it goes to the, the, the reality of trained observers being like a thing like that's a, that's an actual you know. It's easy to just like use that term and have it be disconnected from the reality, but we're talking about people who are like career aviators or career you know radar operators. Uh, in a, in a you know military setting. Like it's a, it's a real skill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I forget who made this point, but somebody made the excellent point it might have been Christopher Mellon that in lots of other places we rely on expert testimony and consider it almost scientific, Like it's relevant in a court of law, if an expert in a certain area tells you their opinion about something or other. And in this case we have aeronautics experts like David Fravor telling us this stuff doesn't look like anything we have or are developing. Also important that Fravor saw the Tic Tac in 2004, which throws a little cold water on some of the more recent technology developments uh, potentially accounting for this kind of stuff, but we'll maybe circle back to that because that's a broader point. I have a great quote that I'll put in a link from, uh, the original CIA director, the guy uh who headed what was sort of the precursor to the CIA during World War II, admiral RH Hillencotter. Maybe Hillenketter, not exactly sure it's K-O-E Cotterketter. Anyway, he says the unknown objects are operating under intelligent control. It is imperative that we learn where the UFOs come from and what their purpose is, and he's referring to World War II and the years immediately following and saying. He goes on to say I know that neither Russia nor this country had anything even approaching such speeds and maneuvers.
Speaker 1:So that, I guess, goes to this broader second part of our argument, which is the experts have been saying this for years. The experts today or in the last 20 years have been saying, wow, this stuff is obviously more advanced than our human tech. But if you zoom way back into the 40s, 50s and 60s or before, people have been saying that same thing, which is that this is way more advanced than human technology. So the best possible argument for it being human tech, I think, is that we had some crazy physics breakthrough that we've kept very secret, and you made this claim in one of our other episodes. That I thought was really smart that if we'd made such a breakthrough we might reasonably want to keep it secret because it would be really valuable militarily to have a capability that nobody knew that you had, um.
Speaker 1:But critically, for this to be the case, for that to be the situation, we would have had to have that breakthrough in the forties at least, which means like basically, the A-bomb crew would have had to be in on this breakthrough and then we would have had to keep it quiet and out of the war and economic fields for the intervening 80 years, which sort of daggers belief. But you can almost squint and imagine it being possible that in the last like 10 or 20 years there was a physics breakthrough, like one of the congressmen pointed out, that the Higgs boson was only discovered like 10 years ago and maybe we did something really cool with that and that's that's a reasonable thing to say and to think, but it can't explain something from 2004. It definitely can't explain something from 1944. I rambled a little. You want to go?
Speaker 2:Yeah, are we kind of shifting gears into talking about the consistency of reports over decades?
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, did you want to maybe talk about the Iranian event?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, did you want to maybe talk about the Iranian event? You know maneuvers, um. You shared then that CIA quote, that's from 19, what? 52 or something. 48.
Speaker 1:I think he might be quoted in the sixties, uh, but he headed the agency from 47 to 50.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is June of 1960 that he's quoted. He's basically calling for a probe, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Okay, I mean, I think, another corollary to that before I do a rant, the Twining Memo, which if you're a UFO nerd, you probably know about the Twining Memo already. This is from 1947. It's been declassified or released through FOIA and it's from Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, charles Twining no, sorry, nathan Twining. And part of what this report says again is 1947. It is the opinion that A the phenomenon reported is something real, not visionary or fictitious. B there are objects probably approximating the shape of a disk, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft. C there's a possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena such as meteors, that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena such as meteors. And then, d the reported operating characteristics, such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability, particularly in roll, and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.
Speaker 2:And then there's more detail in this memo as well. It's really short, it's three pages. It's pretty stunning. So this is 1947. This is like 77 years ago, the US government describing unexplainable maneuverability of these objects. So I don't know. To me that's pretty persuasive. That, yeah, just goes to the point that, like you know, we would have had to have had a breakthrough I don't know in 19, before 1947, that developed these craft and then not used them in any of the subsequent wars. So that's one point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that seems extremely unlikely, unlikely. You also reminded me that I wanted to touch the UAP, the DNI Report, director of National Intelligence Report from 2021. I think we take this for granted. I take this for granted. Probably a lot of people in the UFO community take for granted that we are talking about physical objects, but some people still aren't totally sold on that. So it's relevant to point them to this report from 2021 from the Director of National Intelligence, and I'm going to read a few things that they found. But one of them is that most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects, given that a majority of the UAP were registered across multiple sensors to include radar, infrared, electro-optical weapons seekers and visual observation. So that's pretty important.
