Don Derry, a tenured McGill professor with 47 years of service, recounts teaching a UFO course despite stigma, citing his 1947 magazine inspirations and personal 1980s sightings. He analyzes global phenomena from the Brooklyn Bridge abduction to waves in Brazil and Belgium, discussing telepathic control, hybridization theories, and the 2023 US Senate hearings. While noting Western institutions allow open discourse unlike unstable regions, Derry warns that humanity's limited capacity to absorb such knowledge could trigger ontological shock if full disclosure occurs, urging listeners to explore his books for deeper research. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Early UFO Knowledge00:15:05
Welcome back to a new episode of Debriefed.
Today I am joined by somebody very special who I've just come to know.
This is Don Don Derry, professor, associate professor, associate professor with, I mean, how many years at McGill?
At McGill, 47.
47 years, tenured professor, associate professor at McGill, a professor of psychology, I believe.
Correct.
And what's really interesting about Don is Don.
Is probably the only person that I know of, at any rate, who taught a course on UFOs.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
And the McGill's Community for Lifelong Learning for adults who already graduated and were just coming back for more.
That is incredible.
And what I mean, we've spoken a little bit about this off camera.
Before I get into this, though, I do want to encourage you guys to, you know, do all the things go hit the like button, subscribe, and leave us a review on Spotify or iTunes or wherever it is you're watching it from.
It really helps us out.
And Go check out some of these books.
So, these both these books here are by Don, Don Derry.
Uh, what we have UFOs, ETs, and Alien Abductions, a scientist's look at the evidence.
And then we have his latest one, Truth, Lies, and ETs How We Stumbled Into the Universe.
So, I'll leave the links below to that.
You guys can check that out.
Thank you.
No problem.
So, where do we start?
Well, that's a good question.
Where do you want to start?
If I go back to where I began with this subject, it was in about 1965.
I was at McGill, I was by that time.
Tenured, which meant I couldn't be fired for opening my mouth on unpleasant subjects.
And I began to realize that the evidence that people were presenting in the newspapers and on radio in those days mostly that they were seeing things in the sky was fascinating to me.
And I go back a little further because I remember as a kid reading about this stuff, and I mentioned this in some of my books.
In about 1947, UFOs began to make their way into the public media in the US where I grew up.
And that was in things like Look Magazine and in newspaper headlines.
And that interested me.
In 47, I was 10 years old.
I was a little too young to pursue the subject in detail.
But it got my attention then.
And then later on, when I got to be older and actually had a steady job from which I could not get fired, I took it up seriously as a psych prof at McGill.
When was the year that you started this course?
Well, the course came much later.
My interest began in 1965.
The courses at McGill in the Community for Lifelong Learning.
Started in the mid 80s, 90s.
Wow.
They were much later on.
So that was, I mean, that must have been a really exciting time because even nowadays we look at the stigma associated with UFOs and ETs and abductions and all of this, and there still is a stigma, but it's dissipating.
But back then, it must have been, you must have found a little bit of pushback, I would assume.
Funnily enough, no.
I lived in a very good environment.
I give credit now to the psych department at McGill for having never given me a moment of trouble about this.
Wow.
I had tenure, to be fair.
Which meant they couldn't fire me for my opinions.
But people didn't.
They didn't make it hard for me.
And I even had a university administrative job after that in the 70s.
So I got kicked upstairs, so to speak, to deal with graduate faculty fellowships and scholarships, which is a fairly responsible job, after I had gone public with this stuff.
And so even my seniors at McGill were tolerant of my interests and didn't suppress me, so to speak.
So I have to say, with all credit to McGill, I never felt a moment.
Of upset from them by having taken this subject up.
I mean, that's it.
That's amazing.
I feel good about it.
I would feel great about that too.
I mean, that's such an interesting thing to discuss nowadays is the teaching of you.
I suspect that in 50 years' time, you might have been well ahead of the rest of us because I suspect that eventually this will become public knowledge that UFOs are out there, that they exist, and that we're possibly interacting with them.
I think that.
There probably will be courses on UFOs.
I suspect that that's something that's going to happen.
We're in the middle of that transition right now, I think.
All the publicity that came out from the, well, for one thing, that Senate hearing in 2023 in the U.S. made a big difference.
It made it visible to the public.
Now, it's been visible to the people interested in this for years, like you and me and our friends.
They've always been interested.
And there's always been a small fraction of the public that's been interested, has been writing about this, has been talking to each other about it on.
Social media and what have you.
But now it's become more public with those U.S. Senate hearings.
The U.S. government is still lying about the subject, but the Senate was not, at least.
And the public people who appeared in the mid 2023 about that have really made a difference.
Yeah, knocking on some doors, ruffling some feathers.
Absolutely.
Especially with all the talk about the private corporations who possibly retrieved these craft and are reverse engineering them.
Let's go back a little bit into maybe some of this and some of your knowledge of UFOs.
So, what do you credit your repertoire and your knowledge of all these things that you have in your books?
What do you credit that to?
I credit it to curiosity, seriously, and protected curiosity.
Remember, it's a little boring to go over it again.
Not to you, not to the podcast people, but to the public who may not realize how protected an academic is when he or she has tenure.
