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Nov. 14, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:54
Edition 591 - John Greenwald
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hey, thank you very much for being part of my show.
Thank you for making contact with me, giving me your guest suggestions, telling me what's going on with your life, how you're getting by, all of the things that you do.
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So if you want to get in touch with me that way or just check out what's going on with the show, that is a good way to do it.
The guest on this edition of The Unexplained, somebody from my radio show, an extended version of the conversation with John Greenwald, a man who began making freedom of information requests in the United States from his home in California when he was only 15.
He's been doing this for 25 years now, has 3 million documents on his website, The Black Vault, and has unearthed over the years some interesting nuggets of information that have made headlines around the world about topics like UFOs and some of the things that people create conspiracy theories about.
So, John Greenwald, the guest on this edition of the show, a very eloquent guy and a fabulous guest in my opinion, but your opinion is the one that counts.
If you listen to this show and you have some thoughts about it, please let me know.
I think that's all I've got to say, really, just to remind you again that when you get in touch with me by email, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you make use of this show.
And that, I think, on this grey and grim afternoon in November is about all I have to say.
So let's get to our conversation with John Greenwald from the Black Vault from my radio show.
The truth, I think as we see as we look at politics in the United Kingdom and around the world and daily affairs, is a very rare commodity and seems to be getting, in an age of digital media, social media, seems to be getting rarer and rarer.
Sometimes the truth lies within archives and records and documents that are held by governments at other official institutions.
Stuff that they may not want you to know, but stuff that maybe sometimes they can rest assured that it's such a difficult process to get hold of this information and make sense of it, you probably won't be able to understand it anyway if you do get it.
Somebody who isn't deterred by any of that is John Greenwald, who has filed thousands, I believe, of freedom of information requests and is determined to get to the truth.
In fact, he's been doing this since he was a kid.
He is the man behind the Black Vault website that we've referenced here so many times before and has been so important in recent news stories.
I've got to stop talking, so let's get to California now and say, John Greenwald, thank you for coming on this show.
Oh, absolutely.
It's a pleasure to be here again.
Thank you.
I'm not sure whether my summation was any good at all, really, but I kind of see you as a seeker after truth in a modern era.
How do you see yourself?
You know, I've been called worse.
So it's very, no, I think that's a perfect summation.
It's very hard to describe what I do.
I absolutely am an investigator, researcher, and you nailed a point in that that I think a lot of people don't realize.
And I think, especially with the next generation, you know, people coming up wanting to know the truth, that they feel that the internet will give them everything.
And a lot of times you're absolutely right.
The truth exists in archives and documents that have never seen the digital age, that they're, you know, typed sometimes 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago.
And that's where they have sat.
They've never seen the digital age and been scanned or put on the internet.
And that's where a lot of the nuggets that I try and dig out are.
And with the Black Vault, I have done over 10,000 Freedom of Information Act requests in 25 years.
And it goes to every corner of the United States government.
And that is one of the biggest things that I've learned is that the answers to a lot of the questions we have, whether it be about UFOs or any other type of government secret, they lie within documents and archives, sometimes never seeing the light of day themselves for decades.
And they will be declassified for the first time.
And my aim with the Black Vault is to bring all that to light, that sometimes in those 10,000 requests, I've waited years for documents to come.
My record is 14 and a half years, if you could believe it, from the point that I requested a document to actually getting it.
And the document wasn't really that interesting.
It was more the point that you had to wait 14 and a half years to get it.
Right.
Well, tell me what it was.
Was it the president's dinner or something like that?
You know, was it something that was actually just a World War II era document that, again, was nothing earth-shattering.
It's just the security review process and the bureaucracy in some corners of the American government.
It was the culmination of a lot of things that contributed to that case going 14 and a half years.
So, I mean, I wish it was a mind-blowing revelation.
So not to dismiss your question, it just wasn't, you know, a World War II era document that was profiling some aircraft and some other intelligence things.
But again, it was just the reality of taking 14 and a half years.
Now, although that is a little bit of a rarity, it's not uncommon for requests to go four, five, six years.
Once they start hitting a decade, then you know that you've at least struck a nerve to the point where they, what's going on?
Why don't they want to have their security review done?
And so those are the ones that become intriguing, but very frustrating.
So the Black Vault, to kind of sum that up, just aims to bring all of that to light.
Take the waiting time to seconds with our internet connections anywhere in the world.
You click on a document.
Took me 14 and a half years to get it.
You can get it in a couple of seconds.
And that's really what I aim to do is to just educate the public and give them access to information they normally wouldn't have.
But you've opened my eyes to something, John.
You tell me that in some cases, it's taken years to be able to get hold of the document and sometimes quite an innocuous one.
Do you get the feeling in some of those cases that the person on the other end or the people on the other end are kind of hoping that you will go away?
Absolutely.
And that is one of the many tactics that some of these government agencies will deploy to try and get you to go away.
And one of them is the waiting game.
