James Fox details his documentary career, from early Roswell investigations to the 1997 Phoenix Lights and the Pentagon's admission of anomalous craft. He highlights the 1996 Varginha incident in Brazil, where military personnel captured a live entity before one officer died of an immune failure, alongside global cases like Westall and Zimbabwe involving telepathic beings. Fox argues that evidence remains suppressed by agencies and corporations, suggesting these non-human entities possess transmedium capabilities and may be interdimensional travelers, urging public awareness as his film "Moment of Contact" approaches release. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Filmmaker's Journey Into UFOs00:01:19
It's an honor to have you here.
I really appreciate you coming down and doing the show.
You have a phenomenal body of work behind you from Phenomenon, all the works before that, your latest film.
It's totally, absolutely mind bending, some of the stuff that you do.
For people that aren't familiar, I doubt there's any, but for people that don't know or aren't familiar with your work, just give me a brief background on how you got into this subject, filmmaking.
How brief?
Yeah, we got plenty of time.
Okay.
Because I could actually give you a slightly less brief version because it's kind of funny how I got into it all.
Were you into filmmaking?
Were you originally just a filmmaker first and just got into, got obsessed with this topic of UFOs and UAPs?
Kind of, kind of.
So, because I can tell just by your work, I mean, just the way you produce your films, the style and everything, I'm a big fan of that in a totally separate bubble of the topic.
Like, if you even separate the UFO topic, which is fascinating, the style of your films and the way you cut them and the way you shoot them, I'm a huge fan of that.
Well, thank you.
So, I strive for credibility with the phenomenon because I used to always tell people they're like, oh, you got to add the green smoke and the cheesy lights.
Adding Credibility To Strange Stories00:14:29
And I'm like, no, you don't.
The story itself, any UFO story, is so fascinating, so otherworldly, excuse the pun there, but that.
I would always say if you could add credibility to a fascinating story, like someone coming in contact allegedly with a UFO, then that will succeed, you know, because that's the story's already so incredible and already so unbelievable that if you could add that element of credibility to your production, then that's a winning, you know, recipe.
And so I developed that very, very early on.
I remember having like shouting matches with the two older guys that I was working with.
They're like, You don't know anything about filmmaking.
We're going to put, you know, you need to add, overproduce, and put cheesy effects in.
And just stuff that just makes you want to puke in a bucket.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, we talked about this before.
There's a lot of shows out there on the big networks that they go so far overboard with the graphics, the motion graphics, and all that stuff, and the production of it.
And it's just so for people like, I don't know for normal people what it's like, but for people like you and me, it's just you can see right through it.
It just makes it, I don't think it does the subject any favors.
I find it unwatchable when I look at it because if the story is not compelling enough to carry itself and you have to add those so called bells and whistles or whatever to keep people's attention, then don't do that story.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Right.
But let me back up.
My father was a mainstream journalist.
His name was Charles Fox.
He wrote, we lived on the East Coast.
He wrote for Car Driver Magazine in the 60s.
He was born in England and he got multiple sclerosis when I was born.
And so I, as I grew up, became sort of his legs, his secretary, his chauffeur, his assistant.
And I traveled all around and got to do these really cool stories, watching my father perform as a journalist.
And it was a lot of hard work.
I remember thinking, like, all the writing for the stories and all the copy editing that goes into it, it was more work than you'd expect when it's just words.
And so.
I kind of was exposed to journalism at an early age more so than I would have been because of my father's condition.
And people would be like, oh, you're so lucky you get to travel around the world and do all these cool things.
I'm like, you try traveling with a quadriplegic sometime, okay?
And see how hard that is.
Wow.
You know, because it's basically like, you know, having a, you know, a 200 pound baby trying to make a living.
And I'm not referring to my dad as a baby, he was an amazing guy, but I had to take care of all of his needs because he couldn't move.
But he would travel and he was incredibly driven and he was hilarious and fun to be around.
And so we had a kind of a different relationship, father son relationship very early on because of his dependence on me and my dependence on him.
It was a codependency thing, but we got along great.
And we had a lot of fun.
We traveled all around the world.
And I was driving on the Autobomb and I was like 15, you know, basically doing stuff that I shouldn't have been doing until I was.
I remember driving to go see this guy, Dan Gurney, who was a race car driver.
There were films about him, even on now, I think Mustang versus Ford or no, Ford versus Ferrari.
Anyway, my dad goes, God, my legs are really bad today.
I can't drive, you know.
And I was like 12 or 13.
We were in Southern California and he goes, You're going to have to take the wheel.
I said, Dad, I've never driven on the freeway.
He goes, Just keep it.
I'll never forget this.
He goes, Just keep it between the lines.
So I've got this big van and my dad in his chair.
And I'm like, You know, because with multiple sclerosis, he couldn't, he got to the point where he couldn't walk anymore, but he could still like move his legs a little bit on a good day where he could, you know, activate the accelerator.
Eventually he lost all movement.
But there was a period of, I don't know, five or 10 years where on a good day, Things were going well.
You know, he could drive if you could get him behind the wheel.
He could push the accelerated pedal and the brake pedal and all that stuff.
But I just remember, like, and then we pulled up to interview this guy, Dan Gurney, and who won Le Mans, I think, in the 60s.
And he goes, How old's your son?
The little tiny guy driving, you know.
So my point is that I got to share intimately share my father's career as a journalist very early on because of his condition.
And so I remember finding the video camera, like just discovering the video camera and what a great tool that was for instant playback and communication and documentation of stuff.
And it seemed to me a really nice alternative than all the hard work that my father used to have to do with writing stories.
I mean, I was shocked at how much work went into writing an article.
Of course, later I realized, you know, once you document things, you got to edit them in the edit room, and that process is very tedious.
But in any case, I picked up a video camera and I thought, wow, this is great.
I could really get into this, you know, documenting stories.
I did some PSAs, public service announcements, just basic editing.
And then a very good friend of mine turned me on, and I'll give you guys, I'm not going to give you the super long version of it because I, you know, you guys would, your eyes would glaze over.
But, uh, It turned me on to UFOs.
And he was like, This is back in the 90s when it wasn't really out that much, like the early 90s, you know.
And I went to high school with this guy and I remember thinking, Boy, too bad this friendship's over because he's lost his mind.
And he was talking about Roswell.
He goes, Oh, you haven't heard about Roswell, the UFO that crashed, the recovery.
And I just dismissed him as quickly as you could.
I mean, I literally was like, What a pity, my very dear friend Renee, I'm going to have to write our friendship off because he's lost his mind.
Then I was apprenticing at a video production company in Northern California.
And I started talking to this guy, Richard Van Sickle, who's running the company.
And I had a lot of respect for him.
I looked up to him a lot.
And I said, Yeah, my buddy Renee is starting to believe in UFOs and Roswell.
He goes, Oh, yeah, you don't know about that?
I was like, No, I don't know.
Roswell?
I mean, an alien spaceship crashed.
He goes, Yeah, you didn't know about that?
I was like, No, how am I supposed to know about that?
And so I started to look into it and I realized, Wow, the military really did put out an official statement that this happened.
And then I went to a couple of conferences and I met some ex military guys that were talking about.
You know, gun cam footage of UFOs in the 50s.
And I thought, wow, these guys are really credible.
Maybe there's something to this.
And I was just kind of interested.
And so I was like, I got my video camera.
I'm going to make a documentary on UFOs.
And my father was horrified.
I mean, he was like, son, please come back.
Like, what happened?
What did I do wrong?
You know?
And he was begging me.
He said, literally, I'll never forget it.
He goes, it's a dead end street, son.
There's nothing to it.
It's going nowhere.
Don't waste your life.
And I thought, my father's been so supportive of so many things for so long.
He used to say to me when I was a kid, I don't care if you want to be a garbage man or if you want to be a teacher or whatever it is that makes you happy, that's what I will support always.
That's the only thing that matters in life.
And yet, this, he was so opposed to it.
And he had members, because I was born in England, he had members of my family writing letters to say, please, your father's begging you to reconsider it.
Don't waste your life, you know, kind of thing.
And I'm like a Taurus, so I'm kind of stubborn.
And I thought, well, I'll show him.
So I probably worked like 10 times harder than I've ever worked in my life just to kind of show him, you know?
And it was hard.
Boy, it was really hard.
And it took me about four and a half years.
And I got some incredible interviews.
And the final coup for me was I got the opportunity to do a phone interview with Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
And that really kind of solidified the credibility of the film, it kind of stepped it up a few notches.
And I went to Roswell for the 50th anniversary.
Toward the tail end of production, and I got some never before seen testimony from alleged army officials that were involved in Roswell.
Because, like, in 1997, that was the tail end of when the people were dying off.
You know what I mean?
With Roswell.
Right.
Like, it had been 50 years.
So, the people that were, you know, they were like in their, excuse me, they were in their like 20s, they would have been in their 70s.
So, 50 years was kind of the last, the 50th anniversary of Roswell.
You could actually go there and meet.
A handful of people that were directly involved with the incident.
They're all dead now, pretty much.
I don't think there's anybody left alive.
So, anyway, I went there and I made this film and I ended up selling it to Discovery Channel.
And I was so burnt out by the process.
I had no idea what it took to make a documentary and how long it took and how much work it took and all the B roll and the editing and the writing and the researching.
And my God, you know, it just really kind of caught me off guard.
But it was about four and a half years and I sold it to Discovery Channel.
Everyone was kind of shocked, my dad included.
And I thought, well, never again am I doing any UFOs.
I've, you know, that's this, this, this was it.
And then, um, and if I'm going on too long, just tell me because no, you're not.
Just trying to tell you how I got involved with this whole thing.
And I never intended to be where I'm at today, nearly 30 years later, of still producing documentaries on UFOs because never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd be that guy.
And I never wanted to be that guy.
But when the film sold to Discovery, Everyone was shocked, myself included, and doors started to open.
Like, oh, here's an independent guy who treated the subject matter seriously, who didn't ridicule and add green smoke to production.
Hey, if you want to meet with anyone, meet with this guy.
And so suddenly doors started open.
I was invited to Russia.
And I thought, gosh, I can't not go to Russia and meet with like Pavel Popovich, cosmonaut.
I went to Star City.
I got to meet with generals.
This is the 90s.
And, you know, Uh, okay, well, I guess I'm going to do another film on UFOs.
How could I not?
Like, I mean, these doors are opening, and so I worked another, and raising the money was always incredibly challenging.
Oh my god, I learned how to operate cameras, and how to edit, and how to do the sound all those things completely on my own because I couldn't possibly afford to pay somebody else to do any of it.
And so, even though I sold my film to Discovery, I didn't make it, I would have made more flipping burgers at the end of the day, you know what I mean?
So, anyway, so then I made another film called Out of the Blue, and it was.
It was really funny.
When do you know a film is done?
You know, and it's a tough moment to when do you actually realize, hey, this film is done?
Because I never really feel satisfied with any work I ever do.
It always feels like I can make it better.
So I'm looking at Out of the Blue, and we're about five years into production.
And my buddy, this guy Boris Zuboff, was kind of my mentor.
He was in a fetal position crying, and his wife, And his wife is not really that funny, but his wife's like, You're killing my husband.
Stop it with this movie.
Stop it.
You're killing him.
And he's like, Oh, because I'm pushing so hard, everybody, right?
And there was not enough money.
And so I was like, All right, well, I guess I'll put out Out of the Blue.
And then I sold Out of the Blue to NBC Universal and aired on Sci Fi.
It was, again, just a total coup.
Like I just completely lucked out, right place, right time.
I don't know.
This guy, Larry Landsman at Sci Fi, saw it and he was like, You know, came in at me.
I didn't even have a lawyer, I didn't have an agent.
And I have these like people at acquisitions at NBC Universal ask me, so kid, like, what do you want for your movie?
I'm like, I have no idea.
Like, what I didn't know how to negotiate with any people.
I know what I was doing, you know.
And so I sold it, I sold it, but I sold it reluctantly because I felt like it wasn't the film that I envisioned when I set out.
When you embark on a certain project, you have a vision of how you want something to be, you know, whether you're building a house or designing a bar or doing a podcast, whatever it is.
Excuse me.
And it didn't, it never materialized.
You know what I mean?
Like, I just was unsatisfied when it came out.
So I sold the film.
I did okay.
Probably again, flipping burgers at the end of the day.
You tallied up all the hours.
And about three years after the film came out, I got a letter from NBC Universal and they said they're not going to renew the broadcast option.
So guess what?
I owned the movie again.
So, I was like, well, I'll, I'm going to make a checklist of all the things that I was unhappy about.
I'm going to redo this film.
And I remember at the time, my partner was like, you know, what are you doing?
What are you talking about?
Redo the movie.
We did that movie.
We sold it.
It's done.
I was like, yeah, but it's never the movie I wanted it to be.
So they were like, you're out of your mind.
Okay.
Go sell crazy somewhere else.
We're done.
And so I ended up having to bring in new investors and new partners and to redesign out of the blue and raise more money.
So I made a checklist.
Of things that I wanted to accomplish for the film Out of the Blue to revise it, make a director's cut.
Press Conference And New Funding00:15:36
And that was about 10 people long.
And the ninth one, one was like, I wanted to get more direct eyewitness accounts of the Rendlesham Forest case back in December of 1980 that happened in England at a joint US British air base that housed nuclear weapons that had a UFO land.
It's a fascinating case.
You can look it up, Bentwaters, Rendlesham Forest.
And then there was a very, very compelling close encounter, like a mass sighting that happened in 1997 in March in Arizona.
And it's commonly referred to as the Phoenix Lights.
If you talk to witnesses, they say, don't call it the Phoenix Lights, call it the massive, you know, UFO flyover, because the object was not lights.
It was a massive boomerang shaped object that was from one to two miles across.
And that's something that you wanted to include in that film?
Well, I investigated the case and I did include it in the film.
But in, I think it was like June, the sighting happened on March 13th, 1997.
And then in, I think it was June, there was mounting pressure from, The people from witnesses, it got like a national story.
And the governor of Arizona, the then governor of Arizona, Fife Simonton, was like, You know, we're going to get to the bottom of it.
We're going to find out what it was.
I'm contacting the local Luke Air Force Base and the Pentagon, blah, blah, blah.
Isn't that the guy who walked out of the press conference dressed like an alien or something?
So a couple of hours later, he has one of his aides.
And I was investigating this case when this was all going down.
You know, I was into production on either 50 years or out of the blue, probably out of the blue.
But in any case, I was in.
In deep investigating this case and that little so, so Five Simonton, the governor, then governor, was like, We're going to get to the bottom of it.
And he was serious.
Like, he really was.
You can look at the press conference, it's in out of the blue.
And a couple hours later, he has this unscheduled press conference and he has one of his aides dressed up in an alien suit and makes a joke out of the whole thing.
And I'll tell you, man, the witnesses that all the witnesses that I was talking to, they were pissed.
They're like, I put you in office.
You know, we're your constituents.
How dare you like make fun of us like that?
What's wrong?
You know, and it was.
It was this object was witnessed by a lot of people because everybody was out under the night sky trying to get a glimpse of the Hellbob Comet at the time.
So, and this object flew from the north all the way across to the south of the entire state of Arizona.
It's a fascinating case.
Anyway, my goal was to get Five Simonton on camera and find out, you know, why the hell he did what he did.
Right.
So, and this all takes many, you know, years to do all this stuff.
And so, to my complete astonishment or shock, I got nine out of the 10 objectives done for that film, including an interview with Governor Fife Simington.
He was no longer governor at the time, but I got an interview with the governor, Fife.
Nobody ever got an interview with Fife, right?
So I'm driving down.
I'll never forget it.
I had one of my partners, and he's like, Well, what's Fife going to say?
I said, Who cares what he's going to say?
You know, we got the former governor of Arizona willing to meet with us.
Like, you know.
So on the way down to meet with him in Santa Barbara, he's like, Well, I.
I have a house in Arizona, but I also live in Santa Barbara.
If you want to come down and meet me in Santa Barbara, say that'll be a little easier for me.
So, sure, I'll meet with you.
So, on the way down to meet with the former governor of Arizona, Five Simonton, I pulled the car over the side of the road, got out my pocket tape recorder, and I contacted one of the witnesses, this woman, Stacey Rhodes, who literally was driving on Interstate 10 with her daughter, Emily.
And they got out of the car and they said there were all the cars stopped on both sides.
And it was like maybe seven o'clock in the evening, 6 37, something like this.
And she said that every car on Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson were stopped and they got out of their car and this massive boomerang shaped thing, like this, like a big chevron floating like a city super slowly.
We were just sitting there just looking at it as it floated right over, huge, like a mile.
She goes, If I, excuse me, if she goes, if I held up an opened up newspaper, Like this, directly over my head, I could not have blocked out this craft.
That's how big it was.
Okay.
And a lot of people saw it.
I mean, I interviewed people all across the state of Arizona that saw this thing.
So, in any case, I pulled over.
I was like, You're not going to believe.
And she was furious at the stunt that the governor had pulled.
So I was like, You're not going to believe who I'm going to go meet with right now.
And she's like, Who?
Take a guess.
She couldn't.
I said, Governor Five Simon.
Is there anything you'd like to say to him?
She's like, You're damn right I would.
Like, I said, well, hold on, let me get my tape recorder out.
