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The Basement: Jeremy Corbell | Betrayal, Surveillance, and the Secret Higher Than Nuclear Weapons

Four hours with Jeremy Corbell, the filmmaker who put a camera in front of Bob Lazar for the first time and later released the Navy UAP footage the Pentagon confirmed was real. The first ninety minutes are not about UFOs at all: a jiu-jitsu instructor nearly killed by valley fever, an art career he backed into by salvaging doors out of Santa Monica demolition sites, seventy two hours in a Prague holding cell, and eight years of fixing John Lear's toilets and smuggling him cigars as the entry fee to UFO disclosure. The second half is a detailed account of interference, including the false friendship playbook he says intelligence officers run on him, solicitation attempts he calls legal entrapment, a nine month ODNI investigation he now considers a ruse, a congressional hearing he says was rigged the night before, and a federal agency handing his family safety protocols. He also walks the Nimitz Tic Tac case and the 2019 Navy swarm in full detail, and explains why he was told UAP is classified above weapons of mass destruction: the energy needed for the observed performance is itself a weapon.

Published Jul 20, 2026 3:59:39 video 150 min read Added Jul 27, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

For four straight hours in The Why Files interview room called The Basement, host AJ Gentile sits across from Jeremy Corbell, the filmmaker who put a camera in front of Bob Lazar for the first time, who released the Navy UAP footage the Pentagon later confirmed as real, and who now walks whistleblowers into congressional offices. It is the longest conversation either man has done, and it is not a UFO interview for the first ninety minutes. It is the story of how a jiu-jitsu instructor with a fatal fungal infection lost his identity, started salvaging doors out of demolition sites, got mistaken for an artist, got mistaken for a photographer, got mistaken for a filmmaker, and ended up as the person the intelligence community sends people to befriend.

The spine is trust: who earns it, what it costs, and what it looks like when a government tries to manufacture it. Corbell walks the whole arc in order. The chai in Varanasi he refused to drink because a voice in his head said trust needs to be earned. Eight years of weekends fixing John Lear's toilets and smuggling him Phillies Titan cigars from Walgreens. The three minutes he asked Bob Lazar for that turned into a career. The phone call where a news director said "hold for George Knapp." And then the second half, which is darker: false friendship, solicitation, a nine month ODNI investigation he now calls a ruse, a hearing he says was mechanically rigged the night before, a break in at a whistleblower's house where nothing was stolen and a grandfather's ashes were smashed, and a federal agency handing his family safety protocols.

He also says the thing in the title, flatly, and says he was told it in official meetings: UFOs are held at a higher classification than weapons of mass destruction. His explanation is not mystical. It is that the propulsion is the weapon.

Jeremy Corbell 4 hours, The Basement, July 2026 The accident jiu-jitsu from age 9 Nepal, Varanasi, Pune valley fever, 107 degrees salvaged doors, blood art Prague, 72 hours in holding Sharon Tate, unflattened The mentors grandma and the camera John Lear, 8 years Bob Lazar, 3 minutes George Knapp, the call Ned Day's newsroom rule Weaponized, the podcast The evidence Tic Tac, 2004 the 2019 swarm, 4 sensors Syria 2021 UAP Lacatski: we breached it the blocked transfer material science is the throttle The interference false friendship solicitation and entrapment the ODNI nine months the watermarked page the skiff that was a trap safety protocols for family One question runs the whole four hours: how do you know who to trust, when the people trying to earn your trust are trained to earn it? "Trust needs to be earned." What he heard in his head in Varanasi, age 20 something, before any of it
Figure 1. The shape of the four hours. The first ninety minutes are a life, the last two and a half are a war of attrition over information. The hinge is the same sentence in both halves.

Chapters

0:00 Cold open 1:14 Welcome to the Basement, and the blood 6:05 Losing an identity 9:08 The brother, the hip throw, and jiu-jitsu 10:40 Warrior yoga, juvenile hall, and Sinaloa SWAT 12:58 Nepal, and the monk who called him sensei 15:59 Varanasi, and the chai he did not drink 22:48 Pune, Osho, and a 107 degree fever 27:23 Valley fever, and the flight home 28:55 The best thing that ever happened to him 30:26 Salvage, and unflattening Sharon Tate 38:03 Prague: the safe, the Serbian, and three days in holding 43:23 The Polaroid dresses 44:53 The camera, and what grandma saw 48:41 Sleeping Dog, and his mother 50:12 John Lear, and the entry fee to UFO disclosure 1:04:02 Sleeper, the ticket, and UFO disease 1:07:49 The Little A'Le'Inn: "Where's Bob Lazar?" 1:11:38 The napkin, and the falling out 1:15:27 Three minutes with Bob Lazar 1:21:31 The movie, Storm Area 51, and S4 1:26:51 The gatekeeping charge 1:31:25 What they hold back, and why 1:33:41 Hold for George Knapp 1:38:16 The harpoon at the Atomic Testing Museum 1:42:53 The tape in the brown case 1:45:12 How he vets 1:47:27 False friendship 1:48:59 The bar with the gray shirts and the black shirts 1:52:02 Solicitation, entrapment, and a federal lawyer 1:57:21 The ODNI nine months 1:59:38 How Sleeping Dog got made 2:03:28 The Honeywell pyramid, and who owns the footage 2:06:31 Syria 2021, and a false target on Lenval Logan 2:11:06 The least that can be given 2:14:10 From UFO to UAP, from aliens to biologics 2:17:57 The threat to his family 2:24:04 Behind the contractors 2:25:34 Higher than nuclear 2:27:04 Lacatski: one craft, and we breached the hull 2:29:22 The transfer that got blocked 2:30:54 The throttle is material science 2:36:16 Orbs, and the perforated boundary 2:38:16 Jacques Vallee: you have better questions 2:40:51 Why he stopped believing the Tic Tac was ours 2:45:24 The Tic Tac, from the top 2:52:17 Senior Chief Wiggins, and what is under the water 2:53:03 Nuts, the tape, and active jamming 2:59:55 Not in 2004, not in 2024, not for 50 years 3:00:40 The 2019 swarm: four kinds of footage 3:05:15 The Bass Strait, and the sailor who was watching it 3:08:17 Smuggling Matthew Brown into Congress 3:14:22 The watermark 3:16:40 The skiff that was a trap 3:18:57 AARO gets zero 3:20:28 The threat to Senior Chief Wiggins 3:22:48 The scientific advisory panel 3:26:38 What ODNI told him about Dylan Borland 3:28:56 The smears 3:38:05 "If it is us doing these shenanigans, then it is okay" 3:38:51 The watchers 3:40:23 How you shape a narrative 3:45:44 Who carries the baton 3:48:00 Psionics, Age of Disclosure, and James Clapper 3:49:30 Secure comms 3:51:45 Closing 3:53:16 What the host could check

Welcome to the Basement, and the blood

The first question AJ asks is not about UFOs. It is: what kind of art do you make with your own blood, and do you use any other bodily fluids?

Corbell's face does the thing. "It is going to be that kind of party. Here we go." Then, after a beat: "That was a phase, you know." He asks whether he has ever said that publicly. He has not. AJ has done his homework, and the whole four hours proceed from that opening move, which is a small act of trust in itself. Corbell answers everything.

The blood is real and the explanation is banal in the best way. He was in his twenties, chronically ill, getting blood drawn constantly to monitor a fungal infection and the medications for it. A phlebotomist told him he had a really pretty color of blood. He said it was kind of cool, and asked if he could have some. She filled a few vials. He resined them into the constructed pieces he was making at the time. His mother owns one. When AJ points out that you can just buy red ochre, Corbell agrees. "I know, I know, I know. I do not know what I was doing, dude. It was weird."

The whole art thing, he says, was a total fluke. "I cannot draw a stick figure."

Losing an identity

The through line of the first hour, and arguably of the entire four, is what happens when the one thing you thought you were gets taken away.

Corbell trained jiu-jitsu and martial athletics from age nine. He went to UC Santa Cruz, built a school with satellite schools, hundreds and eventually thousands of students over a decade, taught full time for ten years after twenty years of teaching part time, and assumed that was the entire shape of his life. AJ, it turns out, trained Kenpo for thirty years, taught for twenty, and was full time for ten, which he admits he does not talk about "because it sounds stupid." The two of them recognize each other immediately.

Then Corbell got sick, and could no longer do the only thing he had ever done.

"I lost my identity, man," he says. "You think you are what you do, and you think this is the one thing and the one way your life is going to go. And then when that was just stripped away from me, I had to figure out, who am I if not this guy that trains martial arts?"

He would repeat a version of that lesson four hours later, applied to whistleblowers and to himself: we are not what other people say we are. Praise and blame are the same thing. If someone does not know you, they are filling in voids about who you are, and usually with false things.

The brother, the hip throw, and jiu-jitsu

He got into martial arts for all the wrong reasons, he says, the same as AJ. Uncontrolled energy. Parents who did not know what to do with him. The kind of kid who would see white and taste metal in his mouth and go crazy.

The introduction was a single moment. He came home from school, his big brother was messing with him, he threw a punch at his brother's face, and his brother executed a hip throw. All the air went out of him. Lying on the floor looking up, he was not angry. He was impressed. "How did you do that?" Jiu-jitsu. "What the heck?"

He was younger than his brother, so he started skipping school to take a bus from Santa Monica out to the valley to train at a high school before he was in high school. A teacher eventually caught on, mostly by wondering how he had gotten across the city in that amount of time.

The lesson that stuck was volume. "You try something a thousand times and someone else has only tried it a hundred times, and you are going to pull it off." AJ finishes it for him: if you want the skill, you got to drill. Corbell: "Repetition is the mother of skill."

