← The Rest Is Classified
The Rest Is Classified
61. The Truth About UFOs: Whistleblowers, Warplanes, and Worlds Unknown (Ep 4)
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- [00:04]
David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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Selena Gomez
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Gordon Carrera
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- [01:44]
David McCloskey
The truth is that when I came into office I asked, right? I was like, alright, is there the lab somewhere where we're keeping the alien specimens and spaceship and you know, they did a little bit of research and the answer was, was no. What is true? And I'm actually being serious here. Well, there's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how they move their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is. Well, welcome to the Rest Is classified. I'm David McCloskey.
- [02:18]
Gordon Carrera
And I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [02:20]
David McCloskey
And that was President Barack Obama talking to James Corden on the Late show in May of 2021 after President Obama had of course left office. And he is talking, Gordon, about uaps/ufo's. He's talking about unexplained sort of anomalies and aerial phenomena that even he, as the President of the United States did not have the answer to. And so today we are finishing, yeah, our deeply rigorous and scientific investigation into whether we are alone in the universe. Looking at the history of UFOs through the. I'd say the Rest is Classified. Lens Gordon of secret government programs and the CIA's involvement in both trying to calm down public anxiety over UFOs while also simultaneously feeding the flames. We've talked about the Roswell incident, we've talked about balloons and their role in feeding UFO paranoia. And we ended last time. Gordon on the cliffhanger of well, there's going to be a resurgence, isn't there, in recent years of interest in UFOs. And I think that Barack Obama quote sums it up nicely, which is that there are these unexplained phenomena that even high ranking government officials don't seem able to explain.
- [03:47]
Gordon Carrera
And this is the final episode, we're going to answer all the questions. So it is interesting, isn't it, because there has been this recent resurgence, which is in about the last 10 years, in the idea that there might be something unexplained out there. And that President Obama quote is a great example of it. A lot of that comes back actually to some reports in 2017 from the New York Times, that illustrious publication, because it came out with a couple of blockbuster stories on UFOs. And one was the existence of something called the Advanced Aerospace threat identification program, AATIP, which had been basically designated to look for UFOs. And the idea that this program that existed. But the second one which was linked to that was that one of the reasons that program had been created was that the US Navy had some videos of UFOs taken from some of its fast jets. And these were actually leaked to the paper and published. And so those videos, which came from the kind of early 2000s, had led to the creation of this Pentagon program, which was in existence, I think for five years or so from 2007 to 2012, but like everything else, kept completely secret. It's kind of interesting, isn't it, because one of the reasons it came to existence was it had a big backer who funded it with I think, $22 million, which was Senator Harry Reid, who was a kind of influential Democrat senator, wasn't he?
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David McCloskey
Well, which we should say, I mean, $22 million is in the defense budget is sort of the equivalent of like rummaging around your couch and digging up coins that are under the cushions. Right? So it's not maybe in America, in Britain. Oh, okay, yeah, that's, that's true. That's fair enough. But I mean, in the US defense context, I think finding $22 million in the Pentagon, it's not the most challenging thing, let's just say, but it does indicate high level interest and that Harry Reid Appropriated it.
- [05:31]
Gordon Carrera
And when it later comes out, he writes a piece of where he says, I've always been fascinated by things I don't understand. He kind of grew up in rural Nevada and used to kind of look up at the sky and wonder what it contained. And then he says, as a Democratic senator from Nevada, I visited Area 51. So he got there. The top secret Air Force testing site.
- [05:50]
David McCloskey
He saw the bodies?
- [05:51]
Gordon Carrera
Well, no, what I love is in this article, he says, what I saw fascinated me, though much of it remains classified.
- [05:57]
David McCloskey
Oh, that's great. That's great.
- [05:58]
Gordon Carrera
I don't think he's around anymore because otherwise we could have just had him on the pod. He would have been like the perfect guest bonus episode. So he's backing it. Another backer is John Podesta, been Clinton's chief of staff. So it's kind of interesting because you get a few powerful people in government who have a view that something is out there, and they are going to play a quite a big role in driving programs and driving funding to have this stuff properly investigated.
- [06:21]
David McCloskey
But it is coming after some real interesting sightings by, I think, predominantly US Navy pilots that. That have to be driving a lot of interest inside the Pentagon as well.