And so I pressed record and I recorded her statement, and it was directed directly at the governor.
And who better to ask a question than a former constituent of his and witness to the event?
So I get into the interview and I thought, well, I'm not going to like spring this on him right away because I'm worried this guy is going to just, you know, get up and walk out.
So let me get what I can get out of him.
And then when the time is right, I'll put the squeeze on him and I'll.
Do a little bit of an ambush with this, you know.
So, uh, the interview is going great.
He was like, you know, I was, he talked about the reason why he pulled the stunt that he was just trying to find some, like, trying to calm the people down.
A little bit of levity is the word he used.
Didn't mean to, like, make fun of anybody, you know, this kind of thing.
So then I said, Hey, Governor, I've got a little something I'd like to share with you.
It's one of your former constituents and a witness to the event, and she'd like to ask you a question if you don't mind.
He's kind of squirmed in his seat a little bit.
And, you know, he's like, Oh, it's been a while since I've been kind of, you know, ambushed or whatever.
So I press play and she kind of lays into him pretty heavily.
Like, how dare you, like, you know, make fun of all the witnesses?
There were thousands of us.
You know, it was a serious event and we voted you in office and you just, like, you know, left us out to dry.
And the one representative, Frances Barwood, a Sydney councilwoman, you made fun of her when she was just trying to make serious inquiries into the whole thing.
And he, Sat there for a moment and I thought, well, I probably blew it.
He's probably going to get up and leave.
To my amazement, he admits right there that for the first time ever, that he too, as a former Air Force pilot, saw this thing and he knew immediately it was not of this earth.
And he said that because of the sheer size of it, because it was so big, this big V shaped thing.
He said, there's just nothing terrestrial that could be that big and fly that quietly and all this stuff.
And so.
I knew the story was going to be big, but I didn't realize how big.
And that story came out as I wasn't even done yet with the revision of Out of the Blue.
And we were just catapulted all over the headlines.
I was on Larry King seven, eight, nine times.
I was on every talk show, Nightline, Dateline, you name it, right?
Which is great.
I mean, you get in the spotlight a little bit and you can make some moves.
You got a little influence, you know, people are watching you suddenly.
And so.
Uh, I'm probably definitely boring you guys to death.
No, no, not at all.
I'm kidding.
Keep going there.
So, so anyway, because I'm just on this ride, right?
I don't really know where I'm going.
You know, I don't know where this is leading.
I'm, you know, I'm just a curious Joe.
I'm just a guy that really wanted to know what the hell was going on.
Yeah.
You know, and so I was just asking a lot of questions.
And every now and again, I got some traction.
Now I'm in the limelight and I'm on Larry King with the former governor of Arizona.
We were on together.
You know what I mean?
And I'm on all these shows.
I mean, I had like, My phone memory was full.
I mean, I, they were called, everybody was calling me, Jay Leno, like you name it.
So, anyway, I figured, well, hey, let me capitalize on this.
Well, then I decided, God, you know, I might not ever have the spotlight like this again.
I should do something big.
I should capitalize on this moment.
So, I, I, I woke up in the middle of the night and, and I saw this press conference in, I know it sounds crazy.
But I saw this press conference, and I don't think I had like two dimes to rub together at the time.
I think it maybe had like 500 bucks in my bank account, max.
And I had a little room on my credit card.
I was living with my sister at the time.
And I woke up in the middle of the night and I had this dream.
I had this kind of like, I went to school, I just saw this event at the National Press Club where I got military and government officials from all these different countries to come and testify and do this thing, right?
At the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Well, I had the attention of a lot of the media at that point.
I had their numbers in my pockets.
And I think I called my contact at Larry King and I said, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this event.
I didn't give many details and I had no money.
I was like, I'm thinking about doing this event at the National Press Club.
And if I did it, would you guys cover it?
And they said, Yeah, we'll give you a full hour.
I said, Fantastic.
So then I contacted this woman, Leslie Kane, who helped break the story of the New York Times article in 2017.
Right.
Catapulted this whole phenomenon on the front page of the New York Times.
And that was like the secret Pentagon program.
So I contacted Leslie.
This is way years ago.
I said, Leslie, I'm thinking about doing this thing.
And she'd seen me in the news all over the place.
She knew that I had a little traction.
And she was like, Well, hold on.
Well, we got to think about this.
We got to hold on.
We got to strategize.
I don't know.
I need to think about it.
I might need to think for a month or two.
I said, Look, I'm doing this and I'm doing it starting now.
Are you in or are you out?
And she's like, Oh, I can't.
I'm in.
And so, so now all I needed was the money to put the event on.
So then I was like, okay, so now I got the media coverage and now I got this.
Now I need some money.
So I contacted the National Press Club and I booked the ballroom, which is the biggest, most fancy room they had.
And I had to put $500 down to hold it, but it was like, I don't know, thousands of dollars to book it.
So I called the National Press Club that morning and I, Well, we take a $500 deposit.
Well, I had $500 on my credit card.
So I booked it.
And I heard my sister in the other room, she goes, Did you just book the National Press Club?
I was like, Yeah.
She goes, How are you going to afford to ever do that?
I was like, I don't know.
I'll figure it out.
And because I was getting a lot of media coverage that really helped, I was able to buy out my two other partners and bring in new investment.
And for the money that I bought them out, And that I sold their share of the production, the new production, I was able to fund the National Press Club.
In fact, I was a little short.
Somebody ended up sending me some.
My point is that you have an idea, you might not have the resources, but an idea could lead to something big because a lot of people are too scared to go for it.
Because failure is kind of a scary thing, right?
Especially if you're at the poker table and you push all your chips in on one bet.
But I remember at one point having a bit of a meltdown.
And by the way, my father had slowly started to come around during this.
And I took him to a, when I got back from Russia, I went and met with Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper.
Who was an iconic figure of my dad's generation?
He was the last American astronaut to go up in space alone.
And, you know, everybody knew of my dad's generation who Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper was in the right stuff.
And I brought my father along to that interview.
And Gordon Cooper had talked about a landed flying saucer that was filmed at Edwards Air Force Base circa 1965 and how he chased these disks and fighter jets over Germany in the, I think it was late, late.
Late 50s, I think like 57, something like that.
But in any case, my dad was like, God, here's a man whose credibility is on the line.
He's got nothing, he's not getting paid.
He's got everything to lose, nothing to gain.
Why on earth would he make these stories up?
That was a bit of a turning point for him.
And he also saw, you know, some of the success.
And I was, you know, things were really taking off.
And my dad definitely started to more than reconsider.
He became a very big supporter of mine and was very, very excited about what was happening.
It was all just kind of unfolding, you know, as it was happening.
But getting back to the National Press Club event, so we did that.
And I didn't have, I'll share another story since we have the time, I guess.
It's kind of funny.
We didn't have an alternative, a plan B to promote the National Press Club event.
Okay.
It was a big deal.
We were flying in 15 people from seven countries, from all around the world, military, government.
FAA officials, people from Tehran.
I've got a photograph of a fighter pilot in Tehran that had one of the most dramatic encounters with a UFO in 1976 over Tehran, Iran, where he literally tried to fire at the thing.
It blocked up his plane.
He started falling out of the sky.
I'll show you a picture of that in a little bit.
Incredible encounter.
And nobody had ever gotten Parviz Jafari to come to the United States, ever.
And it was right after the Bush administration had called Iran the axis of evil.
So I'm like, Oh, dude, I was like, don't say that.
I'm trying to get a permit, I'm trying to get visas to get this guy over to the States, you know.
Anyway, the time was very like, you know, sketchy.
So we did the National Press Club event, and I was like, I'm gonna make a movie out of this National Press Club event.
I'm gonna film it all in HD, and everyone's like, How are you gonna make a movie about a bunch of old retired guys standing at a podium testifying under the UFO phenomenon?
Right.
I said, Well, Who's the guy?
Al Gore made a PowerPoint presentation on a film, and that, you know, if he can do it, heck, I can do it.
Right.
So I ended up making a whole movie, and I was still in production.
I still hadn't finished production with Out of the Blue, the revised version of Out of the Blue.
But suddenly, this whole new thing came along.
And so I made a film on the National Press Club event that I did with Leslie Kane.
And it's called I Know What I Saw.
And I continued production with that.
But the crazy part was, As I was saying earlier, sorry, I keep going off these tangents.
National Press Club Event Film00:08:06
Is that I never really had the money.
I never, ever had any money up front to do anything I've ever done.
I always kind of found the money because I really believe, and I've lived it, people will see and be inspired by you're going for it, right?
And it's a scary thing to go for it.
It really is because you're shouldering this project.
You don't know the ultimate outcome.
You don't know witnesses you're going to get to come forward or not come forward.
You don't know where your next check's going to come from.
But people will be inspired, particularly when I had some traction in the media.
That really helped.
And they'll be inclined to want to help you and support you.
And so there was this upswell of support coming from this.
I had one guy, I never even met him.
Bless his heart.
I just went to thank him the other day.
I found out he passed.
His name was Joe Bellotti.
Never met the guy.
He goes, I love what you're doing.
He sent me a check for 20 grand.
That was like a million dollars to me.
I mean, I did so much with that money.
Yeah.
And I contacted him recently.
I was like, I'd lost contact with him and I reached out and I, His daughter goes, like, yeah, Joe Bilotti.
Unfortunately, you know, he passed a couple of years.
I was like, oh my God, I never really got to.
Anyway, my point is.
Whoa, man.
So that's crazy.
Yeah.
So then I did, and I could go on till I'm blue in the face.
How many times, you know, people come out of the woodwork to help out and support what you're doing?
Some anonymously, some not.
But then I did, I know what I saw, and I sold, I know what I saw to A.N.E. It was all rather precarious.
And, You know, you've got a gritty do it yourself production.
Things have changed in the last decade and a half a lot.
But I remember finishing the movie, and it was a pretty good movie.
I narrated it the first time I went out from Peter Coyote, and it was a good film.
And Tom DeLong was helping a little bit with the sound.
I recorded some sound in his studio in San Diego.
And, you know, At the end of a production, you're pretty broke, and then you got deliverables.
Deliverables at that time were a nightmare.
You had to like you had to produce standard def, high def version, short version, long version, uh, audio stems this side, that side, independent textless version, texted version.
Oh my god!
And I had to do it on digi beta tapes.
Digi beta tapes, I was like, What the hell am I doing these on digi beta tapes?
You guys are going to digitize this stuff anyway, it's already digitized.
Like, what are you doing?
And it was like the last year or two that they did that stupid process.
It was a nightmare and it cost so much money every time.
And I kept failing the delivery process.
Black levels have to be a certain this.
And they're very, the AE had very high standards of like deliverables.
And it was like, you know, super expensive process to do these digi beta tapes and everything.
So I failed the first two attempts.
And then my financial backer said, We're not putting another penny into this movie.
I was like, We have a sale right now for half a million dollars online.
Right now, you mean to tell me you're not going to put another dime into this thing?
My really good friend had just died, left me with this fancy BMW.
So I pawned that car to pay for the last round.
And I literally contacted the guys at the acquisitions department at AE.
And I was at the end of my rope.
I had nothing to lose.
And I was pretty much arguing with them, right?
I was like, look, man, this is not a high-def production on the beauty of the Grand Canyon.
What the hell is wrong with you guys?
Like, it's never going to be.
It's a gritty, do-it-yourself documentary, but look at the content.
And it was shot over like a long period of time.
And I got archival footage and there's different frame rates.
And who cares?
Like, And I was like, oh God, maybe I went a little far with this stuff.
I was like, oh God, I was like kind of silent on the phone.
I was like, I got a half million dollars and I was so broke.
And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got a point.
You got a point.
Okay, I'll tell you what.
I'll let these three things go, which I could have never fixed.
I need you to do this, this, and this.
And if you do that, we got a deal.
So I went back to the drawing board and I went into the production facility that was making the tapes and I sat there with them.
They're like, you know, our clients don't usually sit and look over our shoulders and look at the black levels and know this and that.
And I said, look, buddy, I can't afford to do this one more time.
This is it.
So I need to get this right.
And so they made an exception and I looked over, you know, Send the tapes off.
I mean, it was like 15 grand or something.
Send the tapes off back east.
And I barely made the FedEx.
It was so precarious.
Oh my God.
People had no idea.
So precarious.
What was the biggest difference between.
So, anyway, so the last one I'll finish.
Yeah.
So the next morning or two mornings later, I get a phone call.
I was driving my car.
I look down.
It's 212.
I was like, oh God, that's Amy.
I pulled my car over.
Mr. Fox, how are you doing?
This is so and so with acquisitions.
I was like, well, I don't really know how I'm doing.
Once you tell me, he goes, You passed.
And so, you know, so I know what I saw, you know, I sold that and then that went out.
And it just kind of, but I was never satisfied with a production of mine since the early concept in the 90s when I was like, I'm going to do the feature length documentary on the topic of UFOs.
It's going to like transcend into the mainstream.
I wasn't satisfied until I did the Phenomenon.
When I finished that, I cried and I was like, I did it.
It took me like years and years, but I did it.
Excuse me.
So you released the Phenomenon in 2020, right?
At the end of 2020, yes.
What's the biggest difference in your experience from creating these films in the 90s compared to now, right now?
Because obviously there's a ton of resistance, right?
There's a ton of friction with the whole topic, especially when it comes to different secret levels of government.
People not being wanted to be associated with the stigmas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How is the whole world around this topic changed?
So I used to get laughed at all the time to the point where if I go to a cocktail party, I tell people I was with, don't tell them what I do.
I don't want to spend the night defending myself.
I'm not interested.
And I'm out here to like prophesize and get people to join my cult of believers.
I really don't care.
And so that is what I was used to.
You know, I was used to being laughed at and ridiculed and made fun of.
And there was like, You know, a few people that might quietly kind of behind the scenes, like, oh, is there really something to that?
You know what I mean?
Or I have a friend that claimed they saw something.
That all changed December 2017.
When the new, and I had no idea, I was like three or four years into production with the phenomenon.
Of course, I didn't have a title for it at that point, but I was three or four years into production and I was kind of struggling for financing.
You know, a lot of times with making a dock, I'll get.
You know, funding and then it'll, it takes me so long, it'll, like, that funding will dry up.
Then I got to go find more funding.
Well, right around the time when the New York Times revealed the secret Pentagon UFO program, that changed everything because it wasn't just the fact that they revealed this secret Pentagon UFO program, but they also revealed or released evidence.
That was the cockpit recordings of those UFOs, you know, and then you had slowly the pilots coming out, right?
And, That really, and then you have the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid talking about how he initiated this with a couple of other senators.
And like they gave the contract to Bigelow.
And anyway, this whole thing had come out.
And I had people from all around the world apologizing to me.
I'm not kidding you, man.
Like, we're so sorry we made fun of you for so long.
Close Encounters Change Everything00:14:42
Wow.
I guess there really is something to this.
It really changed.
It really changed everything.
That front page of the New York Times.
Sorry, I got to wipe my nose.
Yeah, yeah.
So, the difference in terms of perception, I think the phenomenon, the film, and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but.
But I guess I can pat myself on the back.
I was terrified.
So there are three categories of UFO sightings, according to Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who investigated UFOs in an official capacity.
He was a scientific advisor to Project Blue Book.
Project Blue Book ran from 47 to 69, someplace 70, but they announced its closing in 69.
They investigated 12,000 UFOs.
This is the United States Air Force.
They investigated 12,618 cases, out of which 701 remained unidentified.
And remind me about that number.
I'll explain the relevancy with that number to the report that came out yesterday on the Hill.
Okay.
So that's a very stubborn, small percent.
So Dr. Hynek broke them down into three categories close encounters of the first kind, it's when someone claims to see a UFO.
Close encounter of the second kind.
They see a UFO, and somehow this UFO interacts with the environment, whether it leaves a burnt mark on the ground or the radiation affects someone's face within certain proximity, burns soil samples, leaves, trees, bushes, whatever.
That's close encounter of the second kind.
Okay.
Close encounter of the third kind is when the witness reports allegedly beans.
Entities associated with the UFO.
That's close encounter of the third kind.
So the phenomenon for the first time in all the films that I'd ever made dealt with close encounters of the third kind alleged beings.
And it's very different between objects in the sky and beings on the ground.
Yeah.
It was a big, big difference, right?
Because you could talk about Russia or China all you want, but when you talk about beings on the ground, that's just a game changer.
I'm going to get to the relevance of what the close encounters of the first, second, and third kind.
So, all the history I'd done, I did 50 Years of Denial, which I sold to Discovery.
I did Out of the Blue version one, Out of the Blue version two.
I did I Know What I Saw.
I never, ever dealt with close encounters of the third kind where the witness report, they report seeing beings associated with the craft.
Okay.
I felt like a slippery slope.
And boy, that's kind of a difficult one to kind of swallow.
Yeah.
With the phenomenon, I. Went for it.
And honestly, I was terrified because I had high level government and intelligence officers in the film, several of which, including the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, refused to sign a release form until they got to see the movie.
Oh.
Wow.
I don't blame them.
Right.
So I got a movie that starts in Alabama in the 50s and it ends in Africa of an alleged landing of a UFO.
Multiple UFOs and the occupants getting out in broad daylight with 100 witnesses and interacting telepathically with these witnesses.
That's just nuts, right?
I mean, come on.