And they want you to either give up, get frustrated, or forget.
And the American government, some agencies, they do something that's very frowned upon.
It's actually frowned upon within our own government as well.
But some agencies, they send what are called still interested letters.
So they will go years and have you just sit and simmer.
And then they'll send you a letter and say, okay, your request has been open since 2016.
With the passage of time, we just need to know you're still interested.
And if we don't hear from you within 30 days, we're going to close the request.
And it's like, wait a minute, you just took three, four, five years sitting on my request.
Now you're getting around to sending me this still interested letter.
And I have 30 days to get back to you or you're going to close the request and then I have to start over.
And it becomes very frustrating to play those games.
Yeah.
And it also becomes very obvious to you or the recipient of what you were the recipient of, the game that is being played.
It's almost like I've just got this mental image of a car showroom accidentally offering a car worth thousands of dollars for $25, realizing what it's done, not able to take it back, and then waiting, waiting, waiting, and getting in touch with the person who thinks they bought it and saying, you still interested in this, really?
It's like that kind of thing.
So that's the game that we're playing.
The information, much of it is out there.
But you must also come across the case that in many areas, like ufology and other areas, the stuff that you really want is either redacted or it simply isn't there.
Yes.
Now, there is kind of a common misconception about this that everything you get is redacted.
And to be honest with you, I'm very surprised at some of the stuff I do get that's not redacted, that you can read and that you can access.
And as much as I'm kind of harping on the process, to kind of flip that narrative a little bit, there are quite a few agencies that actually do want to help people like me, the researchers, the people that are really trying to access information and trying to do something good with it.
There are agencies that try and do that.
And on top of it, not everything is redacted, but it very much is a gamble on when you go after documents, what is the result going to be?
And sometimes, yes, you get reams of pages that are just blacked out from top to bottom.
And then other times you'll get a response and you'll get reams of information that's not redacted.
And those are the, both are pieces to the puzzle.
So both are valuable in their respective ways.
But obviously the latter, those that don't have the redactions, those are those nuggets that you look for to realize, okay, there's something to the topic that I'm researching.
And then those unredacted paragraphs will lead to two or five or sometimes, you know, 20 different requests that you file off of that.
And it just builds from there.
It just keeps going and going.
And that's, I think, one of my personal favorite things is the puzzle, putting together the puzzle.
And again, those redacted documents, even though they're frustrating, are pieces of the puzzle that do tell a story.
Seems to me then to do this stuff, you must be a methodical, be patient, two things which I am not.
But it sounds to me like you've just got to be, you've got to never lose your temper and you've always got to be calm and clear about this.
It's almost like you need a legally forensic brain.
I will admit there are many, many times over 25 years that I have been frustrated and lose my cool, you know, here at my desk and want to just throw my monitor out the window.
Can you give me an example of what's frustrated you most?
Well, definitely the waiting game or on top of that, where sometimes you will, one prime example is I did a request with the Defense Intelligence Agency and I filed it back in the end of 2017.
And it was UFO related.
It was about what we now known as ATIP and OSAP, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit.
But regardless, it was about the programs that had allegedly been looking into UFOs.
I say allegedly because there was a lot of controversy and still is with the government and what those programs did.
Regardless, what I did was I had followed up in the beginning of 2018 to make sure that the Defense Intelligence Agency was going to process my request properly and that the response would include certain types of records, namely mission statements, objectives, and stuff like that.
And years go by.
And this just happened in the last couple of weeks where they process the request.
They say there's no records.
So I've waited for years to hear there's nothing.
And then I learned that the what I call amendment that I sent in the beginning of 2018 was never acknowledged or put into my case.
When they explained why, they said I sent it to the wrong email address.
So I researched it and then got them into a corner where they finally admitted they still check that email.
So they tried to say that they did not check that email.
It was my fault.
I sent it to the wrong address when I showed them, hey, look, this government website lists that email.
And after I pushed and pushed, they finally admitted, yes, they still check the email.
My entire point is that they tried to essentially lie their way out of it.
They tried to take a three Plus year waiting game for me and try and make it my fault that the result wasn't what it should have been.
And so I have to go through the appeal process now, which is a much more lengthier legal process, and type out an appeal, explain why I feel that the case should be reopened, they should revisit it and process it properly.
So some of that gets, you know, very dry and legalese and kind of boring.
But that's stuff that frustrates me because there will be a day.
I hope it's long from now, but there will be a day when I file a request and I'll question whether or not I'm going to be alive by the time, you know, that it is processed and put forth.
So to wait three years for essentially nothing, that's brutal.
And that one irks me more than most.
But you do have time on your side.
You're a young guy.
You've been doing this for 25 years, but you started when you were 15.
Just as we close off this segment about you and the process of what you do, what was it about a 15-year-old?
And your dad, we have to say, who has the same name as you, worked on the Space Shuttle program, didn't he?
Worked on the building of the Space Shuttle.
So I can understand that interest in those things.
