Edition 772 - Nick Pope, Christopher Mellon & Professor Avi Loeb
Conversations from my Nov 26th radio show with Nick Pope and Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and key member of the Galileo Project about what is happening with the UAP disclosure issue in Washington. Also Galileo Project founder Professor Avi Loeb with the latest on his strange “spherules” recovered from the ocean bed off Papua New Guinea and currently under analysis for signs they are “extra solar”. *Please note these conversations reflect the situation as it stood on Nov 26th.
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Guests on this edition, three from my radio show recently, last Sunday, in fact.
Nick Pope, of course, here, UFO man, former MOD employee, talking about the current state of affairs to do with UAP disclosure in Washington and why things might have come to a bit of a halt or certainly slowed down.
He will explain that.
Then a long conversation with Christopher Mellon, and I'm very grateful to Christopher and his people for making this possible.
Long conversation with him.
Of course, Christopher is a member of the Galileo Project and, of course, is steeped in security, the security field in the United States, and is a very well-known commentator on the UAP issue and friend of people like Dave Grush.
The last item is from the man who founded the Galileo Project, Professor Avilo, with an update on the spherules and an answer to some criticism that the spherules may be earthly, may in fact be composed of coal dust.
You'll hear his answer to that here.
Retained for posterity on this podcast on this edition of The Unexplained.
Right, let's get to item number one then, the state of play with UAPs.
And in New York, here is Nick Pope.
So, Nick, are you hearing the same thing that the Schumer amendment, the Schumer law change, which would have allowed a lot of UAP-related information to go straight into the public domain, into a central repository?
This is in jeopardy now.
Is that so?
It is, yes.
I'll give you the short version of this.
And I'm sure Christopher Mellon, who I heard that you have on later, will give you a much more expanded version.
But the short version is that the so-called Schumer Rounds UAP Disclosure Act is part of the Senate-passed National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024.
This is being debated at the moment.
As you know, there's two parts of Congress, the Senate and the House.
They are getting together to discuss what's going to go forward into the final bill.
And yes, the Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act is in jeopardy.
So what happens then, Nick?
If it is hobbled, if it isn't passed in the same way or in the same form that it's been proposed once this reconciliation process is complete, or if it doesn't pass at all in any form, what does that mean for all of those people who thought that the light was beginning to dawn?
Well, there's good news and bad news.
And my understanding is there are three possibilities here.
It could go forward as drafted.
It could be knocked out in entirety, or it could go forward in an amended form.
And, you know, there's always, there's nothing new about this.
In one sense, any part of the defense bill that's drafted by, say, the Senate and then goes for joint consideration with the Senate and the House, there's always going to be this horse trading, whatever the issue is, whether it's UAP, whether it's cybersecurity, whatever it is.
So that's not unusual.
But it does look as if some of the most robust UAP provisions ever drafted might not make it into the final bill.
But the good news is that even if that happens, it's not the only UAP-related material going forward.
There are other things in parallel with the Schumer Rounds amendment.
Where is the resistance to it coming from?
Well, this is where I want to tread carefully, because on social media, I have seen people blame specific lawmakers and one of the two specific parties.
I'm seeing some people blaming the Republicans on this.
I think that's an oversimplification of the position.
It just so happens, of course, that two of the key people are the chairs of the respective committees in the House.
Don't forget, this is passed by the Senate.
But the House hasn't really considered this.
And the two chairs, Mike Rogers and Mike Turner, are said to be pushing back against this.
But look, I think it's unfortunate and an oversimplification to make this out, as some are, that the Republicans are trying to scupper this.
They may well have been briefed certain things.
And this is one of the few issues that is totally non-partisan in a way.
So I'd be very disappointed to see this turned suddenly into a party political issue.
I read this week, and this sparks apparently from the very popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
David Grush, the man who started all of this this year, certainly, claims apparently, according to the reports that I've seen of this thing, I haven't heard that edition of the podcast, that the U.S. has retrieved at least 10 alien bodies from UFO crashes.
Does that chime as a man who's just come back from ancient aliens live all over the United States, Nick?
I know it's been a hell of a schedule for you, many audiences in many cities, but does that chime with you?
It does.
These rumors have been around for years, but to have them be testified under oath in Congress takes it to a new level.
And it's not just David Grush.
There are other people like Carl Nell and a number of other people whose names we have yet to be told who apparently support all This and one of the things in the Schumer Rounds amendment was going to be eminent domain, which was effectively going to force the government to take possession back of any material like this, material which it's alleged, of course, have been put into the private sector.
But even if eminent domain and the independent disclosure review board and some of the other things in the act are taken out, we've still got, I mean, we've still got other draft proposals.
