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June 11, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
39:23
Edition 729 - UAP Latest

Updates on the bombshell "whistleblower" UFO story from Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean for The Debrief - and Harvard Professor Avi Loeb and Nick Pope on the recent NASA UAP Session...

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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.
Coming to you in the beginnings of what looks like a mini heat wave here, they're talking about temperatures nudging into the high 20s Celsius, which is close to 30 degrees Celsius, which is somewhere in the low 80s Fahrenheit, which for the beginning of June is pretty remarkable.
And I wonder if it's the shape of things to come for this summer.
Who knows?
All bets, as they say, are off.
Meaning that things are pretty hot and steamy where I'm recording this, but I hope they're okay wherever you are.
Now, the topic on this edition of The Unexplained, we're going to revisit the conversation that I had about an hour and a half or two hours after the publication of that bombshell story in the debrief this week.
The latest on that story is this.
The Guardian reported, the U.S. House of Representatives plans to investigate claims that the U.S. government is harboring UFOs after a whistleblower, former intelligence officer, said that the U.S. has possession of intact and partially intact alien vehicles.
James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said the committee would hold a hearing into claims by David Grush, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena, UAPs, within a U.S. Department of Defense agency, that the government had been collecting non-human craft for, quotes, decades.
Grush, who left the government in April after a 14-year career in U.S. intelligence, told the debrief that information on these vehicles was being illegally withheld from Congress.
So what I thought I would do is let you hear the whole of that conversation that I recorded with one of the authors of that piece in the debrief, Ralph Blumenthal, who along with Leslie Kane, the people behind the Tic Tac story in 2017, authored the piece.
So I basically phoned Ralph Blumenthal.
He picked up the phone and very kindly agreed to speak with me.
So you're going to hear that first.
And then two pieces from my TV show.
Number one, Professor R. V. Loeb, Harvard professor, of course, and founder of the groundbreaking Galileo Project, talking about the NASA UFO UAP hearings that happened this last, what, 10 days or so ago, as you will be hearing this.
So we'll hear from him and also Nick Pope with his views on it.
They, of course, when we recorded that piece, didn't know the information that had come out in the piece by Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal.
It hadn't been published yet.
But the conversation is very much around that sort of area.
And I think we're heading into, unless I'm completely deluded and I've missed the point, I think we're into some very exciting territory here.
So that's the order of business here.
I'm going to let you hear the entire piece as I recorded it with Ralph Blumenthal, including the introduction that includes part of the piece from the debrief.
That'll be followed by RV Loeb, Professor R. V. Loeb from the Galileo Project, and that'll be followed by the views of Nick Pope.
Here on this edition of The Unexplained, a very exciting time, I think, in the affairs of man.
Item number one then.
This is my recording exactly as it appeared here with Ralph Blumenthal.
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 Grush.
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 he is 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, you know, 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 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.
And 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's 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 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.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
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.
Watch this space.
And my thanks to Ralph Blumenthal for giving me time on what was an incredibly busy day for him.
Next up, the NASA UFO UAP hearings.
There were four hours of them, approximately 10 days ago from when I'm recording these words.
They were pretty important, although some people criticized them.
I got the views of Nick Pope about this.
And first, I asked Professor Arvi Loeb, of course, Harvard professor of astrophysics and founder of the Galileo project.
Here are his thoughts.
Arvi, what did you think of the NASA hearings?
We had four hours of it on Wednesday.
Did we get anywhere?
No, I mean, they looked, this committee, this study looked at the unclassified data, open to the public.
We have seen it already, most of it.
So there was not something new that they looked at.
I differ in my opinion from the non-scientists that we just heard, because this is a matter of science.
And basically, what we need is a set of sensors that are fully calibrated under control.
That's what the NASA study recommended.
And the point is that the Galileo project that I'm leading at Harvard University already has that.
We came up with this narrative two years ago, two years ago.
And since then, we already have a functioning observatory in the optical, infrared, radio, and audio.
The study also recommended analyzing such data using artificial intelligence.
We are doing that already.
The panel recommended that the data will be made open and collected 24-7 in a systematic fashion.
And we are already doing that.
So my point is the panel just reiterated what the Galileo project is already doing two years too late.
And it's not a question of looking back at what happened in 1940 or what some fuzzy images showed 30 years ago.
That's not really the issue.
The issue is collecting high-quality data that is beyond any reasonable doubt in a systematic fashion, not anecdotally, like a pilot flying a jet plane and suddenly seeing something unexpected.
Because such data, we can't go back to those circumstances.
We don't know what the fighter jet was doing.