Like, I thought the Harry Reid's and the Podestas and all the other intelligence people that are in my movie, the New York Times, like, take us out of the movie.
I was terrified.
Nobody had ever done up with a mainstream reporting with all that and dealt with alleged close encounters of the third kind.
That's just such a game changer because you can no longer like talk about whether it's Russia or whether it's a drone or whether we're talking beings.
Right.
And these beings look very different than a human.
Right.
In fact, if you want, I've got some illustrations I could do.
Yeah, no, we'll definitely get into that.
But anyway, my point is that that was the first film, The Phenomenon, where I broke through to a much broader mainstream audience.
And not only that, but we dealt with, we reported on very compelling close encounters of the third kind.
Yeah, the stigma, when you talk about the stigma associated with just UFO sightings or encounters of the first and the second kind, right.
It's definitely been largely erased by the New York Times article.
But there's obviously still a lot of it when it comes to actual creatures or beings being reported.
To you, actually, before we get into that, let's talk about the Hill.
Yeah, the latest news that just came out yesterday regarding the Hill.
And I also want to ask about what you know about the new bill that was passed to protect whistleblowers.
It's to maybe you can find it.
It's a, it's a, the, we'll talk about that after, but it's the new bill that was passed to protect whistleblowers of private organizations that are working on some of these secret programs.
For example, in Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, whatever it might be.
They've been talking about basically giving people immunity that can come forward and share government secrets without fear of prosecution because a violation of National Security Act, I think it is.
But backing up for a moment.
So, I read the article that came out, I think it was yesterday in the Hill Vice.
And I thought I interpreted it fairly well.
But then I reached out to Lou Elizondo, who ran the ATIP program at the Pentagon, just to be sure, because we go back, we text things back and forth, and I share stuff with him and vice versa.
So, he was, for people who don't know who he is, the head of the ATIP program.
So, it was Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
It was the program at the Pentagon, the secret UFO program that ended up on the front page of the New York Times.
And you see all the little UFOs that came out with it.
So, let me read you the text that he sent me.
Yeah.
Because, and I'll explain this.
Okay.
For the first time in recent history, our Congress is focusing on UFOs in a non prosaic manner, meaning, if it turns out that a particular incident, a product of man made process or technology, Then the UAP JPO, I have to look up what the JPO is, will not continue to study it.
Only those phenomena that fall outside the category and are truly anomalous will be focused.
So basically, what he's saying is you've got a select committee, right?
And they're saying, I talked earlier about the 701 cases that ended up in the unidentified category that were investigated from the Air Force out of 12,618.
So that's that very stubborn, small percentage of cases.
To what the select committee is saying, we're only going to look at stuff that's non human.
All the other stuff we have no interest in investigating.
So, by them saying that, they're admitting that a small percentage of UFOs, we're not trying to find out if all UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin, right?
It's are any of them, because it only takes one or two, right?
So, they're saying we're only interested in that core 10 or 15% of truly unidentifiable cases, like the non human cases.
So, it's basically them saying, without directly saying, that a small percentage of UFOs are not of.
Earthly origin or not of human, right?
You know, or not man made, and they changed it to where they they talk, they're now talking about being transmedium to where they're like they're they're uh aerospace and submersible, yeah.
They can go crafts, they can operate in outer space, they can operate in the atmosphere, and they can operate underwater, and they can do all three simultaneously, yeah.
And this is new.
This is something that the commander David Fravor was talking about.
The thing was hovering about.
There's videos of the crafts that are hovering above the water, then disappear.
Peering into the ocean.
And that's something that hasn't really, I don't think the New York Times article talked much about the underwater aspect of it, but the underwater aspect of it to me is fascinating.
Unbelievable.
I mean, look, I went and I got to interview Fravor.
I got to meet a lot of people, you know, for the phenomenon.
And the videos that have been released are pretty impressive.
But the videos that I'm told that people have seen that I've spoken to that have not been released are just like, You know, more in focus.
They exhibit, they'll exhibit like a flight characteristic.
Like, for instance, there's one out right now called the Go Fast.
According to people that I've talked to, you see the Go Fast, and the guy likes trying to, he's trying to get his radar on it.
He goes, I got him, I got him.
And he finally gets it as it's screaming across the top of the ocean, right?
The Go Fast.
You can look up Go Fast.
But apparently, that video is much longer.
And then it does a 90 degree angle turn and then shoots off the screen.
So there's that.
The famous tic tac that David Fravor had talked about, where it's like stationary and the jets flying towards it and then it shoots off to one side.
That was in 2004, the Nimitz UFO encounter.
That apparently, according to David Fravor and others, there's a much higher resolution version of that one.
Somehow that has not been released.
There's stuff that underwater, I mean, I've, I just heard some incredible stories.
In fact, I've been hearing incredible stories for decades about video and photographic evidence that has yet to see the light of day.
And when I got to meet with the guy who spearheaded the ATIP program, who was former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, which I had to pinch myself that I was in the same room with the guy, he confirmed on camera, which was a very, very big gotcha moment in the phenomenon where he says, I said, wait a minute, are you suggesting that the.
There's a lot of evidence that hasn't been released to the public, and he says, I'm telling you that most of the evidence has yet to see the light of day.
So, some intelligence or agency I don't know who's in charge is sitting on the most compelling.
I know this because I've talked to the witnesses that have either handed the evidence over or that they've seen the evidence, they've seen the video and photographic evidence.
So, one of my objectives moving forward is.
Is locating that footage and locating who has the authority to release it because that would be it's one thing to talk about the reality of the phenomenon, it's another to start, you know, they've got all the sensors for them to start, you know, releasing it into the general public.
Right.
Another thing is Al Putoff, who was the head of, I think, what was he?
He was the senior advisor of ATIP, which was at Bigelow Airspace.
The guy, Al Putoff, older guy, yeah.
He talks about.
The same thing, except that what happens is a lot of this technology, a lot of this information that's being held is in the hands of private agencies.
That way, it's protected by FOIA, by the Freedom of Information Act.
So people can't go to the government and request these records because they're held by these private entities, like whatever it might be, like Lockheed Martin or.
So that's a very, very good point.
And I sort of organically came to that conclusion because.
Well, I'll give an example.
This book right here, okay.
This is a briefing document that was sponsored.
If you could see it, it's a briefing document that was paid for and sponsored by Lawrence Spellman Rockefeller.
It was done during the Clinton administration.
And he was, this is a briefing document for world leaders to bring them up to speed on the most compelling aspects that, you know, that 5% or 10% of truly inexplicable UFO cases.
This book features a lot of the really best ones.
And in it, he, during making this, during putting this whole thing together, he was putting significant pressure on the Clinton administration.
In fact, he even said to Clinton, You either going to go after the UFO phenomenon, or I'm going to expose the fact that you're not willing to do this.
I know this.
I have inside information.
This has definitely happened.
Or I'll publish on the front page of everything.
And UFOs were kind of getting a little bit of traction because you had the.
50th anniversary coming up for the Roswell.
You know, there had been some reports coming out.
There was the Bob Lazar thing.
You know, people were talking UFOs in the early 90s, early mid 90s.
So ultimately, what they concluded was he said, Okay, President Clinton said, Okay, give me a case.
What case should we go after?
And Rockefeller said, Roswell.
So they went after Roswell, the administration.
They've got, I cover some of this in the phenomenon, but they went after Roswell.
And At the end of the day, they concluded that the hard evidence had gone out to these subcontractors.
So, these outside companies that were free from oversight.
So, when the government says we don't have it, they really don't.
Government Hand On Roswell Files00:15:52
They really don't have it.
It could be like, let's just say, Boeing or Lockheed Martin or one of these companies.
They are outside of oversight from members of Congress and presidential reach.
Because people go, well, the president has access to everything.
Well, actually, he doesn't.
Because if it's outside, I guess, or if you don't know about it, he said, President Clinton said he was not happy with the answers he was getting.
So, and you know, you hear the same thing.
I mean, President Jimmy Carter had said that Gerald Ford had gone, you know, I talked to Gerald Ford.
I interviewed Jimmy Carter very briefly at a book signing where he was basically like, we went after it, but we weren't getting the answers.
Who else was, well, I'm sure Bush knew.
Probably quite a bit because he was head of the CIA.
I don't know about Bush Jr.
But yeah, I definitely have definitely concluded from all the people that I've talked to that presidents do not have access.
And I don't know who does, to be honest with you.
I'm not sure what agency does.
I wish I did know.
You know, I'd like to know.
Yeah, it almost seems like it's obvious that some of these private aerospace companies are holding evidence or material, physical material that's not available to academia or the public, obviously.
Mm hmm.
Which I think it makes it, which shows one of the reasons for stuff like this Congress having the bill to the Whistleblower Act to protect the people who work in those companies to shine light on it or make it public.
But at the same time, it seems like those people would be hard for them to do it because they would just be sacrificing their career.
Also, think of it this way How do they benefit by sharing what they have with the general public?
How do they benefit?
Right?
Like, you have to reveal your vulnerabilities and the things that you don't know in order to reveal what you do know.
Because as soon as you start talking about these, I mean, just think about it.
If the president of the United States tomorrow said, you know, my fellow Americans, it's been brought to my attention that we have structured craft of unknown origin.
Whizzing around with impunity in our airspace.
We don't know.
They fly rings around our fastest jets.
They exhibit a technology that's light years advanced from what we have.
We don't know who they are, where they come from, or what they want.
Thank you and good night.
I mean, that's honestly what I believe.
I believe that they know that the phenomenon's real.
I believe they have hardware and bodies.
Mm hmm.
But does that mean they have all the answers?
Does that mean that they understand whatever the agenda could be of whoever these people are?
Right.
Uh, that we know where they come from.
Are they interdimensional?
Do they live under the ocean?
Are they interplanetary?
Are they time travelers?
Are they all the above?
I have no idea.
Do they know?
I mean, they got more answers than we do, but they might not have a whole lot more.
So they might be opening up a can of worms.
There are people.
Right now, fearful of what the level of transparency, and don't get me wrong, what's been happening since 2017 is unprecedented.
It really is.
But remember, somebody forced the government's hand.
The former intelligence guy, Christopher Mellon, who's friends with Lou Elizondo, who ran the ATIP program, they walked those tapes out of the Pentagon.
Granted, they found a loophole.
That they didn't necessarily like violate the law.
They took advantage of that loophole, but they kind of like bend the rules a little bit, right?
Those tapes came out of the Pentagon and they went onto the front page of the New York Times.
That was kind of forcing the government's hand.
They can't put the genie back in the bottle.
So there are people that want this out, and there are other people that do not want this out.
And they don't want it out for fear of like, A, they've been lying to us all these years.
But B, it exposes their vulnerabilities.
It exposes our vulnerabilities.
Just imagine for a moment, like I said earlier, if there really were these unknown objects that could just fly rings around our fastest jets, they turn off our nuclear weapons, turn them on, turn them off, mostly turn them off.
Yeah.
Right.
They whiz off at an unbelievable rate of speed.
And we don't know who they are, where they come from, whether here.
Like, that's a little unnerving to release to the general public, wouldn't you think?
I'm not saying that your audience to believe what I'm telling you or not.
Just imagine if that's the case.
You can kind of see a justification for secrecy, right?
Not that you agree with it.
I don't agree with it.
I don't care how scary it is.
I want to know the truth.
Right.
Let us all know the truth.
We're all entitled to it.
Let's let's know this.
Do you think it's possible that one of these private aerospace companies has some sort of have figured out in any capacity anti gravity or anything like that?
Some of these projects that Bob Lazar was talking about.
Do you think it's possible that they have some of this technology and aren't letting other scientists in academia know about it?
I think that they have the technology, and I didn't just believe that overnight.
I mean, it didn't just like it was a very slow process for me because I am.
Believe it or not, I'm actually quite skeptical.
A lot of the cases that I cover, like my new film, Moment of Contact, we'll talk about that a little later, which is the UFO crash case that happened in 1996 in Brazil.
I didn't believe that for over 10 years when I heard about it.
I didn't believe in the Rua case, the landing in Africa.
Absolutely didn't believe it.
I wouldn't even look into it.
I was like, there's no way that that happened.
So the fact that I believe that crashes have happened and bodies and debris have been recovered was a very slow process.
Process for me, it was witnesses after witness after witness after document after intelligence person I've talked to.
Like, I finally was like, There's more evidence to suggest that it happened than it didn't happen, and that clearly went somewhere, right?
I've even asked, you know, I jokingly ask, I always kind of do it with a smile on my face, but I'll say, All right, hey, you know, to some intelligence guy that I'm talking with, all right, so here we go.
All right, here we go.
I want to know where the bodies are.
We'll get that.
Let's talk about that first.
And then we can get over to the debris.
Like, where do they hide the bodies?
Right.
Everybody has a good laugh.
And I think they kind of know that they are being hidden somewhere.
But it sounds like crazy talk.
I know.
We were talking about it last night.
The bodies from Roswell are apparently in the Air Force Base in Florida.
Yes.
And I've also heard California, too.
Maybe they go back and forth.
I don't know.
But that was in the 70s.
Right.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
The 70s is the story when Jackie Gleason and Nixon went to go see the Air Force Base.
Yes.
How did that story go?
Well, so.
Because I've heard it before, but nobody seems to know the whole story.
Okay.
So, a really good friend of mine, a guy who's very high up in the entertainment industry, who's been very instrumental in getting my foot in the door with some executives over the years to help me out.
His name is Jeff Sagansky.
And.
One day, quite a while ago, actually, I was doing what I saw.
I said, Jeff, you're so nice to me.
Like, why are you helping me?
You're this top executive, you're a gazillionaire, you know.
Why are you helping me?
I'm just this little guy, like this little independent guy.
And he goes, You know, James, I was friends with Jackie Gleason.
And Jackie Gleason told me one time, Jeff, don't ever believe anyone that tells you that UFOs are not real.
I had 100% definitive proof.
Excuse me, whether he saw it or shown it, but he was somewhat nebulous as to exactly what happened.
But he said, don't ever believe anything.
This event's happened.
UFOs are real.
They're here.
It's a fact.
So he said he always remembered that encounter with Gleason when he told me that.
And when he saw this independent guy, myself, just striving to get the word out and find out what's going on, he always offered a helping hand.
He was always really helpful.
Then I think it was like maybe about two years after Jackie Gleason died, his wife came forward and said that one night he came home.
In the early 70s, from a meeting with Nixon at a Florida military base.
Yeah.
You know, the one Homestead.
Yeah.
Homestead.
Right, the tip of Florida.
And that his eyes were wide and his face was white.
And he said, I was just shown entities from a crash in New Mexico.
And they're floating in some fluid or something at the Air Force Base.
That's what his wife came up with.
Now, you know, that's probably what Gleason was referring to, I would imagine.
When he met with Jeff Sagansky and told him that, I would imagine, right?
If he had that level of confirmation, that's what he said to Jeff.
He didn't say to Jeff, you know, Nixon showed me the bodies.
Right.
He just said, I had definitive proof.
Like, there's no, don't ever believe anyone tell you otherwise.
They're absolutely here.
It's a fact.
That's what he said to Jeff Sagansky.
And so when his wife came out with that, that's probably what happened.
Do you get the feeling that a lot of, when you talk to a lot of these people that you interview that, Obviously, there's people who worked in the government and worked on some of these top secret programs.
Do you get the feeling that they're holding things back, a lot of things back sometimes, where they're talking to you?
Because obviously, there's times where you're talking to people like witnesses who aren't tied to anything and they're just talking to you freely, they're just having a conversation with you.
But then there's people you talk to who are influenced by organizations and it's a different kind of conversation.
Yeah.
I'll give you an example.
This is kind of funny.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to, as an intelligence person.
We're putting together this.
He was helping me put together some language for something I was doing.
And he said, No, no, no, change that wording.
And I said, Okay, why?
It was like, I don't know if I said like extraterrestrial or if I said alien or otherworldly.
I can't remember exactly how I phrased it.
And he said, No, no, no, no, delete that, change it, make it to this.
And I said, Okay, sure.
Why?
He goes, Well, they might be living under our oceans.
And I was like, Okay, can you elaborate a little bit?
He's like, No.
What?
That's what he said.
I swear to God.
Yeah, that's what he said.
Hey, where did this guy work?
He was an intelligence guy.
I'll leave it at that.
Okay.
He definitely would be in a position to know, certainly, you know.
But that's all he said was like, They might be living under the ocean.
They might be living in our oceans.
Yeah.
They might be.
They didn't say they did or they did or didn't.
They say they might, but he was so nonchalant about it.
He was just like, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, Robert Bigelow.
Yes.
We talked about him last night.
Yeah.
So I did, I know what I saw.
Now your audience knows a little bit about my history.
So you'll have a reference when I tell you this.
When I finished, I know what I saw.
And it was based on that event I did at the National Press Club, which was a pretty credible civilian effort at the time.
It was like, You know, you have all these retired military and government officials and pilots and FAA officials from seven countries.
We had Chile, we had Iran, France, Belgium, England, um, uh, anyway, uh, Peru.
Um, it was incredible, it was incredible listening to these like officials from all these, you know, I was, it was, it was credible.
It was a pretty credible civilian effort to get this stuff out.
I, the film comes out and, uh, I get an email from, which I showed you last night.
I get an email from, um, Robert Bigelow, he's in aerospace.