Speaker 1:Then they go on to say that they've considered, they consider five possibilities, including like junk and weather events, and they consider US government or industry development developed programs and they consider adversarialS government or industry development developed programs and they consider adversarial tech like China and Russia. And here's what they say about those two things. To the USG or industrial development programs, they say some UAP observations could be attributable to developments in classified programs by US entities. We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports. We collected Foreign adversary systems. Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, russia, another nation or a non-governmental entity, but again and they go on to say this later we currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of major technological advancement by a potential adversary. And they say we continue to monitor for evidence of such programs, given the counterintelligence challenge they would pose, particularly as some UAP have been detected near military facilities or by aircraft carrying the USG's most advanced sensor systems.
Speaker 1:So they basically say it could be US tech or it could be adversarial tech, but we don't know either of those things for sure and we don't have evidence to suggest it, which is weird coming from the director of national intelligence. It's it's it's striking to me that they say they're definitely physical. It's striking that they say we can't confirm that they're US secret tech. It's striking that they say we can't confirm that they're US secret tech and it's striking that they say we don't have evidence that they're Chinese or Russian tech. So this is kind of like a conversation with your friend who says yeah, but they're probably just human tech. They float this and then they say we can neither confirm nor deny. It's some evidence that they can't confirm it, but it's not great evidence. I sort of mentioned this to the side because I don't put a ton of stock in the direct information we're getting from government reports. I think a stronger argument is that we would have seen this stuff in some other area of the world which you were just hinting at with regard to war right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean just one other thing to pile on to the they are physical objects, because I think that's a really important thing to understand or to like internalize. Another quote I want to just share is from May 17th 2022. There was a hearing in the Office of Naval Intelligence there testifying, and Congressman Krishnamoorthy from Illinois digs in on this question and asks we say with a lot of probability we say, quote unquote probably do represent physical objects. When we say probably, is that because we cannot conclusively say that they're physical objects, conclusively say that they're physical objects? And Scott Bray, the deputy director for naval intelligence, says when I say probably represent physical objects, most of them represent physical objects.
Speaker 2:There could be some that are more of a meteorological phenomenon, something like that, that may not be a physical object in the sense that most people think of something to go up and touch. And Congressman Christian Morty says would you say most of them represent physical objects? Can you say they are definitely like, with 100% certainty that they are physical objects? And the Pentagon representative, scott Bray, says I can say with certainty that a number of these are physical objects. And the context of this conversation is that they're talking about unidentified aerial phenomenon, that they're talking about unidentified aerial phenomenon. They're not talking, you know. They're talking about the truly unidentified ones that are still unidentified after, you know, a long period of investigation, so that that to me is another really persuasive point for them being physical or just without you know, and there's all sorts of other.
Speaker 2:There's all sorts of other stuff like impressions in the ground and burning of trees and you know, over decades there's lots and lots of stuff. But that's yeah, and that's like the official us government line on it is that we don't know what they are and their physical objects.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that sounds good and I would just say for people who are interested in further reading on that, the UFO experience by Hynek, who headed Project Blue Book for years, has some good data on physical trace evidence. Physical trace evidence like indentations in the ground or burned grass, and this is also something that Leslie Kane covers. In UFOs, generals, government officials and pilots go on the record, which is our favorite book, and we'll put a link to that also. So we basically consider it settled law that these things are physical objects, but if you're not there yet and you want to learn more, you can go to any of those places and find them and find more evidence supporting that case.
Speaker 2:OK, well, yeah.
Speaker 1:I wanted to just put somewhere in the hopper this recent discovery of plasma effects.