And people shouldn't forget, we've got enacted provisions in the 2023 Act.
I mean, nothing, it's all moot until anything is signed into law.
But we already have signed into law the 2023 Act, which requires there to be a full report to Congress by June of next year.
So, you know, we've got a lot of things in play at present.
So don't give up on it yet, as David Sowell kind of sang once.
Absolutely don't give up.
My thanks to Nick Pope for making time for me.
And now, as promised, this is the long conversation.
I think it's about 40 minutes of Christopher Mellon, the complete conversation, all to do with the situation over UAPs, his views of where we're at and how we got here.
I think you're going to be fascinated by this.
This is Christopher Mellon.
First of all, Christopher, I was lucky enough to be able to speak with Ralph Blumenthal two hours after his story to do with David Grush broke at the end of June.
Of course, the story that he wrote with Leslie Kane.
What are your thoughts about that story, both then and now?
Well, my thoughts are much the same as they were at the time, which is that Dave is credible, Dave is sincere, and obviously this is something with transformational, profound implications if it's true.
There's enough evidence to warrant investigation.
Congress is doing that, and I hope they'll continue.
One of the things that Ralph Bruenthal said to me was that, and this was in the euphoria and excitement of that moment, was that this was potentially a Woodward and Bernstein moment.
Do you think that it might be?
Well, I'm not sure what he means by that.
I'm the one that actually introduced them to Dave Brush, and of course, the one that provided the materials for the first story.
This has not been a, you know, if they mean it's a case of something that could be huge, that's absolutely true in my view.
I don't know that there's as much drama and investigative journalism involved in this case, but it certainly has, you know, immense, far-reaching potential if it's true.
Where is Dave Grush now?
What's he doing?
Dave is at home as far as I know.
I saw him.
He appeared online at a conference recently in California via Zoom.
And he's doing a lot of media interviews.
And I think he's still trying to return to Capitol Hill and testify in closed session, but I don't think they've finalized those arrangements yet.
Back in June, July, there seemed to be a tremendous head of steam for all of this.
People were saying, well, if there's a disclosure to be had, now is probably the time to be having it.
It all seems to have slowed down.
Do you get a sense of that?
I absolutely do.
And in fact, I'm concerned that the Schumer Amendment, which would establish a presidential commission to examine all the documentation, may not pass.
The conference between the House and the Senate on the defense bill, which is where that language resides, is concluding Monday, and there appears to be strong opposition.
There's also either a lack of interest or opposition on the part of many of the key chairmen of the committees that have jurisdiction on this issue.
So it's not clear that there'll be much of an aggressive investigation continuing on the Hill.
So I'm doubtful that there's going to be closure on this in the immediate future.
That's a terrible shame.
A lot of people will be hugely disappointed.
And frankly, I think, Christopher, that they won't understand it.
People won't understand that you can go so far and Chuck Schumer can come up with this amendment, which was effectively a transparency amendment, and then the whole thing is going to be shunted into a railroad siding.
Yeah, it's fascinating to me and surprising how few people care about the issue, both among the general public and on Capitol Hill.
There's no clamor from the public to get to the bottom of this.
Most people, frankly, don't seem to care, or they're frightened and they don't want to know.
And of course, there's resistance and opposition from the administration, from the Pentagon in terms of the Schumer legislation.
And we don't know what the truth is behind the scenes, but if indeed there is a program and they have these materials, undoubtedly they're working through whatever channels they have to prevent that from being disclosed.
Did it strike you, Chris, as slightly absurd?
As it struck me from this side of the Atlantic as mildly absurd, that the Department of Defense, just after the Grush revelations, came out and said, of course, we're very keen to hear from, we've got no definite evidence of anything, but we're very keen to hear from whistleblowers, people who've got information, please come forward.
The absurdity seemed to me that they were asking to be told something that, you know, they're running the place.
They're running the government.
They should know this stuff anyway.
Why are they asking for stuff they should know?
Well, to me, it was a mistake to give them this mission to begin with because the executive branch is not going to be in a good position to investigate itself.
The individual leading that office reports to the deputy director of intelligence, as well as the deputy secretary of defense, and they have to follow orders.
And who knows what is being withheld from them.
So, as I've said in several articles, if Congress wants to get to the bottom of this, they have to do it themselves.
It's rather like asking the executive branch to investigate the Iran-Contra affair.
And, you know, that doesn't really work.
There's too much of an inherent conflict of interest.
So I think really the ball that's going to be on that issue is going to be back in Congress's court.
And it's a question of whether the House, there's some members in the House who are very active to move forward.
Not clear that they'll get support from the leadership to do that.