But what was it about a 15-year-old John Greenwald Jr. that made him want to dig beneath layers of obfuscation?
Curiosity.
I was absolutely curious about what the American government would tell me.
And I made the very wrong decision that they would tell me the truth.
And that's what I thought, you know, because I was reading all these internet stories and you don't know what's up, down, left, or right.
You don't know who's telling the truth or who's not.
So at 15, I thought, well, if I'm going to get the truth, I'm going to go to the U.S. government and I'll get the actual documents.
Well, you know, that was only half true.
You know, documents don't lie in the sense that once you get them, they tell a story.
But it was a very big challenge to get there.
I never had an experience when it comes to like UFO related stuff.
That obviously was my first push.
And that's what I'm most well known for.
But I mean, when it came to government secrets as a whole, I was just curious.
JFK assassination, biological weapon secrets, mind control experiments.
You named the government secret.
I was going after documents about it.
And it really all was rooted in a deep curiosity of knowing what was the absolute truth.
Did any of this have consequences for your dad?
Because your dad was by a couple of degrees of separation, but he was nevertheless doing this.
He was working for the government.
That's right.
Never any consequences for him, but there was absolutely a fear.
And for 25 years, I've been known as John Greenwald Jr., but I'm not legally a junior.
I had adopted it early on just simply because of my dad and to differentiate between him and I, because working for a government contractor, he didn't want corners of the government going, hey, wait a minute, you know, this guy's working on, it wasn't classified programs, but sensitive programs when it came to the space shuttle and rocket technology and what's called the RS-68 engine on the space shuttle.
All of that is sensitive.
He couldn't go online and, you know, post the blueprints of stuff like that.
So here was somebody by the same name looking for classified secrets on all sorts of things.
He feared it.
Nothing ever happened, but he definitely feared it.
So I made sure that any government agency I went to, which at that time included the CIA, NSA, DIA, you name it, they were finding out who I was.
I made sure that they knew that I was a 15-year-old kid, a student.
I would put my student ID card in every request and make sure they knew I was not my dad.
Gee, I read that.
And just finally, before we take some commercials here, I was amused on one podcast where you referenced the fact that you can't be blacklisted doing this, but you can be put on a list of vexatious persons.
And in a number of organizations, I think including the CIA, you're on that list.
That's right.
There was a discovery with the FBI that they have what's called a vexum list.
And a vexum list is essentially the list of people and organizations that could get documentation and get enough publicity, get enough public, you know, get enough of the public to see it that would be problematic to the FBI and those that created a lot of work for them.
You ended up on the Vexim list.
There's only about, if I remember, about 12 people on it or so, and I was one of them.
So going after FBI files, I know, was definitely problematic.
I made a second discovery that the IRS also has a list that they are potentially concerned about when people file requests.
Just to explain to my British listener, the IRS is like the inland revenue, the tax authority.
Right, exactly.
And that's one you don't want to upset because they can really cause some problems for you.
But thankfully, Knock on Wood, I haven't had any issues with that agency, but it was pretty disconcerting to see that I was problematic enough for them to put me on this list.
And most of those on the list very quickly were news agencies like the Washington Post or the New York Times.
Those were bigger agencies that were on there.
I was only one of like two individuals that was on the list by name.
You know, so we weren't news media outlets.
We were just people, but they were concerned enough to put me on the list nonetheless.
Gee, you were there with Woodward and Bernstein.
That's a reference that dates me, I know.
John Greenwald, hold that thought.
Thank you very much indeed.
John Greenwald in Los Angeles, California, a guy who I think you're hearing why we are discussing these matters with him, because the stuff that he's doing, I think, in this world, what do you think is very important?
So, John Greenwald, let's get into the UFO stuff here.
And I don't know really where to begin.
I've got a few subject areas that I would like to go into, but let me ask you this first.
What was the first UFO-related request and investigation that you did?
Sure.
So that goes back to that curiosity when I was 15, and I had come across a website that described what is infamously known in ufology as the 1976 Iran incident.
And I had read this, I'm going to say alleged because I was very skeptical even at 15 that it was real, this four-page document that was said to come from the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency.
And at the age of 15, I had no idea what that government agency was.
And the case itself from 1976 really did explore an encounter that defies explanation.
And I would argue, even in 2021, we really don't have an adequate explanation for multiple UFOs coming out of what can be described in science fiction lingo as kind of a mothership.
You know, you've got one craft and you have multiple other craft coming out of it.
I think they also, the terminology out of sci-fi would be like a hybrid aircraft, I think is what it's called.
And essentially, it's just a carrier.
Multiple UFOs seen.
One of them either lands on Earth or hovers just above the ground and casts this big light.
I mean, it really went into great detail, even shutting down two separate F-4 Phantom jets, when one of which was trying to engage the UFO and fire upon it because it felt that the UFO was doing an aggressive maneuver against it.
And for the second time, this technology seemingly had shut down this second F-4 Phantom jet.
