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June 5, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
15:08
Special - Ralph Blumenthal UAP Breaking News June 5 2023

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Across the UK and around the world, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
If you can hear some excitement in my voice, it is because what I think is one of the most important stories in the field of ufology, if you want to call it that, has just this afternoon broken.
I'm recording these words at 5.44 p.m.
United Kingdom time on Monday, the 5th of June, 2023.
An hour or two ago, the debrief, and you know that I featured the debrief and Chrissy Newton and various people, Christopher Plain and others from the debrief many times here.
They're running some wonderful material, a lot of material about the UAP field, the UFO field, and they've broken this story this afternoon.
Now, the story was compiled by Leslie Kane, who was the person behind the 2017 Tic Tac story, and Ralph Blumenthal.
And I've been able just by phoning around this afternoon at home to get a conversation with Ralph Blumenthal, who you can understand is very much in demand right now.
The story in the debrief is, a former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the intelligence community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.
The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures reported in the debrief for the first time.
Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar corroborating information, both on and off the record.
The whistleblower is named David Charles Grush.
He's 36, a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, veteran of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the NGA, and the National Reconnaissance Office.
He served as the Reconnaissance Office's representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019 to 2021.
From late 2021 to July 22, he was the NGA's co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force.
That is the nub of the story.
Grush said that the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through to the present day by the government, its allies and defense contractors.
Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are of exotic origin, brackets, non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin, and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures, he said.
There is much more for you to see on the debrief, so I won't quote any more from it, but I think we're all grateful to them for an enormous story.
You can see that story at thedebrief.org, and I'm going to be trying to talk with them.
But in the meantime, I'm very excited just by doing some old-fashioned journalism that I've been able to get hold of, and he's a man very much in demand now.
Ralph Blumenthal himself, who with Leslie Kane, put together this pretty earth-shattering story on this June the 5th.
I hope my intro made sense there to this.
I'm going to let you now hear this conversation, and that is all you're going to hear.
There's 10 minutes of it, and we are among the first to speak to one of the people who put together this piece, as far as I am aware, for any media outlet.
And, you know, that's pretty amazing, really.
This is the conversation with Ralph Blumenthal, and my eternal thanks to him for picking up the phone.
Ralph, thank you very much for doing this.
One person in the community has so far described this as the biggest thing since Watergate.
Do you concur?
Bigger than Watergate, maybe?
I don't know.
Different.
We think, Leslie and I, that it's probably the biggest story bigger than the one we broke in December 2017 when we reported on the Pentagon unit, the secret Pentagon office investigating UFOs.
That was in the New York Times.
So we're very proud of this.
We think it's a big development.
Can you, because it is a complex story and everything connected with this is complicated and complex, can you boil it down for my listener into its elements?
This is somebody who is a whistleblower who has felt fit to be able to come out now and reveal things and also seek the protection of law and a little bit more than that.
But can you explain this?
Yeah.
His name is David Grosch.
He's a high-level, former intelligence operative in the Air Force.
And he's now, he left the office to pursue other things.
But he was intimately involved with the UFO recovery program, which he describes in testimony to Congress and in comments to us that were cleared for publication.
And in the course of this, he was targeted by the very Pentagon that was instructed to allow people with knowledge of UAP and UFOs to come forward.
So he claims in another filing that he was retaliated against, and that case is ongoing.
But the interesting thing is that he spoke on the record to us.
We have his official comments.
He also testified secretly to Congress, and that part is classified.
We don't know what he told Congress in that testimony because it's classified, but he was allowed to say enough to reflect or to expose the fact that the U.S. government has recovered over the years,
intact and partially intact, craft, UAP, UFOs, and has concealed those very important discoveries from Congress improperly, he says, and from the American people.
That is an astonishing revelation.
It is something that Has been hinted at.
Of course, it has for decades now.
But here's a guy who I understand has impeccable bona fides, they say, coming out and saying it.
This means a huge amount, doesn't it?
It does.
And not only that, but he is vouched for by other people, we quote, on the record.
Another former military officer, another intelligence officer who had first-hand knowledge of these recoveries.
So there are no unacknowledged, no unnamed sources in our story.
Everything is on the record.
We don't report everything that there is to the story, obviously, because a lot of it is still classified.
We don't know that.
But what is available, we report and we put names to it.
And so we think it does move the needle.
And essentially, this man is saying that there has been for a long period recovered material, recovered craft, even in some cases, not only in the United States, but also in other places.
And it's time for this information to get out there.
And he made his submissions, but that material is being withheld from the people in Congress who need to hear it.
Is that so?
Well, that's true.
He claims that not everybody in Congress is even cleared to receive this information.
So he was not able to describe all the things he wanted to say.
And so he's kind of under constraints.