- [06:35]
Gordon Carrera
I mean, it's worth digging into some of these sightings. November 14, 2004. The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group training about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. An advanced new radar has detected multiple Anomalous Aerial Vehicles over the horizon, descending 80,000ft in less than a second. Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich and a Super Hornet was out there in the air when something moving fast and erratically came into view. Dietrich's boss flew in for a closer look to check it out. There's a kind of white Tic Tac object which begins mirroring his movements and then just disappears. And that's one of the videos. And you can see the video of it. It's a kind of grainy video. So it's kind of. It's not perfect to be able to see what's going on, but you can see all the kind of sense of stuff around it. But that's one of the ones that gets leaked in 2017 and causes a kind of big fuss.
- [07:23]
David McCloskey
I have a friend who is a former US Navy fighter pilot and Top Gun instructor who flew Super Hornets, and he has a story. It hasn't been made public, but he's given this kind of debrief to this Pentagon task force. He had actually a very similar incident. He was doing a simulated dogfight with a wingman over the, the Gulf of America, Gordon, I should say.
- [07:52]
Gordon Carrera
Well done.
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David McCloskey
Yeah, over the Gulf of America. And he saw, I mean, he's kind of banking. He sees a, an object that is flying then kind of moving between him and his partner in this, in this dogfight. That is a sphere, it's like a white sphere, almost like a golf ball without dimples, that's just a little bit smaller than his plane. So a large object that is moving through the sky and then he sights it and it kind of comes and moves behind him. And then his wingman says that he sees it quickly change direction and follow him for a little bit before they lose it. And you know, he's a highly credible guy. So you do have these very interesting reports from a lot of Navy pilots in this time period, which I think it is really interesting because I asked him, like, what do you think it was? And he's like, I don't know of anything that we have that moves that way with that kind of propulsion, changing directions. Because the example he gave is, you know, as he's banking in a Super Hornet or something, as you're turning, you're doing kind of a wide arc to change directions when you're moving that fast. And this object is not obeying that same kind of expectation. It's just shifting directions super rapidly and keeping up with. Than FA18 Super Hornet, he would say. He thought, well, maybe it's something that the Russians or the Chinese have developed that they're using in our airspace.
- [09:23]
Gordon Carrera
So he's kind of open minded. He doesn't know what it is, basically.
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David McCloskey
Yeah, he doesn't. I mean, even now it's like there's not an explanation for it. It's one of these small percentage of things that Barack Obama's talking about in that opening quote where it defies our abilities as of now to explain what it is.
- [09:38]
Gordon Carrera
And so there definitely have been a kind of rash of these sightings. You also get some people who call themselves whistleblowers. So there's a former Pentagon intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, comes out and talks about that there is a program and he's been part of it. And he's one of the people who reveals this kind of secret Pentagon program. And as you kind of referred to earlier, it's now called the UAP programs, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. And that's partly because there was a stigma, it was thought, for pilots reporting UFOs. So UFOs are seen as people who wear tinfoil hats, whereas a different classification makes it easier for people to talk about it.
- [10:13]
David McCloskey
My friend said that very similar thing, that there was a big push inside the Navy to get pilots to actually fill out reports and to log these things. And I think changing the name and really trying to push in the Navy to kind of de. Stigmatize it because you think, I mean, this is something we can't explain it. It would be great if we could. Right. And if you have pilots who think they're going to be lumped in with the tinfoil hat brigade, you won't actually get a robust data set on, on all these incidents.
- [10:40]
Gordon Carrera
I just remind you, you are currently wearing a tinfoil hat.
- [10:43]
David McCloskey
I forgot. Actually, as I was saying that, just.
- [10:46]
Gordon Carrera
Want to remind you of that.
- [10:47]
David McCloskey
I'm an honorary member of the brigade. Gordon.