And if that doesn't happen, I think this is going to remain where it is for the time being.
2024, of course, a key year presidential election coming up.
People are not going to want to think about UAPs and UFOs on Capitol Hill when there's a presidential election.
Now, they've got so many other issues and so many problems, and this is nowhere near the top of the heap for the average person who's trying to make ends meet and has so many other issues on their plate.
So, and as I say, surprisingly, the thing that's surprising to me is it's such a sensational, wild allegation and with such far-reaching potential.
And it would be undoubtedly the greatest discovery in the history of science, the most far-reaching, the most impactful.
And yet there's almost no interest on the part of the general public in taking the last couple of steps to find out if this is true.
Well, maybe, and I've given a lot of thought this side of the Atlantic to that, maybe that is the initial euphoria.
Cheat whiz, this is going to happen.
And then you think, hold on, think of all the consequences if we did not.
Say there was a big truth, which many people think there is.
That's going to change everybody's perception of everything.
And that's scary.
It is.
And in fact, I just wrote an article to that effect.
And I begin the article by asking the reader, imagine you're the president of the United States, and you just get a classified briefing after you're elected saying this is true.
And we have some of this material and these craft, but we don't know where these beings are from or why they're here.
And we can't offer any assurance that we can protect the public.
Would you want to share that with the public?
Would it make sense to go public?
Would there be a net positive gain or would it be a negative overall?
And what would it do to the rest of your agenda going forward, your political agenda and so forth?
I think when people look at it from the standpoint of somebody who's actually responsible to the public, knowing how upsetting this would be and terrifying to many people, it's not a given that you would necessarily conclude this was something that the public was ready for at this moment.
I lean in favor of disclosure, and as I explained why in the article, but I can understand why reasonable people would disagree.
In the summer, the Daily Mail newspaper here and internationally ran a headline saying, former defense official, that's you, says the U.S. has recovered technology that, quotes, did not originate on this earth.
Did you say that?
Nope.
Okay.
Well, if you didn't say that, you must.
My position has been, I don't know where they got that quote.
My position has been clear and I've been misquoted at times.
But my position is there is ample reason to believe that that is true.
I've been told that by some senior defense officials, not Dave Grush, other officials.
So I have reason to believe that's true, but that's not, I'm not saying that I know for a fact it's true.
I have not seen the materials.
I've not been cleared into a program like that.
So I cannot state it as a fact.
I can only say that I'm aware of credible information that indicates that it's true and credible people, but I don't know that for a fact.
I've not been able to confirm that.
That walks us towards the question that's the big one, I think, the $64 question is if the U.S. has somewhere alien bodies and material, how and where would they have been kept secret for so long?
Yeah.
Well, there are ample places to do that.
And the federal government has massive hundreds of facilities sprinkled around the world and around the United States.
Many of them are remote, very restricted locations.
Area 51 is an example, which is actually next to three other test ranges.
They're adjacent to one another, forming a huge enclave in the middle of the state of Nevada.
And there's Edwards Air Force Base.
We have a lot of desert test ranges, not to mention Wright-Patterson.
There are lots of places they can, where there are labs and facilities and underground tunnels and all sorts of things.
The back engineering question is always the one that fascinates people, and it's one that made a lot of headlines, as you know, during this last summer.
Do you think that it is likely that the United States, for one, and of course the United States is in train and in league with nations like the one that I'm speaking to you from, that the United States has been back engineering material for years and years and years, and that's how we've received so many technological developments over the years that have appeared to come from a clear blue sky.
I'm skeptical of those claims.
I think if you look at the integrated circuit and so forth, there appears to be a strong body of history indicating how that came to light and how that was discovered and developed.
So I'm fairly skeptical of those claims.
I've also been told that they've not made a great deal of progress on some of the key reverse engineering objectives regarding propulsion.
So they've tried.
So what I've understood, what I've been told is that they've struggled to succeed in reverse engineering the technology.
Again, I don't know if that's true.
I've been told that by some different sources and seems potentially plausible.
But if that's true, it suggests that maybe very little has migrated.
Isn't that interesting?
But there's a possibility that some has, hey, that's the thing.
There is.
And of course, the government does have a lot of things that are not yet in the public eye.
When the B-2 bomber was rolled out and the F-117, we had an operational unit of F-117 stealth bombers, and the world and the public had no idea we even had a prototype.
And we had gone all the way through research and development, prototypes, testing, manufacturing to actual deployment at a secret base and operational units that were ready to fly missions before that was revealed to the public.
People who think the government can't keep secrets are absolutely naive.
They do a really great job in a lot of areas of keeping secrets, actually, the Defense Department and the Department of Energy.