Speaker 1:Um, there's been like science chatter about this, like weather phenomenon, um, that I think it seems like a lot of the anti-ufo I don't want to call them skeptical community because I don't think that's a fair uh term for them but like ufo skeptical community has been pointing to this and saying, oh, maybe it's all just this weather phenomenon, um, and I think, um, there's probably a bunch of stuff we don't know about in the atmosphere and there are definitely like lightning effects that over the years we've discovered, like sprites and ball lightning that do very weird things and look very strange. And that's one of the reasons that I think it's so important to keep listening to our aeronautic experts when they say things like this thing exhibited intelligent behavior, um, like it was mimicking my behavior, or or like fravor says about the tic-tac, that it spirals up out of the water and then meets them face on and then blasts off. And that's obviously not a balloon like, as uh, ben rhod, the former deputy national security advisor, said, you ever see a fucking balloon? Do that Like? No, you haven't, and it's. It's almost certainly not one of these plasma things either.
Speaker 1:The plasma things are interesting, but they're, I don't think, going to explain sufficiently this intelligent, seeming sort of like interplay that some of these devices are having um I'm going to share, uh, just a couple more quotes that I think help make this argument that they're that, they're, uh, not foreign tech, um.
Speaker 2:One of them, like you mentioned, uh, it comes from the 1976, 1976 Tehran encounter, which is like a pretty, pretty widely reported one. So with this guy, major Parviz Jafari, squadron commander in the Iranian Air Force, there's a giant glowing diamond in the sky outside Tehran. So the Iranian Air Force scrambles an F F4 jet flown by major Jafari um and uh, who then goes on to write about this in Leslie Kane's book, um. So he goes in uh and intercepts the thing um, his equipment malfunctions, yada, yada, yada. After, after the encounter, iran writes up a little report and they send it to the U Ss and the us. Then the uh uh defense intelligence agency or the department of national intelligence, whatever the dni is, um the director of national intelligence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there you go office, so they write up a little analysis of it and pin it onto this report. Um from iran and the. The key quote, one of the key pull quotes from it anyways, is an outstanding report. This clay, this case, is a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the ufo phenomenon. Um, and as so, first of all, well, as leslie came points out, it's just like pretty interesting to have them be. You know, to see that on an official government document when at the time, in 1976, the official line from the government is like we're not interested in UFOs, we're not studying them, there's no reason to be studying them, and meanwhile they're saying like this is a really interesting case that you know has all the hallmarks of a case that we should study. So to me that shows that we didn't know what these things were in 1976 and still don't now, it seems. What do you think? Is that persuasive?
Speaker 1:I spent most of that time trying to think of a pun for Jafari finding a diamond in the rough patch of sky. Okay, thanks, but yeah, I think it's obviously persuasive. I think it's really crazy that we've been collecting this evidence for decades and decades and I think, like every decade that you add, going back into the past makes it harder to make the argument that we have some secret technology Like the secret technology in the twenties, kind of viable in 2004,. It's less viable in the seventies. It's that much less viable. And when you get back into the fifties and forties it's like basically impossible to believe, especially when you're you go ahead. Well, off of that point is the next quote I wanted to believe, especially when you're Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Well. Off of that point is the next quote I wanted to share, which is something Lou Elizondo, the former director of AATIP, said to GQ. He said I have in my possession official US government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac, being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory. For some country to have developed hypersonic technology, instantaneous acceleration and basically transmedial travel in the early 1950s is absolutely preposterous. So that's what Elizondo says.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really freaking crazy.
Speaker 2:And saying that, it's not that. And I would say Elizondo is one of those people who's like literally leading the Pentagon's department investigating UFOs at some point. And then David Grush is also saying that and he's like one of the most highly cleared people in our government at a certain point and he's saying the same thing.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I guess on that pile I want to add this Ben Rhodes quote about how it's almost certainly not our stuff either. Ben Rhodes, again, was the assistant national security advisor for eight years under Obama and we'll put the link to his podcast where he says this stuff, but loosely. He says the idea that Russia and China have these things moving up and down at the speed of sound and with no engines. I mean, if they do, you'd think they'd be doing other stuff with them. So I kind of rule that out, he says. And then he goes on to say that he was there for eight years and he definitely wasn't right into a program about secret US government tech that can fly circles around our planes, which is not necessarily conclusive evidence, but it's another tick in the column for this not being us and not being adversarial. If the national security team in the White House doesn't know about any of these projects, you would at least expect them to say, yeah, you know, there is some DARPA technology that can do some pretty cool things and there have been instances where things were secret for decades. Uh, but we don't know what this particular thing is. Um, I, I did want to maybe touch that. Maybe you did too, that, like there, we have had programs that have been secret for multiple decades, like built in the 50s and then revealed in the 80s, or built in the 80s and revealed in the teens. That does happen, but the fact that we find out about it on like 30 year timescales strongly suggests that we would have found out about something that was designed in the 40s by now, and again it would have had to be designed in the 40s to account for all those crazy old sightings that sound exactly like the TikTok from 04. So I think we've done a pretty good job establishing that they're physical, establishing that they act like intelligent technology and establishing that those reports have been consistent over the years.