We don't know what the cameras were doing because we didn't calibrate them.
So suggesting that crappy data or blurry images or things that were reported back in the 40s or eyewitness testimonies are all real evidence and this committee did not really look at the actual evidence.
I mean, that's false, because if there was any open data, they would have seen it.
Now, of course, there is the classified data that may be quite convincing, but I haven't seen it.
The public didn't see it.
So it's all speculation talking about it.
How can you say that data we had not seen shows conclusively something?
If we haven't seen it, it cannot show anything.
And so now there is actually an organization in government, as you mentioned, called Aero, All Domain Anomaly Resolution.
And the head of that is Sean Kirkpatrick.
He visited me several times.
We even wrote a paper together.
And of course, they are looking into the classified data.
And the way they do it, according to Sean, he testified in front of Congress.
Basically, he has two teams.
One is led by intelligence experts and the other one by scientists and engineers.
And they look at these past reports, which, as I said, are anecdotal.
They were not planned.
They are not systematic.
The instruments are not well understood or defined or calibrated.
And they're trying to make the best out of them.
Now, if they are lucky, if the data was exquisite, they might reach some conclusion.
But if the data is compromised, you can't go back to these events and reconstruct what happened in a very remote place 20 years ago.
There is no way to do that.
So you can't get to the bottom of the nature of these unidentified objects.
What he says is in the cases that they were able to analyze, only 2 to 5% of those cases show evidence for truly anomalous objects.
The rest are probably balloons, drones, things that they can make sense of.
2% to 5%, that's a small fraction.
That means that somewhere between 95 to 98% of all these unidentified aerial phenomena are things that they were able to identify.
That's important to know.
We are dealing with a very small minority of all cases.
By now, they have over 800 reports that they are looking into.
As you said, about 100 every month of new cases that are brought to their attention.
Out of those 100, only a few percent, only a few cases appear to be anomalous.
But the way to get to the bottom of what the nature of these objects that are anomalous is, we need better data.
And that's what the Galileo Project is doing, collecting that data.
Right.
And one of the delegates that you would have heard to that conference halfway through it stood up and said, and it was a very sober affair.
So it was a bit of, I thought it was a bit of a bombshell moment.
He said, yes, we'd like to have greater data.
We'd like to have all of the data.
I think some journalists questioned him about this.
But it would be too costly and at the moment too difficult for us to crunch all of this data.
You clearly don't buy that.
No, because we are doing it.
So we built an observatory at Harvard University, which is collecting data 24-7 of the entire sky in the infrared, optical, radio, and audio.
It's not a matter of talking about it, arguing about it.
We already did that.
Have you found anything?
The observatory, yeah, so we are analyzing data with machine learning, artificial intelligence.
We haven't found yet an object that merits your attention.
I mean, if we will see anything, we will let you know.
We published eight papers from the Galileo project.
They were publicly made available two weeks ago, and you can find them on the Galileo Project website.
These represent the eight papers written a year ago when we constructed this observatory.
So what I'm saying is all this talk is about something we already did.
When the study talks about what needs to be done, it was already done.
Now, maybe they cannot mention the Galileo Project because it will show some bias towards a particular group of people.
But my point is, it's all news.
What they are saying was already done by us.
Now, the next step is us collecting huge amounts of data.
We already have more than the total amount of data in all the reports ever, ever, because we collected 24-7.
The question is, what does it show?
So this is just one location, and maybe in that location, there is nothing unusual.
So a week ago, I was contacted by a few people who were willing to donate funds such that we will make five copies of the first observatory.
So we are now in the process of planning those additional copies, putting them in different locations.
The key is to have maybe tens of those observatories or maybe even 100 such that we will get very good statistics.
So we are getting into the business of actually doing what needs to be done.
We are not saying, oh, in 1940 there was something, but I can't really prove it to you.
Or we are not saying we have some interesting data, but it's classified.
We're not saying that.
We are not relying on anyone else.
We are simply collecting that data.
Right.
A piece in Politico, and I know this is a little off tack here, but a piece in Politico this week said that if the government of the U.S. has got crashed craft and materials from those craft, now is the time to reveal them.
Do you agree?
Yeah, definitely.
If they do have that, this was written by Chris Mellon, who is a member of the Galileo Project and he served in government.
Again, he may be signed on an NDA that he can't reveal any information he knows.
What I'm saying is I haven't seen any classified data.
Therefore, you know, to me, it's just a hearsay when people talk about the government having in their possession something conclusive, because I haven't seen it.
Now, of course, any day there might be some news release of the government declassifying some very interesting information.