It had already happened minutes prior.
So they went and scrambled a second F-4.
So, you know, you look at this four-page document and you can read it, right?
So that was my skepticism.
You can read it.
And you go through this.
It was an unknown.
They were going out and testing soil samples the next day.
I thought, there's no way this is real.
And I went after it through this thing called the Freedom of Information Act.
No, I had no idea what that was either, but this website taught you how to do it.
And essentially by teaching you, they said, copy and paste this letter, which I did and got it.
And that four pages have now turned into over 3 million on all sorts of different topics because it taught me, yeah, over 3 million now.
It taught me not only the FOIA, but it taught me that there were nuggets there within the U.S. intelligence community, government agencies, military branches that were not redacted and that were stories that were amazing.
And so that set me off on my journey.
And that four-page document, like I said, was absolutely real.
And it was something that the Defense Intelligence Agency still gives out to this day.
They don't hide it.
It is something that they've declassified and put out there.
And it's just an amazing story, but absolutely one of my major motivating factors to do all this.
And when you got that four-page document that was revelatory for you, did you make a point then of trying to do, I mean, you were 15 then, but did you make a point of trying to do further investigation on that?
Or is it simply the receipt of and analysis of the document that you were into?
Well, my first reaction after just kind of being, you know, amazed at the document was I ran back to the internet.
And this was 1996.
So, you know, quote unquote Googling wasn't really a thing.
The search engine of the day was called Alta Vista, not to age myself.
But, you know, that was how you looked on the internet.
And that was my first reaction was to go back and look for other government documents.
And in 1996, they were very few and far between, especially with UFO stuff.
But government documents like this weren't there.
And so the black vault is modeled even 25 plus years later after what I was looking for as a reaction to seeing that record.
And so I built that website.
So as I was building the website, I was filing FOIA requests to not only the DIA, but then I started branching out.
I was like, well, what does the NSA have?
What does the DOD have?
What does, you know, this branch have?
And so I would file the requests.
And then at the same time, once I'd get the documents, put them on the internet.
And that's really what you see today is just kind of the evolution of what I was looking for in 1996 as a kid, but never found.
And I thought if I was looking for it, somebody else would be also.
And those FOIA requests that I kept filing, I mean, there were some days I was sending out 30, 40 in a day.
They were yielding documents in some cases that had never seen the light of day before.
The 1976 Iran incident document, that had been around for many, many years.
I don't claim to have discovered that.
But then all of a sudden, I was getting documents that were declassified for the first time.
And that's when I knew that the resource would be valuable to people because there were records there that were available nowhere else.
And in some cases, documents had not seen the light of day for decades before my request would go in, get them declassified and put them online.
That's astonishing that they would, I mean, look, 15-year-old boy here, 15-year-old youth doing this, and you were getting stuff that was being effectively declassified for the first time for you.
When you went to various agencies and you tried to see what Agency B had, agency C had, in this 1976 case from which it all sprang for you, did you find discrepancies or tie-ins that were useful?
What benefit was it to go to different agencies on the same case?
Sure.
Yeah.
And that's an excellent question because I didn't know what to expect, but by going to other agencies, found that that document, that 1976 Iran incident document, was forwarded throughout pretty much the entire intelligence community within the U.S. government, including the White House.
And in addition, had found a formally classified document within the NSA, which was written and prefaced with a statement by a captain of the United States Air Force, essentially saying things happen, and I'm paraphrasing, but things happen in a pilot's career that defy explanation.
And he's like, this is one of those cases.
Now we should investigate it.
But in his words, he says, essentially, this will likely be filed away in a drawer and forgotten.
And that is essentially what happened.
But I found these documents In agencies outside the DIA.
So you put the pieces of the puzzle together.
This 1976 Iran incident case alone was very, very important to the intelligence community.
Now, why does that matter?
Very quickly, I do want to address this, and it's the year that it happened, 1976.
Now, we have to remember the era that this happened, which was, let me see here, seven years after the government's investigation in UFOs ended.
So from 1947 to 1969, the United States military had investigated UFOs.
Their conclusion, not a threat to national security, no extraterrestrial indication, and they were not interested in any UFOs thereafter because they felt that after 12,000 cases through the Project Blue Book era and then prior to that, Project Sign and Project Grudge, they were done.
And documentation that they released to the public said, if you have a UFO case, go to a local UFO group, call your local law enforcement, but they didn't want to be bothered by the issue anymore.
But internally, that was the polar opposite of the reality of what was going on.
And this 1976 case should have never been of interest to the U.S. government, if you believe what they say.
But in reality, it was of interest.
And on top of that, something they felt the need to inform the president about.
And this is not a standalone case because in the process of investigating that, had made discovery that there were hundreds of other cases throughout every corner of the globe, including in America, of these UFOs that were being seen over sensitive installations.
And namely here in America, they were being seen over military installations with nuclear weapons.