Speaker 1:I did have two story quotes to go through, but they're so fun that maybe we should just divert one more time. First, to pick up on that especially, I was going to say it's hard to believe, especially when it's coming from the mouths of highly qualified leaders in this field, like the former head of the cia, saying these objects are operating under intelligent control. We got to find out what they are. Um, that's you know, the. The head of the cia looked at these things in the 40s and 50s and said we don't know what these things are and we need to find out. For him to say we need to find out, but he doesn't know what they are right, and if he was the head of the intelligence agency during world war II, he would damn well have known about the absolute cutting edge of our secret technology. So it seems to me like irrational to imagine that somebody in that position wouldn't have had access to that technology If we had it at the time.
Speaker 1:Like world war II was a crazy time, obviously in human history. It was a giant moment, and the big technology that we did have, which was a secret until it wasn't, then became public knowledge pretty quickly and critically to this point we're going to make about negative evidence. We used nuclear technology that we discovered for these bombs to then create nuclear power plants that became like a major part of global energy infrastructure. So something that is missing from the history that you would expect to see if this was human technology is an energy application. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but we've heard claims that these things can produce just like insane amounts of energy, which you would expect if they're moving faster than the speed of sound, uh, and like doing instantaneous acceleration, descending from the edge of space, etc. Um, those they clearly need a huge amount of energy.
Speaker 1:So not only is it weird that we haven't seen these things in war if we had invented them, but it's also like it beggars belief to imagine that we would have invented such an incredibly powerful energy technology 80 years ago and just completely walled it off from the rest of our economy and not used it in any way.
Speaker 1:And the only possible explanation for that would be your take about how it's super valuable to have a piece of technology that your adversaries don't know exists and it would have to be, you know, incredibly valuable for you to never use it. And I don't find that that just doesn't hold a lot of water with me. But I want to point to it because I think it's the best possible argument for human technology that we have kept secret this whole time, like we just never felt like we had an existential crisis and had to use this technology. I think that's like not how war works, and I think we would have used it in Vietnam, um, and I think we would have used it in Korea. I like we definitely would have used it in Vietnam because we lost America, got driven out of Vietnam, obviously not a historian. We would have used it in Iraq and Afghanistan. We would be using it today in Ukraine, but also we would be powering our country with it for far less expense, both financially and environmentally, than we currently exert on fossil fuels.
Speaker 2:Rant pause financially and environmentally than we currently exert on fossil fuels.
Speaker 1:Yeah, rant pause.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh, I'm convinced I mean. So, yeah, I mean that I. I think this is the. This is, to me, one of the most persuasive arguments here is that combining the idea that, combining the timeframe of these, of these sightings with, with you know, the idea of, like using technology in wars or in the economy, it's just like unbelievable that we would have this tech and not use it.
Speaker 1:I agree, so is it a good time for the old timey stories now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I think so Right. Yeah, I think so Okay cool.
Speaker 1:I should say off the bat that these both come from UFO drawings from the National Archives, which is an awesome, wonderful book, really cool. Thank you, we strongly recommend it. It we don't have an affiliate program, but if we did, we would be selling these. Um, they're super. It's got like a ton of hand-drawn art. Do you want to? Just?