When this happens, I will look at it with great interest.
But, you know, we have to be realistic.
We can't just talk about rumors because who knows if they are right.
And I can understand why the government keeps the data close to their chest.
They don't want adversaries to be aware of the capabilities of the sensors being used.
Now, I haven't seen, if I would have seen any intriguing facts about captured material, I would let you know because it would have been in the open.
The other thing I should say is that very soon we are embarking on an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to collect the fragments of the first interstellar meteor.
Now, this is public information in the sense that we wrote maybe five scientific papers on this first interstellar meteor, and now we're going to collect the material that it was made of.
And if we find it, we could tell whether it was a spacecraft from another civilization, whether it was artificially made, or a very unusual rock because it was tougher than all the previous space rocks that were documented by NASA.
And if you want to learn more about it, just check my essays on medium.com.
Thank you very much, Arvi.
I know that this expedition is very important.
Just remind me when you're heading off on this to Papua New Guinea.
It's imminent.
Very soon.
By mid-June, we should be there.
Excellent.
We'll get a report back.
Thank you so much for giving me your time again.
Thanks for having me.
And my thanks to Arvi for being a friend of this show.
My thanks also to Nick Pope for being a friend of this show.
Here are his views on this.
Good to be on.
And I'm actually at Contact in the Desert too.
So here we are.
I have to say, I didn't think we'd get you there.
So that's absolutely fantastic.
Are you in your hotel room?
Yes, I've nipped back to my hotel room.
So I'm not in my usual location.
Okay, well, listen, I'm glad they're looking after you.
And thank you for doing it from contact.
That's fabulous.
What did you think of the NASA hearing then?
Four hours of it.
The only real revelation I think we got out of it, as far as I was concerned, there were two.
Number one, the claim that some panelists had been harassed online and had been given a tough time by people.
I thought that kind of thing was not happening now.
Apparently it is.
And the other one being that it's all about the data.
I think we knew that anyway.
What did you make of it, Nick?
Yes.
I mean, the online harassment is shameful.
And I understand from the Q ⁇ A that it's coming actually, interestingly, from both ends of the spectrum.
So it's coming from true believers and conspiracy theorists who think that NASA already know about this and are covering it up.
And at the other end of the spectrum, it's coming from sort of die-hard debunkers who think it's all nonsense and that NASA shouldn't be looking at this at all.
But it's either way, it's shameful.
Now, to me, the big revelation actually was something else.
It was something Sean Kirkpatrick said, and it's when he mentioned that he had just convened the first Five Eyes panel on UAP.
Now, Five Eyes, of course, is the intelligence sharing alliance between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
What this means, of course, fabulously, is that the Brits are back in this.
We've talked about this, of course, how since the termination of the MOD's UFO program, there has been no official confirmation.
But Sean Kirkpatrick has now let the cat out of the bag, and we know that at some level, the UK government is now engaging with Arrow on this.
So that was a bit of a bombshell.
And congratulations for commenting about that on your social media.
Otherwise, I wouldn't have picked up on that.
I think that's something that the newspapers should have been getting deeply into, because that means that we now almost have the Allies, if we want to use Second World War terminology, involved in this issue.
We're all together on it.
Do you think that will make a difference?
Yes, I think it will.
I've long said that it was a mistake for us to get out of the UFO investigation business.
There are plenty of people who think we should be back in it, and now clearly we are.
And I think the UK can bring a lot to the table here in terms of resources, capabilities, and expertise.
I mean, in terms, for example, of resources, the RAF Filingdales, the space tracking radar there, is going to be an essential part of this.
But also, various Ministry of Defense and Defense Intelligence staff personnel with specialisms in things like MAZINT, measurement and signature intelligence, they are going to be able to contribute a lot to what Arrow are doing.
So this is tremendous news.
And I can only hope now that MPs and peers will now engage on this in the way that various congressional representatives are doing in the U.S. And of course, we've had congressional hearings.
It's about time the Defense Select Committee, perhaps, took a look at this.
We had a four-hour session.
It was a lot to watch.
I have to say, I skipped through it.
A lot of people were very critical.
They said it was dull.
What was the point of this?
I actually think it was important because here we had serious-minded people talking in a serious-minded way about stuff that used to get derided.
And I think that's any day of the week very, very important.
I suppose the question that you must have been asking yourself, Nick, I certainly have, why is Bill Nelson, the director of NASA and NASA as an organization, doing this now?
Well, I think Bill Nelson is key to this.
He used to sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He's had the classified briefing on UAP when he was in that role.
And what did he do when he ended up as the boss of NASA?