So there may have been some success in some programs that are still confidential.
There certainly is a lot of ongoing research and development.
I've got a bunch of questions from listeners.
I'm going to try and get through as many of these as possible.
John asked, any thoughts on where UAPs, as they are called, are coming from?
Have any been tracked further out into space?
That's an interesting question because I'm only aware, apart from the odd shady video of things allegedly hanging around the International Space Station, I'm only aware of things being pictured and talked about within our immediate environs.
Yes, it is a fascinating question.
It's a great question.
I'm afraid I don't have any good answers.
The few things that I've heard about that are highly speculative and not even worth repeating.
Paul asks a question that I think definitely comes from the ufological side of things.
And I'm not sure whether you're going to have a comment on this.
But Paul tells me that in the book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, there is a suggestion, says Paul, that you were involved in oversight of the remote viewing program, which I thought ended in the 90s.
Clearly, you have been deeply involved for a long time.
Paul says, I'm keen to understand how disclosure might negatively affect the population.
I'm guessing those things are connected.
Any thoughts?
Well, in terms of the remote viewing program, there was a program for a long time, and I was briefly involved in a hearing when I worked in the Senate and a meeting when I was in the Pentagon, but it was something that just barely crossed my radar and only very briefly.
I didn't have any close connection with the program or understand what they were doing until much, much later after I left the government when I met Hal Putoff, who was deeply involved in the program and Jacquel Villais.
And so I learned quite a bit from them.
And they had the view that it was providing useful intelligence and useful information, but other people didn't agree and pulled the plug on it.
So that went away.
To my knowledge, it's not been restarted.
In terms of the effects of disclosure on the population, I think it helps to have these kinds of discussion because people need, if people are educated, I think it'll be less shocking if it turns out to be true.
This has been going on for a long time, maybe even thousands of years.
We're not seeing hostility.
And in that context, if you have that background understanding, it's less concerning.
It looks like there may be sort of a fair bit of intermittent activity.
And I think on balance, if it had the effect of causing nations around the world to develop a closer relationship to mitigate a lot of the potential friction and hostilities between the U.S. and China and Russia and others,
if there was a sense, oh my gosh, we're being watched, we're being monitored, and we need to work together to find out what's going on, maybe like the space program, which started out as a competition, but became collaborative, maybe it would have a net beneficial effect.
So a lot of this is about educating people and governments around the world, including the one that, you know, the nation that I'm in, need to be introducing people to this subject and suggesting they give it some thought.
Otherwise, if we do get disclosure, so-called, it's going to come as a great big shock.
Yes, I think there needs to be a gradual process of exposing people and getting this into the public domain.
There are scientists.
I mean, one of the challenge, one of the risks is if this is true, we don't control it, obviously.
We've had situations in 1952, for example, where on two consecutive weekends, there were numerous objects flying right over the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. So-called Washington Nationals, yeah.
Yeah, and we were launching fighter aircraft and there were front page headlines in all the newspapers with, you know, block high two-inch letters, screaming headlines.
The president was involved.
If something like that happened again today with social media and everybody having smartphones with cameras and so forth, it might, you know, really ignite a panic.
Instability.
Instability.
Yeah, it would be much harder to control that and address that than if people had been inoculated in advance with the idea that something is going on and we are seeing craft.
And if indeed we actually have proof that one or more alien civilizations have the ability to reach our planet, obviously that would mitigate a lot of that shock if something happened just sort of out of the blue.
Anthony asks, how can we ensure that scientists and those controlling science in both private organizations and government agencies, how can we ensure that they don't collude with intelligence operatives to maintain secrecy, assuming that is the case?
Yeah, I don't know that there's necessarily a way we could do that, but I frankly don't have that concern.
I work with these people, all of the scientists that I know are pro-disclosure.
I work with supporting the Galileo Project with Dr. Loeb at Harvard.
That whole group is pro-disclosure.
The Scientific Coalition for UFO Studies, I'm a supporter of that group and the Saul Foundation, which was just at its inaugural meeting in California.
These are all people that are wanting openness and they want to publish peer-reviewed scientific papers.
They want to make their data available to the public.
So I don't see that as a risk right now, but there's no way that I know of to absolutely guarantee that couldn't happen.
But for the time being, I don't think that's an issue.
Michael asks, and this question starts with a premise.
You and others, he says, have indicated that there is a, quote, rogue element within the military related to UAPs, which operates without appropriate oversight, says Michael.
Would you address the folks who are believing that this organization is a secret satellite government that is controlled by aliens?
I mean, that question is on the far side, I think, of the panoply of questions you might be asked.