Speaker 1:explain what it is yeah, it's a collection of uh, declassified reports to the to the up government um, over the decades that they conducted this um election. People would write and call them and then they would submit their hand drawings of the things that they saw. Only a couple instances came with photographs, mostly their hand drawings, um. So I'm going to show you one as part of this story. But here's like a great double page splash of just like the kinds of things people submitted, so freaking cool, and you can see, or if you're listening, there are a lot of different form factors here. They tend to be oval-ish, they tend to be saucery, but there are lots of different details and designs that people shared over the years.
Speaker 1:I like this one from Norway with the ridges in the middle. The ridges slash windows in the middle tends to be a common element. A dome on top tends to be a common element, sort of like an egg or football shape tends to be a common element. And then some of them are like cigarette e or tic tac e. Um, this one looks like a mantis, this thing that looks uh wild like, yeah, ufo, catamaran, okay, but um, uh.
Speaker 1:So now I'm going to read two stories, one of which has a cool piece of art to go with it, and this is kind of to help make that point that these crazy sightings were happening way back when. So this one is from September 1952. And it's by Flight Lieutenant John Kilburn, who's on the airfield at the Royal Air Force Top Cliff in North Yorkshire. On the airfield at the Royal Air Force Top Cliff in North Yorkshire, alongside a group of Shackleton air crew from 269 Squadron. They're among 80,000 military personnel from eight countries, part of a massive NATO exercise which was simulating a Soviet attack. So they're looking up and they see a meteor jet. Meteor is like a kind of jet approaching the airfield at 5,000 feet.
Speaker 1:Then one of his colleagues noticed something extraordinary a silver, circular object much higher in the sky that appeared to be following the meteor. And again, this is not a meteor, it's a jet called a meteor jet. Initially the men thought that it was a parachute or a piece of engine cowling that had detached from the aircraft. But then suddenly the object descended, swinging in a pendular motion similar to a falling sycamore leaf, they said, towards the jet. Then it began rotating on its own axis. Look at that thing, dude, it's rotating. Before it accelerated away to the west at a speed quote in excess of that of a shooting star, which I love as a description and totally rings true with things that we've seen. We all know how fast shooting stars go. They're pretty zippy.
Speaker 2:That's very poetic A sycamore leaf moving faster than a shooting star.
Speaker 1:Somebody's taking poetry classes, lovely. So that's again. That's 1952, on a British air base, and this is the same year that Churchill was told there was nothing to worry about when he asked what's going on with these UFOs. So that was a worrisome report when it came up the chain because it was, you know, by a official member of the Royal Air Force, somebody people trusted, and that sounds pretty similar to some stuff that we've heard recently, like, specifically, the instantaneous acceleration sounds a lot like the Tic Tac, and again in 1952. Ok, so then there's one more here, and this is kind of like the Foo Fighters.
Speaker 1:We're going to maybe dig into Foo Fighters another time, but the short story is that, like World War Two, pilots sometimes saw these mysterious lights pursuing their aircraft during night raids over occupied Europe. For a while they thought they were like advanced German technology, but eventually they figured out that they couldn't have been, and I think German soldiers saw them too, but citation needed on that. But this one is like slightly different, but it's still happening during the context of World War II. We're talking about Ronald Claridge, dfc AEA. We're talking about Ronald Claridge, dfc AEA, and he's writing to his Minister of Parliament in 2003, when Ronald Claridge is 90. He was an amateur artist in his retirement and so he produced a stunning watercolor that will be the button of this little story, and he describes that he and eight other members of his Lancaster crew saw an object one night in the summer of 1944. He was the radio operator in the bomber he was flying, commanded by Brian Frow, who was then aged 21. Good God, war is crazy.
Speaker 1:Flight commander of the number seven Pathfinder squadron. On the night of 11th of August, they were returning from a raid on oil refineries in southern France at about 25,000 feet when the radar malfunctioned and Frau called out what the hell is that? Moving into the Astrodome for a better view, claridge saw quote an enormous string of lights on course with us at about a distance of 1,000 yards. The lights quote like portholes on a ship. End quote appeared to be the edge of an enormous disc-shaped object. The crew were stunned into silence, but 50 years later, claridge could still remember quote a feeling of complete calm and happiness that pervaded the aircraft, so that our gunners, who would normally open fire, were helpless. After three minutes it suddenly shot ahead and was gone, leaving no noise, vapor or turbulence in its wake, and that's the picture that John is showing now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Also show it while I make noise.