- [10:50]
Gordon Carrera
There's another one called David Grush. He's a decorated combat officer, served in Afghanistan, works in different bits of the wider intelligence community and works on this. Now he's at the kind of further end of stuff because he goes, the government has knowledge of UAPs which were the product of, as he puts it, a non human intelligence. So this becomes known as nhis. And he says that for decades there's been a multi decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, and that also there's a kind of Cold War arms race between the US and its adversaries to kind of reverse engineer this technology to kind of get an advantage. Now again, one of the kind of challenges with his testimony is that he hasn't seen any of these kind of crashed items from what I understand firsthand. Now, there's a very interesting statement about him from Marco Rubio back when Marco Rubio was a senator, so before he became Secretary of State. And he says, right now, what I know is reliable people tell us, and we've seen objects operating over restricted military and national security airspace. They claim it's not ours and they claim they don't know whose it is. That's like the definition of a national security threat. We have a number of people, including Grush, who have come forward, both publicly and privately, to make claims one of two things are true. Either A, they're telling the truth or some version of the truth, or B, we have a bunch of people with high clearances and really important jobs in our government who are nuts. Both are a problem. And I'm not accusing these people of being nuts. That said, that's something we'll look at and continue to look at seriously. It's a really kind of interesting statement because when you get to the kind of Grush ideas It's not just that there's something odd like your pilot seeing it. He's like, there's a crash retrieval program and we're reverse engineering it and it's being kept secret. And now that is either true or not true. That's not in the kind of mystery phase of things.
- [12:40]
David McCloskey
But what feels maybe a little bit misleading about this logical choice that then Senator Rubio laid out is that what is verifiably true is that there's a handful of these incidents, a small percentage that do not have an explanation as of right now, and that the US Government at the highest levels is basically saying, look, these aren't ours. Whatever it is, it's not something we're doing. It's not a balloon. It's not a secret CIA platform. It's. It's not next generation technology that the Air Force is actually testing or the Navy is testing. We don't know what it is. Right. Yeah, but what Grush is doing is he's then making the jump from that.
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Gordon Carrera
To aliens or non human intelligence.
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David McCloskey
We should say non human. Okay. I mean, non human intelligence. So that to me feels like a leap. A leap where Marco Rubio's A and B are not actually quite true. It could be the fact that the people who Grush is talking to are in fact misleading him about this being aliens or some kind of reverse engineering thing. Right. Like that to me feels like the sort of distinction.
- [13:49]
Gordon Carrera
But as a result of this kind of new last few years interest in it, the U.S. office of the Director of National Intelligence now kind of regularly does these reports on UAPs. So June 2021, they looked at the kind of previous 17 years, they found 144 reports. You know, some of these UAPS remain stationary in winds, moving against the wind, maneuver in strange ways. All the stuff we're talking about, it says like most of them can be explained. And it breaks it down, I think into basically five categories. One is airborne clutter, that's kind of birds, balloons, recreational drones, debris, plastic bags even, which kind of get in the way. Then there's natural atmospheric phenomena, ice crystals, moisture, which might kind of affect infrared and systems. The third one they do list is US government or industry developmental programs. So they say this some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities. We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected. I think that's kind of interesting answer. Then the next one they've got is foreign adversary systems. Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non governmental entity. And then finally there's another category called other.
- [15:05]
David McCloskey
Ah, the other bucket.
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Gordon Carrera
The other bucket. That one. Although most of the UAP described in our data set probably remain identified due to limited challenges, limited data, we may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize some of them. So they basically go. Some we can't say. And the number of reports grows. So by 2022, they say they've got 510 reports. So the number of reports, it's that classic thing. A bit like the 50s, isn't it? The more you look, the more you see. So the number of reports are growing. A lot of them do look like they're drones. And some of them, it appears, may be back in the world of balloons. What else?
- [15:46]
David McCloskey
And that's a good cliffhanger, Gordon, because in 2023, something will be seen floating above our great open American skies. And it's going to bring us right back to where this hopefully extraterrestrial journey started. So we'll see you after the break.
- [16:08]
Selena Gomez
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Selena Gomez
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Marina Hyde
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Selena Gomez
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At just $19.99 with the Blink Mini 2 Plug In Camera Shop now@Amazon.com Blink well, welcome back. We are in rural Montana. It's the 1st of February, 2023. And Gordon, people, as they have for millennia, are staring up at the sky wondering, are we alone in this vast and unforgiving universe? A universe, Gordon, where the endlessness just expands and expands. These people in rural Montana, they're looking up at a starry American sky and they see, they see something in that sky. What is it, Gordon?