Even now that he's a former intelligence operative, he's very limited into what he can say.
But he certainly has said enough.
And now it's really up to Congress to demand more answers and to be a little more forthcoming with the American people.
And can you give me and my audience just a small flavor of what he says has been recovered and has been sat on, hidden?
Well, he didn't go into a lot of detail with that.
And Congress, as we say in the story, has not been shown any physical evidence, has not been given any pieces of craft.
We're not at that point yet.
But what he does say is that the U.S. is in a real world Cold War with other global powers, and you can guess who they might be who have that level of sophistication with UAP interests and possible recoveries.
We've been in competition with them for a long time for this data, and there's some reverse engineering going on to try to understand and duplicate the technology, the astounding technology of these objects.
And that also has been withheld, he says, improperly from Congress and the American people.
So there's a lot yet to be illuminated, let's say that.
This man says that he was harassed, impeded when he decided to come forward in the way that he's come forward.
What has been happening to him?
Well, we didn't go into a lot of detail in the article for various reasons, but he has just said officially, and we have it on the record, and he's filed an official complaint to the extent that he says he suffered improper, illegal, actually, illegal retaliation for his testimony.
So we didn't go into detail for some obvious reasons.
We don't want to expose him to more harassment.
A hell of a story to get, Ralph.
I realize the entire world right now, since it's only just broken, wants to speak with you.
What would you anticipate is going to happen next?
Do you think that other people will feel emboldened to come out now and speak?
Could this be the opening of some floodgates?
Yeah, we hope so.
We hope so because, you know, the law says that people who come forward with credible information in the proper channels cannot be retaliated against.
So this might show them that it is possible to do that, to come forward and, of course, face retaliation perhaps as well.
But we'll have to see what happens next.
Perhaps there are other people waiting in the wings to come forward.
We know other people have testified.
We haven't been able to get much information on that yet, but some of it, much of it is classified.
But we'll see.
You and I have both been looking into these things for many years, you longer than me.
Do you think that this is a time in the affairs of man from which there is no going back?
In other words, have we taken a step here that means that there has to be that thing that people have talked at, sometimes laughed about, disclosure?
Well, I think you can't unring a bell, Howard, and put the genie back in the bottle to take another image.
So the information is out there.
There is no going back.
How quickly it'll proceed is another question.
There are a lot of interests that are trying to block further disclosures.
There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes.
But I think let's put it this way, we're moving in the right direction.
And finally, but most importantly, what has made this man want to come out and put himself on the line in this way now?
What do you think?
I mean, you've spoken with him.
Well, you know, we say that he feels very strongly about this issue.
He knows that there's very important information.
It says he has a righteous anger that this information has been withheld from Congress, illegally so, he says, and the American people and people of the world who are entitled to it.
So, you know, he's one of those rare people who, I mean, he was a war hero in Afghanistan.
He has, you know, great credentials.
He's a patriot.
And he feels that something happened here that was not right.
And he wants to make it right by coming forward.
So those are the reasons he has stated.
And we have no reason to doubt him.
We think he's eminently credible and a hero.
Do you think that somebody there, somebody bigger than both of us, somebody perhaps in some alphabet agency, somebody connected with the government in a capacity that we can't know about, has decided actually that now is the time for this to come out?
This is no coincidence.
No, no, I don't believe that.
There are a lot of conspiracy theories.
There's a puppeteer pulling the strings here.
I don't believe that.
I've seen enough news events and coverage in my 45 years at the New York Times that these things are not choreographed to that extent.
I think events sort of, there was a confluence of events.
It was the right time, the right people, in the right place.
But I don't think this is some huge master plot or master scheme to put this out in this way.
It just, it kind of happened.
Things came together.
I'm going to have to run.
Okay, well, listen, thank you so much, Ralph, and I wish you well.
I know everybody wants to speak with you.
Thank you for talking with me.
Thank you, Howard.
Take it.
Pleasure.
Bye-bye.
Now, just to update, since that conversation was recorded, the U.S. Sun, which is the American branch of the Sun newspaper from the UK, has got a statement from the Pentagon, and I'm going to read it to you.
The statement denies the claim.
Spokesperson for the Department of Defense Sue Gough told the U.S. Sun, to date, RO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.
RO is committed to following the data and its investigation wherever it leads.
Gough noted that RO, working with the Office of the General Counsel and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, has, quotes, established a safe and secure process for individuals to come forward with information to aid RO in its congressionally mandated historical review.
She added, RO's historical review of records and testimonies is ongoing and due to Congress by June 2024, June next year.
RO welcomes the opportunity to speak with any former or current government employee or contractor who believes they have information relevant to the historical review.
As they used to say on the news in the old days in the United States, this story is developing.
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