One of his primary teachers was David Meyer, now a coral belt and one of the Dirty Dozen, the first twelve non Brazilians to earn a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. Meyer was learning it as he taught it. This was the embryonic stage, long before MMA as anyone knows it now: you had to go train boxing, wrestling, judo, Kenpo, jiu-jitsu, aikido separately and bring them together yourself, and you had to lie to each sensei that you were only studying with them.

Warrior yoga, juvenile hall, and Sinaloa SWAT

Two of the side businesses that came out of that decade matter later, because they are the reason he can still pay his own bills.

The first is warrior yoga, which he taught for ten years at a university. It was yoga for athletes, and the name existed because he was teaching it in juvenile hall and needed to get the kids' attention. He had asked if he could come teach the kids martial arts and been told no, obviously, you cannot teach them wrist escapes. So he built a conditioning program instead. His pitch to the kids was a bribe with a fuse on it: if you do not stop doing push-ups, you get free training for life, we are right up here at the university, I will have students come pick you up. The point was to break the habit loop by giving them something physical and good to do. He brought in his friend Frank Shamrock, who had been incarcerated himself, and the kids knew exactly who he was. The program grew into something large.

AJ says his own favorite part of his career was teaching fourteen to seventeen year old boys who were pains in the ass, "just slapping them around and setting them on that path." Corbell: "There are a lot of boys that need that." AJ: "I did." Corbell: "I did too." Parents used to come in and thank AJ for kicking the shit out of their kids for a year.

The second is bodywork. Corbell trademarked Restoration Massage Therapy, though he is careful to say he did not invent the underlying style. He started learning massage at nine, at a school with five teachers from five disciplines, all of whom insisted that if you learn to disassemble a body you had better learn to heal one. The lineage he names runs from Henry Okazaki in Japan, who created the Okazaki restorative style, through a student named Sig Kufferath out of the Bay Area, who trained him. He is blunt that this is mostly gone now: "I do not think it is today, and the same with MMA. It is much more a sport now."

The demos are a smaller aside but a good one. Twice a year he took students to Mazatlan to train Sinaloa SWAT in hand to hand and non lethal technique, then do festival demonstrations. He is careful to note that the flipping and the flash in a demo is not the training. "That is for show." AJ, who ran a demo team, needs no convincing. "Like, do not try this in the alley." Corbell: "No, no. It is to excite the minds and inspire kids that there is another way. Because that happened for me."

Nepal, and the monk who called him sensei

Then he said a sentence out loud that he still thinks the universe answered.

He had the school, the satellite schools, the community, the life. And he said out loud: is this all that I have inside of me? Is this my life? Is this the path I am supposed to go on?

He went to the visa office and asked where he could go today. Not in a week. Today. India took seven days. The answer was Nepal, a country he says he had never heard of. He was not one of those guys planning to walk the earth. He just wanted somewhere he could get to immediately, somewhere he could stop being sensei to hundreds of people who only knew him as that. He landed during what he remembers as a period when bombs had gone off in the city, and had no idea where he was.

The cosmic joke arrived within days. It is midnight in a Tibetan monastery, rooms the size of a table with a bed in them, and he is walking down the hallway explicitly trying to get away from who he is in order to find out who he is. Down the hall, a voice: "Sensei?"

A student from Santa Cruz, California, was leaving the monastery at that exact moment.

"I swear on my life, bro."

Varanasi, and the chai he did not drink

He made his way toward India and stopped in Varanasi, which he did not know anything about, because this was effectively before the internet and he had not cracked a guidebook. Varanasi, as he explains it, is the place you go to die: die there and you are not reborn into karma. So the city is full of people who came to die, bodies being cremated on the ghats, remains going into the Ganges. He notes the two categories exempt from cremation as it was explained to him: sadhus, the holy men, and pregnant women, because the babies are pure. The funeral fire, they told him, has been kept lit for thousands of years.

He stayed long enough to know the place. The riverside cafes had flies so thick he ate with a shirt over his head. A white sadhu sat down next to him, smirked, put a sugar cube on a dish with a little water, and every fly in the vicinity went to it, "like molten flies," while the man ate and smiled at him. Corbell's takeaway: "Oh, there is a trick to this life. What is going on here?"

Then the part he still cannot fully explain.

A local man he had known for a few days, whom he liked, whom he has photographs with, invited him for chai in a house. Sitting there, he had what he describes as an absolute knowing that they were going to poison him. Not a suspicion. A knowing, almost audible: trust needs to be earned.

He broke every social norm in the room. He stood up, put his hand on the man's chest, and said it out loud: "Trust needs to be earned." The instant he said it, two large men came in. He did not drink the chai. They had expected him to drink the chai.

He walked out, went a couple of blocks, and found a young Western woman with bright red hair sitting on a curb crying. He recognized her from earlier in the week, because it was the off season and there were almost no tourists. He asked what was wrong.

Her friend had been poisoned with tea. She was in the hospital. They had taken her passport, and she believed they were keeping her sick through the IV.

Corbell went with her to the hospital and made a very large scene. It was the first time in his life he had seen armed guards at a hospital. The friend had mentioned that when her family found out they would get the embassy involved, which he did not understand until "some badass bitch comes in from the embassy with two other people," pulled the girl out immediately, and asked him to escort them to Delhi. That is how he became friends with them.

The kicker is in the guidebook. Had he read one, it would have told him: be careful of poison in the chai, it is a known scam in Varanasi. Make the tourist sick, claim cholera, put them in the hospital, keep an IV in them that keeps them sick, milk the insurance money, then let them recover.

AJ: "That is crazy that you felt it, though."

Corbell: "That was one of the times in my life where something just saved me there, man. I do not know. Intuition." AJ offers a mundane explanation, martial arts situational awareness. Corbell half accepts it and then says the honest thing: "It was almost more than that. I have only had a couple experiences like that in my life where you get information that there is no logical way for you to have obtained it."

Pune, Osho, and a 107 degree fever

His illness had nothing to do with the tea. He thinks he inhaled fungal spores from disturbed soil, either sleeping outdoors in a farm area or from bat dust in caves. He got spores in his lungs and did not notice how bad he looked because he was not looking in mirrors.

He went down to Pune, India, drawn by curiosity about the guru Osho, whose books he had read. Osho was already dead. What Corbell found was a compound with big pyramids and a whole city built around it, and the feeling that he was inside a cult. To enter, you had to surrender your passport, which he did, and which twenty years later he considers evidence of how dumb he was. "You are in your twenties, right? So you will do anything. You are invincible."

He calls this the possible start of the investigator in him: he spent a few days just reading and watching and thinking, what is going on here?

Then he went to bed and something felt wrong, and he came out of it two or three days later, in a bed completely drenched with sweat, having been hearing chimes, having had a long conversation with his buddy Ricky.

Ricky had been dead for years.

"I was hallucinating from a fever. My brain was cooking, man."

The compound panicked at the prospect of a foreigner dying on the property and sent in a doctor, because he refused to go to a hospital after Varanasi. She put a thermometer in his armpit. It read 107. In the armpit. They shot him in the backside with something to break the fever, and he describes the effect as being yanked out of water by the head, an instantaneous return of consciousness, with one clear thought: I have to get out of here.

They told him he had to drink a set amount of water over a set number of days before they would return his passport. He filmed himself lining up the bottles, talking to himself, pounding the water. They gave the passport back. He left.

Valley fever, and the flight home

It happened twice more. Each time he was told it was just bacteria, that things are different in India than in the US, and given bronchitis medicine and antibiotics that worked for a while. Eventually he understood: something is really wrong. You have to get home.

He flew home in business class for the first time in his life and could not enjoy a second of it. "You have this nice seat, but I was just dying, dude. They must have thought a dead man was on the plane." Passing up champagne asking for water.

The diagnosis at home was coccidioidomycosis, valley fever. It had spread from his lungs and damaged his heart, his kidney and his liver. It had begun coming out through the skin, and he still has small scars on his arms from it. Even at UCLA they were worried it had progressed too far. The treatment was an antifungal and a stack of other things, and then a very slow return of energy.

He could not train. He could not walk down the block and salvage a door without being flattened for a day and a half. He was skinny as a rail and, in his words, really messed up.

AJ asks the obvious question. Were you not depressed?

The best thing that ever happened to him

Corbell's answer is the philosophical center of the first hour, and it is worth quoting at length because it explains his behavior for the next three.

"You get back to okay, I can move, but who am I? What am I doing? So there is absolutely that loss of identity and ego, which is the best thing that ever happened to me."

The reason it was the best thing: "The one thing I learned from all of that is that we are not what other people say we are. Praise and blame is all the same. If someone does not know you, they are filling in voids about who you are, and usually with false things. And it also taught me that we are not just the things that we do. The things that we do are because of who and what we are on the inside."

And the practical corollary: "It taught me that we can live many lives, and that we can apply ourselves to almost anything, and if we are diligent, if we do it a thousand times and not just a hundred times, the only failure you are going to have is not trying."

He met his wife through the wreckage, because she was an artist who walked in and looked at what a sick man was making in a garage and thought it was art. He makes the joke again that he cannot draw a stick figure and that she can actually paint amazing, creepy, weird things out of her imagination. For him it was a physical trade. "Jiu-jitsu is an art to me, but it is very mechanical." AJ: "It is like paint by number. You learn what the next number is." Corbell: "Do it a thousand times and then you earn another number."