- [18:59]
Gordon Carrera
They see something. And some wonder, could it be a spaceship? Could it be the aliens? Is it Independence Day? Are they going to get abducted? But it quickly emerges that it's not. Sadly, spoiler. It was, as people may remember, a Chinese spy balloon. And that balloon had first entered the US airspace over Alaska on January 28th. It crosses north, comes back over mainland Alaska, over Canada, then comes back into US airspace over northern Idaho on January 31st. Then Montana on the February 1st.
- [19:34]
David McCloskey
Spotted by people, good old American citizens, Gordon, staring up at the sky.
- [19:39]
Gordon Carrera
Spot it, spot it. But it also seems to, to be on the path over Malmstrom Air Force Base, which I think is where Minuteman missiles are housed. So at this point, it blows up into a huge row once it becomes clear it's a Chinese spy balloon. Because the Chinese are saying it's just a weather balloon. Do you remember that argument from Roswell and everywhere else? It's just, it's just a weather balloon, as the general said. But it's clearly not a weather balloon. There's kind of uproaring Congress. They're like, how dare the Chinese, you know, be spying on us and sending balloons over our airspace. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postpones a trip to Beijing. At this point, US China relations are not great. And this was a kind of big moment to try and kind of improve them with the Secretary of State going to Beijing and they just cancel it.
- [20:22]
David McCloskey
The impact of balloons on our society, I think is one of the themes of this series because not only have they fed conspiracies about aliens for the past 75 years, but they've also thrown a real wrench into US China, great power politics. So the humble balloon, Gordon.
- [20:40]
Gordon Carrera
So it's being tracked across the country. They scramble some fighter jets from Nellis Air Force Base when they first spot it. But interesting enough, they don't want to shoot it down over land.
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David McCloskey
That's interesting to me because I remember watching this and thinking, why are we letting this just soar over our country once we know it's there? It does seem a little odd that they didn't shoot it down right away.
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Gordon Carrera
Well, the official reason. Cause I remember covering this as a journalist quite a lot at the time, it was like a big story, was that the debris could actually crash to the ground and kill someone. Because even though it's flying very high, it's flying at about 60, 65,000ft. So much higher than a regular airliner, higher than some fighter jets can go. The US actually sends a U2 spy plane on the February 3rd, which can go over 70,000ft, to take a look at it. And to see what it is is an amazing image which gets kind of released where you can see the pilot in his suit looking down. You can see the curvature of the earth pretty much. And there is the kind of massive balloon. And I guess also that tells you why they're nervous about shooting it down, because it's not just the balloon, but there's these two big kind of solar panels to the side of it and then a big box in the middle. And so clearly there's a lot of stuff. It's not just a kind of balloon. And so I guess the point about shooting it down is if that does land on someone, it's going to kill them. And it's pretty small chance of it, but that's gotta be a risk.
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David McCloskey
Well, and I guess also, and this part of the story is not reported, I think, at the time, and I'm just speculating here, but I would have to imagine that once it was sort of spotted, that the balloon's ability to communicate with the satellite that it was communicating with was probably jammed, hampered in some way. Right. Because I presume we wouldn't allow it to continue collecting as it just flies over the entire continental U.S. i'm sure.
- [22:32]
Gordon Carrera
They worked out what signal it's transmitting on and jammed. So eventually it's shot down on February 4th once it's gone over the ocean near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, they use an F22 Raptor using a sidewinder missile designed for air to air combat. But it is the right thing to hit a slow moving balloon, it turns out. And it's kind of interesting because they need to ensure that the warhead of the missile detonates on impact with the balloon, rather than the missile just flying through the balloon, puncturing the balloon, puncturing the balloon, and then it'll just limp along. So I just love that idea. And then they've got sailors assigned to Virginia based Explosive ordnance Disposal Group 2 who recover the wreckage from the ocean. And it's got a big parabolic dish 1.2 meters in diameter, kind of unidentified sensors, mast antenna. And what they realize, it's got quite sophisticated reconnaissance capabilities. It's got a synthetic aperture radar which can see at night, penetrate through clouds and topsoil, and kind of thin material by sending pulses of microwaves to the Earth to create images. Some kind of video camera with the ability to zoom. And engineers are going to say from the National Space Intelligence center that the solar panel on it could generate upward of 10,000 watts of solar power. So, you know, this is a kind of pretty sophisticated thing that we're talking about.