That is, unless you're immoral or don't show up for work, you've got a job for life or for your professional life.
And I had one.
And I also had, as a psychology professor interested in human visual perception, which is how you see things, and memory, which is how you remember them, the fact that people had been reporting these things for years and the academic public was scoffing.
And I thought this was ridiculous on the basis of the evidence.
So I had been interested as a kid in 1947 when I was 10 years old.
I began to read about it in the magazines that were widely circulated in the U.S. where I lived at the time.
So you heard about Roswell.
I did indeed.
When you were a young man.
Well, I think I probably heard about whatever was going on in 1947.
Those first sightings that people were having were publicized in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and others.
And I read them.
And that kept me interested in the back of my head.
I had no, obviously, place to put that interest other than when I got to McGill and had a platform where I could speak, as I said, without losing my job, without the boss coming in and saying, Don, we've heard enough of this.
Would you please find another job?
That didn't happen to me.
Now, my colleagues may have thought so, but they were prevented from saying so by the rules.
And I appreciated that.
Thank you, McGill.
Definitely.
Thank you, McGill.
What's.
So, in this, I'm really curious about this course, but before I get into this, where does the information come from that you've acquired through the years?
Is this, I guess, meeting with other like minded folk?
Where did you acquire this knowledge that you have about these crafts?
Well, a lot of it by myself.
That is, reading the books that have been published for years about the subject.
There's always been a UFO culture in North America.
That is, groups of people who've been interested in it for probably since back into the 50s.
When I was growing up, there was a culture.
It grew and it was most noticeable and still is online.
You can find many people online.
There's an organization called the Mutual UFO Network, which is big, which has lots of members in lots of parts of North America and Canada, and which is interested in the subject.
There are similar organizations in Europe, in France, Jepin, it's called.
I can't recall the exact meaning of the initials.
In the UK, in other places.
Where there are interested people who have always been able to gather in public in open societies and talk to each other about this and write books about it and write papers and have conferences.
And I've been interested in that for as long as those organizations have existed.
And when I was an adult and able to find and read this stuff as an academic with computers for the first time and you can find things online, I started to collect information and keep my interest active.
And again, I've been a member of that organization called the Mutual UFO Network for many years.
And some of it's Predecessors as well.
Have you been able, have you ever had an encounter yourself?
No.
No encounters, but you've met with.
I have, sorry, I've had an encounter.
I once saw a UFO, a glowing orb in the sky at a great distance.
And this is probably interesting because many people may have seen this without bothering to report it, and I never did.
I was standing looking out the upstairs back porch when we lived on Beaconfield Avenue in Montreal back in the 80s, I think early 80s.
And I was taking a break from my work, which was an upstairs study.
Went out, looked out the window on the porch, and there I saw a UFO gradually going through the sky in that motion, that skimming motion that everybody has reported.
But this was just a nocturnal light, as they say.
And so, in the list of important UFO sightings, it rates way down there somewhere.
But it was my UFO sighting.
That's right.
And I know that's what it was, because airplanes don't do that.
And I was well enough equipped with eyes so that I knew it.
I wasn't making it up.
That must have been very exciting at the time.
It was.
But it was just confirmatory to me, because by that time, I was already.
You were already a believer.
And now you are a knower.
A believer.
Now I'm a knower, yes.
All right.
Thank you.
I put the word belief in a professional way to mean, how shall I put it?
I read a lot of stuff, as anyone would who's interested in this subject.
And it's all out there to read.
I'm currently in the middle of reading J. Allen Hynek's.
Oh, that old book.
Yeah.
The first one he wrote.
Yeah, exactly.
The first one about his time at Blue Book.
Right, right.
That's a fascinating book.
Yeah.
What was it called?
I can't recall the title right now, but it's a very interesting book.
Yeah, I have it here.
I don't recall it.
It's a lengthier title, but.
But the contents are really fascinating because not only does he go in great detail through a lot of the cases that were reported to the government during Project Blue Book, but also he was an astronomer.
Yes.
And that gives you a really unique perspective on what it is we're seeing in the sky.
Yes.
And it's really important to know for people out there that things are explainable.
Even though someone like me who might not have all the knowledge in the world, I might see something and.
And to me, it's unidentified.
It could be a planet.
It could be a fireball, like a meteor or a weather balloon.
You know, we've heard all these things.
But it was his job to quote unquote debunk these.
In Project Blue Book.
Yes, that's right.
Yeah.
Very, very fascinating.
Oh, he was interesting.
I met him once.
He came to McGill to give a lecture.
He came to Montreal to give a lecture.
And I met him in the preparation for that lecture.
That's all.
And just to meet, not to deal with it in any great way.
But I'm very impressed by the books he wrote.
I really am.
Yeah.
I'm also aware of you were involved with a case, if I'm not mistaken, at the Brooklyn Bridge, an abduction case?
Yes.
Very famous one?
Would you care to talk about that a little bit?
Yes, I was.
That was a case that was looked into by a friend of mine, Bud Hopkins, who was an artist, an abstract expressionist painter, and also interested because of people he knew who had these experiences in UFO encounters and abduction encounters.
And I met Bud years ago at a conference in.
MIT, in which he was one of the speakers, and I was also one of the speakers.