What do you think?
Yeah, so I don't know anybody who thinks that this program, assuming it does exist, is controlled by aliens.
I've not heard that before.
Dave Grush is not saying that.
I don't know anybody that's saying that or putting that forward.
The picture is more one of we have gotten hold of, not necessarily crashed.
It could have been something that was landed and abandoned.
Much as we have the lunar lander on the moon and there are a number of Earth-launched vehicles that are, you know, satellites that have crashed on the moon or landed there.
They just, they're abandoned and they're just lying there.
We may have come across some probe from some other place that was just standing proud in the desert and gotten our hands on it, not necessarily crashed.
But if that was the case, the allegations that I'm familiar with are that this started the program back in the late 40s or early 50s and it went deep underground and has remained there.
But I've not heard, I've heard some allegations of discussions of whether or not there was ever any contact with aliens.
I've not heard anything.
Anyone suggest that aliens are controlling that program.
When Dave Grush first appeared and in the weeks afterwards, there were those who excitedly said there were anything up to 40 was one number that I heard whistleblowers, so-called, in the wings, ready to spill the beans and say what they know.
Is that a number that you are familiar with?
I've heard that number and I've referred some people to Arrow myself who had pertinent information.
And what we're hearing is from Dr. Kirkpatrick at Arrow that he's looked into these stories and he's claiming there's nothing there.
Now, most of these people who I'm aware of were not actually in the program or cleared for it in most cases.
They were people who had tangential contact.
Obviously, there is a, you know, people who are in the program are very unlikely to want to come forward.
And even anyone who's employed by the government, there's a fear of retaliation, even though they're promising people, they're going to be safe.
I know there are a number of people that have had their security clearances threatened and that sort of thing, people in the government who are asking questions, looking into this.
And lo and behold, some people show up at their office and start asking them security questions or even marching them out of the building.
So I don't know.
This goes back to my belief that Congress is going to have to get to the bottom of this on its own if they want to be absolutely sure of the truth.
And they have names now of people who really should know, alleged gatekeepers for the program and key people that they could call in and put under oath.
I think they've got enough threads they can pull that they can get to the bottom of this if they want to.
Around the Grush Revelations time, there was a lot of talk, including obliquely from David himself in the hearing, one of the hearings, that some people had paid a very high price for either being about to go public with something, you know, to say what they knew or actually saying what they knew, you know, maybe the ultimate price in some cases.
Have you heard any of those things?
Is there any credibility in that suggestion?
People might, or people are at that degree of risk.
Yeah.
So that's kind of interesting.
I had a discussion with a senior official who pointed out to me that Title 18 of the U.S. Code does authorize the use of lethal force to protect national security information.
And in fact, when you go to Area 51, if you approach it from the ground, you'll see signs all around that says use of lethal force authorized.
So I think in theory, it's conceivable.
I'm not aware of any instance of anyone being physically harmed because they were outspoken on this issue.
But the possibility is there and the law allows for it.
It seems to be the case that the law does allow for it.
They're very harsh on people.
There's been a couple of instances of people who are mucking around on the exterior of Area 51 on the perimeter, and they had their doors kicked in and their homes were raided and they got taken to court and severe reactions on the part of the government to people that were relatively innocent.
I mean, they were not doing dangerous or violent things.
They were, you know, looking for information and so forth.
But really strong, forceful responses.
I would say they overreacted.
So that's, you know, not out of the question.
Question from Andrew in Northampton in the UK.
Five years From now, where do you hope the subject of UFOs, stroke UAPs, will be in terms of how the traditional media report it and the public, that's us, perceive it?
Wow, that's a great question.
So, I would hope that we would have made progress over the next five years, at least through the scientific side, people like Dr. Loeb at Harvard, who are collecting raw data and deploying sensor sites and others.
I would hope that this would enter the mainstream of science and there would be more discussion and more research.
More physicists are starting to get involved.
And NASA has actually said, you know, acknowledge this is one of the greatest mysteries of all time.
And they've made some suggestions for gathering information.
So I would hope that through that process, it would begin to educate the educators and through them, the public.
And this would become less of a sensational and frightening notion.
And I think that would facilitate getting answers, whatever the truth may be.
If there is a truth to be got out there, are you saying, and I'm starting to think this is probably the case, that it's not going to be politics and politicking that will make it happen?
It's going to be necessarily.
It could be.
It could be.
And it could come about either way.
The scientific approach would be more gradual and perhaps easier for the public to digest.
It would be slower over a longer period.