- [23:49]
David McCloskey
Was it all jerry rigged together with floral tape like the original Roswell crash?
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Gordon Carrera
I think it's a bit better than that. But what I love, there's some detail from these leaks that come out from some U.S. documents which show it was codenamed Killeen 23 by the U.S. military. Now, I mean, this is bizarre. A U.S. official supposedly tells the Washington Post that the U.S. naming convention for balloons is alphabetical from A to Z or to Z even if you want to be American about it. And it looks like they're named after notorious criminals. So I hadn't heard of Donald Killeen, but turns out there's another one, James Whitey Bulger. I remember him. And Tony Accado, who sounds like something out of the Sopranos. I mean, I knew they named hurricanes and they have a kind of naming convention. But it turns out the US Military has a balloon naming convention and uses criminals.
- [24:38]
David McCloskey
It's violent criminals.
- [24:39]
Gordon Carrera
This is weird, isn't it? And so Another balloon called Bulger 21 circumnavigates the globe from December 2021 until May 2022, while Ocardo 21 carries also equipment as well as a foil lined gimbaled sensor.
- [24:57]
David McCloskey
I mean, that's what I have. Keeping tabs on the temperature in my hat. Yeah. Does the name of, like Bulger21, do we know if the Naming convention. Is it the same group of criminals and they just get like, there's Bulger 22 and Bulger 23. Or is it.
- [25:15]
Gordon Carrera
I think it's the year. So I think Bulger 21 is found in 2021. That would make sense. I'm guessing this and killing 23.
- [25:21]
David McCloskey
So it's like COVID 19.
- [25:23]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, exactly, that's what I'm guessing. But any, anyone from the US Military Chinese Balloon Threat Intelligence center can happily kind of email in and tell us what they think. So suddenly we kind of learn at this point that there's this massive spy balloon program. And it turns out even the Chinese Foreign ministry didn't know about it and large part to their military. But they do have this kind of big Chinese program which is out of Hainan island in China. You know, afterwards it suddenly turns out there have been ones in Japan which had been confused with the UFO in 2020, India, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Latin America. And once we know about them, suddenly more reports make sense again about what they might be.
- [26:02]
David McCloskey
So this was a question I had even when this balloon story was breaking, which is I guess in an era of really significant sort of density of spy satellite coverage and frankly really advanced SIGINT platforms, or at least the potential for them. Like what purpose is this balloon program serving in the 21st century? I guess at first blush it just seems like something out of another era.
- [26:31]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, a bit old school and I kind of tried to find out about it and I was asking a lot about it when it was happening and there were different theories. One was that they can linger over a target for longer than a satellite can. So that might mean they can get more pictures and they're a bit closer to the resol. Might be better. But I think the other theory, which I think is quite plausible is that they were more used to collect signals intelligence where it's more useful to be close to the ground to collect those signals. So you're scooping up the communications or emissions and there's this kind of thing called mass Int measurement and signature intelligence.
- [27:06]
David McCloskey
One of the more obscure ints, I would say an underappreciated int Massint.
- [27:11]
Gordon Carrera
We'll one day do an entire 10.
- [27:12]
David McCloskey
Part series on mass Int Massent Massint through the ages. That's right.
- [27:17]
Gordon Carrera
So you can use that to understand, you know, emissions and what a missile.
- [27:21]
David McCloskey
Launch looks like, soil samples, things like that. You can take soil samples outside nuclear sites.
- [27:25]
Gordon Carrera
So I think that's the view, is that perhaps it was a useful platform to collect that kind of signals closer to the ground. Now the other thing that was interesting is of course the question, a bit like the Cold War, is, do we do this? And the answer is, of course it's not just China with high altitude balloons. Both the US and UK had their own balloon programs. The UK had been codenamed Project Ether and the reports say it was intended to provide a stratospheric ultra persistent communication and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance capability. So if that's what the UK version is designed to do, that gives you a pretty good sense of what probably the Chinese version is doing. So we're a long way away from Roswell, but we're still using balloons.
- [28:04]
David McCloskey
But we're still using flying balloons up there. That's a nice bow tie on this whole, on this whole story. And I mean going back, Gordon, to these UAPs, I mean now, you know, I mean the office of the Director of National Intelligence is reporting on them. We've got various Pentagon kind of task forces that are still looking into these. It does seem like it's just kind of cool to talk about, you know, UFOs and UAPs again, isn't it? And it's not just the, the tinfoil hat brigade that are talking about them. It is now, is now very sort of reputable parts of our security and military establishment.