And we got to be friends, and I visited Bud in his walk up in the Lower East Side and got to know him.
And Bud and I were friends, and he had dealt with people who had met people independently of his parade as an artist who'd had these kind of experiences and written about them in a book called Missing Time.
And so Bud and I got to be friends.
I met him, went to his house, met his other friend, Leslie Kane, who's a journalist who'd written about those.
And we got to know each other pretty well.
So that's the truth.
And for those people who don't know anything about this story, what is a little bit about the history about this book, Missing Time, and this particular case that happened?
Oh, well, Bud knew abductees he'd met in the New York City area.
And took their encounters very seriously.
And one person who's mentioned in one of his books as Linda Cortilli, which is not her real name, but she still wants to keep that secret, lived in Brooklyn and was inducted out her window from a high rise apartment within view of the Brooklyn Bridge.
That sighting was well reported by people who'd seen it on the ground.
It was well reviewed by people who'd studied the evidence, including Bud, who wrote a book about it, and that was part of Missing Time.
And I got into this because I met.
His acquaintance, Linda Cortilli, and some of the other people who saw this event.
So, you met the lady?
Yes, I met the lady.
Yeah.
At Bud's house.
Yeah.
And it was most fun.
Now, I've been close to some of these people a long time ago.
This was back in the 90s.
And this world has been in review, so to speak, by capable people who've been writing about it.
When writing was the thing people did, they didn't do podcasts then because they didn't know how.
But when things Got put into books, people I knew were writing about them.
People like David Jacobs and Bud Hopkins and others.
And at this, as I said, I mentioned a conference at MIT in the 90s where a lot of people who had written about it went to a conference sponsored by a group centered on MIT, not by the university itself.
But it was one of the first really public academic, quote unquote, events that took this seriously.
And that book was published in 1990 something.
I can't recall the exact year.
We'll bring it up.
I'll put it in the link below as well.
I'll do my own research and have a look at that.
Good.
All right, let's talk crafts.
Scientific Curiosity vs Hostility00:03:57
For a sec.
Yeah, not arts and crafts, but flying crafts.
Crafts of a different nature.
Okay.
There are so many different types of crafts that are reported over the years.
Yes.
You know, in this area, there's a lot of reportings as well, but we've seen saucers, we've seen cigars, tic tacs, giant triangles, orbs.
Do you think this is my personal sort of take on it, but there's got to be more than one type?
I agree with you, and there's quite likely more than one type of observer in these machines as well.
I don't know that.
In my book, I have a couple of sketches borrowed from other people.
Of various types of ETs, some of whom look more like us, some of whom don't.
They're mostly bipedal, as far as I know, and they all have two arms, two legs, a head.
And the other thing they do is they do telepathy.
And they can control us telepathically.
The one thing you won't hear much about, and this is something that needs more publicity, and I'm glad I can make this case here, there seems to be a way to protect yourself from it by putting on a Helmet that covers your head with plastic that basically disturbs electromagnetic radiation.
Really?
And this is, as far as I know, known, but not widely known.
The discovery was made by a man named Michael Mencken, who lived somewhere near Seattle, Washington, and who developed a helmet with sheets of non transmitting electrical insulators that you could put inside a hat and protect yourself from the telepathic.
Instructions that you were getting from ETs who wanted to abduct you.
Now, this is not even widely accepted in the ET world.
I put it in my book because I thought Mencken was credible.
I've talked to him a long time ago.
I don't even know if he's still alive, to be honest.
But he discovered this himself in dealing with his own UFO experiences and prevented future abductions.
And the abductions are controlled by telepathy.
If they're standing over there and they can't control you telepathically, you can pick your 22 off the wall and Threaten to shoot them.
Right.
If you have a.22 on the wall, which you may or may not.
Do you think they're hostile?
No.
I don't think they're deliberately hostile.
I think they're curious.
I see.
And they're maybe a bit interventionist, as we are with other species on Earth.
We're not, quote, hostile, unquote, to raccoons or to, well, we are hostile to rats in the walls, for sure.
Sure, I am.
But we're not hostile to a lot of animals we investigate and study.
Right.
Bears in the woods, deer in the woods.
We shoot them.
We also are interested in them.
And the better intended of us go and look for them, look at them, try and be nice to them.
The less well intended of us still go out and shoot them for meat.
But in between, there's an attitude which is curiosity, which you might call scientific curiosity.
And I think they have that curiosity towards us.
Whether they're interested in doing more or not is an open question I can't answer.
But they're certainly interested in looking and exploring, that's for sure.
I'm reminded of Betty and Barney Hill.
Oh, yeah.
Very famous case.
Yes, indeed.
Also, Project Blue Book, I believe.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And in there, through their hypnotherapy sessions, especially Betty had an encounter where she basically had a conversation with one of these beings.
And the being told her that this is like a, like, you could tell by the conversation they apparently had was that they didn't know much about us.
You know, they were asking about her teeth and why her teeth didn't come out.
We've read the same books.
The Petri Dish Concept00:08:25
That's right.
And then that's right, and also asking, you know, about they didn't understand the concept of age, right?
Of you know, so there was it seemed to me for the first time because I would assume that beings who can buzz around the universe at free will would know everything, and it seemed that they didn't.