But I think as we learn more about the universe that we're in, this strange, strange, infinite universe, the idea that there are, at a minimum, intelligent machines that may be unmanned, but artificial intelligence, digital intelligences in spacecraft that are very advanced and very sophisticated and are able to travel widely, that is something that should not really be surprising to us if we encounter that.
When you look at our own progress in the space of just a couple of generations, my grandfather was born in 1897 before the Wright brothers had made their first flight in North Carolina.
And he lived to see the landing on the moon and then the space shuttle.
He lived well into his 90s.
And right now, we've already got the Voyager craft has left the solar system.
We're talking about, you know, we've got a helicopter on Mars.
We're making incredible advances.
And so given the immense age of the universe, imagine a society, a civilization that was a mere 100,000 years more advanced than us, or a mere million years, or 100 million years.
We're talking, you know, this galaxy's been here for over 10 billion years.
So there's ample time for intelligent civilizations to have developed extreme capabilities and ample time for them to have thoroughly explored the galaxy, even at sublight speeds, even if they can't develop a way to travel faster through light.
If you proceed at 10 or 20% the speed of light and you expand outward from a central point in the galaxy, you reach the perimeter in a few million years.
And so that's a tiny fraction of the age of the galaxy.
So I think as people get their heads around this more and think about this and we become a little less arrogant and self-centered, people are more likely to recognize the possibility at a minimum of intelligent machines that are probes or craft from other civilizations.
Makes you wonder, though, doesn't it?
I'm sure you've wondered, I've wondered, most people have wondered, I think, really, that if other civilizations are out there and trawling the galaxy, and maybe they're more sophisticated than we are, if they are coming here, why is it all cloak and dagger?
Why don't they appear on the White House lawn, go meet the president, go on, you know, Jimmy Kimmel show, whatever?
Yeah, I guess I would offer two answers for that.
And the first thing is, I would say, when you go to the zoo, do you talk to the animals?
You know, why would they be interested in talking to us?
I mean, we think we're so great and so important and so smart.
We may not look that way at all to them.
Just as when you go to the zoo and you look at an antelope, you might think it's interesting and beautiful, but you're not interested in what he, you know, striking up a conversation with him.
So I would offer that.
And secondly, there are people that claim they have had encounters.
And of course, we did have them buzzing around the nation's capital.
And there are a number of stories, and some of them are probably UFO lore, but there are a number of documented instances, say, of mass encounters.
For example, in Africa, the former Rhodesia, where an entire school of 40 or 50 kids rushed out and saw this flying saucer and beings outside of it.
And they actually had very powerful impressions at the time.
There was a similar incident in Australia.
There have been many, thousands of claims of people who say they've had encounters of one kind or another.
So I wouldn't assume that there haven't been any encounters, but I also wouldn't assume that we would be particularly interesting for them to want to exchange views with.
Would you like to have an encounter?
Depends what they're like.
I've never seen the UFO.
I would love to see one.
I've only seen movies, videos, pictures, and that sort of thing.
But to me, it's just an inherently fascinating topic, and it has such potential.
If you have a secular worldview, then there are few things that could really achieve a massive breakthrough in our lifetimes other than this.
This is one thing that could happen if communication developed, if we made contact, if some of these civilizations were visiting us, that could really be transformative in the way that we think about ourselves and relate to other members of our species in different countries and in terms of technological breakthroughs and understanding of science and technology and the universe.
So for me, it's an incredibly exciting prospect.
But there's so much we don't know.
And not knowing the facts, it could also be frightening.
You know, we're seeing a lot of activity around military facilities and bases.
And why is that?
So that's a little concerning.
There is an organization that you will be aware of, of course, called Five Eyes, which is an agglomeration of nations, including ourselves and the Canadians.
And I think the Australians, well, I know the Australians are part of all of that.
Do you think that behind the scenes they are quietly chewing over this issue at the moment?
Because there doesn't seem to be a lot of coordination from what I see.
No, I don't think there's a lot of coordination on this right now.
We have a terrific relationship, intelligence relationship with the British, as you mentioned, and with the Canadians, Australians, and the New Zealanders as well.
And we really share a lot of information at a lot of levels.
There's a lot of trust there.
And it's a really great working relationship, I think, that's mutually beneficial.
But this is a fairly still obscure, unusual topic.
And I don't, there's supposed to be, Congress has asked this new office in the Pentagon to reach out to our allies and begin having these discussions.
And as it's become more prominent in the U.S. media, it has started to become of some public interest.
And ministers and foreign governments are asking questions.
So I think there's potential for that to develop down the line.
You've been very generous with your time, Chris.
I've taken up more of it than we agreed.
And thank you for doing that.
Listen, thank you.
And my apologies for not having better, more precise answers.
No, I can only share what I know.