- [28:40]
Gordon Carrera
It's people like me, not just people like you.
- [28:42]
David McCloskey
It's people like you and not just people like me who we're talking about.
- [28:45]
Gordon Carrera
Exactly. That's right, yeah, yeah. And you've got the Pentagon's all Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. I like the way they keep changing the name.
- [28:50]
David McCloskey
These are great, these are great names. Yeah, these are hard, hard acronyms, I would say.
- [28:55]
Gordon Carrera
That's really good. And you know, it's interesting because they're still doing it, they're still looking at this stuff and it's often they can resolve what it was some of these sightings. So it's interesting, in one case, a commercial pilot sees flashing lights and they can resolve it as being a Starlink satellite launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida the same evening. In other cases you get birds, you get kind of what they call sensor artifacts resulting from compression and pixelation that often renders an object as an amorphous blob. So that's the kind of computer sensors which do that sensor glare. There's all kinds of interesting things going on. There's also, I think, a raft of things which happen near US nuclear infrastructure. So there's a load of reports of sightings near that. And it looks like, they can categorize almost all of those as what are called UASs unmanned aircraft or drones. So they've got some of those flying over, some for five minutes, some for like nearly two hours over U.S. nuclear infrastructure. So I think it's quite interesting because that tells you someone is flying drones around the US and people are worried about that. And that's one of the problems.
- [30:04]
David McCloskey
I actually, I dug into some of these all Domain Anomaly Resolution Office numbers, Gordon, some of these arrow numbers, and I was. It was interesting because they have like an open case and then they close cases if they feel like they've gotten to a point where they can actually render a verdict. In a period between about 2021 and 2023, I mean, there were almost 800 reports of sightings and almost 70% of them were balloons in the end. So the vast majority are balloons. 8% were birds. So still a lot of bird sightings. But the arrow director said that there were 21 reports in that period that warranted additional investigation, some of which he described as, quote, true anomalies. Yeah, so you do get this picture of the vast majority of this stuff. Very explicable, but a small percentage is absolutely not.
- [30:57]
Gordon Carrera
So. Yeah, I mean, what are we to make of it? I mean, some people do still believe something's out there. I mean, I love this quote from former CIA director John Brennan says some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don't yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life. There's a lot of sums and mays and parts.
- [31:22]
David McCloskey
A lot of caveats. A lot of caveats there.
- [31:24]
Gordon Carrera
It's like kind of. Yeah, there's a lot of caveats. There's like, if I'm looking, there's like some. Some might. Some. But, you know, he's kind of not ruling it out, basically, which for me, the story tells us that spy programs have fueled the belief in UFOs.
- [31:38]
David McCloskey
Yeah, that's undoubtedly true.
- [31:39]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, the classified programs have fueled that belief and. And the idea that the government is hiding something because it often has been hiding something because it's had classified programs which it's not wanted to reveal, or classified investigations into UFOs. And so all of that has fueled this belief, which has kind of pervaded popular culture. But does that explain everything? I don't know. You're the one with the tinfoil hat on, you tell me.
- [32:04]
David McCloskey
I am. I am. One angle that I have considered as we're, as we've been talking in this episode is whether if it's possible to imagine that what we're seeing today is actually in some ways a mirror image of the dynamic in the 50s and 60s. Where are there platforms, technologies that our government is testing inside the Pentagon, inside the sea or whatever that we're seeing sort of bubble out into the public and that the government itself is, of course, they're not covering up alien life, but there's a reluctance to be public with really frontier technology. Right. I mean, the thing that feels different about this phase of the story is that so, so many of the sightings are, and some of the more credible sightings are actually from members of the military and the military establishment. Right? So it does feel different in that sense. It also seems like we're getting, instead of necessarily a cover up, we're getting, we're actually getting openness inside the Pentagon or the White House or in this case John Brennan talking as a former CIA director, an openness to the reality that we're not able to explain what a lot of these are, as opposed to trying to kind of keep it quiet or explain this other bucket away with natural phenomena or something else to sort of COVID up the fact that it's a highly classified program or some kind of advanced propulsion system that has been worked on inside the Pentagon for years. So it does seem like that hypothesis that this is the US government sort of testing things that we haven't yet fielded militarily, I don't know if that holds as much water as it might have in the 50s and 60s.