Indeed, on October the 19th, as you will know, we both know, there was a major event at the National Press Club in Washington.
My friend and your friend, Robert Salas, was involved in that.
And they were again trying to get some action on this, because it is happening to this day, we are told.
I suppose what I would ask you then, as you were starting this long road that you've been on, this 25 years, in that event, did you start to see that perhaps there was some kind of correlation between the documents that you were receiving both on that event and other events as well that might indicate to you that there's some kind of policy here?
I hesitate to say the word, but maybe some kind of obfuscation or cover-up about all of this that begins in your teenage brain to become a reality.
I haven't phrased that well, but I think you might get my drift here.
Yeah, I think I know where you're going with it.
Very early on, I realized, yes, there was a cover-up.
And there's no way around that.
A lot of times to just kind of the general public who don't listen to shows about UFOs or so on, they might think, oh, that's conspiracy talk.
You know, there is no cover-up.
No, there absolutely is.
And that is indicative by the games that they play, the redactions that they have, and whatever it is about this subject.
And I've researched a lot.
When it comes to the Freedom of Information Act and UFOs, it is single-handedly the most difficult topic to navigate and to try and get information on, more so, arguably than anything else.
In my opinion, it's more than anything else, simply because for whatever reason, they don't want you to know the truth.
And the pattern that emerged as the years went on was that not only was there a cover-up, but the documents that I were able to get my hands on in some cases would require a legal appeal to a denial.
So I won't bore you to death with the whole legal process, but essentially you file your original request.
If it's denied, you can appeal.
If your appeal is denied, you take them to court.
That's the nutshell version of how the FOIA works.
So in some cases, I would have to appeal their denial, get the documents, and show that this pattern of not only the cover-up was there, but what I could get my hands on proved a technology that was highly advanced, that didn't have an explanation, that really showed the military was clueless, the government was clueless on what they were really encountering.
Now, that discussion in the last couple of years has opened up and the military is finally admitting that they're seeing these things.
But keep in mind, for 20 plus years of me doing this, the government was saying they had done it all.
They had looked into UFOs.
They explained what they could and that there was no threat and nothing to look into.
Now, obviously, they've changed that tune.
But all of these documents were showing me at not only the age of 15, but into turning 20 and my mid-20s and so on, that there was something to this phenomena that was not as easily explainable as many of the skeptics and debunkers wanted us to think.
And a lot of those skeptics and debunkers fall back on military technology classified this, classified that.
And that's all well and good.
But when you're talking about the military itself encountering objects that they themselves have no idea what it is, you're starting to really limit the amount of explanations that you can give for these UFO encounters.
And a lot of those skeptical debunker tactics of just falling back on the easy answers were going away.
And that was one of the biggest, I think, through lines, what I would call a through line between these documents is that they weren't explainable.
They were real.
They were nuts and bolts.
They were encounters well beyond the time that the military wanted to investigate them.
And they were taking it serious in secret.
They did not want the public to know the truth.
When you put all that together, you realize that that puzzle, that the picture that's emerging from the puzzle is one that they don't want you To see.
And that serves as one of my major motivating factors is to see that puzzle complete.
Which delivers us to exactly where we stand at the moment, where we've had this interim report delivered in Washington, the unclassified report that the public were able to see delivered in June.
Of course, on a Friday, when it was harder to react and ask questions to it, I knew that was coming and that's what happened.
But the $64 question then, allowing for inflation, it becomes the $64,000 question for the world, is whether they, in Inverted Commons, all of these agencies, departments, and interlacing organs, whether they are not wanting you to know this stuff because they don't know what it is, or alternatively, they do know what it is.
Two polar opposite reasons for wanting to keep the lid on all of this because they don't know what it is, and they're still trying to find out, presumably, or they do.
And if we knew what it was, really, it would cause alarm and consternation, don't you think?
Absolutely.
And I think the answer to both of those possibilities is yes.
I do believe that the ultimate answer encompasses both of the scenarios that you just said.
And I'll start with the part that they do know what it is.
I think that there is a percentage of what we, as the general public on a worldwide scale, banter about, which is, yeah, potentially classified military technology, potentially other world powers outside of America and their technology.
And there becomes this protection of the general public to keep that information from them because they don't want that panic.
You know, we don't want to go back into this cold world era style of fear and this country has that, that country has this, and we can't defend against this or that.
So there is that fear to want to calm the nerves of the general public.
So I think to some extent, the military has knowledge of some of these encounters.
But in the same respect, I think that there's a smaller percentage of encounters that defy explanation or any possibility that this is another country on the world stage.
And so your definition is potentially very few in number possibilities of what UFOs can be.
And that's where I believe they are clueless.
I believe that there is a certain percentage where they're essentially scratching their heads.
And maybe in the counterintelligence world, they're trying to essentially play off of that confusion.
But at the end of the day, I don't think they know the real answer either.