  • age 9 A hip throw from his older brother knocks the air out of him. He starts jiu-jitsu and Okazaki bodywork the same year, and skips school to take the bus to the valley to train.
  • 20s Runs a school with satellite schools, trains Sinaloa SWAT in Mazatlan twice a year, teaches warrior yoga in juvenile hall, brings in Frank Shamrock. Says out loud: is this all I have inside of me?
  • the trip Flies to Nepal because it was the only country he could reach that day. A student from Santa Cruz calls him "sensei" in a monastery hallway at midnight.
  • Varanasi Refuses the chai. Two men walk in. Finds a crying woman two blocks away whose friend is in the hospital with an IV keeping her sick. The scam was printed in the guidebook he never read.
  • Pune Surrenders his passport to enter the Osho compound. Wakes from a two or three day fever dream talking to a friend who died years earlier. Armpit temperature: 107.
  • home Diagnosed with valley fever. It has reached his heart, kidney and liver and is coming out through his skin. UCLA is not sure they caught it in time.
  • recovery Cannot train. Starts disassembling computers from Fry's and salvaging doors and windows from demolition sites in Santa Monica. Puts them on his garage wall with lights and rotating imagery.
  • the mistake A man walks down the street and asks, "Are you an artist?" He answers, "I am a martial artist." He gets mistaken for an artist, and says yes.
  • Prague Robbed of everything. Held 72 hours without a passport. Rescued by a Vogue photographer he had met once, who tells him: "Darling, come back. We will shoot a show." He gets mistaken for a photographer.
  • Sharon Tate Hired to shoot Tate's wardrobe. Her sister cries. He proposes something better and builds dresses out of Polaroids, roughly ten thousand pieces, covered by the LA Times.
  • the camera A wedding gift from a friend: a Canon 5D Mark I. He points it at his grandmother, who mentions she saw the Battle of Los Angeles, and then tells him a family secret she had never told her own daughter. He gets mistaken for a filmmaker.
Figure 2. The accidental resume. Corbell's own framing is that his whole life has been a series of mistaken identities he decided to grow into. Every one of them, he points out, started with an illness that took away the only identity he had chosen for himself.

Salvage, and unflattening Sharon Tate

While recovering he started buying stacks of six old computers on sale at Fry's Electronics, taking them apart and putting them back together purely as something to do with his hands. He cannot explain why. His grandfather, he mentions, was a watchmaker, born around 1903, who later moved into import export and jewelry, and Corbell never got to see him work.

Then he noticed his own neighborhood in Santa Monica being demolished, having been away fifteen years, and started pulling windows and doors out of construction sites with hammers and crowbars, through fences. A contractor caught him once and was, reasonably, furious. AJ: "That is where the blood comes from." Corbell: "No, that is a different story."

His garage opened onto a main street. It was supposed to hold tatami mats and a heavy bag. The heavy bag came down and the harvested windows and doors went up on the walls, with lights installed, and computer screens he had figured out how to separate and drive with rotating imagery and sound. "I do not know what I was doing. I do not know what I was doing."

A guy walked down the street and asked if he was an artist. Corbell remembers answering, "I am a martial artist." The guy asked if he had made these, had he shown them, did he want to. He said maybe. He genuinely did not know people did that.

Two words recur in his story, and AJ names them: salvage, and unflattening. People get flattened into a single dimension, whether it is David Grusch or Bob Lazar. AJ's example: Sharon Tate is known for one thing, being murdered in 1969 by the Manson family, and Corbell unflattened her.

But to get there, we have to go through Prague.

Prague: the safe, the Serbian, and three days in holding

He had been throwing art shows in Los Angeles, taking over motels in Hollywood, lining the walls with newspaper because he loved the LA Times logo, girls in sunglasses, crazy themes. Around then, Lululemon made him a local ambassador for the warrior yoga work, which meant a photo shoot in a studio, which is where he met a nice Iranian guy he assumed was a grip. They sat outside and talked for a long time. He filed the man away as "super nice guy named Peter."

Then he took a cheap still camera to Europe to shoot a new series he was going to call Women in Sunglasses, with a show already booked back home.

In Prague he came back from watching a heist movie with a gut feeling: get back to the hotel. The door was smashed in. The safe was wide open. Camera equipment, hard drives, suits, passport, all gone. Three security doors, a big private room door, and somehow the safe was open too. "How did they get in the safe?" "Great question." "I do not like it." "No, I do not like it at all."

A very large Serbian man came up the stairs and asked, "Do we have a problem?" Corbell, being himself, shoved him against the wall. The man just smirked. "He knew something that I did not, and it was frightening."

Then the police arrived and told him he was going to jail. Not for the assault. Because he had no identification. His passport had just been stolen. He was held for 72 hours. He has the paperwork. They gave him a candy bar. None of them spoke English until the third day, at which point they all spoke English.

An embassy officer came to get him an emergency passport and put him on a plane home. Corbell refused. They had taken all of his work. So he started loitering, interviewing employees, and got somewhere: the girl who ran the security cameras started crying and slipped him a note. All the footage was gone from the exact moment he was set up. The Serbian owned the hotel. The investigator assigned to him, whom Corbell nicknamed Inspector Crusoe, was doing nothing.

The Serbian eventually said, in front of Inspector Crusoe, "People get killed for a lot worse."

Corbell turned to the inspector: "See, he is threatening me right there."

The inspector turned back: "Yeah, he is a really bad man."

"And I am like, oh, fuck. I am out of here."

Tail between his legs, he called the one photographic studio he knew. And Peter, the guy he thought was a grip, was Peter Karpatian, a famous Vogue photographer out of the seventies with a wall of covers. The response, delivered exactly as you would hope: "Darling, I am Peter Karpatian. Come back. We will shoot a show."

He got all his friends to wear sunglasses and staged what he cheerfully calls a fake art show, Women in Sunglasses. It worked. And that is how he got mistaken for a photographer. AJ, delighted: "Can I call you darling from now on?" Corbell: "Officially."

The Polaroid dresses

The call came: they needed a photographer to shoot Sharon Tate's wardrobe on a model named Lauren Hastings. Corbell knew nothing about the fashion industry and only knew Tate as the flat, two dimensional person who had been murdered. He thought it was creepy. He said yes anyway.

Karpatian had taught him an old school press Polaroid technique: rip the film out, and once, after Corbell threw one on the ground and stomped on it, he found the patterns it made were beautiful. So he started doing it deliberately.

Tate's sister came to watch the shoot and started crying. Corbell, newly minted as an artist, said the thing that changed the job: I can do better than this. We can do a whole thing honoring your sister.

What he built was a roughly ten thousand piece art show. Dresses constructed out of Polaroids. Huge large format prints. Video of it is still online, the LA Times covered it, and he calls it a smashing success. "So out of nowhere, I have got this art career and it is pretty good."

The camera, and what grandma saw

His friend Jeff Murad gave him a Canon 5D Mark I as a wedding present. Corbell still has it. He filmed every one of his movies on it. "It is not even the good one." He learned to frame shooting on a cross country anniversary road trip with his wife, lighting fireworks on long Texas roads.

Then AJ makes the connection that makes the rest of the four hours make sense: "What I like about you getting the camera is I think you started to learn that for some reason people will open up to a camera."

Corbell: "That is precisely what happened."

It started with his grandmother. He had made an art piece about the Battle of Los Angeles, the February 1942 night the US military fired more than a thousand antiaircraft rounds at something over LA. Two of the windows he had salvaged faced that direction from the Palisades, so he rebuilt the view using imagery from the LA Times as a dual panel. It did not sell. So, like any young artist, he gave it to his parents and installed it high on a wall where they could never take it down.

His grandmother walked past it and said, "I saw that," and kept walking into the kitchen.

He sat her down with the camera. She told him about the Battle of Los Angeles. Then she told him things about the family she had never told her own daughter, Corbell's mother: that she had once had a daughter who did not make it.

"They just told you stuff that would have been lost forever if you did not point the camera at them."

The line Corbell draws from this is the operating principle of his entire career: "The camera became my passport into everything unknown that I wanted to know. You point a camera at somebody and they have these things that they want so desperately to say, just to get it off their chest. Not to be public a lot of the time in the UFO field, but just to say it."

A small, human coda: his mother never had the heart to watch that tape. On the drive to this very interview, roughly fifteen years later, she asked him to send her the 28 minutes. She has probably watched it by now.

Sleeping Dog, and his mother

The documentary about Corbell is Sleeping Dog, directed by Michael Lazovsky. AJ has watched it and it clearly got to him. "She had me choked up a couple of times, to be honest."

Corbell on his mother: "She is a gangster. What you see is what you get." And then the part that is not in the film: "She has had to sit down with agencies before because of threats. My mom has been through a lot."

The moment that surprised both men is when Lazovsky asks her whether she wishes Jeremy had never gotten into this, and she says no, she is glad he did. Corbell: "That surprised me that she said that." AJ: "Me too. I did not see that coming."

Corbell gave Lazovsky the entire archive and complete editorial control. There are moments in the film he asked to have cut, mostly of himself breaking down, and his family agreed with him. AJ disagrees with both of them: "It had to be there, man. It makes you a person."

John Lear, and the entry fee to UFO disclosure

Here the conversation turns, and it turns through one house in Las Vegas.

John Lear was, in Corbell's framing, the godfather. A former CIA pilot, son of Bill Lear who invented the eight track and founded Learjet, holder of more world speed records than any other pilot, plugged into every insider in Nevada, and by the Art Bell era the single omnipresent name in UFO land. "He was the guy. He was infamous."

Corbell first heard of him at about thirteen, through the George Knapp interview with the silhouetted man they called Dennis, who was later revealed to be Bob Lazar. It was all over the airwaves. That is when Knapp's name and Lazar's got onto his radar simultaneously.

What actually flipped his script was not the sensation. It was one physical claim.

Corbell says he grew up assuming, like most people, that aliens are probably real but are not coming here, because the distances are too vast. Then Lazar described a propulsion system that is not reactionary. Not rockets, not roller skates, not pushing something out the back to go forward. The craft, Lazar said, creates a gravity well. You are falling into space and time.