Pardon me for reminding you, the universe is a very big place, and they come in all sorts of ships, as I'm sure you know as well.
Big ones, smaller ones, probably some that sit inside others until they're about to launch a local visit, just like a mothership, and so forth and so on.
And as a matter of fact, Barney and Betty's niece, Kathleen Martin, is very interested in the subject, is a friend, and has written about it as well, as I'm sure you also know.
But yeah, they are interested.
They were interested back then.
They probably still are, that back then being in the 40s.
They undoubtedly still are because they haven't learned everything they need to know.
And they're keeping a watching brief at the very least on humanity, for sure.
I mean, and just like us, like you mentioned, I mean, we all have different motives and different agendas that not everyone, even internally as a species, we're not all nice to each other.
Exactly.
So, you know, it's one thing to assume that, you know, just because they all sort of look the same to us or that they all behave the same way.
But, you know, if you were to float above the earth, you would quickly realize that there's conflict between us.
Hard to believe.
But that's the conflict is real, it's saddening, yeah.
But we're not perfect beings, goodness knows.
Have you heard of him?
He was the head of the Israeli space program.
I'm probably butchering his name at the moment.
I can pull it up.
Have you heard of his accounts?
Not, no, the name is vaguely familiar, but I'm sorry, I'm in the same boat you're in.
I'd have to pull up my cell phone to look too.
So, this gentleman, he was, he was, I'm going to pull just because I want people to, uh, okay.
To make sure we're done.
Sorry, I can't help.
No, I should have been more prepared.
Okay.
Israeli space program.
Haim Eshed.
That is his name.
So he was, this guy was head of the Israeli space program.
In his lifetime, he put up 13 satellites into space.
So he was, for lack of a better comparison, he was their Wernher von Braun.
Okay.
Probably the worst comparison I could have made for many reasons.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
But all that to say is that he came out on a talk show one day and started, quote unquote, spilling the beans.
And said that we are part of a galactic federation that we've been working with these ETs, that he's been working with them in creating all sorts of technologies, which he's won awards for.
And those technologies still to this day, they can't tell us what he won or how he won it.
And he said basically that, and this is the one thing that I found really interesting, that we're basically a petri dish.
And that these guys are bouncing around to 10,000 other planets just like ours, dropping off technology and watching us grow and sort of helping us along.
Is that ever crossed your mind, something like that?
Do you ever think about things like that?
What you've just told me is vaguely familiar, but I've never followed it up.
So the concept is not unreasonable.
Goodness knows they're bopping around the universe.
They have the machines to do it, and not just at this planet, that's for sure, because the machines come from elsewhere.
Yeah.
Add information to what you just said because I know that little about it.
But the concept is clear to me.
For one thing, there are big reports that I've put in my books and other people have well documented of giant UFOs, huge machines, globes that are a quarter of a mile around going low over the Arctic or northern regions of Canada.
This stuff is well documented from way back.
That is, sightings of ships like this, but no direct connection between those sightings, which are documented.
And events that are taking place.
Now, I have no doubt, and this I hope listeners and viewers will not think is a conspiracy theory, because it's not, but it's so obvious that this evidence has been accumulating for so many years that it's equally obvious without paying any attention to conspiracy that somebody in official positions has been paying attention and knows a heck of a lot more about this than you and I,
who are reasonably well informed amateurs about this subject, know.
So, I have no doubt that a lot more is going on than we know about because other people have been paying closer attention to it than we as lay people in the outer world can ever know.
Well put.
What is, Don, what is one of the cases that sticks out to you the most throughout the years?
I mean, you've been a part of this subject for decades and have known a lot about it.
What's a case that springs to the front of your mind when I mention perhaps abductions?
Well, I've met Kathleen Martin, who's the niece of Barney and Betty, and so I know about that well known abduction, but so does everybody else because it's been written well about.
I don't know any direct abduction stories from this neighborhood that is, from Quebec, Montreal, the Laurentians.
I do know people up here who have had close encounters with UFOs, and you do too because they come from this neighborhood the Saint-Savour, Saint-Adolphe-de-Howard neighborhood, and other places around here where close encounters have taken place.
In Montreal, which is where I live and have for the last six, oh, well, since 1962, quite a while, I don't know of any direct abduction cases, but there's certainly plenty of UFO sightings.
Is there any sighting in particular that stands out to you throughout maybe your studies or something that you've looked into that you might be able to share with the listeners?
Just something that really struck you as, oh, this is very credible, this is very important.
Is there anything?
Well, the close encounter.
I talked about with the guy who lives in Sandy Dolph to Howard, it was a very real one because he explained it.
We were up there, Luigi and I, and my wife as well, at different times to meet the observer of this within a month at least of when it happened.
And we sat in his state overnight at his house, as a matter of fact, sat and talked to them about that very close encounter, which may have been preceded and followed by other close encounters as well.
From this neighborhood, basically, this neck of the woods.
Yeah.
And that was a very close eyewitness account of something that I only participated in as a second hand spectator, but got very close to the actual observers of.
And other than that, in the general Montreal area, no, I'm a damn academic, put it that way.
I do a lot of my learning through reading other people's books, and a lot of it comes from there, as well as my interest.