He's designing these.
He's a billionaire.
He lives in Nevada and he has contracts with the United States Air Force dating back God knows how long, decades, where any reports, any pilot reports, things of that nature of UFOs all go to Robert Bigelow's.
You know, he had like a think tank, NIDS, and his organization.
It was like, how could the civilian be getting a contract with the government on UFOs?
What?
You know, and um, he's also working at one point with uh, with uh, um, Tesla, uh, Elon Musk.
With uh, I guess he was trying to use Elon Musk's rockets to put his habitable, inflatable uh, zones up into space because they're lightweight.
Oh, really?
Anyway, I'm not sure what that whatever happened with that effort, but in any case, he's a high profile guy, he was on 60 Minutes, so he sends me an email or his secretary.
Mr. Bigelow has a message he wants to pass along.
He watched your film, I Know What I Saw, and he wants to congratulate you on a job well done.
I was like, damn, Bigelow reached out to me?
Like, whatever, Bigelow.
So I emailed back, thank you so much.
Would he be willing to get together for dinner or lunch or something?
And yes.
So I was like, well, I'm going to go meet Bigelow.
Why not?
Right?
I mean, the guy is like, he's gotten all the contracts.
Now, what was really funny was, I didn't realize this till later.
Robert Bigelow at the time was actually, and I'm convinced of this, he was fishing to see what my next move was going to be.
He wanted to know what I was up to because he was asking me, like, oh, what's your next thing?
You know, maybe I'd finance it.
You know, he just wanted to know.
He wasn't going to finance anything I wanted to do.
He just wanted to know.
And I'm pretty sure of that.
But I said to him at one point, I was like, well, you know, what side, whose side are you on?
Because every case that I'm looking into, particularly the case of the United States and international cases too.
I get people saying, oh, well, Bigelow's organization came and took all that evidence.
And I kept hearing that.
It's like, so what are you doing with all this evidence and stuff?
Anyway, he says, James, do you, before I say this, I'm just going to say that this guy, I guess, legitimately is in a position to know a lot more than I know.
Who Are You Really Supporting00:08:24
Okay.
Particularly at that time, he had the government contracts, he had the contacts, he had the intellectual heavyweights in the scientific community all working for him.
This guy definitely knows a lot, no question.
And so he says, James, do you understand the implications of disclosure?
And I said, I'm not really giving it too much thought.
Why?
He goes, Meaning the implications of disclosure.
This story really came out.
Okay.
So I was like, and to be honest with you, yeah, sure.
I guess I thought about it.
I mean, it didn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
We're not alone.
Great.
You know what I mean?
All right, all right.
Thought about thinking about it every day.
I don't think anybody just thinks that we're alone in the universe anymore, anyway, but they're coming here.
He said, he said, he, and I just need to really emphasize this to everybody out there so you understand what I'm telling you.
I'm not saying I believe what I'm about to tell you, okay?
I need to see more evidence.
I'm not saying I don't believe it, right?
But I don't just believe something because someone told me that.
I need to see supporting evidence.
I need to hear testimony.
I need a lot more.
What's taking me as long as it has with all the other cases that I investigate?
I don't just like to believe a case.
Okay.
So Robert Bigelow said to me, They're walking among us.
I said, What do you mean they're walking among us?
He said, They're walking among us.
They live right here, kind of thing.
So again, I'm looking at him going, I need to see, I'd like to see some proof of that.
Right.
But then he said, We've done studies.
We've done extensive studies on the impacts of this story would have on the general population globally.
And I said, Okay.
Well, like, what was the kind of studies?
He goes, Well, you take Iran, Contra, and you take all these other like super big scandals, and you multiply those, every one of them that's ever happened in the history of mankind, in modern history, and then you multiply that by a million, and that's the impact.
According to our studies, that this reality would have on the general public.
He said the economy would collapse, organized religion would collapse, and he just rattled off all that.
Like, again, I'm not saying that I believe this, I'm just telling you what he said to me.
How could you possibly conduct a study on that?
I could see how you could gather, you could collect data on individuals, but how could you?
Possibly do a study on an entire civilization or a large group of people.
Like, how would you do that?
That's what he told me.
That's what he told me.
I mean, look, it would have an impact.
There's no question it would have an impact.
And it probably would affect religion, right?
Because why am I going to work?
Why the fuck am I paying taxes?
Why am I?
You know?
And it's like, I remember having this conversation with the sixth man to walk on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, and he goes, you know, This story is just part of the bigger picture.
Let it out.
People should know about it.
People should be okay.
He goes, You know, you still have to take out the garbage.
You still got to pay your mortgage or your rent.
You know, that was kind of funny.
Every time I take the garbage out, I feel like, you know, I believe we're not alone in the universe and it's being covered up from us, but I still got to take my garbage out.
Imagine also, imagine the kind of power you must feel holding on to that information that would, you're holding something that could potentially.
Alter humankind.
Yes.
Alter the mindset of every one of our species on earth.
Yeah.
And that could probably change the trajectory of where we go, how we evolve, et cetera.
Like if you hold on to that information, how does that affect your ego?
I literally just interviewed a guy.
I get goosebumps on my arms talking about this because it's just crazy because I believe it.
Who drove a being.
Called a creature or being, or they called it kind of ET on that UFO crash case in Varginha, Brazil in 1996.
And I said to him, You have a level of confirmation that only a handful of people on this planet have.
What does that feel like?
Because I wanted to know.
You know, he's got serious as a heart attack.
And he was not out there trying to get an interview with anybody.
We were chasing him down for years.
And it was like all the money in the world of never coming forward.
And the stars lined up and we had like a.
36 hour window where we managed to get this guy on camera.
But I asked him that question You have a level of confirmation.
You know, definitively, you drove this thing around.
What does that feel like?
And he responded like it was more of a burden than anything else.
That it's actually kind of ruined his life.
The level of secrecy.
He gets phone calls from the base that ask him, Hey, how are you doing?
How's your family doing?
You guys having a good time?
Did you move yet or are you still in the same spot?
Right.
Great, great.
I'm glad your family's doing good.
I'm glad you're doing good.
Any change of plans, let us know that those kind of calls he gets all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, the main difference between people like the people you interviewed in Brazil who were a part of the Virginia case and people like Bigelow is Bigelow's a powerful, rich and powerful guy who probably has a lot of leverage in government.
Like, I'm sure if he chose one day on his, whether it be just because he was in the right mood or because he was on his deathbed, whatever, if he chose to release that information, I'm sure he could do it and wouldn't have to suffer any kind of crazy repercussions.
Maybe I'm wrong.
But the guys that are in Brazil, like, literally, they're dealing with the threats of military and government threatening their families.
I feel like it's a little bit different.
I feel like Bigelow's in a position of, I hold on to this mad, like, it's like this piece of magic that he's holding, this power.
The power to change the world.
Yeah.
For me, I feel like Bigelow is selfish.
Yeah.
Because when I met with, I think I might have called him later as well a couple of times.
I can't remember, but I said to him, whose side are you on?
You know, and I was serious because like everything that I do, I do to share everything that I uncover with the rest of the world.
That's why I do what I do.
I honestly and firmly believe that every man, woman, and child on this planet is entitled to this information.
I believe that with all my heart.
And it pisses me off, quite frankly, that someone feels that we are not worthy of knowing this, that we can't handle it or that we don't deserve it or something.
You know what I mean?
So it's like when I see someone of his stature, he's got resources, man.
That guy's a billionaire.
I'm like a squirrel trying to get a nut out in this compared to a guy like that.
And then the fact that he's hoarding it all.
And it's under armed guard in a vault at his house, like, or his whatever, his office.
It kind of pisses me off a little bit.
I'm like, what?
What?
Wait a minute.
What?
What?
How are you?
Does he have an agreement with the government?
So he has to do that?
Or is he just being like selfish and doesn't want to share the results of his, you know, work and investigation with the general public?
Because he's like, feels like he's better.
I don't know what the hell he's thinking, but I share everything.
The only thing I don't generally share is stuff that I know.
Billionaire Hoarding Secret Evidence00:05:11
For sure, beyond a shadow of doubt, that I'm going to be looked at like a crazy guy because I've looked at myself as a crazy guy.
You know, I can't tell you enough.
Like, I'm putting my credibility on the line for this Virginia case, okay?
Because you got this.
And I'll say right up front I honestly, sincerely, and unequivocally do not expect any of your audience to believe any of this without looking at the testimony.
In other words, don't believe a word coming out of my mouth because I heard about this case decades ago.
I heard about it within a year or two of it happening.
And you wrote it off?
I dismissed it like that.
I was like, no way a UFO crashed and the beans survived and we're walking through the town.
No way.
No way.
In fact, I dismissed it for 10 years.
Let's see.
No.
No.
I dismissed it in 97.
I wouldn't look into it for one second.
Not one second.
In 97, 98, 99, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
13 years.
Okay.
So 2011, I was going to Brazil on a completely another.
I was going to give a presentation on one of the films I'd done.
Probably, I know what I saw or something.
And my buddy Jeff Sagansky, the guy I was telling you about earlier who met with Jackie Gleason, he goes, Oh, you're going to Brazil?
You got to look into the Virginia case.
And I was like, You mean the one where the UFO crashed and the aliens survived and walked into the town?
I go, Sure, Jeff, I'll look into that.
Click.
I wrote my cell phone.
And I had no intentions looking into it.
I told him I might have said I would.
I'm not looking into that.
I'm not wasting my time on that case.
So I get to Brazil, and this is 2011.
And totally accidentally, completely like inadvertently, I met some witnesses from, they were happy to be at the conference that I was at and talked to them a little bit about it.
A little bit.
I was like, huh?
Okay.
Interesting.
Kind of believed them a little bit.
So I went back in 2012 and I thought, maybe there's something here.
And I was knocking on doors and really chasing it.
I mean, I went down to downtown Virginia, Brazil.
Virginia is in the state of Minas Gerais, which is about four or five hours north of Sao Paulo.
In Sao Paulo, everyone, myself, used to think I included the capital of Brazil, but it's actually Brasilia, which is way to the north.
But Sao Paulo is like the big city, right?
And second time around, I was like, wow, hmm, maybe there really is something to this.
And then I went a third time, and then I went a fourth time.
And then ultimately I made the film, and now I'm absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt, fully, completely convinced that a UFO crashed.
In January of 1996, and that the beans, some of the beans survived and were captured by the authorities and witnessed by civilians in the town of Virginia, Brazil.
And the film is complete now?
Totally done.
And you started working on it how many years ago?
Well, it started like actually making the film.
I know you've been researching it for a long time.
So if you look at it from when I started researching to the completion, it's probably 10 or 11 years.
10 or 11 years.
Yeah, but in actual, in terms of like, Production, like go there, boots on ground.
We're going to do this.
But all that prep work went into it.
That was just less than a year.
Absolutely mind bending film.
For full disclosure, I watched it Monday night and it had me completely in a chokehold the whole time I was watching it.
I did not look up once.
Maybe we should show the trailer before we go deeper into it.
Can you pull the trailer for it for a moment of contact?
This trailer took, I think, three months to make, maybe a bit more.
In 1996, the people of Virginia, Brazil, witnessed a UFO event that would change their lives forever.
So, he planeava, he was at the same altitude, he was caming.
He called another Rothwall, if you will.
It was a crashed vehicle that had beings on board.
But that they didn't admit the truth.
A population enters in collapse.
Virginia Brazil UFO Incident00:09:33
None of us has to say.
Finally, the facts will be revealed.
The Virginia case is considered the most well kept secret in the military circles of Brazil.
My objective here is to put some clarity on what happened in Virginia, Brazil, January 1996.
Two seres extraterrestres were captured and then, posteriormente, were levied to hospital.
The witnesses are some of the most complete.
My name is Carlos de Souza.
My name is Cato Xavier.
My name is Liliane Silva.
My name is Valkyrie Silva.
In 1996, I saw a lot of people in this town had a little piece of the puzzle.
This year, Mark Richardson captured this creature with his bare hands.
This year, Mark Richardson captured this creature with his bare hands.
After he captured the creature, he developed this infection that wouldn't go away.
This can no longer be covered up.
They might shoot us because we're on the property.
This can't be denied.
This was proof.
We pulled this off.
It would be the most compelling testimony.
Revealed of contact.
This is a level of confirmation that only a handful of people on this planet have.
Dun dun dun.
Fascinating trailer.
His first mistake turned out to be his last.
What a fucking compelling voice he has, man.
So good.
One of the most unique voices ever.
I know.
I was a little, little worried.
Again, I'm pushing the envelope.
Make sure you turn the USB channel down again.
It's good.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm pushing the envelope a little on the comfort level of those around me because you're dealing with like, I know how I looked at the case.
And I looked at the case when I first heard about it, the Virginia case.
I dismissed it so quickly.
I told you earlier, like, I know how other people are going to react when they hear, sure, a UFO crash.
Sure, the bean survived.
Yeah.
You know, because that's how I.
But.
I'm literally putting my 30 year reputation on the line for this one.
29 year reputation on the line.
Do you know what I mean?
I stand behind it.
I stand behind it.
And I really believe, and I think you do as well.
Sure, that's got a lot of pizzazz.
The trailer is designed to get people to watch the film, but the film delivers.
It does.
It delivers.
It delivers.
It's not just a bunch of hot air.
Not at all.
The amount of evidence that you have and the amount of people, civilians and ex military that you talk to, is amazing.
Astounding.
And I don't, correct me if I'm wrong, I know the Zimbabwe case is close to this when it comes to the amount of witnesses.
But when you have civilian witnesses mixed with military and police witnesses, on top of that, people handling this creature and seeing it come into their place of work, into the hospital, I don't think there's ever been a case.
Where there's been a being like this with all these witnesses running around a neighborhood or a city, has there?
No, I've never, I've never, I've never.
I just, it seems so sci fi.
I get the goosebumps talking about it because I challenge anyone out there in the UFO community, anyone to show me a crazier story.
It's the most sensational story I've ever heard.
And the crazy part.
About it is that you will believe it.
I have one of my most skeptical friends who's watched my career from day one.
One of my best friends.
He lives in San Diego.
And he's been moderately supportive.
And he watched the phenomenon.
He loved it.
He watched this one about a month ago.
And I always, he's my barometer.
And he called me up and he goes, I'm floored.
I said, What do you, he goes, It's the craziest story I've ever heard in my life.
And I actually believe it happened.
I think this is the most powerful thing you've ever done.
And it's not my story, right?
I'm just reporting on it.
But we went out of our way to really, I mean, we worked on some of those witnesses for nearly a decade.
We identified some of the doctors early on, and they were like, I will never talk with you.
Like, this is never going to happen.
You might as well just not even.
And then one of them, allegedly, the guy that did the x rays, Which, for some reason, I don't know, there's something about that testimony that really just like, for me personally, listening to him, he goes, at the end of it, he goes, thank you for giving me this opportunity.
This has been the heaviest weight on my shoulders for so long.
The fact that I have the opportunity, even though I'm doing it anonymously, the fact that I've got, and everybody that we feature that you're filming from behind, you know, we have their credentials.
We have them in uniform.
We have all the history of them, all of it, right?
So we verify all of that before they even.
And then the fact that we get them to come forward was just a miracle, quite honestly, just a miracle.
Yeah.
To you, what was the most compelling piece of evidence or interviews that you did from all the people you talked to in Brazil?
In Brazil?
Yeah.
To you, what was the thing that stood out to you the most?
I met with an Air Force brigadier by the name of Jose Carlos Pereira.
I have a photograph of him in uniform somewhere.
And he said, I'll talk to you about the UFO phenomenon in Brazil gladly.
I could talk about this case in 86, UFOs in Brazil, and I could talk about the Calaris case, but I don't want to talk about Varginha.
I was like, okay, why are you even talking about Virginia?
Don't even bring it up.
I was like, Jesus.
So, Marco, my partner in Brazil, we did the interview.
I honored the fact that he didn't want to, I don't know how I brought it up, but I basically didn't bring it up on camera.
At the end of the interview, and I have video and photographic proof that I was with this guy, at the end of the interview, We walked him to his car where he had his driver waiting.
And I looked him in the eye and I said, I swear on my life and on my family's life, there are no recording devices anywhere on my body, no cameras rolling.
Please, General, like, please tell me, did Vargenia happen or not?
And Marco and I were just basically just, I mean, we were like, I mean, I'd never begged.
I wanted to know so bad.
And, He looked at Marco and he looked at me.
And as he was getting into his car, he opened up the back door and he goes, It happened.
And he got in his car, closed the door, and off he drove.
So I had at that early stage very definitive for me.
It's obviously this is a story for you or anybody else listening to what I'm saying.
Why on earth would he not want to talk about it?
Why on earth would I have to beg and plead with him on my hands and knees to get him very discreetly at the last possible second when he was driving off?
To look at us and say it happened, why on earth would he lie to us?
You know, and so I had a pretty concrete level of confirmation early on on the case.
So now it's like, okay, we got to keep digging, we got to keep digging.
But what we were finding was that the better the witness, the less likely they wanted to come forward, and that the more likely that they had been intimidated and threatened.
And they would do it in a way where it wasn't like, hey, we're going to kill you.
It was just like the punishment for.
Violating your security oath or your security is going to be so severe, they would say, you know, so severe.
You know, how's your family kind of thing?