"You are falling. You are falling in. And I thought, if what he is saying is true, not his whole story, just if craft could do that with science, then distance no longer matters. You need a lot of energy to do that, but distances no longer matter. So why would they not be here?"

AJ points out that Lazar was saying this roughly twenty five years before the Alcubierre drive entered popular conversation, and they note the modern overlap with work on compressing space and searching for Kaluza-Klein particles. Corbell is careful: Lazar did not say Kaluza-Klein. And Lazar himself will be the first to say all he knows is what he saw, touched, was shown, and read on paper, and that he has never claimed the briefing documents were true, because "there is always disinformation sewn in with real information just so you can identify leaks. That is a standard practice in any black budget program."

Getting to Lear took persistence. Corbell called and emailed for a long time with nothing. Then Lear picked up the phone once and said, in effect: come on out to Las Vegas, Nevada, here is my address, come visit me, click.

"It was totally insane to me. Nobody knows me. I am not doing UFO stuff." His read now: Lear was lonely, and Corbell arrived at the right moment with a camera, which Lear thought meant something. Corbell was honest with him. I have never made a movie, but I am fascinated by this, I want to learn from you, can I record some of it?

Then he came back. Over and over. For eight or nine years. Rolling every single time. AJ asks how much footage. Corbell: "Ask Michael, he will tell you the exact thousands of hours."

His first interview was a disaster in a way he now finds funny. He came in hot with what he thought was the obvious first question: what is your greatest piece of evidence that UFOs are real and extraterrestrials exist? "I thought it was simple, like this guy had something. It was not that. It is an accumulative weight of relationships and evidence and understanding that brought John to some weird places that he believed."

For a long time Lear would not talk to him about UFOs at all. He would smoke his cigar, barely look at the camera, and go take a nap. "He is letting me film him like an animal in the zoo."

The house was a hoarder's sci-fi set. Walls of televisions, which had once been a real workflow: CNN on one, Fox on another, BBC on another, news separated by screen, tapes playing, random material people mailed him. Corbell slept on that floor, next to the rat's nest of wires under the desk, the first several visits, because he did not have money and was driving out every weekend he could.

The toilet is the famous part. There was a toilet ghost flushing constantly, ruining his audio. Corbell, who actually runs an apartment and house renovation business for a living, knew how to deal with it: dye in the tank, wait five minutes, check the bowl. He fixed it so it would stop making the sound while he recorded.

"Then he realized: gold mine. I have got a smuggler and a handyman."

"And man, did he put me to work."

Everything in the house. Lear also decided Corbell was a computer wizard, which he is not, so he would have to call his brother for help, and half the time the problem was that Lear's caps lock was on. Corbell's line about it: "I said the entry fee to UFO disclosure was fixing an old man's toilet."

The smuggling was cigars. Phillies Titan cigars from Walgreens. "You want the story? Got to bring me Titans." He learned that on the second visit.

He is emphatic about one thing, having spent nearly a decade in the room. "I can tell you for a matter of fact that John Lear was not a paid disinformation guy from the CIA. I have heard that a bunch. The dude could not tie his own shoelaces properly because of his illness. He just did not have it in him. He believed the things he would tell you, unless he was testing you, telling you things just to see how far he could make you go."

What did Lear get right? Mostly the test site material. Pilots from Nellis came over while Corbell was there. Lear still had deep connections and, crucially, no judgment and no filter, which is why people talked to him. "He did not have a bullshit meter. He would just take everything as gospel." That made him safe to talk to, except for the part where he would then blab about it.

The prominence came from journalism. Lear walked into Ned Day, the Las Vegas reporter who was Knapp's mentor, and told him about the stealth fighter when it was still top secret. The FBI came in and started shaking Ned Day down. Day's answer became a newsroom legend: "Look, I am a small Las Vegas, Nevada reporter. If I can find out about the stealth fighter, then you sure as shit know the Russians and the Chinese know as well. I did you a favor."

And Lear could draw. Photorealism, with a pencil. Corbell asked to see one and Lear pulled out a perfect, gorgeous, porcelain man's standing urinal. "That was so John Lear."

AJ: "Genius and crazy. They are right next to each other."

Corbell asked him once whether he thought he was crazy. Lear laughed. "No. If I am, it has been a fun ride. But no, I know what I am saying is true."

Sleeper, the ticket, and UFO disease

The hardest sequence in Sleeping Dog, and the one AJ keeps returning to, is about a man named Lou Baldin, whom Lear called Sleeper and described as having come to Earth on a craft.

Corbell found the way Lear talked about him perplexing. "Like UFO Jesus. Everything this guy says is so." And this from a man Corbell considers a genuine genius.

Lear believed, to the best of Corbell's assessment, that souls are harvested on the moon. He believed his own grandson Damian had been abducted. And Baldin had written him something amounting to a pass, a ticket off what Lear called the prison planet.

Corbell flew Baldin in on a Southwest flight so the two could finally meet, because it was one of Lear's dying wishes. The first meeting is in the film. What is not in the film is what happened after, because Lazovsky decided the movie was not about that: they wheeled Lear out onto his own tennis courts, overgrown after twenty years of nobody playing there, a zombie tennis court, and Corbell filmed him crying, saying he did not want to go yet because of his grandson.

The scene that is in the movie is Lear asking Baldin: "Is my ticket still good?" And Baldin saying yeah, yeah, it is good. And Lear saying okay, cool.

Corbell calls it what he thinks it is, and he does not spare himself in the naming.

"I call this UFO disease. It is when people get so deep into this and they do not know the answers. We do not know the answers. We like to fill it with what feels best to us. And I really fight against that. I have heard it all, man. I have heard every theory from incredible people. I do not know the answer. And so I am not going to fill it in, because I have seen that go wrong with everybody."

AJ: "But you naturally want to fill it in. So you just leave the hole there."

Corbell: "Leave the hole. Be okay with it."

The Little A'Le'Inn: "Where's Bob Lazar?"

The other dying wish was to see Area 51 again, and Corbell took him. They drove out to Rachel, Nevada, to the Little A'Le'Inn, and got shaken down.

It was overt. Bad contact, in his phrasing. A man and a woman positioned themselves between him and the wall where his batteries and backpacks were, so he could not get around them.

"Hey, Jeremy, what are you filming?"

He said he was doing interviews with John Lear, then asked how they had gotten there, since he had not seen them walk in.

"We flew in."

Corbell's read: they were flexing, because the only people flying into Rachel are coming from the base. They identified themselves as naval intelligence. And then they asked him a question that has never stopped being strange to him.

"Where's Bob Lazar?"

He had never met Bob Lazar. He was there filming John Lear. "This is my indoctrination into the high strangeness."

Being himself, he pointed at a photo of Lazar on the wall. "He's right there."

They did not look. They did not have a sense of humor about it. Stone cold. "You are not thinking about going over the gates, are you?"

"Oh, no. I would not think about doing that. I hear there is a six hundred dollar fine if you do that."

Lear, meanwhile, was asleep in the back of Corbell's Scion, seat folded down, snoring. Corbell came to the window and said, dude, we have to go, there are two intelligence people inside.

Lear's reaction, delivered from a dead sleep: "You met aliens."

They did not drive out to the gates after that, since it was clear they were expected, but Lear did get to see the proximity of Area 51 one more time before he died.

AJ, drily: "You were safer with the Serbian dude."

The napkin, and the falling out

Lear died in 2022, and Corbell says they were not on good terms.

The mechanism was a piece of paper. After years of filming toward a documentary, Lear signed his life rights over to a family member on a napkin, which eliminated Corbell's autonomy over the film entirely.

Corbell does not take it personally and refuses to speculate meanly. "He was a complicated guy. I feel like maybe people were taking advantage of him a little bit. Everybody thought he was a meal ticket." Lear framed it to him as "this is what we are up against," which made no sense to Corbell, whose response was: I have literally done this for all these years, and this does not help get a movie made about you.

AJ, who has watched the footage: "You were there for you. You helping him put a shirt on. Pillows on the couch."

Corbell will not judge the end of life care he saw. "I would say it did not feel right to me." Lear had flatlined once between filming sessions, and one of the phone calls in the documentary is Corbell being told he is not doing so good and driving out. Lear lived longer than expected, "long enough to be pissed at me."

What Lear was actually angry about, Corbell believes, is that Corbell went and made the film he could make instead, the one about Bob Lazar. "And then he had some poisonous people in his ears saying that I just used him that whole time to get to Lazar. Not true. And George knows that. Everybody that was there knows that I really, in good faith, was trying to make that film. He made it impossible."

Three minutes with Bob Lazar

Lear had been dangling it for years. Lazar might come over for my birthday. Corbell had stopped falling for it.

Then one day he was already at the house and Lazar was in town and called through. Corbell turned the camera off, as he always did when Lear was on the phone with people like Edgar Mitchell, because those people had not consented. AJ is genuinely surprised: "You really did? A lot of dudes would roll."

Corbell: "But then how are you going to use it? It is not moral to use it."

He goes further and puts away the camera, the tripod and the recorder entirely, out of sight, because he did not know what Lazar was thinking. "You trap a feral animal. He had not come public at all, and you had just seen people saying all this garbage about him."

Lazar came in with his wife Joy. They had a pow-wow, they laughed. And Corbell found his opening.

"Look, I do not know if you are telling the truth or not. I have no judgment on it. I would love to know. But here is what I do know: people are saying the craziest stories about you that are not true. It is very targeted. They are trying to dismiss you. Can I just turn on the camera for three minutes? It will make a huge difference."

Lazar said yeah.

It went far longer than three minutes, and it became the first footage in Corbell's career. It is the first time anyone hears Bob Lazar put his foot down and say it plainly: I know that UFOs are real, I was inside one, I know they are made with a science and a material we have never been able to make.