Speaker 2:That's's so crazy it's really stunning.
Speaker 1:it's, it's a beautiful like work of art and it's also a wild description and it also sounds like something that we should talk about at another time that we pinged before, which is the idea of alien tourism, because that sort of sounds like a cruise ship, like a giant object with a lot of portholes that's exuding a feeling of calm and serenity, maybe, maybe a bunch of tourists.
Speaker 2:So wild Are you? I just remembered another case that I think is relevant to our discussion today. Are you familiar with the Swedish ghost rockets?
Speaker 1:oh only from what you told me so cool.
Speaker 2:So basically in 1946, from a period, let's see, like between like February and August, in Sweden and also Finland, there are these rocket-shaped objects that are coming down from the sky and going into a lake In many cases going into a lake. Sweden's freaking out about them. They ask England if they're testing new tech. England says no. They ask America, america then is very interested in it. They ask, uh, england, if they're like testing new tech? England says no. They ask America, america then is very interested in it. Um, and I just uh pulled up and was reminded of this declassified, top secret uh document from the air force, um, from 1948. We're there investigating this, is it? Are you bored of reading? Can I read a couple bits from this for me? Yeah, please. This is the US Air Force. Yeah, so this is the US Air Force talking about this, 1948.
Speaker 2:For some time we've been concerned by the recurring reports on flying saucers. They periodically continue to crop up. During the last week, one was observed hovering near Newberg Air Force Base, air Base, for about 30 minutes. They've been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking. And then I'll just read one more section from this.
Speaker 2:When officers of this directorate and this is the Air Force writing this, I don't know if it's Air Force Intelligence Directorate, I'm not positive, but this when officers of this directorate recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, this question was put to the Swedes. Was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that, quote these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth. They, the Swedes, are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside of the earth. And then there's like's, like another paragraph. And then they, they end by saying uh, we are inclined not to discredit entirely this somewhat spectacular theory, meantime keeping an open mind on the subject.
Speaker 2:What are your reactions? Um, so that's again. That's the U? S air force describing, and they're talking about they're. They're describing, you know crazy maneuvers. Again, you know that kind of thing. It's the US Air Force again, and this time in 1948, saying we don't know what these are and we can't say they're not. You know extraterrestrial technology.
Speaker 1:That feels like it happens more as you go into the past of these archives. Um, I don't know if you've had this experience, but like in the last 10 or 20 years it's like very giggly and rare and probably like even in the last 50 years, um, you just like get this sense from the quotes that you read that people aren't taking it seriously. They think it's kind of dumb. Um, but then when you get back into the 50s, people are like pretty open about the idea that this might be non-human technology and at the time they thought like maybe it's martians because they didn't know very much about mars. But, um, but there's, there's like a a common theme of of people being more open to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Like, the farther back you go and I guess that's probably because it predates the like massive debunking effort and like probably disinformation campaign waged by the United States government to make us all think that this was silly and, um, just like Hollywood bullshit.
Speaker 2:Well, we should probably try to bring this in for a landing soon, huh yuck, yuck, yuck, yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, I guess to zoom back out, I think I think that thesis holds that the strongest, simplest explanation for why these things aren't human is that our experts tell us that they look like technology, that they look like technology that we don't have, and that they have had to create the advanced technology to do this 80 years ago, which is incredibly unlikely, because we would have seen lots of other stuff happen in the years since then if we had created the technology way back then. And, as you pointed out, you also have to wave off all the stuff before the 1940s to believe that it could be human tech. And there is stuff in the early 19s and the 18s that also seems crazy. It's not as clear cut as the stuff that sounds like the Tic Tac, but it's from 1944 or 52. But it's still pretty compelling. So it seems like a slam dunk to us, and we hope at this point that it seems like a slam dunk to you.