Not we're going to kill your family, but these are the kinds of things.
It was spooky, right?
To the witnesses, like really spooked them.
And then to get phone calls every couple of years, hey, how are you doing?
You know, that kind of thing.
So we worked incredibly hard and we were so lucky.
Ultralight Pilot In Trouble00:04:08
And I've got to take my.
Tip my hat 100 times to Marco Leal, my producing partner, who's Brazilian, who's been investigating this case longer than I have.
And he's been just a force to be reckoned with.
Could never have done it without Marco.
It's incredible.
What, for people that are listening and watching, can you lay out kind of a linear timeline of what went down?
What was seen first?
Was it crafts, the crash from the girls to the cop that actually captured the beam?
So, in January, probably 12th or 13th of 1996, there was a.
Ultralight pilot by the name of Carlos de Souza.
And Carlos was driving from Sao Paulo up to a state called Minas Gerais.
It's a state to the north.
And in Minas Gerais is Varginha and a number of surrounding cities.
And he was driving on the freeway, and I think it was five o'clock in the morning, five, 5 30, maybe.
And he saw something in the sky.
That was cigar shaped that didn't look right and it looked like it was in trouble.
And he witnessed it crash.
Prior to that, there were two, it was like 2 30 in the morning.
There were two farmers, which I interviewed both of them as well, that saw the object that looked like it was going to crash, but they didn't see it crash.
There were two of them, and it was about 2 30 o'clock in the morning for them.
And it was a cigar shaped object and it had a gash in the side of it and it had vapor coming out, like a white vapor coming out, according to the witnesses.
But they kept kind of expecting it to impact the ground, but they didn't see it impact the ground because it looked like it was in serious trouble and it was flying slowly.
So then Carlos DeSouza, like I said, was up early one morning driving to go meet some ultralight pilot friends of his to go flying.
And he saw this object and then he saw it kind of go down like it was going down.
And he jumped off the freeway and he drove up this farm called Mayolini Farm.
And he came upon.
Maybe a football size field of debris, and one very large piece of the cigar shaped UFO that was kind of a metallic light that was still intact, but a lot of bits that were not intact.
And he jumped out of his car.
He ran up and he said there were like these tinfoil type pieces.
He wasn't thinking extraterrestrial, he thought it was a government thing.
He didn't know what it was.
He thought there were some people that were in trouble.
Yeah, he thought there were people in trouble.
He wanted to help them.
He never, ever, ever did he think alien.
Not one time.
Not till after what I'm about to tell you.
So then, I don't want to give too much away, but he held one of the pieces and he said it was light as a feather, very similar to what the description of the people at Roswell, where he could take it and crumple it up and then it would rebound and reshape itself.
But he said it was light, like just so light you could barely feel it in your hands.
He was looking at her going, The hell is this?
And then all of a sudden, these military trucks start rolling in.
They take guns out and they threaten him.
And he gets in his car and they force him to leave.
And it was all rather terrifying for him.
And off he goes and he was collecting himself, I don't know, half an hour down the road at a gas station, went in to get a coffee.
And that's when he had a visit from these men.
They basically knew his name and knew everything about him and warned him of.
Keeping his mouth shut.
Footprint And Military Trucks00:16:04
This was right after?
Pretty much right after, yeah.
I think within an hour, half an hour, something like this.
And a couple months after the incident, he met with a famous UFO researcher by the name of Clodio Covo, and he gave one brief on camera statement, and then he vanished for 26 years.
Well, Marco and his associates were, because I kept saying 10 years ago, I was like, we got to find the crash, we got to find Carlos, like, we got to find the guy, but he was just vanished.
I think it took us like eight years, we found him.
Marco found him.
Anyway, we got him.
Then, so then, roughly, let's see, it would have been the morning of January 13th.
So, the afternoon of January 20th, you've got all sorts of reports of unusual activity in the town of Argenia.
You get in reports of weird, strange creatures.
Nobody said ET.
It was like, what the hell are these creatures?
The fire department was called.
It was five days.
Wow.
About five days.
Yeah.
And the distance, I think the distance between the crash and the sighting in the town of Argenia is somewhere in the realm of 12 to 15 miles.
Whoa.
Something like that.
And so you're getting these reports.
The most compelling reports came from civilian reports, came from three girls.
It was Katya, Liliani, and Valkyria.
And Valkyria.
And Liliani, her two sisters, and then Katya was a little older, she's 21, and it was like 14 and 16.
And they were going through a little field on the outskirts of town, but in the town, and they saw this creature in broad daylight, I think it was like three o'clock in the afternoon, crouched against a cinder block wall, and they were like, You know, looking at this thing, like, what the heck are we looking at here?
And it had, it was weak.
It had spindly arms and legs.
It had like a brown, oily skin, almost like a kidney or something.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it was like an exposed organ.
And it had, and they shrieked when they looked at it, and then it turned and made eye contact.
Two of the girls, I think it was Liliani and Valkyria, Took off, and Katya got completely mesmerized by making eye contact with it.
There was some level of communication that was happening.
Katya was kind of frozen in her tracks.
She was about eight feet, maybe 10 feet away from it.
And it was feeble.
It was scared, according to Katya.
It wanted help, like get me out of here kind of thing.
Help, according to Katya.
The other two girls got, I don't know, 50 or 70 feet away.
And we're like, where's Katya?
We got to go back and get Katya.
And they ran back.
I think it was Liliani, ran back and grabbed Katya and broke her stare and yanked her out of there.
And then they reported, they went running home to their mother and they were like telling her what, you know, and they thought it was something of the devil, like it was a devil or something.
Did she say anything about any kind of communication between the being and her?
Yeah, well, I asked her about that.
Yeah, because I said, this is where the title came from.
I said, And I didn't even realize this at the time.
I said, because I wanted to know.
I know it was very brief.
It was probably just a couple of seconds, but a lot can happen in that moment.
In a couple of seconds, time slows down.
Right.
And you kind of get, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Like, so I said, during that moment of contact, was there any level of communication?
If so, what was said?
What did you feel?
And she says, there was obviously no words or anything, but it was like, I'm scared.
I'm weak.
I'm scared and I need help.
That was what she got.
And Katya was staying behind, and Liliana and Valkyria ran back and grabbed her.
Katya was the oldest, she was 21.
And so they run back to their mother's house, the two sisters with Katya, and the mother says, We're going to let's go back.
And the two sisters didn't want to go, so she went back with Katya, who was the oldest one.
So the mother went back and they found a footprint where it was and just the strongest smell of like ammonia.
They said the smell was just like paralyzing, like 100,000 times worse than a skunk, just the smell.
I had somebody say to me that seemed to be in a position to know, but I don't know.
It could be complete speculation because everybody had talked about the smell of this thing.
That when certain creatures get scared, they have this, they excrete something that can protect them or paralyze those around them to protect.
Do you know what I mean?
Like a skunk does.
And that a lot of people thought that that's what these creatures did.
They said it was like a sulfur mixed with ammonia.
Sulfur ammonia.
They said it was the worst, like it was just paralyzingly bad.
Like, and it was in your nose for like a week.
Yeah, everybody talked about that.
So, in any case, so the mother, I don't know if I'm going into too detail.
The mother went back and smelled the smell and saw the footprint of this weird creature, which I actually have a drawing of the footprint if you want to see it.
Yeah, yeah.
They drew the pictures or they had an artist do a rendition from their description.
No, the mother actually drew the footprint for me right there on the spot.
Let's see if I have it here.
Watch me not have it.
I saw it last night when I was going through these.
Yeah, I think it's in there.
Okay, here we go.
This could be it.
But it's basically like two digits, like two digits like this, with one appendage that looks like it maybe comes out when it's trying to beat by when it's standing up.
And when it's not standing up, it looks like this, kind of like so it can walk.
Right.
I'll keep discreetly looking here, you guys.
That's right there.
Ah, there it is.
Boom.
Wow.
Okay.
Yep.
Good eye.
So, kind of a round paw with three long fingers.
This is exactly where you can see that.
Hold it back behind the mic, right there.
Yeah, okay.
So, this is exactly where the encounter took place.
And these are the three witnesses that's Katya, Valkyria, and Liliani.
And his exact location.
And this photograph was taken in 1996, right after that, right after it, yes.
Uh huh.
And then you've got here, hold this up by the microphone, real quick.
You've got to see that.
The footprint that was the footprint of the creature, and then the mother who saw the footprint drew this for me a little bit higher.
There you go, perfect!
Yeah, crazy, drew that for me.
And a lot of witnesses I talked to had seen the foot in the hospital.
So, um, later that day, only a few blocks away, there were two military officers on patrol.
Nobody was talking ET, okay?
Nobody had mentioned ET.
The girls thought it was the devil.
They were very religious.
The mother didn't know what the girls saw.
Later on that day, two military officers, Eric Lopes and this guy named Marco Chirizzi.
And when you're in the police, it's like the fire department's part of the military, the police is part of the military, military police.
So these two officers were on patrol looking for something unusual.
They didn't say UFO crash, and there was ET walking around.
So they're driving around and they're just a couple blocks away, and it's around 5 30 p.m.
They're a couple blocks away from where the girls encountered.
And by the way, I talked to a lot of people.
That had that area of Varginha completely cordoned off by the military, like military blockades all around there.
And I talked to a lot of them, I have them on camera, but they were armed.
And like, you're not walking one step further, including the local news outlets.
I interviewed them as well.
So they cordoned off the area that I'm talking about right now.
And that's where the girls had the encounter, and two blocks away at 5 30, where military officers, Marco, Cherise and Eric Lopes saw this creature run across the road in front of them, slammed on his brakes.
Marco jumps out the passenger door and grabs this thing with his bare hands.
And he takes it and he puts it in the back seat on his lap.
Believe it was the back seat.
On his lap?
On his lap.
Yes.
And they take it initially to a clinic in the town of Virginia.
And the guy comes out and says, I don't know what the heck that thing is.
Get it out of here.
I have no idea what you guys are doing.
Kind of thing.
And so they go to another hospital called Hospital Regional, and at which point the creature remains in hospital, regional hospital.
Sorry, I got a little there.
The creature remains in regional hospital for I'm not sure exactly how long, but it ultimately ended up in Humanitas Hospital.
And we have testimony from doctors that performed certain things, as well as military guys that drove.
The creature.
We have the whole entire area where the creature was.
So they captured two creatures.
One was alive, and I think the other one was not alive.
The one that Eric Lopes caught that you said was in his lap in the car was that one alive or dead?
It was alive.
That one was still alive.
Yeah, and put up very little resistance.
So he got a cut on his arm, kind of on his shoulder, like right here during the capture of it, whether it scratched him with a nail or I don't know what exactly happened, but he got infection.
And within days, week, or whatever it was, he went into the hospital.
The doctor administered antibiotics, and he said he'd never in all of his years prior or since seen anything like it.
Marco Trees, a perfectly healthy 23 year old young man, got this like complete immune system failure and he died.
And we interviewed.
The family, his sister, we interviewed the doctor who worked on him.
And they wanted to put him in the ground as soon as possible.
I couldn't believe that you actually got the doctor on camera, the doctor that treated him.
I know it's crazy, right?
What did he say?
What was he looking for?
What did he see when he was treating Eric?
He just said that he'd never, in all of his career, and he's been, In there for like 40 plus years.
He's never seen someone with an infection from a simple cut like that have a complete immune system failure and not respond to any of the antibiotics that he's pumped them full of everything and nothing worked at all.
And he just, his health just went down and he died.
There was some sort of mention of a granular toxin.
Yeah, I know.
I didn't quite, yes.
We have the autopsy reports, which the family had to fight to get.
We interviewed, I didn't interview his wife.
His wife was interviewed one time very briefly, never seen the light of day, by Roger Lear.
Roger Lear, Dr. Roger Lear is a UFO researcher.
He used to take allegedly implants out of people.
And when Roger Lear found out that I was making this movie years ago, 2014, He was adamant that he wanted to talk with me.
He wanted to get together.
And I sincerely wanted to talk to him too.
But I was investigating Rua at the time and I was kind of back burning the Varginia case.
Long story short, he sent me, he said, Well, if you can't get me on camera, you got to have my tapes.
I went to Varginia in 2002 and I documented a bunch of witnesses, some of whom had gone off the radar completely forever.
Those tapes had never seen the light of day.
I transferred the tapes.
Had them digitized and then Dr. Roger Lear sent them back to Rear to Dr. Roger Lear and then he died.
And so I never got a chance to talk to Dr. Roger Lear, but I got his tapes.
And one of those tapes, he interviewed the wife of Marco Treese.
Nobody's ever done that.
Nobody's even going to get a hold of her.
But nobody had ever managed to get the driver, Eric Lopes.
He'd been in hiding for like 26 years.
Marco, what's the name of the guy who died again?
Marco Treese died.
Yes.
He was the guy that leapt out of the passenger seat and grabbed this creature, apparently.
And the guy who was driving the car has never been.
Now, one even talked to the family of the guy who deceased.
The guy who was driving the car, that's the guy who basically was trying, was about to shoot you guys.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a crazy story.
You know, and we interviewed the town mayor.
He was like, Yeah, this is unbelievable as this sounds.
I believe this actually happened.
I interviewed the local news station, you know, saying the same thing.
They completely threatened to lock us up if we asked one more question.
At the military base, as a to lock up the local media in the prison for asking questions, they came down so hard.
And then, you know, I don't want to give away too much of the film, the storyline, but because I want to ruin it for anybody, but but they shut it down, they shut the story down.
And then we came to the realization not for about 10 years on my last trip to.
Of Argenia, which was just last year, we came to the realization that the U.S. government was 100% involved and that they arrived and they took.
We talked to the radar operator who saw the plane coming in and saw U.S. Air Force plane come in.
It came into the exact area where we knew the body was because we drove, we interviewed the guy who drove the body to the location and then the United States Air Force plane came in.
Yeah.
And then flew out, in and out.
Yeah.
Wow.
So it's heavy.
Highly likely, extremely likely that they, one of the reasons for the level of secrecy is that the Brazilian government would be exposing the US government by revealing what they know.
So I'm just guessing here, but there are some pretty crazy aspects that we uncovered during meeting the witnesses and stuff that you just go, Jesus, like, really?
Guys in suits from some unknown government agency coming and trying to like intimidate and influence testimony and offering large sums of money.
Bribes, yeah.
Bribes.
And then you've got like the lead UFO researcher on the case, Uber Ejado Rodriguez, who's a lawyer in the town of Virginia, who suddenly, after writing a book, does a complete 180 and he won't even talk to anybody anymore.
Severe Consequences For Witnesses00:03:00
Pacaccini, the same thing.
Clodio Covil's unfortunately passed.
But so they managed to like get the lead UFO researchers to either recant what they said previously or made to print in a book or just go silent altogether and never comment on the case ever again.
And then threatening the witnesses.
They didn't say, I never heard a witness say to me, they said they're going to kill me.
They just say the consequences of revealing what you know would be extremely severe.
The punishment would be extremely severe.
And they'd ask, you know, how's the family, you know, that kind of thing.
Right, right.
So, yeah.
So now, as crazy as it all sounds, and I think I told your audience earlier, don't believe a single word I'm telling you because I wouldn't if I were you.
But this story happened.
One of the parts that freaked me out the most was the interview with the x ray technician.
Crazy.
What did he say specifically?
Like, how was his description of it?
Just working in the hospital one night, one late afternoon, early evening, and military trucks pulled up.
And they're like, You're going to be doing some work for us.
He's like, Okay, like, what exactly am I doing here?
And they had an object in a black body bag.
He said it stank to no end.
And it was kind of smaller, but he said that they were armed guards in there watching his every move, looking at him in the eyes.
You just perform this.
You can't look at the x rays.
For the first time in history, he couldn't look at the x rays because he always verifies to make sure they come out.
Couldn't look at the x rays.
They just looked at him very carefully.
And then he performed his duties.
And then they said, Don't you ever talk about any of this stuff.
And they said he x rayed the skull, the torso, all of it.
Yeah, the whole thing.
Yeah.
He actually thanked us when at the end of it.
I mean, I think Marco Leal, my partner, co producer, who's amazing, Brazilian, he said that I think he spent like eight years because he found him in the hospital through a student that he revealed the story to once.
But he was still working at the hospital and he's like, I'll never, they'll never ever reveal.
And then he retired and then we worked on him and Marco worked on him for a couple more years after he was retired.
And then he finally.
Agreed, provided we shoot the back of him, but we got a photograph of him at the hospital.
We shoot the back of his head and disguise his voice that he'll come forward.
And at the end of it, he said, I feel so much better.
Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to share this story because I've been holding this on my shoulders for 26 years.
And they all were very, quite honest.
Could you imagine if that something like that happened and you couldn't talk about it?
That's a big deal.
Accurate Creature Depiction Model00:03:24
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really big deal.
Yeah, man, it's compelling how a lot of those interviews are.
Those people had to, they demanded to be interviewed from the rear and have their voices change and completely be censored 100%.
It was that or nothing.
So it seems like the thing that would blow this out of the water is if it's just crazy that there's this whole story happened.
There's all this evidence from everybody.
All these people are willing to talk, but still, we can't get a photo or a video clip.
All we get is can we show the drawing?
Wasn't there a rendition of the creature?
Hiding.
There's an artist that a rendition of the creature.