John Lear watched it happen and looked at Corbell like, holy shit. He had never heard Lazar stand up for himself that way.

Corbell's own verdict from the room: "Oh, that does not seem like a liar to me right now."

He is careful about what that does and does not establish. He already had cause to believe a lot of what Lazar described was actual. What he did not know was whether Lazar had personally been there, or whether Lazar was being used as a disinformation vector. So he did the slow work: got to know everybody around Lazar, watched some of them dislike each other, and concluded that this was not a coordinated conspiracy, because a conspiracy requires more agreement than these people have. "The one thing they agree on is that Lazar did work out there, that he did have the job he said he did, and that all these little things happened."

And the pressure was real, and it is on the record. Lear used to warn Lazar not to come over after working out there because they would follow him. Knapp's newsroom was tapped. Knapp's own framing, which Corbell repeats: "You had to have been there to really understand what that pressure was like. Now we all think, oh, NSA, we are all tapped. Not back then. Back then, to tap a newsroom was unbelievable."

On the raids and the harassment of Lazar over the years: "Whether you believe him or not about UFOs, there are some things that we know about Bob that have happened, and it is a pressure cooker."

The movie, Storm Area 51, and S4

Corbell's film is Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers (2018). He is disarming about how it happened. "I lucked out. Got a couple movies on Netflix, one on Hulu. I had never made a movie in my life. I am not a filmmaker. I lucked out with distribution."

He is precise about what the film was for, and it is the unflattening idea applied at scale.

"I was not trying to prove the details of Lazar's story. I was trying to humanize him. I want you to see: this is Bob. This is his life. This is Joy. Oh, by the way, he actually is a scientist. He works in a scientific capacity. He has a laboratory. He is more of a science guy than most scientists I have met. He is hands-on physically doing stuff. He has a cool business, a cool life, he has doggies. If you could see what I have seen, then you have to contend with what he said in a different way, rather than just dismissing him, often based on stuff he never said."

What it actually produced was Storm Area 51, which he still finds absurd. A college kid named Matty Roberts watched the Joe Rogan episode with Lazar and then the movie, made a Facebook joke, and roughly two million people RSVP'd to raid a military installation. Corbell and Knapp looked at it and decided to try to steer it somewhere harmless rather than let it run: Knapp went to report on it, and Corbell called a musician he did not realize was popular and got him to come out.

He was never formally contacted by the FBI or DOJ about it. He is careful to say "on that one," twice, with a laugh. But federal agents were overtly badged and present at the event.

On the recent S4: The Bob Lazar Story, directed by Luigi Vendittelli, which reconstructs the site and the craft in 3D, Corbell is supportive: "Bob has always said it is important that people could kind of see what I saw. He said everything he can possibly say, but saying it is different than seeing it. And with a big thumbs up, Bob is like, that is what it looked like."

He also thinks Lazar's story is finished. "There is nothing more he can tell. He has said it all. He has shown it all. There is nothing big he is hiding from anybody, like a name." People come to Corbell claiming they worked with Lazar out there, and Corbell knows the questions to ask, and where he does not, he passes them to Lazar, who holds a few details back specifically as a filter.

On Dan Burisch, asked in passing: "He's full of shit."

AJ suggests there are maybe two or three genuine hinge points in modern UFO history: Bill Moore's Roswell book, and Corbell's Lazar film. Do you realize how much of history you are?

Corbell: "No. I have no rearview mirror, man. I know that George and I have made some noise. I know that we brought out a bunch of military videos. I am glad the world is embracing this mystery. But I have got more questions than answers. We are just starting with this thing."

The gatekeeping charge

AJ raises the accusation directly, and frames it well: you are up against compartmentalization, and yet your own methodology is encrypted files, staged information releases, careful planning. Are you doing what they are doing?

Corbell welcomes the question. "I am open to any question. I want to clarify things people misunderstand."

His defense is the record. "The last thing that George and I are doing is holding information back. Look at our history. We have put out more than anybody when it comes to these things that should not be seen, and we do not do it lightly. Every time you do that, you put a source at risk. Every single time."

And then a genuinely interesting asymmetry that gets overlooked. When Corbell and Knapp release footage, the footage is worse, because of how they had to get it, and the internet immediately attacks the frame rate. When the government releases the same footage, it comes straight off a server, there is no frame rate discussion, and no human being is exposed. "The onus is on our government. They have said they are going to be transparent about UFOs. All we have been doing is journalism. We have been provoking truth. We have been provoking the release of data."

He is explicit about what he does not claim: "It is not like we stand behind every piece of footage as an alien spacecraft. That is not our position."

They also have continuity plans. "Everything that we have ever accumulated is not going to go lost if something goes wrong with me and George. A simple process, so there is no dead end with our reporting."

What they hold back, and why

AJ pushes on the one thing he thinks will frustrate the audience: you have said there are things you hold back for national security.

Corbell's answer is more careful than the accusation assumes, and it starts by rejecting the premise. "Big picture, holding back for national security is not my job. I am not qualified to assess that kind of thing. My lawyer will tell you I am not qualified."

Then he gives the concrete example, which is the most vivid thing in this stretch of the conversation. Imagine a thermal video in which there is a Russian submarine breaching, and two lenticular objects crossing the frame from left to right.

"Now, will that one piece of footage crack the egg? Is it better than a piece of footage without a Russian submarine in it? No, it is not."

"When you are assessing with national security in mind, I have been told directly that that type of footage is really bad for American defense. So the question becomes, what is the value in a piece of footage compared to others?"

He is careful to note he does not have that. Things like that have passed in front of his eyes. "I have been shown a lot more than George and I have ever obtained."

And the practical argument closes it: why would a source ever give a journalist anything if that journalist had a record of endangering national security? Awareness is not the same as the ability to publish. AJ: "It is annoying." Corbell: "It is annoying. I am doing my best. If somebody can do better, they should do it."

Hold for George Knapp

The Knapp origin story is a phone call.

Corbell had been calling the news station and emailing over the course of about two years, trying to be respectful without being too much, and getting nowhere. "It was harder than getting to the president during an election. He has all these layers, and he just does not answer his phone a lot."

Then the news director called back, at a moment when Corbell was totally unprepared, and said: "Hold for George Knapp."

And then Knapp, before the conversation started, took mercy on him: "Can I give you a piece of advice? Know what you have to say. Say it succinctly. And just listen."

What followed was probably the longest conversation Knapp had had on the subject to date, and Corbell describes it as a pressure valve opening. Knapp laid it out in three buckets, which is now Corbell's own habit: here is what I know, here is what I do not know, here is what I suspect.

Why did they click? Because Corbell had done eight years of graduate school in John Lear's living room. "Probably not a lot of people could have held the conversation with so many details about it like I could. It was almost like Lear was training me for my black belt." And it was relieving, he says, to finally hear George Knapp say "well, that is fucking bonkers," or "no, let me tell you a real story about that."

The first thing they did together was call Nellis Air Force Base, which Corbell filmed. It is a study in the difference a name makes. When Corbell calls Nellis and asks about S4, nothing happens. When Knapp calls, the public information officer calls him back, because "he's George motherfucking Knapp," the lead investigative reporter in Las Vegas for more than thirty years.

The recorded response is one of the funnier artifacts in the interview. The officer, audibly giggling: "We have no site 4 specifically designated on our maps."

The harpoon at the Atomic Testing Museum

Before they had worked much together, Corbell went to a panel at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. On stage: the CIA's chief historian and the man who had run science and technology at Area 51. Knapp was hosting, and it was all about the wonderful things that had happened out there.

Corbell was in the front row with his Canon 5D. Knapp looked out and said, "I think that guy has a question over there," and threw him in.

Corbell's question: are you aware of a movie called UFOs Past, Present and Future, fully funded by the CIA?

He describes the panel whispering to each other, and things getting a little tense, because he was the UFO guy. Knapp has shown a clip of the whispered answer since. A longer version exists online with the question intact.

"That was the first time George kind of threw me in as the harpoon to ask the questions that nobody else was going to ask. I think that kind of started it off for us."

They both note Knapp's own summary of his professional joy, which Corbell repeats admiringly: "I love catching them in bullshit."

The podcast, Weaponized, was Corbell's idea, and the format came from Joe Rogan. Corbell had been putting things out on his own site and asked Rogan why it needed to be filmed. Rogan's answer: "Do you think there would have been a viral moment if you just heard Elon smoking a joint?"

The tape in the brown case

Knapp is the reason Corbell knows how central Knapp is. "You want to start a conspiracy, George Knapp has been at the center of everything." Lazar came forward through him. Harry Reid's interest traces through him. AAWSAP would not exist, Corbell argues, if Knapp's book had not sparked the interest of Dr. James Lacatski.

Which makes the missing tape more painful.

Somewhere in Knapp's house, in a nondescript brown case, is allegedly a video of a cloud chamber test conducted at a home, in which a puck of what Lazar said was element 115 was used to try to bend light. Knapp, not a scientific guy, says it looked like the light was bent. The other, more scientifically literate people present described the same thing. The tape was given to Knapp specifically for safekeeping, because he was the trustworthy reporter who would never lose it.

"Man, I have torn apart his entire house over almost a fifteen year period. I have digitized every blank tape I could find."

Bob Lazar is furious about it. Knapp is furious at himself about it. And Corbell's answer to whether they ever found it is simply: no.

Would it be proof? "It would be proof of something, but it would not be the ultimate proof." AJ: "But it would be something."

There is hope, though, because Knapp's house is a museum of tapes and papers and he just found a whole cache of undigitized material from his Russian travels. Michael Lazovsky is doing the digitizing now. "Now I have got my successor, Michael. He is doing the hard work."

How he vets

Corbell gets a lot of email and a lot of what he calls shit. He has said publicly that if you want to get your story out, he is not the guy to call.