And I think that is where the national security risk and threat exists, that if they came out and says, hey, we're completely clueless, we really don't know what some of these cases are, that that's potentially problematic for them.
And although they seemingly are starting to do that now, I question whether or not some of that is strategic.
Do they really not know?
I don't know, but I think that if I were to make a guess, yes, it encompasses both scenarios you put forward.
And I think that the government is clueless on a percentage of this.
And that is the national security risk for them to really start admitting it.
I got to know your name in 2019.
When, to use an American term, you hit pay dirt.
You got your biggest story, I guess, to date.
You got the Navy to admit that the so-called Tic Tac UFO videos were unexplained.
I think that's the gist of what you came out with, but it got you worldwide headlines, didn't it?
It did.
Yeah, that was, I think, one of the biggest stories that I broke.
And that was one that I was not expecting and fell off my chair.
When I got that statement sent to me from the Navy, they had never acknowledged the videos at this point were real.
They kept saying they were leaks.
So in essence, yes, that does say that they're real.
But with the U.S. government, they're kind of quirky like that.
They just said that those came out, you know, in an unauthorized way, but would not talk about what they were.
Wouldn't even say, yes, they are genuine Navy videos, Air Force video.
They wouldn't say anything.
So before they officially released them, that September of 2019 statement where they said, we consider these unidentified aerial phenomena.
Yeah, I fell over because it was decades before that, when their last admission to a UFO, anything was.
I mean, they had never talked about UFOs, UAPs, nothing for decades.
And now they're saying, yes, those three videos depict unidentified aerial phenomena.
I'm not 100% convinced that wasn't potentially a mistake, that maybe the officer who did give me that statement maybe didn't realize what he was doing.
And since then, for those who aren't aware, I was getting these statements through 2018, 2019 from the Pentagon, from the Navy, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, all surrounding the stories that we were hearing about with UFOs and ATIP and so on.
However, after that story broke, whether or not this is the reason for it or not, I'm not sure.
But shortly after the Pentagon said to all agencies involved in anything to do with UFOs or UAPs that they were going to be the central place to talk about that, that no other agency was essentially allowed to put statements out to the general public.
And now there is effectively one spokesperson for all of this.
One spokesperson, yep, falls to the desk of one person.
And since her name's public, I'll say it is Susan Goff.
And she is the one that's attributed all these statements to.
So again, it has completely locked down people like me going to, let's say, the Navy and getting a UFO-related statement simply because Susan Goff at the Pentagon is now the sole person to respond to everything.
And that creates its challenges because she's not there dedicated to respond to UFOs.
She's there working at the Pentagon as a spokesperson On any DOD-related matter, her amongst other spokespeople as well.
But when it comes to UFOs, she's it.
And so you're at the mercy of her, I guess, desire to want to respond because when you're flooded with the same types of questions from all corners of the globe and you're now fielding questions for the DOD, the DIA, the Navy, the Air Force, and I forget what some of the others are, but when you're fielding all UFO-related questions that would be better served at those other agencies, I mean, she can only have so many hours in the day to respond.
And so it's not uncommon to filter.
And if John Greenwald's name keeps coming up, then maybe John Greenwald is going to be slipping down the list.
That makes it more of a challenge.
Hold that thought, John.
John Greenwald is here from the black vault.
John, if I was doing what you do, and I don't think I've got the patience for it, okay?
You know, I like stuff that I can deal with quickly.
You have to be methodical in a way that I can't be.
The one thing that I would want to probe is something that a lot of people have discussed with me over the years, and I've discussed with them, and that is the idea that the exotic materials from spacecraft, UFOs, the bodies of aliens are maybe held in a couple of places, maybe one place, maybe Wright-Patterson Air Base, a name that keeps coming up all the time, maybe Area 51, maybe somewhere.
Have you asked and filed questions about that?
It's been quite a few years, but yes, the problem when you get into, let's say, bodies or stuff like that, to the eyes of the U.S. military and government, they encompass all UFO-related requests and kind of put them in the same basket and then give you the same answer.
So they've never admitted to alien bodies.
They said that they've searched for material when it comes to Roswell.
So they fall back on the Roswell report when it comes to the allegation of alien bodies.
Now, in my book, Inside the Black Vault, in the very beginning, what I do is pick apart their most recent explanation for Roswell, which is where the idea of where bodies came from.
And what's interesting is when you break down the Roswell report and you look at the facts, quote unquote, facts that they try and put forward, you realize that nothing makes sense, nor does it match up to the eyewitness testimony that has come forward.
And if you only have one or two witnesses, I'd say, okay, maybe some of the witnesses got it wrong that support the notion that it was an alien-related event.
But in reality, you have, you know, it's hundreds of witnesses from all corners of the story wherein you've got a narrative and their Roswell report contradicts all of them.
And their explanation for that is simply, well, with the passage of time, they're all wrong.
But what's wrong to me is really the factually incorrect statements put forward in the Roswell report.