Yeah.
Kind of like huddled, like crouched in the corner.
Well, hang on.
Is it online?
Well, I do have the actual creature that the girls gave me.
They said it was the most accurate depiction of what the creature looked like, but it's a little model.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, because I don't have that really high level drawing.
Okay.
I don't have that with me, but I have the.
Let me grab it.
Okay.
Hold on one sec.
Yep.
It's like super glue would probably do it.
The head fell off.
There's super glue here.
We'll fix it after.
Oh, man.
So it's this.
Shiny brown creature.
Well, they, you know, I generally try to, you know, avoid little trinkets like that because there's somewhat cheesy paraphernalia for UFOs.
But the girls who came into contact with that creature allegedly said that this was the most accurate depiction of what the creature looked like.
And that's why I brought it.
I don't know if you want me to see if I can hold it.
The reason why I have this is because the girls gave this to me and said that this is the only.
Like facing me.
There you go.
This is the only depiction of the creature that is totally accurate.
It's exactly what they saw.
And it was given to me by.
And how big was it?
It was like about four and a half feet, maybe four and a half feet tall.
Wow.
Brown, oily skin, big eyes, scared, cowering, non threatening.
It was non threatening.
It was scared.
That image, that drawing, isn't anywhere on Google.
It's strange because it matches all of the traditional depictions of the alien beings.
Except for the eyes.
Except for the eyes and its brown skin.
Yes.
And it had like ridges.
There you go.
There's a bunch of them.
All right.
So that's pretty accurate.
That one upper right.
Yeah, it's pretty accurate.
That's pretty accurate.
So it had this brown skin and red eyes.
Yeah.
It wasn't evil looking.
Yeah.
Some of these renditions try to make it look evil.
I know.
It was not.
Oh, look at that one.
Go up.
Left, yeah.
Yeah, that doesn't.
Yeah, those aren't.
It's too big and no, it wasn't reaching out.
It's the wrong position.
It was crouched.
I mean, if you could see like all it did, okay, the entire time, it was crouched.
It had its arms kind of between the legs, like this, right?
And when the girl screamed, it went like this.
And that was it.
Military Blockade And Capture Site00:13:26
It didn't get up, didn't come after them.
It just turned to look them right in the eyes.
Did they say he made any noise?
No, they didn't, but others did.
Like a whistle, like a.
There were witnesses, and we actually have them in the movie where they say kind of sounded like a cricket, like a cricket.
Yeah, I can't.
And there were people in the hospital.
Once they took the alien that had died, it was partly covered up.
But there were people in there who said they saw the feet of it kind of hanging out and they were all just looking at each other in bewilderment, not knowing what to do or what to say.
Yes.
Yes.
I said to that witness, I said, put me in that hospital room.
Right.
What was the feeling like?
What was the atmosphere like?
What were the doctors doing?
What were the other military officers doing?
And he said they were all scared, like they were all feeling in over their heads, like, what are we looking at?
What is going on here?
Do you know what I mean?
Like everybody was freaked out.
And he said he's looking at these feet.
And it was like, you know, I think it had another appendage that when it stood up, it did that because, but yeah, it's a truly crazy story.
But, you know, there are other crazy stories like I was talking about the Rua incident, which is different because they were in control.
Right.
Here, these creatures were clearly not in control, they were scared.
Which is so crazy, man.
It's so crazy.
You always think of in these stories of the creatures being the ones in control.
Yeah.
They're the ones who have the upper hand.
In this case, this thing was all alone and in distress.
That is what makes it so insane to me.
Oh my gosh.
I was going to tell you.
So I flew my drone.
Yeah.
I learned I fly remote control airplanes.
And I remember years ago, I was like learning to fly remote control airplanes so I could put cameras on them and.
Then, of course, the drones.
And so I droned, I took it everywhere I go just to get aerial photography of cases, right?
And I took it way up and I pointed the camera straight down because I wanted to document the area where the girls came in contact with this being, allegedly.
And you could see the military blockade, where that was from a different witness.
Then you could see where the girls saw the creature in this one little.
Area.
And then you could see where the capture occurred.
And we were all like coming to the realization wow, this, the vast majority of this occurred in a rather small area, like I don't know, within eight, 10 blocks.
Right.
And then the family that we rented, we Airbnb'd a big house on the outskirts of town that was fairly secure.
And the owners of the house were doctors.
And they were like, What are you guys doing here?
And we told them, You know, we're making this.
Oh, okay.
We're all really good friends, have a story.
So we end up going to their house.
It took like a couple of days because they really didn't want to talk on camera.
And then they wanted to just, they were like, No, no, we weren't going to go on camera.
We just wanted to tell you they're doctors.
And they were worried about the impact it would have on their careers and their credibility.
And they didn't want to, they were like, No, we're just going to tell you.
We didn't, not on camera.
We just wanted you to know what happened.
We were like, well, okay, well, why don't I film me from the, you know?
You think all this camera equipment's here?
Yeah, I did not use it.
Yeah.
So, long story short, what we realized is that we had done an overhead shot of the encounter site, the military blockade site, the capture site, according to witnesses,
all with one shot and the home of the witnesses that we were just about to interview, the whole family, the mother, The husband and the daughter, and they all watched this thing for about 12 to 15 minutes.
And we realized in the middle of the interview wait a minute, the proximity to these witnesses, to the girl's witnesses, to the capture, to the military blockade, it's all right here.
So, we have testimony from an entire family that watched that night in January, right around midnight, a UFO, according to the entire family of doctors, looking for something.
And it was doing a grid search over the area where the girls had seen it, where the capture happened, where it all happened.
That to me was so compelling because I'm going, wait a minute.
Now you've got witnesses describing a recovery effort.
You've got very compelling testimony of people witnessing.
And I actually interviewed four people that all claimed of this disc shaped craft that was looking for something.
Doing sort of a grid move.
Well, I mean, if we left our people behind, I'm sure we would be looking for something too.
Right.
I know it sounds so crazy.
I really do.
But you didn't put this together.
Like they didn't put two and two together.
No, they talked to them.
No.
Well, they said they were looking for something.
I said, how do you know?
They were doing this grid search.
Everybody said it was looking for something.
Then I was like, wait a minute.
I think we just accidentally captured their home from my drone.
And I'm looking at the drone shot.
And I've got their home, which is like, say, you know, like here.
Let's just show you.
So we got an overhead shot.
This is representative of about 10 city blocks, maybe a little bit more.
Right.
This is the road where the capture happened.
This is the little area where the girls came direct contact with the creature.
This is where the military blockade was.
And this is the home of the family we interviewed.
It's all right here.
It all took place.
Yeah, man, it was incredible.
I had goosebumps.
So I was, we were all just going, oh my God, they were looking for their people.
Clearly, what the hell else are they looking for?
If you are to believe the accounts of the people that you met, and I believed all of them, no question about it.
Can I have some of this liquid death?
Oh, absolutely.
Hell yeah, man, it's for you.
Awesome.
This is water in a bottle.
Water in a can.
Yeah.
Water in a can.
I really like that because I hate plastic.
I always feel so bad about all the plastic.
Yeah.
So this is death to plastic, aluminum, murder your thirst, murder your thirst.
I'm gonna do that right now.
Did you get any sense from any of them whether this being was a biological entity compared to possibly being some sort of robot or humanoid, sort of drone or clones?
Because you think when these creatures visit us, if they're coming from someplace far away, similar to the way we look at Mars, we send robots, like why would they come here themselves?
So, there are so many unanswered questions.
But according to the witnesses that I interviewed personally, that being was a sentient being.
It had emotion, it had intelligence, it had fear, it was cowering, it was scared, it was non threatening, it was scared, and it was feeble and having a hard time.
So, I mean, it's kind of sad, you know, when you think about it.
I started thinking, like, gosh, you know, how did they treat this thing?
You know, did they, were they, were they kind to it?
Did they try to make any kind of communication?
What did the authorities do?
Did it, how long did it live?
Did it live for weeks or days?
I, I just wish I knew, you know, I need to find the counter, like, once it left the soil, the Brazilian soil, and we have, Very compelling testimony that it did.
What happened to it?
Was it alive?
How long did it live?
How long did it live?
Was there any level of communication with it?
You know, all these questions I have unanswered, I'm just dying to know.
And I'm going to continue researching this case in the United States because I'm going to start finding out.
I know of a bunch of evidence, photographic evidence, videotaped evidence, filmed evidence, and now physical debris evidence with bodies.
I'm very confident that some unknown government agency or outside government agency, whether it's a Independent contractor for the United States government has got this stuff.
Now, my objective moving forward is where is it and who has the authority to release it?
Because, and I want to know if there are any Americans out there that were involved in this case.
In fact, if there's any of them listening to this podcast right now, please reach out.
They can get in touch with you or they can email me at James C as in Charlie Fox, James.
CFox at gmail.com.
And I'd love to hear from you.
What are the obstacles for you in order to get your hands on footage of something like this or photos of something like this?
Like, what are the biggest obstacles?
What are the, what do the people that have them have to lose?
The people, unfortunately, are terrified.
People that, The higher the stakes, like the.
This has been across the board with pretty much every case I've ever investigated.
You have people that are just legitimately scared.
And the more better evidence they have, the better the encounter.
Like the girls encountered this thing, the mother had men in suits come and intimidate her.
And I absolutely believed her.
No question.
The guy that watched it crash had men in suits come up to him and intimidate him, scared him, spooked him.
People with photographic or videotaped evidence are terrified.
I can't emphasize that enough.
Let's just speak hypothetically for a moment, okay?
Obviously, I'm covering this case.
Clearly, I want to uncover photographic videotaped evidence.
I mean, come on, man, it's obvious.
If you don't think I'm going after that, then you need to readjust your thinking.
There's nothing, it's the holy grail, right?
How do you execute?
Let's just say, hypothetically, that you did identify someone with evidence like that and you offer them a significant compensation for it.
Either they don't want it, they're too scared, there's no amount of money, or let's just say they do agree to take.
How do you get 100 grand or 200 grand cash into Brazil?
You can't even take more than 10 grand with them asking you questions.
They're watching you.
I know the military base is watching me.
They've already called all around to half the witnesses I've talked to.
Send them Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I had some people say, yeah, some of the alternative currency, but, you know, how do you do the handoff?
How do you get it out of the country?
Do you upload it to a server?
Like, this is all logistical things that.
And then you have people that are just terrified.
I mean, look at Eric Lopes, the driver of the car.
He's been in hiding for 26 years.
He threatened to shoot everybody when we got to his property.
He's not messing around.
What did they tell him?
Like, you know, is it not just threatening him, but his family?
Like, what would get a guy to literally say he was going to shoot everybody?
He wouldn't even give a statement to the family of his buddy who was in the passenger seat.
Like, think about that for a minute.
He wouldn't give a statement.
To the family of his buddy who died after holding that, handling that creature.
What on earth?
Like, he grew up.
Threats Against Family Members00:13:33
Those two grew up together.
They were good friends.
Like, the fact that he, you know, I mean, isn't that so?
You just kind of have to, you know, fill in the blanks a little bit.
It's not easy.
It's not easy going after, you know, videotape photographs.
That stuff has a weird way of disappearing.
Um, It's horrible.
I know.
It's like, I mean, there's nobody on the planet probably trying harder than I am.
Yeah.
I mean, no civilian that I could think of.
I'm giving it 110% 24 7, you know?
And I look, I'll be incredibly satisfied if our film comes out and it triggers other evidence and testimony to come forward.
Right.
And that maybe that's a part of another project that somebody else does or I do.
I don't really care.
I want it out.
But of course, of course.
We know there's that kind of evidence out there.
We know that.
Now, John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist, did he interview the girls and the boys in Zimbabwe after that thing happened?
But he also interviewed, did he also talk to the people in Virginia?
Yes.
Yes.
That's fascinating.
How did he get in touch with them?
How is it that almost no Americans and even the UFO community?
Researchers know very little about this case.
You had two people that I know of, Americans, that investigated excuse me, Roger Lear and Dr. John Mack.
They're both deceased.
Dr. John Mack is really funny because I was investigating the Rua Zimbabwe case.
That's that landing at Ariel School in 1994.
I think it was September.
And where roughly 100 school children were out in broad daylight and they all witnessed.
A couple of disc shaped craft come down and land in the field next to their playground, and they all ran out with great curiosity and came face to face with beings very similar to what the girl, you know, the big eyes, spindly arms and legs, about four feet tall.
There was telepathic communication that occurred.
Sounds totally unbelievable, but I'm pretty sure that case happened as well.
In fact, I'm convinced it did.
But Dr. John Mack was investigating that case, and he was doing so at the behest of.
Lawrence Spellman Rockefeller, who was funding a lot of his efforts at the time, was putting pressure on the Clinton administration.
He was funding researchers.
Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack.
Harvard tried to fire John Mack because of his association with UFOs and alleged abductees and the work that he was doing.
And apparently, Lawrence Spellman Rockefeller picked up the phone and called and said, You know, those grants you guys like getting from the Rockefeller Foundation?
Well, if this guy gets fired, those are all gone.
So, anyway, so he was funding him.
So, you had John Mack investigating with the camera crew in Africa.
Two years later, you got this another amazing case in Varginha, Brazil.
He's interviewing the witnesses.
Those were like two years apart.
Two years apart.
Wow, man.
The 90s were amazing.
Like, think of the two of some of the best cases ever.
That massive broad daylight mass sighting over Arizona.
That's such a good case, man.
Even the governor saw it.
That massive.
You had.
You remember the Phoenix Lights?
Phoenix Lights.
You had the 50th anniversary of Roswell.
You had the people coming forward from Roswell because in 1997, a lot of them weren't dead yet.
A lot of them had died, but a lot of them had not died.
So you had the Roswell thing.
You had the Belgian UFO wave, which was the late 80s, but early 90s as well.
You had in 1994, you had the landing at the school in Africa.
In 1996, you had the crash in Virginia.
In 97, you had the massive flyover of the state of Arizona, the Phoenix Lights.
I mean, my God, that was a hot, what an exciting time.
Why was the 90s so hot?
I mean, you cover in Phenomenon the 80s, you know, during the Cold War.
Yeah, I cover a lot of.
They targeted these nuclear facilities.
Like there were many sightings.
I love the way you showed the graphic of the world and you showed the timeline of every nuclear bomb ever detonated.
Yeah.
Crazy.
That was Lance Mungia's idea.
It was a brilliant idea.
That was brilliant.
Yes, Lance, let's do that.
I had no idea we put we detonated so many nukes.
I know, isn't it crazy?
Those stories of like the UFOs over these top secret facilities of shutting these things off.
Fascinating.
That was an afterthought because I was pretty much wrapping up the phenomenon.
Of course, you got the front page of the New York Times revealing that Pentagon UFO program, and then I was interviewing the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had initiated ATIP Bigelow and everybody else, and um.
I don't know why, for some reason, during the sit down interview, I didn't ask this question and that was bad on me.
But when after the fact I was walking, I said to Senator Reed, Hey, do you mind really quickly if I get a quick B roll shot of the two of us walking?
He's like, Okay.
And he had just a couple minutes.
And so he had like these security guys detailed kind of looking at me and I couldn't even get near him without them looking at me all funny.
It's kind of weird.
You know, big brute guys, you know.
And is it okay if I stand next to them and we'll walk down the hallway?
Yeah, okay.
You know, they were walking and I said, What was one of the more astonishing aspects of the phenomenon that you uncovered during this Pentagon UFO program?
And he immediately said, The fact they're shutting off our nukes.
And I thought, Oh my God, I just got that on camera with Senator Harry Reid.
That's an aspect of the phenomenon we're going to have to cover in the movie.
And that's, I went back to some researchers and I, that was the last thing we did.
That was the last aspect of the phenomenon that we put in the film.
But in any case, getting back to, John Mack.
I was following his work in Africa, kind of picking up where he left off with that case.
Randall Nickerson also did a film on just Rua, which is, I think it's out now, called Aerial Phenomenon.
He was very helpful in helping me put me in touch with some of the witnesses.
But in any case, I was following Dr. John Mack.
And then to my astonishment, when I got to Brazil, I uncovered archival tapes of John Mack.
Brazil.
So John Mack was doing a lot of like cutting edge investigations in the 90s that he never really saw through to fruition because he was struck down, I think, in the early 2000s by.
He looked the wrong way.
People think it's a big conspiracy that he was killed.
I really don't believe that.
He looked the wrong way in London.
I've done it.
It's easy to do.
You go across the street and you're, you know, especially if you don't spend a lot of time there.
You don't know the way traffic flows.
Got a couple beers in your belly and you just look the wrong way.
Yeah.
You know, you just go jump across the street.
So you look, you know, used to looking this way or what, you know.
Mm hmm.
So, unfortunately, he was run down and died.
But it was amazing to see him.
He was like at the forefront of a lot of these incredibly compelling cases.
And I'm so glad they're coming out now.
You know?
Yeah.
Like, Virginia happened how many years ago?
It's 1996.
Is that 28 years ago?
Is that 28?
Close to 28.
My wife was born in 96.
I think she's 28.
Okay.
Wow.
Wow.
So, it's almost three decades it's taken for the story to really come out in the United States.
Right.
Virginia is known pretty well.
And it's funny, actually.
They put their spin on it the same way, like with Roswell in the United States.