The answer on vetting starts with humility. "One day I will fuck up, and it would be kind to me if I do. We are doing our best."

The distinction he draws with Knapp is temperament, and it is the opposite of what you would guess. Knapp is the news guy, ready to go. Corbell is the patient one. "I am more like the human guy. I take my time. Sometimes really, like years, with people, because they might have told me or shown me something really great."

The rest is defensive. "I am always feeling like people are trying to hurt me, dude. I am always trying to see that people are trying to trip me up, because I know it to be true, because I have had interference."

And that is the pivot into the second half of the conversation.

False friendship

Corbell's actual moment of conviction about the UFO subject did not come from a video. It came from watching the government behave.

"My aha moment with the UFO thing did not come in the form of a video. It came in the form of government influence."

He admits he was naive about it for years. People would tell him that intelligence agencies are baked into the subculture, that his computer was being hacked, and his internal response was "cool story, grandpa." He describes his default setting as the opposite of paranoia, which AJ helpfully names: pronoia. "Everybody is trying to help me. What is going on?"

They both nod at Richard Doty, the AFOSI agent at the center of the Paul Bennewitz affair, as the textbook precedent. Corbell knew about it, and mostly figured the guy was doing his job. He also notes, from people close to it, that "it really did not take much to tip him over the edge with his belief system," which is exactly why "you have to be so careful with what you choose to believe rather than have evidence for."

The technique he names is false friendship, and he describes the playbook in enough detail that it reads like a training manual.

It starts warm. Someone reaches out. They are a big fan of your work. They are NSA. A whole group of them at NSA watch your show with George. They send a photo from a little office at Wright-Patterson with some weaponized things visible in the frame, which Corbell notes they should probably not be doing. AJ recognizes it instantly and gets the biggest laugh of the hour: "I get these too, man. Missile Command is a fan of my show. I did not know that."

Corbell keeps an honest hand open here. "Maybe they are. I do not want to be like, maybe they are, man."

Then the relationship deepens, and the story arrives. "I am a kid at a facility where we look at Reaper footage twenty four seven. I have done it six years. Dude, something crazy happened."

And then Corbell does the one thing they do not expect: he calls around. "I have this unique ability to find out if people have other federal employment." What he finds, repeatedly, is that the person who said they were with one agency turns out to be, say, a liaison to the FBI.

The tell is that it is scripted. "Somewhere there must be a file that says you now have to have badged contact with Jeremy and George, and you need to show them your puppy and tell them you have a wife. It is so funny. It is this playbook. They always talk to me about my dogs, and then they have a dog. It must be in a file."

Does he call people out on it? "All the time. It is a joke." He compares it to the old stories of counterparts in Russia going out for drinks knowing full well they were spying on each other. "It is human nature."

1. APPROACH "Big fan of the show." A photo from the office. Claims one agency. 2. RAPPORT The dog. The wife. "We respect journalists." Good cop, on the record. 3. PATIENCE Four years, in one case. Waits for a public event that leaves you angry. 4. SOLICIT "I am at my computers. Anything you want me to get?" THE GOAL IS NOT SILENCE "They do not want to stop people from talking about UFOs. They want to shape the emerging UAP narrative."

THE COUNTERMEASURES Record everything. Nest cameras in the house, every call on speakerphone. Never say no to a meeting, but never take one alone. Run background checks on anyone new who enters your life. Route it all through a federal lawyer: Charles McCullough III, the first ICIG.

Figure 3. The false friendship sequence, reconstructed from Corbell's own account. He stresses that solicitation and the lying that supports it are, as his lawyer explained to him, legal when a US agency does it, which is the discovery that changed how he lives.

The bar with the gray shirts and the black shirts

There is one detail in this stretch that is pure texture, and it is the best small scene in the four hours.

Corbell sometimes goes to a particular pub in California where the aerospace employees drink after shift. "It is funny, because the gray shirts will come out. I believe that is Lockheed. And the black shirts will come out. I guess that is Raytheon. And there is just this one pub. And I will just sit there, man, like bait."

He has had people come to him from Lockheed and from Boeing. Eventually somebody always breaks from the fold and says something strange.

One guy walked up and said: "History is going to remember you kindly."

Corbell: "What? What would you say?"

"History is going to remember you kindly."

"What do you know?"

He offers to take AJ sometime.

Solicitation, entrapment, and a federal lawyer

Corbell and Knapp have had a great deal of what he calls badged contact: official, identified visits. The framing on those is always respectful. We respect you, you are a journalist, we are not messing with anything, we are more worried about foreign nations compromising you, because then maybe you do not vet things properly, and that hurts America. AJ names it: "They are being good cop to you."

His policy is to take every meeting. "You never say no. Only one time did we say no."

His lawyer is Charles McCullough III, the first Intelligence Community Inspector General, which is a genuinely useful person to have on speed dial. McCullough will tell him there is no reason to take a particular meeting. Corbell takes it anyway. "I am a curious dude. I want to know what they are thinking. He kind of laughs when I say that, but I am serious. I have learned a lot by taking some of those meetings."

The ground rules are established. "They understand strictly that George and I are doing our journalism, First Amendment, not to be fucked with. It will become a public issue if you try to overtly influence any of this. So they are not going to tell you not to report on stuff, but they are going to tell you the guidelines and the rules with national security."

AJ, deadpan: "Hate to see something bad happen to you."

Corbell: "Right. Exactly."

Then he explains the mechanism that actually worries him, and it is the reason the false friendship phase is measured in years rather than weeks.

Say he identifies that someone is liaising with the FBI on an investigation into his sources. That person is patient for four years. Then, at a moment when Corbell is in a heightened emotional state, in a way that is publicly visible, they come back with an offer.

"Hey man, I am at my computers and I am really mad about what I am seeing. Is there anything you want me to get?"

"No. No, bro."

"And these are career human intelligence people. They know exactly what they are doing."

The word for it is solicitation, and this is where Corbell's naivete finally broke. It is legal. It is a form of entrapment that is completely permitted when a US agency does it. Which is also why he records everything, "because if they lie about what you say, you have to be able to show what you actually said."

"I cannot count the number of times that I have directly been invited to solicit, and I have never, and neither has George. I was taught that day one from George."

And the strategic read underneath it: "They do not want to stop people from talking about UFOs. They want to shape the emerging UAP narrative. The best way to do that is to have leverage."

His summary of the position: "I have jumped into the viper pit with all this, and it is not a cool place to be. And it is not just for me. The more I raise my head up, the more it puts pressure on anybody that talks to me."

The ODNI nine months

The specific betrayal he keeps returning to is a nine month investigation run by ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which sits atop the roughly eighteen agencies of the intelligence community.

The first people they came to were Corbell and Knapp. Both walked in optimistic. "Oh, you are going to get to the bottom of this. This is really great. This is a mandated thing."

They then did something they now regret, and Corbell does not soften it. They told whistleblowers what they honestly believed: we do not know that they are on the level, we do not know that they are not just doing a human intelligence collection and will weaponize it against you later, we do not know. But if we could help, go America. Do you want to talk to these folks?

"Most people said yes, in good faith. And they did."

"I come to find out that it was a complete ruse."

McCullough put it best, ribbing him: "Jeremy, they do not need a podcast. You do not need a journalist podcaster to know where the bodies are buried. They are the ODNI. They will know. This whole thing does not make sense. This feels to me like they are just trying to get information."

Corbell's own motive was the one he now considers naive: he thought that if Matthew Brown and Dylan Borland testified to ODNI, on top of what Borland had already done with the ICIG, it would give them another layer of protection. They were doing the right thing.

He is careful to say he never tells a whistleblower what to do. "I tell them what the environment is. They wanted to give testimony. They wanted to take these steps to do the right thing."

The personal cost of all this is the loss of ordinary social life. "You really cannot make a lot of new friends. I have learned that, and I have to do background on anybody that is really coming into my life. It is a very weird thing. I just thought I was doing journalism on UFOs."

How Sleeping Dog got made

Michael Lazovsky did it right, which is the only reason he got in. He left a voicemail and an email, which is exactly what Corbell asks people to do, because he cannot read all the email.

Corbell was drowning. Filming, editing, producing Weaponized, working around the clock. "I am a horrible editor. I cannot do it as fast as other people." His wife told him plainly: you need help, this is not sustainable.

So he called the kid back. And immediately regretted it. "Pit in my stomach. I cannot let somebody into my life I do not know. Some of this stuff is sensitive."

AJ: "That is interesting that you really did not trust him at first."

Corbell: "Oh hell no. I have been burned a lot. People would love to control mine and George's reporting."

Lazovsky came on as a producer and editor, produced all of Weaponized, and over a year or more Corbell got to know him and his family and concluded he was the same kind of animal: someone who just wants to know as much as he can and thinks it matters.

Then Lazovsky asked to look through the unreleased footage. Corbell handed him a drive with something like fifteen years on it and Lazovsky's verdict was: "Oh, look. There is like a bunch of movies in there." The original plan was documentaries built from that archive.

What changed the plan was that Lazovsky started seeing the interference in real time, because he was in the room for the badged contacts and heard the calls. His argument to Corbell: "Dude, we have to show this. This is a First Amendment issue. This is a journalism issue. There is no reason why journalists like you and George should have this many badged contacts during a time of war."

Lazovsky's own reasoning is the sharpest inversion in the film, and Corbell repeats it twice. "To Michael, the biggest proof about UFOs is that during wartime he saw the meetings. You have got all these federal agents on you and George. It just does not make financial sense. You have terrorists coming into the country and you cannot even put one federal agent on them."

So Lazovsky turned the camera around, and told Corbell why: "This is an element of protection for you and your family."

Corbell bought into that, and thinks it worked, to a degree.