And for example, this close encounter today with another person equally interested.
A lot of it is, as is true with academics, through reading, not through direct experience.
I can't say I've walked along Boulevard Côte Saint Antoine, which is where I live, and I know neighbors who've been abducted from their backyards, put it that way.
I wish I could say that, probably, not to their benefit.
Maybe they wish they could talk about it too.
Maybe they do too, but I can't say I can.
Fair enough.
No, that's fine.
Okay.
In the class that you taught, now this is a class, you explained to me like a voluntary class.
Oh, right.
People would, after graduation, would come back for this course?
This was called the McGill Community for Lifelong Learning, and I taught a course there for several years.
By the way, I offered to teach it again in 2023, and you know what they said?
They turned me down.
Credibility and Human Psyche00:15:25
Really?
Which was a surprise to me and a shock.
I was ready to go again and spend about 10 lectures, which is what it lasted.
And it was taught in their, as I said, non credit, low cost adult education program.
Yeah.
And I had done that program for a couple of years, and the last time I volunteered, No thanks, we've had enough.
And there was some kind of snide email that was sent about we don't think there's much in this anymore.
I was really disappointed by that.
I have to say.
That is disappointing.
And I have a shout out to McGill for having done it before and a critique for not having done it the last time I asked.
That's right.
Thank you, McGill.
Do better next time.
And since you're my source of retirement income, do better, please.
I'm still connected.
Fair enough.
Yeah, I agree with that.
McGill, do better.
Yeah.
What are some things that you taught during that course?
Like, let's say I would attend this course.
What are some things that I'm going to learn about?
Well, I'd go back through history.
I'd go back to the early encounters with UFOs that people reported, both from the late 19th century, these airships that people were reporting, and then.
Like the Foo Fighters?
No, even before that.
Before that.
This was back in the.
They saw what they thought were balloons, because balloons were in the air then.
Airplanes had been just invented in 1903, 1904.
But in the 1890s, people were seeing, quote, airships, unquote.
Wow.
Which were thought to be balloons.
But which, by the visual accounts, were much too complicated and too big to be balloons.
But the first well recorded events were during the Second World War in the 1940s.
So called Foo Fighters, which is the name of a rock band as well, these were seen over Germany by pilots flying over Germany.
From both sides.
From both sides, yeah.
By German fighters and by American bombers and English bombers.
These were globes that flew alongside the airplanes and couldn't be explained.
Did things that the airplanes couldn't do.
That was in the late 40s, obviously, during the war.
Shortly after that, after the war, came the sightings we all know so much about.
The Roswell encounters, the close encounters in the 1947s of crashed UFO remains and bodies and the cover up therein.
So all of that began right after the Second World War.
During the Cold War, the government started lying about it, the U.S. government immediately.
People started reporting and forming UFO groups interested in this right after it.
And as I said, I was a kid then.
This was 1947.
It was in the newspapers and the magazines.
And I was reading the newspapers and magazines, but I was in no position to pay attention to write books or to go convince people that this was interesting.
It just was interesting.
And it was interesting to me as a 10 year old.
Yeah, that's for sure.
I guess you didn't know to what extent that headline would have an impact on the rest of humanity when that initial crash happened and they said UFO or flying saucer.
Flying saucer.
Flying saucer.
I didn't know what it was.
And I was fascinated.
And from then on, now that history is all recorded.
People have written about it, lots more people than me, and I know about it through the books and through what people have written.
The Belgian UFO wave in '89.
I just recently stumbled on this.
I didn't know about this one.
There's so many cases, actually.
People think it's all, there's like, oh, there's three sightings.
No, there are thousands.
There are thousands.
You're absolutely right.
And every single, like, I mean, sure, you can chalk a lot of them up to whatever you like, whatever the reason.
But Some of them really are inexplicable because when you're talking about several, you're talking about military personnel, you're talking about like police officers, like people who are in a credible line of work.
And by credible, I mean as an eyewitness.
Yes.
And cross referencing, you know, they don't know each other, they haven't spoken together, and they're saying the same thing.
Well, that is evidence.
Yes.
That is proof.
That's evidence.
Yeah.
That's legal evidence.
That's legal evidence.
And as I said, I just mentioned, I do legal work as a consultant.
Yeah.
And I appreciate that.
The strength of legal evidence.
And when you get it together and put it together, it's a credible human explanation of something humans have seen and experienced.
Period.
That's most people think like they're like, oh, well, if there's UFOs, where's the evidence?
There is evidence.
Oh, there's plenty of evidence.
There's plenty of evidence.
There might not be any smoking gun right now, but there is definitely evidence to suggest that there is a gun somewhere.
Well, usually the government gets there and picks up the pieces first.
That's right.
And they also control most of the media.
That record these things, like the radars and the fighter planes that report them and chase them.
A lot of it.
And the media they don't control are, of course, the personal sightings that people report when they've seen them looking out of airplanes or flying airplanes.
As I mentioned, I've talked to a pilot who went wingtip to wingtip with one for a long distance.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Oh, just I met a pilot at a MUFON UFO conference, and he was talking about his experience.
And I quote, flying wingtip to wingtip with a UFO.