I think that's changed a little bit recently.
But like when I hired a local talent from Rio de Janeiro, this audio guy, twice, two different audio guys, and they were laughing, oh, we're going to go investigate Virginia, you know, kind of thing.
And then at the end of it, after they met the witnesses, they were like, whoa, this happened.
Like, you know, yeah.
But they kind of had that, that.
That level of disinformation that it kind of swirled around Brazil.
But that's that too now is changing.
And I think there's going to be a lot of questions once this film comes out.
Yes.
It really exposes this case unlike it's ever been exposed.
Well, the most fascinating thing to me about the Rua incident is the telepathic communication that they all explain to John Mack.
The videos with John Mack are fantastic.
Are fascinating how he's talking to them and they're explaining this.
Like, I don't know how long after the incident it was.
For people that don't know, maybe for people that don't know, you can give kind of like the bullet points of that encounter.
Sure.
So, there was a sighting of a UFO over probably a three or four or five day period in South Africa, as well as, which is just to the north, Zimbabwe.
Harare is the capital of Zimbabwe.
And then there's a school in a town called Rua, which is.
Maybe an hour, 45 minutes away from Harare.
And the school's called Aerial School.
And it was like, I want to say September 1994.
And there were roughly, they'll say 66, but no, no, they were roughly, I went there and I talked to the teachers.
There were roughly 100 school children playing outside during recess.
It was like 10 30 in the morning.
And they suddenly saw these objects that.
Looked like a disc, and they were coming down and landed.
And the next thing they knew, and a lot of the kids all saw the UFO, some of them came and saw the creatures from further away, others saw the creatures face to face.
Like I would ask some of the witnesses, Well, how close did you get to this being or whatever you call it?
And they were like, Oh, arms reach, like I could touch them.
Yeah.
And there was this.
A parent.
Oh, so within, I think, a week or two, Dr. John Mack, this Harvard psychiatrist, again, I was telling you, he was being funded for general research on the phenomenon by Lawrence Rockefeller, gets a camera crew and flies to Africa and goes to aerial school within a week or two.
And so he interviews, I think it was 66 kids on camera right after it happened, all talking about what they saw.
Some of them had a download, they would look at the creature in the eyes.
And that's when they would, there was a communication with imagery.
And they were talking about imagery.
Imagery, yeah.
Like, well, so I'll talk about the communication.
I can also talk about another thing, which is kind of crazy.
But they had this telepathic communication they described as like images of environmental destruction, fires, like the earth is like we're having an impact, a deleterious impact on.
On the earth, on the environment, our presence, technology, this kind of thing.
And the kids were young.
They never thought about climate change.
This is 1994.
I mean, you know, nobody's written anything about climate change that was in the mainstream.
So they reported that.
But also, and this didn't make it in the film, and this is something that I've only shared a couple of times, but it's something really delightful about this.
So I heard this directly from the witnesses, the children, now adults.
They said, So, they had these very defined areas of the playground because it was Africa.
They had these big telephone pole like things that would define the absolute outer perimeter of where the kids were allowed to play.
And because there were like dangerous snakes and tall grass and spiders and this sort of thing.
So, everything was like groomed within that area.
And then the children weren't allowed to go beyond those poles or telephone poles.
But what they would do is.
Is they would go, children being children, they'd go and they'd skip and dance on top of the poles at that furthest perimeter.
Like if they went two more inches over to the right, they were out of bounds, right?
And they would skip along there.
And apparently, according to some of the children, these beings were mimicking their behavior and skipping with them, dancing with, yes, I know, it's kind of a benign encounter, but they were mimicking their behavior and kind of just, yeah, isn't that weird?
Children Playing Near UFO Sightings00:15:52
Wow.
That's super weird.
I've never heard that part of that.
Yeah, I know.
I didn't put that in the movie, but I thought that was something delightful about that.
That it was a very benign way.
How would they be doing that?
Well, they said to me like this because when I meet a witness, I always want to know.
I like sometimes I even close my eyes and I say, put me there.
I want to be there.
I want every.
The reason why I close my eyes because your words need to recreate the scene.
Right.
And if my eyes are closed, like, what am I looking at here?
Okay.
How far away were they?
What was the sky like?
What was where were you?
What were you standing like?
I wanted to know every aspect of it.
And this witness said to me, Have you ever been out in the wilderness, like in the middle of nowhere, and had an encounter with a wild animal?
There's this standoff, this moment where almost time freezes, where you have like a A level of curiosity from both whatever it is you're looking at, the wild animal, and you.
It's like you're both frozen and you're observing each other with a level of curiosity, a peaked curiosity.
You know, what are you?
Wanting to learn about each other and, like, are you trustworthy?
Is this a threat?
Is this what is this?
Curious, very curious.
They said it was that's what it was like with the bean.
Like, there was they it was just as curious about them as they were of it, you know.
And uh, always kind of stuck in my head about that.
How many of them were there?
Did they say?
Well, there were according to the witnesses, there were multiple UFOs, one was bigger than the rest.
And I want to say between, and they would appear here and then come over here.
Several.
Several of them.
Yeah.
Several.
Yeah.
Can you pull up the pictures that they drew?
Oh, absolutely.
Jordan?
Yeah.
Can you see that?
Yeah.
Yep.
So that's just three of them one in front, two behind.
And this is corroborated by a bunch of the children that were there.
Oh, my God.
Are you kidding?
Like so many children.
And this was.
I think this is.
I'll think of her name in just a second.
Does she put her name on the back?
Gosh, why don't you put your name on here?
Well, it'll come to me.
Anyway, so.
Okay, that's interesting.
That shows like eight of them.
But again, I don't know if there were eight.
Like some of them said we saw one, others said we saw more than one.
Uh huh.
You know.
Um.
Some of them, yeah.
Most of the kids saw more than one UFO.
Most of the kids saw more than one UFO.
And multiple beings, more than four or five beings.
Yeah, but not all the kids came within arm's reach.
Arms reach.
Okay.
Only a handful came that close.
They were gathered around.
So I wanted to share something really crazy because I was in Africa.
And right after I left Africa, I went and I investigated another.
That's wild.
I know.
I went and investigated another UFO landing case at a school.
And this case was Westall.
And it occurred in April of 1966.
Okay.
But there were like all over 300 witnesses to this case.
300 witnesses.
Over 300, including a science professor in Australia.
Okay.
Outside Melbourne.
Okay.
Westall.
I think it was Westall Primary or something.
But it's called the Westall Incident, 1966.
So I was just in Africa, okay?
And I had some of these drawings with me.
I was just kind of sharing them a little bit, you know.
And it looks very much like the classic alien spindly net, long neck with big head and big eyes.
So, anyway, so I'm kind of sharing this, and I had someone say, bloody hell.
I mean, like, that looks just like the Wangina.
I said, the Wangina.
He said, yeah, the Wangina from their 4,000 year old cave paintings here in Australia.
So I looked up Wangina, and I don't know if you, yeah, look at that on the upper right hand 4,000 year old rock art.
Yeah, so click on that one on the upper right if you can, the big one.
Yeah.
And I just have to remind your audience, this is 4,000 years old.
I mean, hello.
Do you see some resemblance?
I mean, yeah.
It's kind of crazy, right?
It looks exactly the same.
That's what I'm saying.
It was just, it was spooky to see that.
The resemblance.
I mean, these are children in 1994.
It looks like a snake slithering in between all these heads of these creatures.
For people that are not watching and only listening, they're these 4,000 year old cave rock paintings from Australia.
And these heads look like the traditional UFO heads with the big eyes, the big head, the spindly bodies.
And there looks like a snake slithering through it, two tall, skinny looking beings off in the background, and a bird.
Anyway, it's just.
I mean, could that possibly be a coincidence?
I mean, I don't know, man, but that was just.
And there's obviously.
And this is.
So these are apparently in some caves.
And how do they date it to 4,000 years ago?
That you're going to have to talk to a specialist because I don't know.
But that's according to everyone I talk to, these are thousands of years old on cave paintings in Australia.
In fact, I almost went to one of them.
And next time I go to Australia, I'm going to go and look at some of this stuff because.
It's just like, I don't know which one that is.
Interesting.
I mean, it's just the big eyes, that shaped head.
It's just fascinating stuff.
And I think I, you know, this is like the historical.
For your audience listening or even watching, you can check out probably there's a book that's put out by Jacques Vallee and it's called Wonders in the Sky.
Sightings, whether it's cave art or paintings or coins or historical paintings, Renaissance paintings.
That's fascinating.
It's called Depicting UFOs.
Depicting UFOs, which cannot be interpreted as anything other than UFOs.
Anyway, there's one drawing that I brought in this briefing document that I was talking about earlier.
Yeah, you can pull that one up, Jordan.
I think you have that one we were looking at earlier.
Pain of the Madonna.
It's in a.
Right, right there.
Yeah, there you go.
So you.
The Madonna with St. Giovanni Giovanni.
Yeah, there's tons.
There's lots of these old Renaissance paintings from like the times of antiquity with religious depictions of Madonna and Jesus and the Virgin Mary with strange objects in the background.
And I think this one shows a guy looking up at it in the sky.
Yeah, if you can click on that and if you zoomed in, you could see there's a guy standing there with a dog.
And they're looking up at it.
So let me.
Can I share?
Can I share?
Can you go back to Australia?
Yes, yes.
This is Westall UFO case.
So I went to Australia right after Africa.
And I was fascinated because I, it's so hard for me as a researcher to imagine how a mass sighting like a school could happen in broad daylight and that the whole world.
Wouldn't know about it.
I just have a really hard time wondering how is that possible?
Do you know what I mean?
So I started investigating, well, with the help of a number of Australians and researchers.
And there was a guy who was 12 miles or less, eight miles away from the school.
It was two days prior.
Usually, when there's a UFO sighting, there's always a couple of days lead up to a whether it's a big event like a landing or something.
It's almost like they're kind of casing the joint.
I don't know.
You'll always, you know, there's UFO activity on a big mass sighting, usually for a few days.
Before it does something, there was a guy that was about, like I said, eight, 10 miles away.
His name was James Kibble.
He'd never come forward ever.
He was out in his garden with a Polaroid.
It was, I want to say, April 4th.
I'd have to look at the exact, but it was April 4th, 1966.
And he wanted to share the progress of the flowering garden at his mother's place.
So he had his Polaroid camera out there.
And then he saw something glinting in the sky that caught his eye.
And he looked up and he saw this disc.
That was according to the witness James Kibble, he's deceased now.
This he sent this to me.
This is a direct scan of his.
He mailed that to you, he mailed this to me.
Yeah, so it's descending like this.
And yeah, please, it's descending like this.
And then all the witnesses at the school that saw this object take off said it was a disc and it went like this it goes up like this on its side and then it shoots up straight up in the air.
Well, that according to James Kibble is the disc that flipped up horizontally like this.
Before it shot off.
A moment later, he said it was like a bullet leaving a gun shot out of there.
Now, I'll share some interesting aspect with your audience.
And that is if you ever see a UFO photograph with crystal clear defined edges, it's probably a fake.
They don't know why, but there's something to do with the propulsion they're guessing that causes the edges to blur ever so slightly.
Like, if you look at a legitimate, bona fide, good photograph that has been like scrutinized to death, like 1950 McMinnville, Oregon, or 1964, 65, the UFO worker that snapped off three or four Polaroids.
I'm looking at his face right now.
It'll come to me in a second, but you'll see that the edges are slightly blurred.
According to witnesses or specialists that I've talked to, that's a pretty good indicator that coupled with the testimony of the person that shot it.
Santa Ana, Rex Heflin, 1965.
He shot, I think, three or four Polaroids.
And the edges, great pictures, points of reference, broad daylight, light reflecting off the object.
Fantastic.
If you zoomed in on it on the originals, the edges are slightly blurred, just like this one.
But this is like a metallic structured object that.
Went from this position to this position and then shot off at high-res speed.
Well, it's interesting.
That's exactly how Bob Lazar described those things flying when he was on S4 testing those scraps.
I learned about that later on.
And you talked to the witnesses.
I'd never talked to, prior to Australia, I'd never talked to someone who described it.
I mean, this thing was sitting on the ground when the kids ran up to it.
Okay.
Sitting on the ground.
Right.
Right there.
Broad daylight.
It lifted off, got like 20 feet up.
And then it flipped on its side, and then that's when it rocketed off.
That's what the kids described?
That's what the kids described, yes.
So, yeah, Bob is.
That's what this guy who snapped a picture of it, right?
This is it in that position, right?
Before he said, a moment later, it shot off.
I said, Describe the acceleration to me.
He said, like it was being shot out of a gun.
Bang, gone.
Yeah.
The pilots described it, the pilots that saw it off the coast of San Diego explained it like if you put a ping pong ball into a cup and you shook the cup.
Yeah.
That's how the motion was.
And then Bob described him flying belly first, like when they did the test flights.
Which brings me to the picture you showed me last night of that red glowing object.
Can you show that?
I can.
I have that on my phone.
I can text it to you and you could forward it over to him.
Okay.
But that's kind of a bigger story behind that whole thing.
I don't know if that's something that you want to go into detail on.
Well, as much as you're comfortable with sharing.
I'm happy to do it.
Absolutely.
I'm happy to do it.
Because that is, if that's real, that is one of the most compelling photos I've ever seen.
Yeah.
Of a UFO.
I'm happy to share that story.
Yes.
I just shared a single frame clip of an object that's basically what I saw.
But I saw videotaped.
I don't know if you got it yet.
I just.
Yep.
I just got it.
I'm forwarding it to you now, Jordan.
Okay, cool.
So then I'll tell you the story about it because I. Did you get it?
Footage that I've seen with my own eyes that's truly so.
Is the first time you told the story about this to Logan Paul's first time you told the story?
Well, I was always kind of hush hush about it for a long time.
I mean, I would tell my friends and stuff because I was worried about it, it, I was worried about jeopardizing my efforts to get it.
Why is that so small?
Yeah, blow it up.
Make it bigger.
Oh, yeah, there we go.
Okay.
So, but.
I've told the story a couple of times publicly.
And the most detailed was probably when I was on Logan Paul's show because he's like, Evidence, where's the evidence?
And of course, I feel him.
I feel, I know he's talking about it.
I feel the same way.
I mean, I've got some evidence, you know, I've uncovered some nice photographic evidence and video.
So let me tell you the story behind this because it's pretty crazy.
I was doing my first UFO documentary way, way, way back.
Believe it or not, they had cameras back there.
I'm old, but not that old.
But, and I was interviewing a guy who lived on the outskirts of Area 51 in the area where you could live.
It's not like restricted, you know, space.
But his name was Chuck Clark.
He lived in a double wide, and he was a former military guy, an amateur astronomer.
And he had a sighting of something out at Area 51.
And remember, this was kind of around the time that Bob Lazar's story was coming out really big.
It was this was the early 90s.
I couldn't tell you exactly what year, but early 90s.
Area 51 Sighting In Early 90s00:06:11
And so Chuck and I, he was participating in my film.
It's called 50 Years of Denial.
And we were going back and forth for several months.
And I was fascinated by what was going on in Area 51.
I was a very curious person by nature.
So I stayed in touch with Chuck and we communicated often.
Well, one day he calls me and he goes, I got something to show you.
And I said, Okay, well, can you tell me what it is?
He goes, No, but I'll tell you this much.
When you see it, your jaw's going to hit the ground.
I said, Really?
And he's not one for hyperbole.
I mean, Chuck is a pretty mellow guy.
I said, Really?
He goes, Yeah, really.
I said, I'm getting in my car and I'm driving straight there.
It was like a 16 hour drive, 14 hour drive.
But I was like, If Chuck says, you know, so I get to the little alien.
Chuck lived just a block away in Rachel, Nevada.
Going to do his double wide.
Super clean trailer.
Very nice.
Like, beautifully air conditioned.
Nice, very clean, nice situation.
And he's got a TV and he's got a VHS tape and he pops his VHS tape and he says, sit down, I'll show you, you know.
And I see two guys on all I can describe is like the typical road trip.
They're listening to tunes, they're filming out the window, they're goofing off next to the little alien and they're posing next to the little alien, you know, just goofing off, just on a road trip.
Yeah.
Going to Chad Area 51 after all the publicity that Bob Lazar gave.
Uh, Area 51, which is a ton the first time, right?
Bob Lazar's story came kind of public in '89, it was like '93, but still, it was like making you know, people were doing tours of Area 51, and there were areas that you could go to and look down onto the base that had yet to be closed off.
If you knew what you're doing, you know, I mean, you could still see the base that doesn't happen anymore because they bought that section too.
But anyway, they're goofing off, they're posing next to the ET sign, blah blah blah, and then all of a sudden, the cars parked, they're in the car, the cars parked.
The camera is on probably the armrest and it's crooked.
It's not like level because it's just cocked a little bit.
The camera's filming the dashboard, a little bit of the windscreen, and the heater and the vents and all that stuff.
And they're arguing.
And what it sounds to me like, you can't see them yet.
You can't see them.
It sounds like they're trying to crawl under the seats.
That's what it sounds like.
And they're arguing.
Excuse me.
And all of a sudden, one of them's like, it's over the top of us.
Get down, get down.
It's over the top of us.
And I'm like, what the hell is going on?
I'm looking at this video going, what am I looking at here?
What's going on?