Journalism, activism, and the Honeywell pyramid

There is a line Corbell knows he crosses, and he names it before anyone can accuse him.

"Where the line changes from journalism to activism: I am definitely setting up hearings. They will call me, red hotline phone, we have a hearing, do you know any whistleblowers willing to talk? So I have become a liaison between people that have something to say and Congress, and also with agencies."

He explains that last part carefully, because he knows how it sounds.

Suppose the DOJ, and therefore the FBI, is hearing about swarms and flyovers on critical infrastructure and is being blocked out of the data by the Department of Energy. And suppose Corbell gets a call from somebody with access to Honeywell security systems at a site, who says: a pyramid lifted up out of this body of water and came over the base, and we have nowhere to send it, and we can see in the media that the DOJ is not getting this footage.

Corbell's move is to broker it. "I have some people in DOJ that I know are running a UFO program. I know you can trust them, that there will not be repercussions. It is lawfully what they are asking for. Would you like to talk to these people who I do trust?" Both sides say yes, and he links them.

AJ is relieved to hear there are good guys inside the system, because he does not know who is running things. "It is clearly not Congress or the president."

Corbell: "Right. And they do not know either."

And then the ending of the Honeywell story, which is the point of telling it.

Before the two parties could meet, the footage got confiscated out of the system. Ownership moved, solely, to the Department of Energy, which put it outside the scope of what DOJ could reach.

"Why would you do this whole thing as a ruse? They are putting a lot on the line."

AJ: "This is why DOE is involved."

Syria 2021, and a false target on Lenval Logan

This is his concrete example of what badged and unbadged contact actually looks like on the receiving end, and it involves a piece of footage that is now in the wild.

Corbell and Knapp obtained and released a video labeled Syria 2021 UAP. They assessed it and did background over a couple of years, and established that it is a piece of footage designated UAP by US intelligence agencies, that it was part of a collection process on UAP, and that it lives in a special area.

The title cards on the released version are replicated rather than original, but they are word for word what is in the actual document. So what a viewer is looking at is an intelligence agency's own analysis of an unknown that appears to demonstrate instantaneous movement.

Corbell is careful and non expert here, and says so. "I am not a perfect expert with this stuff, but there are people smarter than me who have done it online." The motion argument as he understands it: the object visibly shoots off. It moves slightly left when it gets a weapons grade lock, then shoots right. You know it is really moving right rather than being a lens artifact because the ground keeps tracking downward as the object moves right.

"All I can say is our intelligence agencies did an extensive analysis, not just on that one sensor, and they determined that that was a UAP. It looks like a mushroom if you look at the thermal signature. And it demonstrated one of the five observables."

Then the part about people.

The analyst who initiated that report is Lenval Logan, a former member of the UAP Task Force. After the release, Logan got calls, both official and unofficial. What is going on with this? How did they get this?

He had no idea. Corbell and Knapp did not get it from him.

"He was getting a false target painted on him." Which is Corbell's phrase for the thing that keeps happening: "Anybody I know becomes a false target for things that George and I obtain. Anybody George knows."

Their response was to put Logan on Weaponized, on the record, saying he had both official and unofficial contact, and to state flatly that the footage did not come from him.

Logan did once ask Corbell privately who his sources were.

"Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?"

Corbell then said it on the show: if I had answered you, while you were still active, would you not have had to write that up?

Logan: "Yeah, I would."

Corbell's read on this is generous and unsentimental at the same time. "Everybody is like a coin. At least coins have three sides. The combination of the two sides is who people are. You can work in intelligence, you can be working in this field, you can be my friend, but I always know who I am dealing with. Your job is to do your job."

The least that can be given

The Syria footage has a coda that Corbell finds instructive. After they released it and were accused of peddling nonsense, the government released the exact same footage, without the numeric systems on it.

"Which is of zero value. If you do not have the numeric systems, you cannot track it and understand azimuth, altitude, all this stuff."

AJ has noticed the same trend: cropping in, blacking out. "We cannot see the angles or the speed anymore." Corbell: "We need that for the trigonometry."

His summary of the official disclosure process to date is one sentence, and it is the most quotable thing in this stretch: "What we are seeing in these releases so far is the least that can be given."

The evidence he offers is a ratio. Out of hundreds of thousands of UAP videos, many of them far better than anything the public has seen, what is being released is primarily material that has already been out in some form, presented as new.

He does not know who is regulating what gets released. "Sure, the president orders that there is transparency. However, is the president watching? Who is even doing it?" And he notes that most of it is probably flowing through AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which he says has been disingenuous with the American public, demeaned and demoted and tried to harm whistleblowers. "Maybe they are different now, new management. But their job is to keep secrets."

And then the political prediction he repeats twice across the four hours: "If they do not start talking about biologics and reverse engineering, you have people like David Grusch out there saying, I have direct knowledge of those, it was my job to find out. They are going to run into issues."

From UFO to biologics

AJ has noticed the lexicon shift: UFO to UAP, aliens to biologics and non-human intelligence. He hates it. "I like UFOs." Corbell: "I do too."

But Corbell defends both changes as genuinely better terms, and gives the history.

On UAP: Hillary Clinton was one of the first prominent people to use it, on Jimmy Kimmel, many years ago. The internal reason is that the issue is all domain. Space, air, sea. "Unidentified flying object" does not describe a USO, and it does not describe something that transits all mediums. So: unidentified anomalous phenomena, which used to be aerial.

And it worked, in a way that matters. "Major publications do not feel silly doing UAP." AJ: "That scam worked." Corbell: "It did work. And that was our government trying to make it a laugh factory. That is historic fact."

On non-human intelligence, his argument is more interesting, and it is a 2026 argument. The word alien carries stigma, but more than that, "anything is going to be alien with the artificial intelligence way that it is right now. We know for a fact that there is a technological aspect to intelligence, that we can build non-human intelligence."

And he thinks the term may be literally more accurate. "These things that are flying around, some of them look like they have got beings on them. But these could be cybernetic organisms, printed flesh, that all work off of a hive mind." AJ notes the familiar reports where a witness gets close to what looks like an alien and it reads more like a robot.

Neither of them has ever met one. They both say so.

On the deeper question of whether the language is being weaponized, Corbell lands somewhere careful. "We might be. I do not know. But I can tell you the mechanics behind it are not orchestrated. We have fought tooth and nail to get every single piece out. There is not some group of people like David Grusch and Lue Elizondo working together on this. If you knew them as people, if you have seen what has happened in their lives, if you know their families: this is not, unfortunately, some coordinated disclosure."

What changed, in his view, is simpler than a plan. "Our technologies have gotten better to the point where it cannot be ignored what pilots are seeing and recording." AJ: "That started with the Fravor incident."

The threat to his family

There is a scene in Sleeping Dog where Bob Lazar is telling Corbell to stop pushing, and another where David Fravor is on a Zoom call telling him to release it all and send them to jail.

AJ reads it as: you have material that would put powerful people in jail.

Corbell corrects the frame. "Not just material. I have documented a lot of the interference throughout my life. And I have given it to my lawyer." Not files and images. Documentation of interference against journalists and of attempts at entrapment, which he keeps repeating, incredulously, are apparently legal.

He wanted the legal process to know about the nine month ODNI investigation he considers disingenuous, and thinks it should be public. Some of it may become public.

Then he gives the concrete example, and it is the moment the room gets quiet.

"My family had to meet with an agency because of a verified, actionable threat to my family. That is as far as I want to go. They are telling me about the threat, and there are implications of who was behind that threat."

"That is a horrible thing for your family to have to go through. That changed the dynamic of how my family has to operate. And it is not just somebody whispering it to you, or you get some email. This is a federal agency giving my family safety protocols."

"Not cool."

Has it cooled down? "I feel like I have done everything in my self-defense as possible, which is making sure that it is known within federal circles. All of it is documented."

Lazar's counsel, in the film, is the moderate position: acknowledge that this is real, that there are craft made by what seem to be non-humans with technology we cannot replicate, and stop there.

Corbell's answer to it is not defiance so much as momentum. "Yeah, but dude, I have come to this point where I have to follow through with journalism, with George. You see us make a decision in that hotel room. But you have to understand that was a long time ago. We have been doing it. We have been doing it."

His proof that the pushing works is a list. He and Knapp released the Air Force disc material. "Guess what? Our government also just put that out." The same is true, he says, of essentially all of the footage shown in the desert review scenes of Sleeping Dog. AJ: "I think all of those videos are out now." Corbell: "Great. Then we have provoked change, man. Keep it going."

Those desert scenes, where he is reviewing unknown material in his truck, get a plain explanation. "Nothing is in my house, bro." If he receives something and does not know what is on it, he has to review it somewhere controlled, because as a journalist he is protecting sources, methods and footage, and because he will be on the hook if it is damaging.

AJ: "It is tradecraft."

Corbell: "I guess it is. But really it is just trying to do responsible journalism where I am not letting stuff out of my control. Is it dangerous to people? Does it have public value? I am not here to hurt people. I am here to try to learn the truth about this as best I can and share what I can with the world."

Behind the contractors

AJ asks whether they are hiding a lot of it behind contractors. Corbell does not hedge.

"I know they are."

"That is the method. That is the way you stop FOIA requests. That is the way you do not have to have accountability. And it is to the point where our own government is looking at it being like, what the fuck? We do not have control of this stuff anymore."

The documented case is the one everybody in this field points to, and Corbell walks it in a minute: a Lockheed Martin vice president tried to transfer material of unknown origin, "and we are talking, we do not know who built it, but it is not Russia, China or the US," into AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. That transfer was denied. His understanding is that the denial came from the office of Glenn Gaffney, then head of science and technology at the CIA. He is scrupulous about the caveat: "That can be argued. Did he himself block that transfer? But it was his office and his department."