Speaker 1:Uh, and if you're still curious about this, there are lots of books to read. We would recommend the leslie kane one, as we always do. And if you're having a hard time convincing your friends, I guess just repeat this simple point about pilots telling us that it doesn't look like anything we can do and pilots having told us that since the 40s. Yeah, did you want to move on to a little recent news, as we do? A shaggier outro.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure you want to do that. I've got one quick hit, um. So the schumer amendment obviously got gutted at the end of last year and we're not getting. We're not getting, uh, uh, to get our hands on whatever you know bodies we have in freezers, uh. But the part that did survive is the national archives is going to start collecting from all agencies any documentation related to UFOs, and the piece of movement this week on that is that the National Archives and Records Administration sent out a just like heads up letter to other agencies saying like we're going to start doing this. Stay tuned, we're going to be in touch with the specific guidance for what you need to start collecting, doing this, stay tuned, we're going to be in touch with the specific guidance for what you need to start collecting. So that's you know. Obviously the amendment got gutted to some extent and that's a bummer, but this part at least didn't, and the ball is rolling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. We were talking a little earlier about this possibility that the secret program might just not have those records, and we also discussed before the idea that they might just not respond to requests to produce those records and sort of just see what happens.
Speaker 2:We're sending a bunch of scrapbookers to go like, try to get the CIA's most closely held secret. I'm not super optimistic about it, but better than nothing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely will be interesting to see if they like throw us some crumbs, kind of seems like they might be trying to keep us interested with little tidbits for as long as they can. As you pointed out once, you think, if they can keep it, uh, at bay for another week, they will. If they can stop disclosure for another month, they'll do that. If they can prevent it forever, they will, um, but they'll, uh, they'll. They'll just kind of do anything to drag their heels, um, I yeah, I'm not expecting anything from that, to be honest, uh, but maybe there will be.
Speaker 1:It'd be cool if there were some like reports like the ones that the uk released about, like things that people had called in and uh and reported themselves. Maybe there are like other interesting bits of the archives that are just like ufo reports from over the years from various places. I had one more kind of like big picture thing that this all makes me feel, doing these deep historical dives especially, which is just like why is this not conventional wisdom at this point? Like it's, it's. This is sort of a feeling that happens all over this topic. When you start reading, you just feeling like a feeling that I bump into a lot, and maybe you do too. It's just like it's very weird that this isn't more of a mainstream issue, because it's like not hard to connect these pieces.
Speaker 2:I think it and I think that feeling of of, like frustration and like I don't know insanity, like the, the twilight zone effect, of like is everybody else crazy or am I crazy? I think that probably is keeps the UFO community insular.
Speaker 1:Cause it's hard to relate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and cause like we get so we you know people are into it get frustrated enough to the point where they're like I don't really want to engage with skeptics, like I don't want to have to make the argument to you as to why these are physical objects, say, when there's like so much, so much evidence, if you just want to go and look at it. But like, yeah, it's frustrating for it to be, you know, incumbent upon you as a UFO interested person, while being laughed at to then have to lay out all the evidence. Yeah, all right. Well, I don't think I have anything else to say. I hope that this was moderately persuasive, I feel. I mean, I feel a little more persuaded, I guess, than when I started yeah, uh, me kind of too.
Speaker 1:I feel like where I felt, I guess, which is that this stuff has been happening for a really long time. It's definitely technological and it's definitely non-human and it it's, there are just so few possibilities there. Um, I quickly I started saying this and maybe I froze but the physicist miki okaku has been going around saying, like burden of proof has shifted now and, uh, it's not on the ufo community to prove this stuff is extraterrestrial, it's on the department of defense to prove that it's not, because it sure freaking seems like it is. And to ping him one more time, ben Rhodes says in that laughing exchange, but not making a joke, I think if you rule out the US and you rule out our adversaries, that basically leaves aliens, which we presume it is, and whether or not they're aliens from other places it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1:Like, maybe they're from the Andromeda galaxy, maybe they're technological fairies, maybe they're humans from the future, it doesn't matter. There's only non-human intelligence If it's not the US and it's not foreign adversaries, but it is intelligent technology, that has to mean that it's some non-human intelligence. Anyway. I just want to say thank you for watching this show and, uh, we had a really good time making it um and we'll put all the links in the places and I think I'll. I'll make the thumbnail that picture, just in case people listen instead of watching, because it's a really beautiful painting from World War II.
Speaker 2:Awesome, all right, thanks, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you too, dude. See you later.
Speaker 2:Bye.