And at that point, this light, like, this is the car.
There's a light source above it.
Shooting directly down, and it's lighting up the inside of the car.
Okay.
But not normally like if you just had a spotlight with a helicopter.
No, this light was like a yellowy orange.
And the shadows inside the car, you couldn't see the light.
You can only see the effects of the light.
You couldn't see the source of the light.
The shadows on the inside of the car were eerily moving around like the source of the light was on a pendulum.
Because it was kind of like this.
So, all the shadows I'd never seen anything like it on the inside of the car were moving around very fluid, super smooth and fluid, right?
It was no abrupt stop or back and forth.
It was all fluid.
And one of the guys goes, You know, they were like, It's over the top of us.
It's over the top of us.
I don't know what the hell they're talking about.
I don't know what the hell was over the top of us.
I have no idea what they're.
What are they talking about?
I don't know what I'm looking at.
And at this point, the camera is still filming just the dashboard.
Just the dashboard.
Nobody has it in their hand.
And I hear this, I'm getting out.
And the guy's like, no, stay in the car.
Stay in the car.
I'm getting out.
And he grabs the camera, opens the door.
And I don't remember, I'm pretty sure the camera pans up.
You could see the desert floor.
You could see tumbleweed.
I remember seeing a tumbleweed.
I think I saw a tumbleweed.
It was dark, but it wasn't like it was dusk.
You can still see outlines of the desert, right?
Okay.
There outside, 100 feet is that.
Okay.
Now, here's the crazy part.
What I remember is that I'm looking at this thing, probably 30, 40 feet in diameter.
You could have easily hit it with a rock.
It's sitting in the sky and it's magic.
It's like floating silently, kind of rocking, like floating, like it's like a ship on the water.
It's doing this.
And the skin of the craft.
Looks like it's alive, like the molecules are alive, like it's glowing, like phosphorus on a beach or something, right?
And I'm looking at it, and all I'm thinking of is all the witnesses that I've talked to that have seen these things at a loss for words to describe what the hell they're looking at, right?
Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Like, because it looks alive.
It looks like it looks, and it looks like magic.
Living Craft With Phosphorus Skin00:06:17
Like, you're just, you can't even speak.
Like, I was just like, Like, just you know, like, I Chuck Clark was right.
My jaw was on the floor, like, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing.
And then the guy operating the camera goes, Oh my god, like this, and then bam, oh, the camera shuts off.
Did he shut it off, or was it just you know, like, shut down?
I have a vague memory of something like him saying something about a battery, the battery or something, but but the camera shut off very pretty quickly.
Camera shut off.
And that was that.
And I looked over at Chuck Clark and I went, Holy shit.
Like, who gave that to you?
Like, I need to have that.
I was still in production of my first piece, right?
I was like, I got to have that.
And I just said, and he's like, Oh, they're really scared that they shot something that's like a super secret, you know, stealth government, whatever.
And they're terrified.
I said, Okay, well, fine.
Give them my telephone number.
Tell them I'll work with them.
They could be anonymous.
I'll raise whatever kind of money.
Are you kidding me?
Just give them my number, Chuck.
And I kept harassing him and calling him and calling him and calling him.
And he had a copy of this video, too.
Yeah, a VHS copy of it, yes.
And I hate to say this, it was probably one of my biggest regrets I didn't run out of there with that damn thing.
Had I known that it would never see the light of day, I probably would have.
Because that's not right.
They could be anonymous, you know.
Make a copy of it at least for how did you get?
Do you can you tell me how you got the screenshot?
So, so well, somebody will there's a photograph that was taken in France.
Somebody it's so okay.
I'm sorry, I'm just trying to reveal what I can reveal comfortably here.
Okay, that's fine.
I do have screenshots that was given to me about a year and a half ago.
I got contacted, I talked about the story on a podcast.
I just one day said that the hell with it.
I don't care anymore.
Like, you know, what good everybody needs to know.
I saw this footage with my own eyes, I swear on my life.
Okay.
And I knew there wasn't, and I look at a lot of photographs and video.
There's nothing on this one.
Okay.
And not only that, but usually when I look at a photograph or some video footage, I immediately, I'm highly dubious.
It's fake.
It's been good.
Not one, not even 001% of me said that.
This felt the most authentic stuff.
It was just old enough to be before all the special.
No, this was.
This was phenomenal, man.
Okay.
Trust me when I tell you this.
This was like the most pro.
This is the gold standard by which we're all going after the definitive piece of videotaped evidence.
This was it.
Okay.
Right.
It was like, this is the holy grail of evidence.
And I saw it with my own damn eyes.
And the fact that I can get my hands on it.
Anyway, about a year and a half ago, maybe it was two years ago, I don't remember.
I said, Oh, the heck with it.
And I publicly told the story on a podcast.
And I get contacted by a guy who's a PI.
He does private investigating.
He finds people.
He's like, I heard your story, man.
It's unbelievable.
I'm going after this guy, Chuck Clark.
I said, Go for it.
Don't mention my name.
Chuck won't talk to me anymore.
And so I said, Good luck.
Let me know how it goes.
And he finds Chuck Clark.
And he goes, I got his number.
I said, Well, give him a call.
So he did.
And so he, about maybe a year ago, He went out and met Chuck Clark, and Chuck still had that same VHS tape, and it was pretty degraded.
But Chuck actually let him keep a couple frames of it.
I don't know, let him shoot a frame off the TV screen.
That's not one of them, but that's exactly like that.
Somebody sent that.
I don't know where that particular object came from.
Somebody texted it to me and said, Is this what it looked like?
I said, Yeah.
Now, the difference that I remember is that the one that I saw.
Had like, if you took a pie and you took a knife and you symmetrically cut pieces of that pie, very symmetrical, but you didn't remove the pieces, you just made the seams.
Right.
Those were darker.
There were like lines that were darker, like it was a pie, but it wasn't taken apart.
Right.
But they were perfectly symmetrical.
And I remember that.
I remember that.
And I don't see it there.
But in terms of like the color, orangey yellow, And glowing like that, that's what it looked like.
Like it was alive, like it's phosphorus.
That's so weird.
Yeah, I know.
And it had been that close to Area 51.
It must have been right there.
It must have been a test flight by one of the people there.
Could very well have been that.
Could very well.
I have no idea.
But that's what I saw.
And it was flipping.
It was magic.
It was like you look at it and you have nothing to relate it to because you've never seen anything.
Anything like it, not even remotely like it.
It's so foreign to your eyeballs.
Like seeing those shadows on the dash, the way they were moving.
I'm like, the only way you could recreate that is to have a light on a pendulum above a car at night that's bright enough.
Like, and it's moving so slowly.
Like the shadows are moving around in this fluid motion on the inside of the car with this light source coming above the windshield.
It was just like, you've never seen that before.
How would you see that before?
And then when you see the object, and it's like, It's like it's not stable, it's kind of wobbling, like maybe slower, but it's kind of wobbling, right?
Fluid Shadows On Car Dashboard00:12:13
You know what I mean?
Like, if you thought of a boat on the ocean, the way it's kind of moving around the ocean like that, yeah, that's what it looked like.
It wasn't stable, it wasn't like you know what I mean.
The camera shut off, but did the kids describe to Chuck or anything what happened after that?
He, Chuck, wouldn't tell me.
I mean, all here's Chuck at we got to find Chuck, Chuck's in Arizona.
Yeah, he's in Arizona.
Chuck, goddammit, released the footage.
Yeah.
And when this private eye went out and checked it out, he said, Yeah, Chuck said that he would never talk to you.
He goes, Chuck said that.
Chuck said that he told it because he said to me, He said, if you ask me again, I'm never going to speak to you again.
If you ask me again, of course I'm going to ask you again.
Like I was selling, I think it was out of the blue.
I just sold out of the blue to NBC Universal.
Sorry, my mic away from the mic there.
And, uh, There was this guy, Larry Landsman, who was at NBC Universal.
I told him the story.
You know, he was buying my movie, sci fi, whatever.
And he goes, 30 grand.
We'll get 30 grand.
No problem for that.
So I was like, OK, I'll reach out to him, but I don't know how well it's going to go down.
It was like 2009 or 2010.
And I reached out to him and he goes, I'm never talking to you again.
I said, Well, I just have 30 grand.
Could you just offer to the kids $30,000?
Like, come on.
Right.
Just talk to them.
He wouldn't even entertain it.
No.
You think he's in a similar situation to some of those people in Brazil, maybe?
No.
Or those kids are in a similar situation like that?
No, I don't.
You don't?
No.
Why don't you show it to everybody?
I mean, you think he'd keep it in a vault?
He never got it transferred to, he never got it digitized.
That footage should have been transferred to Beta SP from that bloody VHS tape from when I saw it, because I can assure you, VHS tapes deteriorate.
They degrade.
Right.
You go over and you play them over and over, that half inch tape, you know?
So that tape is like.
Who knows how bad it is now, but it's not great.
It's not like, you know, what I saw was pretty phenomenal.
I mean, it was VHS, but it was wow.
It was, I mean, it was like a couple of weeks old when I saw it.
I didn't dilly dally, man.
I went straight after that stuff.
I'm not kidding you.
I was like, okay, I'm going.
Like, I don't know how much more time we have, but there was a couple of things that I could share with you or however you feel.
Yeah, let's share.
Let's talk about everything.
Well, this is kind of interesting because, well, I'll start with this one first.
This was just something that we stumbled upon when we were making the phenomenon.
It was a tele, I think they call it a telex.
What was it when you send a telegram or a telex?
I have no idea.
It's in lieu of, it's in 1952.
We didn't have fax.
So if you're communicating directly, you'd send a telex maybe.
I don't know.
That was way before my time too.
But in any case, this is interesting because we came across this.
This is from the White House, from the Truman Library.
In two consecutive weekends of July 1952, the White House Capitol was buzzed by UFOs.
Right.
I actually found through an archivist, excuse me, through an archivist, testimony from a guy named Al Chop, who was in the radar room the night that the pilot, one of the pilots in 1952, Streaking across the night sky at over 500 miles an hour in the pitch black, and suddenly was surrounded by these UFOs.
They were like kind of could be described as tic tacs.
They were small, circular, self luminous objects that surrounded his plane.
The testimony is phenomenal.
They were given the authority, and we have the newspaper clippings to validate what I'm telling you.
They're given the authority to shoot, and apparently they did shoot, and they attempted to shoot.
At these objects.
We take a very hostile position, according to the witnesses that I've talked to, on unknowns.
You know, I mean, it is oversensitive airspace.
I mean, you know, the White House, the Capitol building, and it was two consecutive weekends.
So there was this guy, president of the Rocket Society.
His name is Robert Farnsworth.
And he wrote a direct plea to, I guess it would have been then President Truman.
And he said, it's really cool.
I respectfully suggest that no offensive action be taken against the object reported.
As unidentified, which have been cited over our nation, should they be extraterrestrial in origin, such action might result in the gravest consequences, as well as possibly alienating us from beings of far superior powers.
Friendly contact should be made, should be sought as long as possible.
Anyway, it's just kind of a cool little thing that came right out of the uh, present the Harry Truman, yeah, Harry Truman Library.
Wow, yeah, I got it directly from the Harry Truman Library.
And I thought that was neat.
And what I wanted to share with you is this photograph.
This photograph here.
This is.
Up a little bit.
You got it?
Perfect.
This is Parviz Jafari.
He was a general.
And in 1976, he had an incredibly dramatic dog and cat, dog, you know, I always call it a dog fight, but he had a.
With a UFO, him and several other pilots, and he tried to shoot it down.
He got it in its sights and he pulled the trigger to fire at this thing.
And his entire cockpit froze and he started falling out of the sky.
And he said he was ready to, he was a second or two away from bailing.
He thought he was done.
And I interviewed him.
We flew him out from Tehran to Washington, D.C., to testify at the National Press Club event that I did, that I made that film about called I Know What I Saw.
And on camera, all these years later, he's since deceased.
He said, Gosh, my biggest regret is why did I try to shoot it?
I should have tried to make friendly contact.
You know, that really kind of left an indelible impression on me hearing him say that.
Like, why did we have to have an aggressive posture?
Why didn't we try to make friendly contact?
You know, we're such an aggressive species.
It's like, then you have to ask yourself, And it's all speculation, man.
Nobody really knows, in my opinion, what's going on.
But these objects chose a school to land in Africa.
They chose a school to land in Australia.
They chose a school to land in England.
Is it a coincidence?
Are the children, they see as a benign presence that they'd rather try to make contact with?
I'm just putting this out there.
I don't know.
But, you know, the military takes an aggressive posture.
We shoot at these things.
We have very credible reports of landings and contact at schools.
I mean, with hundreds of witnesses on some occasions.
So I don't know.
It's just part of my personal journey.
Sometimes I think, like, maybe, maybe if we weren't so aggressive and warlike, maybe, maybe they would make contact.
I don't know.
It's all, like I said, man, it's all speculation on my part, but.
You look at what the phenomenon does, and that tells you some things.
But you also look at what the phenomenon doesn't do.
All they have to do is hover over the Macy's Day Parade, and it's game over.
They don't do that.
You know, you look at some of these abduction cases like Travis Walton, Fire in the Sky, I think it was 75, Snowflake, Arizona.
And they got him.
I'm convinced that he got in the way of the propulsion when he jumped out of the truck.
And he was affected by it, the propulsion of the craft as it was spooling up and getting ready to take off.
And they came back and got him.
And when they five days later dropped him off, if they would have dropped him off in a location where he was captured or obtained, he would have died.
It was the middle of nowhere.
I've been there twice.
Really?
Yeah.
They dropped him off.
I actually have a photograph of the location if you want to see it.
Yeah.
They dropped him off at.
Um, see this one.
They dropped him off on the outskirts of town that was just far enough away in a valley where they could swoop down quickly.
This is my little prize possession.
I have this was a drawing that I don't know 10 or 12 years ago, Travis Walton, the key witness to the fire in the sky case, drew for me.
Oh, wow!
There's something about that.
That's what the disc looked like.
And he signed it.
That's amazing.
Oh my God.
Look at that 10 years ago.
So it's a ton of glowing.
And then this.
Oh, that's at the site.
Yeah, you got it.
Cool.
Yeah, that's at the site.
And the weird thing was, like proximity to where the object was seen hovering, they cut some of the immediate trees as samples to look at the growth rings.
And there was a pattern of accelerated growth.
Within a certain proximity of where that object was over like a 20 year period, whatever it was, since, or maybe it's 30 years since that sighting.
But what I wanted to mention that I thought was rather interesting was so much of what these alleged beings did with Travis.
It's a very credible case because there were so many eyewitnesses, seven of them, they all passed polygraph.
But when they dropped off Travis, they did it so right on the outskirts of town in a little valley so they could like.
Dip down quickly, deposit him right on the outskirts, and then shoot off, minimizing the likelihood of them being spotted.
Why?
But they also cared about his well being because if they would have dropped him off where they picked him up, he wouldn't have made it.
And so that tells you something, too, right?
Excuse me.
It's a fascinating.
So you have to look at what UFOs do, and you also have to look at what UFOs don't do.
I mean, they do some pretty provocative things.
But they don't make overt contact on a mass scale.
Why?
Which is interesting.
Very interesting.
And the children aspect of it is even more fascinating.
Children, think about it.
I mean, children are the most open minded.
They're not set in their ways.
They're closer to the source than we are.
Yeah, they really are.
They really are.
Well, James, thank you so much for doing this, man.
It has been fascinating.
I'm grateful for you coming and sharing all this information.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
It was a real pleasure.
I hope I didn't talk too much.
Where To Watch The Full Film00:01:50
No, you didn't.
I wish you could talk more.
Where can people find it?
When is the movie coming out, Moment of Contact, and where can people find it?
So, Moment of Contact is coming out in mid October.
There are a lot of streaming platforms that are currently looking at it.
It's right now scheduled to be released on TVOD, which is iTunes, Amazon, Fandango, Vimeo, Hulu, all those streaming platforms of transactional download.
But it would be great if anyone out there could just look up the trailer, Moment of Contact, and just spread it out because the more views the trailer gets, The higher profile the film and the more leverage that we have.
Also, if anyone's interested in seeing the phenomenon, you can watch it for free on Tubi.
If you don't want to get commercials, you can rent it for $2.99 or something like that on iTunes and Amazon.
If you buy it, some people go, Why didn't you tell me this?
Because I don't know.
I never think about it.
But if you do decide to buy it, if you want to buy it, you can get it on iTunes.
With three hours of bonus material.
Oh, wow.
And a lot of people, and for the same price, you'd buy it anywhere else.
But I think it's Vimeo and iTunes.
But check it out.
It's one of the, I'm pretty sure it's iTunes.
They have bonus material that you get when you purchase it for nine whatever bucks.
I don't know.
But people that are really into it want to know that.
Yeah.
And so if you're going to watch it for free, watch it on Tubi.
If you want to spend money, go to the cheapest place to rent it, which is like $2.99.
Don't be cheap, you cheap folks.
Spend the money.
No, I'm just saying you can watch it free too.
I don't care.
I don't do this for the money.
It's obviously I have to make a living, but, but, um, Yeah, but thank you for having me on, man.
Absolutely, man.
Thank you so much.
And thank you for bringing all these amazing photographs and everything.
It really made the experience so much more incredible.