The first thing he said was, we need to be doing this.
So that should tell people a lot.
Now, Professor Loeb, of course, has it right.
I mean, you know, in one sense, NASA's talking about something that the Galileo Project is already doing.
And I think the future may well be outside of the government.
I mean, after all, you could say government in its various forms has had 80 years of pecking away at this and the public haven't got much.
Galileo Project is relatively new.
They're already doing this.
So Galileo Project may well be the future of this.
But Bill Nelson is clearly personally enthused on this.
And I think it is important that NASA are looking at this.
And there will be, one of the other revelations was that there will be a NASA person.
There is a NASA person already permanently now embedded with Arrow because the whole interface between Arrow and NASA, the classified and the unclassified, is going to be critical to this and how it unfolds going forward.
Of course, some critics of this process have said, it's pretty rich that these people from NASA are doing this because they are the people behind an awful lot of the cover-up and disinformation over the years.
What do you say?
Well, of course, and that goes back to some of the online abuse.
And NASA were very clear.
They say no, not guilty.
And, you know, if that's their position, fine.
I mean, people I know who are involved in this, I don't think, know or have a smoking gun.
And they are genuinely curious.
And they're trying to apply, obviously, a data-led approach that adheres to the scientific method.
And there are some aspects of how the military and the intelligence community have been doing this that don't necessarily align with the way in which the scientific community do it.
So that needs to be fixed.
And I hope it will be fixed.
But to hear people say at that panel, you know, if we're being visited, one strategy would be to look in the solar system for extraterrestrial probes.
It's just amazing to hear that.
Now, of course, Avi Loeb, again, Galileo Project is doing that.
And Avi has talked about Amua Mua and the need that we kind of missed the last one.
It was pretty much been and gone by the time anyone noticed.
But let's be ready for the next one.
Again, the Galileo Project can play a huge role in this, I think.
And it just shows that when government isn't doing its job, you know, other people will step in.
Steve Bassett, who you will know and I believe is also at contact in the desert with you, believes that we are very close to some very big revelations.
Do you share his boundless enthusiasm about that?
Well, I hope he's right.
I don't know that he is, but you mentioned earlier Christopher Mellon's latest article in Politico today, which is getting a lot of play.
We've spoken about Dr. Gary Nolan, professor at Stanford, who's made some very bullish remarks on this recently.
We really do seem to have a quickening of the pace.
And, you know, we have the further NASA report this summer.
We have another update due from Arrow.
More congressional hearings, perhaps, a number of representatives being very bullish about that.
And all the time, behind the scenes, more and more people who say that they've been involved in legacy programs on this are coming forward and speaking to Arrow.
And it's just a question of how much Congress and then the media and the public gets.
So it's kind of trickled down.
We've got to hope that this information trickles down.
And Nick, you're at Contact in the Desert, which is in the deserts of far California.
Have you been on yet or are you about to?
Have you been?
No, I gave a presentation on the societal impact of first contact.
And I also did a workshop, which I essentially turned into an Ask Me Anything session.
We had lots of amazing questions, took us to a lot of interesting places, including AI, by the way, and the possibility of extraterrestrials being host-biological and us encountering machine intelligence.
So lots of things, lots of threads coming together at the moment.
Something that occurred to me on the train just very quickly, mentioning AI.
I thought to myself, if AI is getting as clever as everybody says it is, and I don't doubt that it is, then maybe it will be at some point inclined to cut out the middleman, that's us, because we're not clever enough, and liaise and communicate directly with an extraterrestrial species, leaving us out.
That's a terrifying prospect, isn't it?
Yeah, if we're being visited by extraterrestrial life and its machine intelligence, it may reach out not to us, but to our AI systems, which may be either sentient already or about to become sentient.
And I, by the way, I started my main presentation with an intro that everyone loved, and then I revealed I'd written it by AI.
And thereby hangs a tale.
Nick, thank you so much for making time for me from Contact in the Desert.
Enjoy.
Thank you.
Nick Pope.
And before that, you heard Professor Arvey Loeb.
And before that, you heard Ralph Blumenthal.
I think, like I said at the top of this show, we're living in some very exciting times.
Watch this space.
I won't say keep monitoring the mainstream media because over the years they haven't been particularly good at picking up on this.
And I noticed the story from the debrief only filtered through very, very slowly to the mainstream media.
But now it has.
So this stuff that we've been talking About here for many, many years is now.
Is it going mainstream?
You know, it's anybody's guess where all of this goes from now.
But like I say, exciting times.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained online.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained in the Sunshine, 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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