I think it was very revealing.
Last question, if you have a minute for it.
As I suspect, and I think you suspect progress on this is going to slow down, and especially with the presidential cycle coming to the point that it's at, what will your role be then in this next period?
As we go into 2024, what do you think you will be doing?
Probably turning to other issues.
I think I've probably done about all I could do in this.
We succeeded in getting Congress involved and bringing this to the attention of the American people and their representatives.
And we've really addressed the immediate issue, which was that we were our airspace was being violated and nobody was reporting it in the military or doing anything about it.
We didn't know if they were alien or Russian or Chinese or whatever.
And that needed to be addressed and needed to be studied.
So at least that is happening now.
And that's a good first step.
Beyond that, I don't know that there's much I can contribute going forward.
Our country has a lot of other challenges.
And I'm in particular starting to turn towards one of those.
Are you disappointed at the way things are?
I'm grateful at the progress we've made.
It's actually been extraordinary how far we've come in a short period of time.
And it was a stroke of serendipity that Dr. Lowe around the same time by a different path as a result of this interstellar object got interested and involved in the subject.
And so a lot of barriers are being broken down and we're making headway.
I don't think there's any going back, but I think the pace may slow down for a while.
So looking ahead, those five years that one of the questioners asked you about, do you think we're going to have something that maybe looks a bit like disclosure in those five years or is it really impossible to tell?
It's impossible to tell at this point.
And one of the questions is going to be who else comes forward and what determinations the seniors make in the administration and what the actual facts are.
I mean, we still have people flatly denying that there's any truth to this, notwithstanding all the detailed information that is surfacing.
Chris Mellon, thank you very much for your time and for giving me so much of it.
And I hope it isn't the last time we speak.
Thank you.
Pleasure.
Thank you.
And my thanks to Christopher Mellon.
I do hope we have that conversation in the future.
There is always a great deal to talk about, and this situation seems to be very fluid at the moment.
So Christopher Mellon, thank you very much indeed.
I enjoyed that conversation a great deal.
Hope you did too.
Finally, on this edition, the man who founded the Galileo Project, Professor Arvi Loeb from Harvard, and a discussion of some criticism of the spherioles and the analysis of them.
These spherioles found, of course, on the ocean floor near Papua New Guinea.
They may be not of this world, and they are currently being analyzed to that effect.
There was some criticism suggesting that they may be coal ash, effectively, a byproduct of industry around the world.
You'll hear Arvi Loeb's refutation of that in this conversation from my radio show here.
There seems to be a little bit of a drive-on to find explanations, and this is in the nature of science and the nature of human life, explanations other than the extra solar for the spherioles that you brought up and are now examining.
The one that I'm referring to here is the suggestion that what they might actually be is something very earthly, and that is coal ash that is a byproduct of combustion in coal and power plants and is very much of this earth.
What do you make of this suggestion?
Well, first of all, the suggestion was made in an unrefereed article that was posted online and it was based on a few elements that were compared to some old paper which tabulated the abundances of those elements in coal ash.
And we actually analyzed the spherols identifying elements in the periodic table, dozens of them, and arguing that the abundance of rare elements is very different from materials that you find on Earth, the Sun, Moon, asteroids.
So we were relying on a large set of elements.
And so once this argument was made, well, first of all, we realized it makes very little sense because the most common element in our spheros is iron.
And the point is that we collected those spherols using a magnetic sled, a sled that has magnets on it.
So coal ash is not, most of the coal ash, fly ash that exists does not attach to magnets.
It's not magnetic.
It has a very small fraction of it in the form of iron.
But even forgetting that, we went back and compared the abundances of elements in coal ash, in fly ash, to the ones we have.
And conclusively, we can say that it has nothing to do with it.
It's not coal ash for sure.
Those Belaus ferols that have an enhanced abundance of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium are not coal ash.
And obviously, you know, those people who make those claims, they make them without having access to our spherols because we have them, we collected them.
And so they just talk hypothetically about, you know, what some elements might indicate.
And moreover, you know, they are not really comparing the full set of elements that we have measured.
They just compare a few and it's not really a study because they just went back to papers in the literature and compared what those papers were talking about in the context of coal-ash to what we find.
We are actually doing the hard work of science.
We collected the materials.
We are using the best mass spectrometer in the world to figure out the composition of those materials.
And, you know, that's hard work.
That takes months and months.
And just planning for the expedition took six months.
Going through the Pacific Ocean took us a few weeks.
And then coming back and doing the analysis at Harvard and at the Brooker Corporation in Germany, that took us by now about six months.
And those people just sit back on their chairs and look at other papers that were looking at very different materials and try to claim this is not really a study.