- [33:48]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, I think that's right. Because I think when you look at that Obama quote that we started with, he is saying, like I went and asked about this stuff, told me there's no Area 51, there's no reverse engineering, okay? But he says there is stuff we can't explain. So I think there is an acknowledgement there and it is almost consistently it's maybe 5%, the things which get reported, which they struggle to explain, and who knows what that could be. But by definition it's anomalous. Unidentified so it's funny, isn't it? Because people often go, do you think UFOs exist? And I think the answer is, yeah, they exist because there are Unidentified Flying Objects or anomalous phenomena, they exist. It doesn't mean that they're aliens. They're two different things, you know, are they UFOs? Yeah, because there's stuff which is unidentified. Are they little green men who are coming together and living among us? I'm more skeptical about that.
- [34:36]
David McCloskey
I mean, the other angle to the hypothesis I raised earlier is if I had been a random Nevadan in the 80s, when the Air Force is testing the F117 Nighthawk or you're starting to test the B2 or something like that, and you saw that plane from the ground or something like that, or from a commercial airliner, I guess, similar to the reports of seeing the U2 in the 50s. It would be so beyond your understanding of flight and the kind of aircraft that you would have seen, you know, sort of day to day, or. Or even out there on military bases. Right. Like, it would be so beyond that. You would make that jump to say, oh, this has to be extraterrestrial, when in fact it is just an absolute kind of frontier technology that's being developed by the government. I guess today, though, given that our own government is saying there's a bunch of these things we can't explain if you assume it's a potentially a foreign adversary. I guess my question there is, is it plausible that the Chinese or the Russians or somebody are so far ahead of us in a system of aerial propulsion that we wouldn't have an understanding of it? Like, is that a plausible hypothesis given where our military capabilities stand and our R and D stands relative to these other peer adversaries or near peer adversaries? I'm not sure. It doesn't seem plausible to me, but I don't know.
- [36:12]
Gordon Carrera
No, I don't know either. I mean, there's bits of technology where they're ahead, like hypersonic missiles and things like that, but the idea that there's something so radically different which they've got, which we don't understand. Yeah, I don't know. So I guess. David.
- [36:23]
David McCloskey
No, no, no. You're not getting out of this, Gordon. You have to answer whether you think it's aliens. Gordon was trying to end the series before we got to. The only question that anyone's interested in is Gordon Carrera's opinion on aliens.
- [36:35]
Gordon Carrera
I am. Well, see, the difference between us is I haven't been abducted. You know, as members of the declassified club know who've listened to the. To the special bonus episode on your abduction. It's no wonder that I'm. I'm more skeptical when I haven't been through the kind of exception experience. I mean, they're really painful experiences. It sounds like the invasive experiences you went through, but I. It Means I'm. I'm unconvinced about the alien hypothesis, but as I said, that doesn't mean I'm. I'm closed to it. But I'm. Yeah, you're not closed yet to be convinced. And if they want, then they can subject me to the same abduction to prove as they did to you. I. I guess we. We should say that. Maybe we should. You know, when we eventually do merch, maybe we could do tinfoil hat. Maybe that's what we should be doing.
- [37:18]
David McCloskey
Oh, we could.
- [37:19]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, you could make them at home.
- [37:22]
David McCloskey
Some secret squirrel out there could do a replica of the various hats that I've created over the course of this series.
- [37:27]
Gordon Carrera
Go on, David. What's your conclusion? What's your. Well, we know it because you've been there. Literally.
- [37:31]
David McCloskey
No, no, no, no, no. I'm not particularly convinced by the assumptions that underlie a lot of the kind of, I guess, UAP community who look at these kind of unexplained events and say, well, it's got to be something from another planet. I'm. I'm not quite there yet. We'll check back in when we do another version of this series. Maybe we should do it every May, Gordon, or every June or something like that. You know, we'll come back and do an alien series. So that's where I'm at.
- [37:57]
Gordon Carrera
So is the Mulder and Scully of this world. We're more Scully than Mulder, I think.
- [38:01]
David McCloskey
It's unfortunate, isn't it?