Now, why I bring that up again is because when you try and figure out, let's say, the bodies or where they are, where they could be, or exotic material from the Roswell craft, they always fall back on those approved statements and they have for years, which is very unfortunate.
So hopefully that wasn't too long-winded to answer your question, but that's how the government works.
The moment they get their foot set in stone on how they're going to answer something, they don't waver from that.
It's very rare for them to do it.
Roswell, they did do it about four times, I think.
They wavered on exactly what the story was, but their most recent is what I picked apart in the book.
And one of my favorites, I'll just throw this out to you, speaking of bodies, is the eyewitness testimony that they saw the bodies at Roswell Army Airfield and the hospital.
And they tried to essentially explain it in two different ways, that the recovery teams that went out were indicative of the Air Force crash test dummies that were thrown outside of an aircraft.
Now, keep in mind, Roswell was 1947.
Reality shows that crash test dummies were not invented until 1952.
And then on top of that, the Army, you wouldn't take a dummy to a hospital.
So in order for them to explain the quote unquote bodies seen at the hospital, they had attributed it to two Air Force accidents or air accidents that happened both nine and 12 years after Roswell happened.
And they believed that that was the bodies that were seen at the hospital.
Again, witnesses being all wrong on their dates.
So you have these, you have two camps to believe in, the eyewitnesses that came forward that told the narrative that we know about Roswell that has been written about extensively.
Or you can believe the other camp, which is time traveling crash test dummies and Air Force pilots that crashed and got injured and taken to a hospital.
You know, it doesn't make sense.
The time traveling thing is laughable at best.
So when you start picking apart those stories, your answer is not going to come in a document that says the bodies are here.
But I think the answers are going to come by looking at the evidence and realizing their current stance just doesn't hold water.
Indeed, if you get two contradictory explanations from people who are supposed to know how to chronicle and report these things, then it starts to smell, I would assume.
And that is probably the impression that you got to.
All right, the last three years, four years have been hugely important.
The Tic Tech UFO revelations, the article in the New York Times, wasn't it, by Leslie Kane and others.
And the appearance of Luis Elizondo, the man who ran the U.S. government's ATIP program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Things began to change around that time.
We now have, and I spoke with him earlier in the show, Professor Aviloe from Harvard and various other people who've connected with him, including Luis Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, who used to be big in the U.S. defense establishment.
They're all part of this.
So things seem to have changed markedly In the last few years, I wonder how your work, going for documents, trying to dig beneath the skin of all this, dovetails with what is happening.
Oh, it helps considerably because, with these revelations now of a UAP task force and the director of National Intelligence Office doing this report to Congress, and then obviously there's a public version, but I have fought extensively to get the classified version released to the general public and I've made leeway on that.
But I had a case open within 24 hours of the publishing of it to get the classified version reviewed.
Do you think that's going to happen?
I do have high hopes that at least a portion of it will be declassified.
If they do deny it in full, I'll be surprised.
But I do have that case still open.
I'm communicating with them pretty much weekly.
I did make the discovery through this process that it was 17 pages in length.
The public version was nine.
So there were a lot of rumors about the length of the classified version.
My legal case has yielded that it is 17 pages.
So at this point, that doesn't sound like a big revelation.
At least we know what Congress got, how big it was, and so on.
So yeah, I do have high hopes that at least a portion of it will come out.
Will it reveal anything new?
I have no idea.
So we'll see how that case comes out.
But these types of revelations, you know, they create paper trails.
So for people like me, that's gold.
From emails, you can see on theblackvault.com, I've got through FOIA emails, email strings and threads throughout various military officials and government personnel talking about UFOs.
Huge revelations have come from that.
Even the discovery that the UAP task force had reached, they reached out to NASA in order to brief NASA.
And one of the people that was going to be in the briefing was the program manager for the space station.
So it's like if they're just focusing in on military encounters over sensitive installations, which is what they've kind of, that's their going line, why do you need to brief the space station, the International Space Station program manager for NASA?
You know, of course, you and I go, well, that's easy because UFOs are seen all over, but not according to the military.
We have to look at what they say and then we look at what they do and it doesn't make sense.
It doesn't line up.
So I think like an onion, there's a lot of layers to this story.
And my aim is to just kind of peel it apart.
But to go back to your question, that's what's important about these revelations is that it creates paper trails.
And that to me is absolutely golden to trying to uncover the truth about what really is going on with all of this.
Fascinating.
On another topic, I've seen the minutes are ticking down on us here, so I want to pack in as much as I can.
And I hope that we can get a chance to talk again when you have time.
I know you're busy.
The secret space program has occupied my attention quite a bit over the last couple of years.
The most recent person I spoke with was Tony Rodriguez, who says he was part of this, went to Mars and all the rest of it.
But there were other people.
Plus, there were also the things that were supposedly, allegedly uncovered by Gary McKinnon when he got into American defense systems back in whatever year that was.
Have you found anything out about the possible existence of a secret space program?
Are there documents that hint towards any of that?