What they did was just, you know, a comment.
The way commentators speak about a soccer match, they can tell the players how to pass the ball, but they are not really in the field.
Okay, so when will we know with more certainty what you believe they are?
So we are now going through 90% of those spherols that were not reported about as of yet, because at first we just had preliminary results on the 10% of the spherols.
And within the next couple of months, we know more in terms of the statistics.
But we already know that there is a type of spheros that was never reported in the scientific literature.
I should also emphasize that coal ash is the product of burning stuff.
And when you burn stuff, you usually end up with just terrestrial rock, for example, material that is here on Earth.
And there is nothing unusual about it.
We would have noticed that, in fact, we do see terrestrial materials, you know, but the spherols that we analyze that are we call special and unique cannot be made of material from this earth.
That we know for sure.
And so these arguments just, you know, make no sense.
And at the end of the day, within a few months, we will simply have a full tally of the spherols that we found.
And at that point, we are planning to design the next expedition because all we could say is that the composition of these spheros is different from solar materials.
But we will not be able to tell exactly where this object came from.
Was it a rock from, let's say, a dwarf star far away?
That's one possible theory.
And I wrote a paper about it recently.
Or another possibility, maybe it's an artificial object.
So the way to find out is to look for bigger pieces.
And that will be the goal of the next expedition.
And we will start planning it as soon as we are done with the analysis of the spheros we have.
And I think you hinted it in our last conversation, but where would you plan to go with that next expedition?
So if we end up deciding that we want to find bigger pieces of this meteor, we will go back to the same site.
We know where to look for the bigger pieces where we found the spheros, the tiny molten droplets.
However, if we decide to go for another meteor that came from interstellar space, we have that candidate, the IM2, interstellar meteor number two, which is not far from Portugal, a very different location.
It's more challenging to go there because the ocean is much deeper.
It's about five kilometers deep and the ocean floor is rugged.
So that site offers its own challenges, but we have to decide whether to go back to the first meteor site or explore another meteor site that could give us new materials of a different type.
Can I run just before we finish, Javi, and thank you for doing this again.
A story passed you that appeared on one of the portals that I was checking about a week or so ago, and it purports to come from the Galileo Project.
12 seconds of strange sound.
I'm going to quote from this piece that I found.
On Friday, the 20th of October, 2023, 7.43 and 20 seconds p.m. Eastern Time, the advanced set of microphones of the Galileo Project Observatory at Harvard recorded a strange sound.
The signal did not resemble the sound of birds, aircraft, or wind, Which were recorded many times before by it, no source was identified by our infrared and optical cameras.
Are you aware of that?
Yeah, of course.
That was reported in the public by other people in Massachusetts that heard this loud sound.
And I did a simple calculation myself based on the data that we have.
And I estimated that a meteor could have produced this sound.
And in fact, around the same day, there was the peak in the Orionid meteor shower.
So it may well be a meteor at a distance of tens of kilometers away from our observatory.
We don't know for sure.
Our research team is looking at more clues to figure it out.
But if I had to guess, based on my calculations, it was potentially a meteor from that shower.
Nothing to do with any extraterrestrial origin, but it's important because it allows us to examine a first case where we notice something that was not obvious.
Because in the past, we saw birds, we saw drones, we saw airplanes, and here there was something unusual.
And my hope is in the coming months we'll identify more and more such sources that require more attention.
And this is the whole point of the observatory, to help government figure out the nature of unidentified anomalous phenomena.
And we are all aware that there is an amendment that was put forward by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to establish a committee within government that would potentially declassify information that the U.S. government has on anomalous phenomena.
The fate of this amendment will be decided in the coming days.
There are some Congress people who oppose to it.
We shall see what happens.
But if it passes, it would be an amazing step forward towards disclosure and towards scientific analysis of what UAP unidentified anomalous phenomena might be.
I'm amazed, and I don't know where I've been and why I didn't understand that.
I didn't know that you were also using sound signatures to scour the cosmos.
I find that fascinating as somebody who, as you know, is minimally scientific.
Well, we're taking a movie of the sky, and a movie includes audio as well.
Okay.
Well, good luck with it all, Arvi.
I wish you a great weekend, and thank you very much for helping me again.
Thanks for having me.
Grateful thanks again to Professor Arvi Loeb, who I think has just come back from Switzerland, where he was addressing scientists there, I believe.
Before that, Christopher Mellon, my thanks to him, and thanks as ever to Nick Pope for making time for me.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes, hoping it's going to get warmer.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, stay in touch.
And if you're in the northern hemisphere or in the United Kingdom, stay warm, whatever you do.