For a long distance.
I can't recall the details, so he hadn't written them down.
But that was a firsthand personal account by a credible and qualified witness who, at a UFO conference, was telling me informally what he was probably reporting at another event that I didn't go to.
So that kind of thing is not uncommon.
It really isn't.
We know that.
And if I talk to one conference, one guy at one time, how many other people in exactly the same position, pilots, qualified observers who've been in the air, have seen the same kind of thing?
And the kind of military pilots who simply can't talk about it.
That's right.
And you said something really important there.
You said qualified observer.
And I think that's something that we have to keep in mind when hearing accounts is that something coming from me might not be as credible.
And I understand that.
But when you have somebody who can read the sky, their whole job is to look out the window and to be able to tell you the conditions that he's looking at and to be able to read what's on.
You know, his data collection devices and to be able to translate that, these people are qualified observers.
These are the people we should be believing.
There are hundreds and thousands of these people who've reported UFOs or whatever you want to call them UAPs.
UAPs.
Extraterrestrial vehicles is what I call them because that's what they are.
So, what do you make of this interdimensional talk?
All the, that they might be transmedium or not transmedium, but transdimensional devices.
Vehicles.
It's beyond my skill set.
I'm serious.
I'm not a physicist.
I don't know how to discuss the structure of the universe in a way that would add anything to this argument simply because that's not my trade.
My trade was visual perception, memory, and psychology.
And I have to concede to other people to make a good story for that or a good explanation for it.
So, somebody who works in assessing people's perception, you're obviously well equipped to look at someone and not spot if they're lying, but spot inconsistencies in a story and maybe the reasons for those inconsistencies psychologically as well.
That's something that you're capable of doing.
You have probably a really keen observation into the human psyche.
Well, let's not go.
Overboard on me first.
Now, I'll tell you why.
My psychology training was all in research.
I have never in my life sat down in front of a person and been paid to help them get over some kind of mental difficulty.
I see.
So, I am not a clinical psychologist in any sense.
I have a great deal of respect for people who can do that.
I have talked to obviously UFO witnesses, but I would never qualify myself as somebody who could sort the wheat from the chaff.
In human behavior by looking or talking to a person.
But you would be able to discern the reason for them telling a story.
Yes, I would mostly be totally sympathetic to people who've seen things like this, but I'd be never in a position to try and denounce them or take their story apart.
The people I've met who are witnesses, and I suppose the most direct ones are the people that we were talking about and sent it off to Howard, just around the corner, so to speak, not that long ago, are people whose.
Integrity, I trust because I sat with them long enough to get to know them.
You too, put it that way.
And there are other people, not many, in the UFO world who've had that kind of close encounter.
And I don't know any people right now who I'm on close terms with who I would say are recovering abductees, to put it that way.
And there are people who've gone through those experiences and have learned to live with them.
Again, as I said, Barney and Betty Hill, for one, and their niece Kathleen.
What do you see is the future of disclosure, the future of this knowledge coming out?
How do you see this moving forward?
Where do you see us going?
We're in the middle of it right now.
And the middle of it is more active than it's ever been.
And that started, well, it started a while ago, but it's been growing in strength.
It was 2017 when we had.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
There were early stories.
And then in 2023.
There was the Senate hearing on what do they call them?
UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.
That's right.
And U.S. senators took it seriously and still do.
And other people from the U.S. legislative branch took it seriously and still do.
So I think we're in the beginning of what people used to call disclosure, which is when all of this is going to impact the general public because they realize that people with what you might call Credentials in the communications world take it seriously, and that now includes the Senate committee, their witnesses.
Some of the people have reported Ryan Graves, David Fravor, these American fighter pilots who've seen them and reported them, and whose cameras have recorded them.
This is all now coming into public focus better than it ever has before.
And the government is still pushing back.
I think we said this earlier there's a guy who's hired by the all domain anomaly thing.
To denounce all this, and he's still denouncing it.
All Domain Anomaly Resolution Arrow.
Thank you.
Something like that.
Sean Kirkpatrick.
Kirkpatrick is the bad guy's name.
And he's still saying it's a lot of.
I won't use the bad word.
You can say it.
A lot of shit.
But it's not.
And I think the public is now beginning to come around to this, as is the legislative branch of at least the U.S. government.
We'll see.
Hopefully.
I mean, it's such an interesting thing, but alongside that, you also have to deal with this sort of ontological shock that's going to happen or that is currently happening.
How do you think we're going to deal with that?
It's something I've thought about but have not thought to write about, and here's why.
I know it's going to happen, and I'm a psychologist in trade, but my trade is just slightly off center on this problem.
How do we deal with the billions of humans who finally realize we're not even in charge of our old world?
And why don't we have done a good job of it?
We haven't.
Not only have we done a bad job, now there are other people outside poking and prodding at us.
And how is this going to affect the way we look at it ourselves, our universe, our governments, our wives, our children, our mistresses, our friends?
It's going to change all of this.
And I have not started to try and organize this in my own mind because it's very, very complicated.
I hope people who are thinking, who appreciate the problem as we do, and have better social psychology credentials than I do.
Begin to take this very seriously.