Well, it depends on what type of secret space program that you're talking about.
So when it gets into some of the traveling to Mars stories and having that type of narrative, that's much more difficult for me to believe when it comes to the secret space program narrative.
However, we do know, and this goes back to the Apollo days, that whenever the government has a scientific endeavor that seems all well and good, there's always a Department of Defense undertone to it where they want to capitalize on it and militarize it.
And that was another thing that I dealt with in one of my books was how they essentially tried to militarize the Apollo missions without the general public's knowledge, that they were actually going to create a lunar military outpost through a program called Project Horizon.
And they were going to build something on the moon that was essentially going to give us that stronghold, you know, that we beat the Soviets.
And on top of beating the Soviets to the moon for the scientific endeavor, we were going to militarize it in the process.
And when you fast forward through the decades, you know that there has been a large amount of programs in space that still remain secret when it comes to space-based weapons, when it comes to space-based technology like satellites.
The National Reconnaissance Office is a prime example, operating for many, many years in secret.
For many years, the public didn't even know the NRO existed, you know, and it was a full-blown agency that was being run.
So in that regards, there is that aspect of the secret space program that even goes to this day with the multiple missions of what's known as the X-37.
The X-37 is, I say allegedly, a unmanned vehicle, a test vehicle that they'll put up for years at a time, but don't tell you why.
And so they've got this space plane flying around up there for unknown reasons.
So for me, there's kind of two definitions of the secret space program.
There are, again, are those more outlandish claims and those I shy away from.
But then you have the reality of it going back to the Apollo days and even prior of a militarization of space all the way to today of them still militarizing space, very much operating in secrecy.
John, do you believe that there is anything that needs to be kept secret?
Do you believe that we should have total transparency?
You know, I get myself in trouble answering this, but yes, I do.
I do believe that there are some secrets that need to be kept.
And that surprises a lot of people because I work so hard to get secrets out.
But I believe in national security.
I have a family that has worked in classified programs in the past, including the space program from my father and grandfather.
So, in short, yeah, I mean, sadly, there are some secrets that need to be kept, and I support it.
What is the one thing that you would like to unearth that perhaps you haven't?
Yeah, that's a tough question.
You know, I try and answer every case that I do with no expectations.
That way, I'm not let down, but also that way I don't pigeonhole myself into a bias, you know, that you expect something.
And when you expect something, you believe something.
And it's very hard.
It's challenging to not do that, but I truly just enter it going, let's see what I'm going to find rather than saying, I think I'm going to find this.
Sometimes I do have expectations.
But again, from a research angle, I try and just let the cases play out and the agencies treat me the way they do.
And the result speaks for itself.
I think that's a really good way of looking at it.
We've only got two minutes.
I wanted to ask you this.
A few weeks ago, we heard, and in fact, it didn't get reported that much in the United Kingdom.
I think only one or two newspapers picked up on this story here, which was very surprising.
A bunch of Kennedy assassination documents were further kept secret for another 30 years, I think it was.
It was decided that they would not be revealed for further three decades.
I think I'm recalling this correctly.
You must have been on this, and I wondered what your thoughts might be.
That's right.
So the short of it is the Trump administration, when President Donald Trump was in office, he wanted to turn Washington upside down, and he did.
And one of the things that he wanted to do was release all JFK documents.
The problem was when it finally got to go time and game time, and they were going to do it, they withheld thousands of pages of records still.
So even with Trump trying to turn Washington upside down, what was fascinating to me was that he then agreed that some of these documents should be withheld.
Now we got to the point in the Biden administration where they were going to potentially release those records withheld.
What happens?
They agree again to keep them secret.
So whatever it is about this incident and this event, here we are, however many years later, from 1963 to now, that they just don't want us to know the truth.
And that doesn't make sense to me at all.
But no matter what, they want to keep us in the dark.
And that's what they have the power to do.
John Greenwald, we've only scratched the surface.
Would love to speak with you again.
Thank you for making time for me on what is, as we record this, a Saturday afternoon.
For my listener, how do they find you online?
What's your website?
Is it theblackvault.com?
Yeah, theblackvault.com is the best way.
That'll give you a roadmap to all my social media as well.
It'll be on the top right corner.
Pretty active on social media as well, whatever your medium of choice is, whether it be Twitter or Facebook or so on.
So that'll give you the roadmap, but theblackvault.com is the way to go.
You get respect from me, and I'm sure many, many other people listening to this.
John, you're doing very important work.
Thank you for your time.
It is my pleasure.
Thanks again for having me.
Really, really appreciate it.
The remarkable and tenacious John Greenwald.
Hope to speak with him again.
I think we have many, many hours of talking to do, him and I, but I'm grateful to him for making time for me.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Remember, the website is theunexplained.tv.
If you want to get in touch with me, then you can do it via the website.
Follow the link and you know the form.
You know what you can do.
Contact me, please, I think is the answer to the question.
Okay, more great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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