- [38:02]
Gordon Carrera
The truth is out there, that's for sure. Whatever that means. I don't even know what that means.
- [38:08]
David McCloskey
That's right. That's a good way. Yeah. We should end on that.
- [38:10]
Gordon Carrera
Just ends on the end every podcast. The truth is out there.
- [38:14]
David McCloskey
That's right. I guess we should close there, Gordon, and say. Thank you, dear listeners, for joining us on this interplanetary journey over four episodes, to the world of the secret government programs that underlie so much of the modern lore around UFOs and UAPs. It has been fun. There's been tinfoil hats, there's been laughter, there's been headaches, there have been tears. And that is a wrap. But. And we should say, Gordon, we've been saying throughout the series, of course, if you want early access to episodes, if you want a bunch of bonus stuff, go and join the declassified club@therestisclassified.com. otherwise, we'll see you next time.
- [38:55]
Gordon Carrera
See you next time.
- [39:01]
Marina Hyde
Hey, everyone, here's that Jaws clip that we mentioned during the break. You can listen to the whole episode for free. On the wrestlers entertainment, there's no cast at this point as well.
- [39:14]
Selena Gomez
The cast is so last minute for this.
- [39:16]
Marina Hyde
It was nine days before principal photography was due to start. Two of the three main parts, Quentin Hooper still hadn't been cast nine days before. So everyone's ready. Everyone's ready to go, you know, the.
- [39:26]
Selena Gomez
Whole universe, who are eventually played by Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus in the movie. And those two have a massive feud. There were so many other different people that they considered. Now, Brody, who was actually played by Roy Scheider, and it's a brilliant performance. He's so sort. It's an amazing performance.
- [39:41]
Marina Hyde
Yeah. So put upon and like every man.
- [39:43]
Selena Gomez
But yeah, I mean, the other people considered were Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman. Like, definitely the last two of those could have done it.
- [39:51]
Marina Hyde
Yeah. So I think Charlton Heston was desperate to be in it. And Spielberg, again, you know what, he was smart right from the beginning. Spielberg, he said the thing about Charlton Heston, he's too big a star.
- [40:00]
Selena Gomez
Why is he too big? Because, you know, Charlton Heston always wins. That's the problem. You know, Charlton Heston is going to defeat the shark. You don't know what Roy Scheider's going to do. You just don't know. So it's really important.
- [40:09]
Marina Hyde
Roy Scheider has the look of a man who could be eaten.
- [40:12]
Selena Gomez
Definitely be eaten.
- [40:13]
Marina Hyde
You'll be like, yeah, I can see it. I don't know if his agent is, you know, gonna be saying he's gonna be in it, but he can't be eaten. It could definitely be eaten.
- [40:21]
Selena Gomez
Charlton Heston Eats Sharks. The end.
- [40:23]
Marina Hyde
Charlton Heston Eats Sharks. Another. Again, another great title for the book.
- [40:26]
Selena Gomez
Roy Scheider actually heard Steven Spielberg talking about it at a party. And Steven Spielberg was saying he'd had this idea for how he could get the shark to jump onto a boat. Roy Scheider thought, I'd like to be in that movie.
- [40:37]
Marina Hyde
That sounds good. I like this kid.
- [40:39]
Selena Gomez
And he said, I would like to be in this movie anyway.
- [40:41]
Marina Hyde
Charlton Heston, by the way, vowed never to work with Spielberg after that.
- [40:48]
David McCloskey
From Wondery, this is the spy who this month we open the file on Oleg Lelon, the spy who saved MI5. Lellin's actions changed the course of the.
- [41:01]
Gordon Carrera
Cold war in the 1970s.
- [41:02]
David McCloskey
A Russian who defected to Britain after being caught in a love affair that shook the world.
- [41:08]
Gordon Carrera
His actions triggered the biggest removal of.
- [41:10]
David McCloskey
Spies by any government in history. It's a story of an overstretched security.
- [41:15]
Gordon Carrera
Service in need of a win and.
- [41:17]
David McCloskey
A covert plan to bring catastrophe to Britain's streets.
- [41:22]
Gordon Carrera
Follow the Spy who on the Wondery.
- [41:24]
David McCloskey
App or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of the spy who saved MI5 early and ad free with Wondery Plus.