I might be forced to do it myself if nobody else does, but I'm looking for the social psychologist or the clinical psychologist or the psychiatrist who knows this world well enough and takes the UFO evidence seriously enough to begin to put out their informed professional opinions about how it's going to deal, how the humanity is going to deal with this, and how we as humanity have to deal with it ourselves.
I hope this comes.
I don't think I'm the first person to write this book.
I hope somebody else does.
Produce the podcast.
Yeah.
Whatever.
Yeah.
I think it's a fascinating discussion, even just to have, because, you know, if you look at the past, we also have evidence of us meeting uncontacted tribes.
I know in Australia, there was a whole documentary made.
I forget what the documentary is, but there were the indigenous people to Australia that were there, and they'd never encountered the white man before.
And all of a sudden, you see on film for the first time, These people reacting to a vehicle.
I'd never seen that.
That sounds like fascinating.
Now, this is exactly what we would look like if we saw a flying saucer.
Well, because that technology is alien to them.
And these strange bipedal people look familiar, but they're also different.
They have a different skin color.
That's right.
They have a different face shape.
They're wearing funny clothes.
That's right.
They're aliens.
That's right.
And when watching this, yeah, and you see their reaction to it, you're frightened for them.
And it got me thinking.
I was like, well, we're in for a bit of a rude awakening.
We are.
And again, as I said, I apologize to you, basically, and to your listeners and viewers that I can't give you an answer to this.
There are better qualified people than me who better take this up and deal with the social implications, the political implications, the personal, psychiatric implications.
It all has got to be done.
I spent my time writing about what I think are the facts and not dealing with the social side of this, which is a very important side of it.
Yeah.
Very important.
Do you think we're ready?
No.
No.
I don't.
Yeah.
We'll find a way of dealing with it.
But I even think, even somebody who's well prepared, you know, might think they're prepared until the moment comes.
Exactly.
Exactly.
The emotions might be stronger than you think.
Yeah.
That might be, you know, from whispers and you hear things, but that seems to be the reason.
We're not being openly contacted, is that we're not seemingly ready for it.
You mean they're looking at us with a certain amount of trepidation as well?
Yeah.
We don't want to come down and mess their lives up totally.
Yeah.
Maybe that could be.
Or mess ourselves up.
Or mess yourselves up.
But they're certainly looking and they're picking around, as you and every person who's studied the predictions knows.
They're picking around with us.
They're looking at some of us anyway and putting us back and dealing with us.
Unready for Open Contact00:08:58
And you've heard the hybrid stories too, I'm sure.
We haven't got into that.
We haven't.
But there's evidence.
In fact, A book written by a guy who lives not that far from here in Montremblant, Marc Saint Germain.
I wrote the introduction to his book.
It's called Les Enfants de Sylvie P.
It's a book written in French about a woman living in the Laurentians who was abducted and inseminated and whose hybrid children were taken away from her.
But this is not a common story.
This is that side of it, which I've never written much about because I haven't dealt with that much of this side of the picture, but it's there.
They do.
Mess around with us.
They're interested genetically.
They're interested to the degree that, and now I'm going on what your podcast watchers will realize is the far edge, but it's an edge I'm convinced is correct, although I'm not a scholar in this edge of what's happening.
And that is direct intervention with human life by creating critters that look like us, can be mistaken for us, but have psychic abilities and are hybrids with humans and humans.
ET is.
And again, that's from this neighborhood.
That's Mark Saint Germain's book.
Very, very interesting.
And such a, you know, for anybody, you know, my audience, I think, is a mix of people who are familiar with the topic and a mix of people who are new to the topic.
So, you know, hearing things like that obviously can be a little off putting for a lot of people out there.
But you also have to understand that there are decades and decades and thousands and thousands of information, there's people coming forward within the government too that we don't hear about, and some we do hear about as well.
But there's witnesses, there's eyewitnesses, there's firsthand witnesses to a lot of these things, to abductions, to even cattle mutilations, things that happened on Skinwalker Ranch, things that were reported there that the government. Was a part of.
How long do we want to go on with this?
Because we've got another two hours to talk about this.
You're right.
And you've just got us into something that I haven't hardly mentioned at all, and don't mention much in my books, because I'm dealing more with the observables and with the what you might call the collated evidence.
But the personal side of this, the alien intrusions into human life, the hybridization, which does go on and which I don't deal much with, but is real, is something that is.
Anxiety producing for the human species, for obvious reasons.
Because we may not be the quote human unquote species anymore.
We may be a species of hybrids who might live on Earth as we have been, but with a little more close relationship to the people who are coming and looking at us.
And that might be in our best interest, it might not.
We don't know.
I don't know.
That's the scary part right there.
That's right.
Is that we are no longer the apex.
On Earth, correct.
Yeah, realizing that is a big pill for us to swallow because we've fought so hard to become the number one.
And what's going to happen once we begin to talk about disclosure, which is a word that people used many years ago, is that we're going to be fighting about it.
I don't mean physically fighting, I mean verbally fighting.
I hope not physically fighting, with what to do about it and how to deal with it.
And our government institutions, and we in the West, fortunately, live in places with relatively advanced government institutions that allow us to talk about these things.
Without confronting each other with murder or mayhem or violence or ostracism.
We've got to deal with this as a public, as a better informed public, and figure out how, as a species, we deal with this.
And of course, as a species, we're not united to start with.
We have the West, quote unquote, we have other parts of the world which don't share the same government systems that we do.
Which are in somewhat less stable conditions for dealing with public events.
I mean, we can take it from there and go on for another three hours on human civilization and its discontents.
But other people have been there before, and we're still living with the fact that, well, we, goodness, well, live in Canada and the US and manage this extremely well along with some other parts of the world.
Other people don't.
What do you say to those people who, because online, you know, people will make their own narratives up and run with the most popular theory at the time?
But when people say, why do these things only happen in North America?
Why aren't they happening anywhere else?
They do happen elsewhere.
You just don't know about it.
That's right.
It's because the news doesn't get around.
And account things that happen in the middle of Central Africa or even in the middle of China aren't going to be reported, period.
They happen, and you get these reports out through the grapevine, but you don't get them reported by the Daily News or even the Newfound International because they're not well known.
They happen.
We just don't have the same direct reporting system.
And some of these cases are even more impressive than a lot of the cases that we've seen over here.
Like you look at the Virginia crash that happened in Brazil.
You look at the UFO wave in Belgium.
Yes.
You know, we can look in.
I mean, there's just.
Oh, gosh, yes.
All over the world, South Africa, Zimbabwe.
French ones.
Not just Quebec, but France.
And France as well.
Russia.
That's right.
That's right.
A lot of sightings that we.
Brought back, thanks to George Knapp, a lot of information we got back after the Cold War that he went there and brought some.
So, yeah, that's in Japan as well.
I'm just a dull academic researcher.
I don't know half of the stuff that a lot of people do and have written about it.
But I agree with you.
And it's happening all over.
And what the ultimate motive, and it may be more than one, of course, there may be more than one species of extraterrestrial dealing with us.
Whether they have agreements among themselves or not, we don't know.
That's fascinating.
We don't even know whether our own governments are in contact with any of these people.
I don't know.
I mean, one has one's suspicions, but there's no direct evidence.
What are your suspicions?
Probably yes.
Do you think Eisenhower had the meeting?
There's rumors of Eisenhower.
I don't know.
I won't go beyond saying I don't know, because I don't.
I'm nowhere close to what some of you, and I expect you as well, are in dealing with this layer of information.
That hasn't gotten itself, remember, I'm the dull academic, hasn't gotten itself into published papers or books that can be reviewed and so forth and so on.
There's a lot of it still out there that I don't know for sure.
Well, hopefully, we'll be able to discover it in the next few years.
And hopefully, articles like these we've got all these articles here on the desk that are Air Force says saucers freaks and around a bend they saw a pair of bulging eyes.
Yeah, that's the one I hadn't seen before.
That's neat.
Woman.
UFO buzzed my car, says woman.
Well, that's happened more than once.
Yes, it has.
Flying saucer seen over Washington for a second time in four days.
Oh, that's well known, of course.
Yeah.
The big Washington flap.
That's right.
In 52, was that?
52, 52, exactly.
Yeah.
No, I think we students of the subject know it's been out there.
And it's been out there for years.
Yeah.
But we don't know the full story, that's for sure.
I don't pretend to.
And you will ever know?
Well.
The full story?
Well, do we know the full story about anything?
Do we know the full story about the French Revolution?
Yeah.
Not totally.
But, I mean, there's.
Oh, and we.
As a species, we have a limited capacity for absorbing knowledge.
That's right.
Those of us who do it and enjoy it are doing as best we can.
Yeah.
But there's a maximum.
There's a maximum.
It's like you can't teach arithmetic to a dog, but you might be able to teach him like one plus two equals three cookies.
That sort of thing, right?
That's right.
Absolutely.
But there is a cap.
We don't know what our cap is.
And we don't know if it's being genetically modified by outsiders right now either.
That's what we've just been talking about.
Yeah.
That's.
That's a big one.
That's a big one to wrap my head around.
And even when so called disclosure is open and has happened, and the public, whatever that means, knows that we're being looked at by ETs, whatever that means, and accepts this, the implications of all of this will take a long time to absorb and to deal with.
And they are very subtle.
And then they'll hit you up for another course at McGill.
Wrapping Up the Conversation00:00:56
Maybe not.
They'll rebag on their last.
Well, we'll see.
The last decision.
They'll be like, you know what?
Maybe you should come back.
Well, maybe.
I hope so.
That was fun, and I enjoyed it.
All right.
And that keeps me busy.
All right.
Well, Don, thank you.
You've been a wonderful guest.
It's been so fascinating talking to you.
It's been my pleasure.
It's been my pleasure.
Really, really just, I could sit here for hours and do this.
You know, it wouldn't bug me at all.
It'd be my pleasure.
But, guys, thank you for watching.
I want you guys to go and check out these books that Don put out.
I left the links below to them.
I believe there's also, are there audio books as well available?
There's a Kindle version.
There's a Kindle version, so there's a digital version that people can pick up.
Audio, I don't think so.
Highly suggest you guys go pick this up.
Go support Don, Don Derry, on his research on UFOs and ETs, the truth, the lies, and all that stuff.
And I want to thank you once again for joining us.