"So there you have a documented attempt at NHI technology transfer that got denied. What other corporations have craft, aspects of the technology? And how come they are not all working together with their brightest minds?"

He also takes a moment to clear up the confusion everyone still has, which is that the 2017 New York Times article merged two different programs, AATIP and AAWSAP, in the public mind. And he refuses to villainize the participants. "Everybody involved is a hero in my book. They have all tried, to some degree, whether some of it be government mandated, to get stuff out."

His scorecard on the last decade is genuinely positive. "We have had UFO programs. They are acknowledged. That is a huge win. We were told nothing to see here, move on, Project Blue Book, we killed it in 1969, that is it. All of a sudden we realized, oh no, we have been studying this ever since then."

Higher than nuclear

Then the claim in the episode title, delivered flatly and sourced to meetings rather than to lore.

"UFOs are considered higher security than weapons of mass destruction. And you have to ask yourself why. And I am not saying that frivolously. Ask George Knapp. We have been in official meetings where we have met people whose job is weapons of mass destruction related to UAP. We were taken aback."

The explanation is not exotic. It is the propulsion.

"If they can create so much energy to do what we think they are doing, what they appear to be doing, instantaneous acceleration, possibly folding or warping time and space itself, the amount of energy needed to do that is so astronomical. That is fundamentally a weapon."

The intuitive version comes from Fravor, and Corbell credits him for it. "Let us Simpsonize it, Bart Simpson style. He says, look, if we have Tic Tacs, what can we do? We can send it up over a country, drop it down from outer space, be back up in less than a second, deliver a dirty bomb, a nuke. No one will ever know who did it."

"So even just as a payload, if we could ever harness the ability to replicate these craft, it is a strategic surprise, a strategic advantage that every country wants. And that was the core of the secrecy from day one: we do not understand this tech, but we need to duplicate it before our enemies do. That is why I know we kept it secret for a long time. Problem is, the cat is out of the bag now."

THE OBSERVED PERFORMANCE Instantaneous acceleration Transmedium travel: space, air, sea Possible folding or warping of spacetime Active jamming of weapon systems THE ENERGY BUDGET IS ASTRONOMICAL "That is fundamentally a weapon." AS A PAYLOAD PLATFORM Fravor's version: up over a country, down from space, back up in under a second. Nobody knows who did it. AS A CLASSIFICATION DRIVER Replicate it before the adversary does. Corbell says he has met people whose WMD job is scoped to UAP.

RESULT: held above weapons of mass destruction "And I am not saying that frivolously. Ask George Knapp."

Figure 4. The argument as Corbell gives it. Note what it does not require: no biology, no aliens, no crash retrievals. It only requires that the performance is real, because a propulsion system capable of that performance is a weapons capability whether or not anyone is inside it.

Lacatski: one craft, and we breached the hull

The specific admission Corbell keeps pointing to comes from Dr. James Lacatski, the DIA scientist who ran the government's covert UFO program.

AJ: "Did he not say that we got through the bulkhead of a craft?"

Corbell: "Yeah. We breached the hull."

Why is he allowed to say it? Corbell's answer is a character reference, and he does not pretend it is more than that. "I know him. George has known him for over a decade. He is a patriot. He is the exact kind of person you would want in a role in our intelligence agencies, because he does not break from the fold. He is only saying what he begged and asked for to be authorized."

The mechanism is the DOPSR prepublication review process. Lacatski submitted the scope of the books he wanted to write and got them cleared. Corbell's judgment on those books is worth sitting with: "It is so nerdy, but if you read his books, if you can conceive of what he is saying, he has told us more about the US investigations into UAP than any other individual, as far as the scope of it."

The core statement, as Corbell relays it: the US government has one craft, one NHI. Not just of unknown origin, meaning they do not know who built it. Technology far superior to ours. By his own description through the DIA: no intakes, no exhaust, no place to store fuel. And they breached the hull of it.

"That is about as far as he has gone with it. There is an admission from a top government official who I can tell you is being genuine."

What makes it more interesting, in Corbell's telling, is that Lacatski is not an advocate. "He is not a big proponent of disclosure like you and I might be. He comes from this cold war mentality of, you cannot tell your friends without telling your enemies. So it takes a lot for him to get there, but he feels it is important."

Corbell then stacks the other name on top of it. Hal Puthoff has said publicly that there are more than a dozen, just in the US. "That is a guy that would know. Do you think he is just making that up? Is that a government conspiracy that he would say that? Maybe."

And the reason he does not think it is coordinated: "He is not the only one singing that tune, and they are not all coordinating with one another. There is friction amongst all these people."

The throttle is material science

Lazar's own long standing complaint, as Corbell relays it, is that he was the wrong guy. "I am not the most qualified guy to be working on this. I am probably the easiest to be discredited." Corbell's read of why he was there anyway: they were stalled, they had been stalled repeatedly, and they were looking for any left-handed, outside the box thinker who might try something that had not been tried.

Where are we now? Corbell's assessment is consistent every time he returns to it.

"The throttle is the material science. To the best of my knowledge, the throttle is the material science. We cannot replicate the alloys and the skins and the systems themselves, or the fuel sources, is how I understand it."

Refined a little further, from someone he respects: we have probably figured out a lot of the alloys, what they are composed of, "but we still cannot replicate them with perfect atomic layering, and that is the throttle."

He is honest that his sources contradict each other. Somebody else, in a position to know, told him flatly: "They are not ours."

"I am like, what do you mean, they are not ours? They are just not ours. Well, who is piloting them? I get different messages and I just do not know."

On the low performance tests: Lazar did describe seeing one, and Corbell notes that Lazar himself flags the holes in it. The best example is the radio. Lazar was shown that they were in communication with the pilot by radio, and asked how that is even possible, because if you have a bubble of spacetime or gravitation, a radio wave is not getting in or out of it. The explanation given at the time was that these were low performance tests because a reactor had been removed.

"Now you would push that off and be like, okay, cool story, bro. Except he brought people out on multiple Wednesday nights, and I have talked to all of them that went out there, to see a disc flying over the mountains. And they saw it. And he did not win awards for taking people out there. They were pissed."

Where does that leave him? "We definitely have craft, and we definitely have been exploiting them for what they call derivative technologies. That is not a question mark for me anymore. The question mark for me is: how far have we gotten? What is the limiting factor?"

He cites the triangles as a live example. There is a witness who never testified but whom they had on Weaponized, who described sorties being flown with one of the gigantic triangles around a military base. "So we have something from that technology."

On the older legends of fiber optics coming out of a crash, they both trace it to Philip Corso. AJ has debunked a lot of that story on his own show. Corbell agrees. "Totally."

And a framing that lands hard: a lot of these are not crashes.

"They are almost like discarded things. It is like you throwing an iPhone into a cage and just saying, see what you can do with this."

AJ: "They have been called gifts in some stories."

Corbell: "Some people call them that. Offerings. Gifts."

Which raises the only question that matters, and neither of them can answer it. Who is the intelligence behind them? Us from the future? Aliens from another planet? What is it?

Orbs, and the perforated boundary

AJ asks about the orbs and spheres people describe as spiritual. Corbell declines the adjective. "I am not inclined to call them spiritual."

But he does not dismiss the consciousness reports either, and the way he handles them is the whole method in miniature.

"If you are bending space and time and you have got some machine that can do that, I do not know what that looks like optically. We might just be seeing the tip of an iceberg above the water. There might be something much bigger behind that."

On the consciousness element that runs through the orb reports: "I cannot deny that. I do not know what that means."

Where he does draw a line is with people who claim to summon them. "Everybody says they are summoners. I am like, you ain't summoning shit, man. I do not believe you are. I think these things are always there, and at times you can perceive them. I think there is a perforated boundary of reality and you are perceiving it."

He is generous about people he has not personally observed. On Chris Bledsoe: "I hear about that and I have met a lot of these guys." Has he seen something with him? "I have not, but Gino has," referring to one of the Why Files producers.

He is candid that this whole register is hard for him. "I am allergic to the paranormal ideas. I do not grasp that stuff. For me that is a heavier lift." His litmus test was being thrown into Skinwalker Ranch before it was popularized. "I really had to open myself up to understanding that the UFO phenomenon, if you just listen to people, is far more complicated than potentially just spaceships coming from other planets. But it makes me uncomfortable. I am not qualified. I do not know who is."

The division of labor with Knapp is the reverse of what you would expect from their public personas. Corbell came from the nuts and bolts side. Knapp, having had a fly on the wall seat inside these government programs for decades, is the one with more experience of the strange.

Jacques Vallee: you have better questions

Jacques Vallee came out to Corbell's ranch once, and the memory Corbell keeps is a specific one, sun going down, driving out to raw acreage.

Corbell asked him: what do you know for sure about UFOs?

Vallee's answer: "What I know for sure is you have better questions than I ever had at a young age, and you have got to keep asking them."

Corbell's own version of it, said twice: "I do not have any special knowledge that other people do not have. I have got special questions. I have gotten to the point where I know the right questions to ask when I am in the presence of people that might have been working on some of this."

He does push back gently on the most famous Vallee idea, that we perceive the phenomenon through whatever cultural lens we currently have: flying saucers in the fifties, something else in the seventies, spiritual orbs now that the zeitgeist has gone that way.

"I do not know if I fully buy that. You look at history, there has always been the variety pack. There have always been orbs, the Foo Fighters. There have always been cylinders, triangles, pyramids."

AJ: "All the shit John Lear said."

Corbell: "All the shit John Lear said. It still bothers me to this day. If he is right about people on the sun, I am just getting up and leaving."

And then the aspiration for what this turns out to be, which is the most generous thing he says all night about the subject itself.

"The ancient Greeks thought that hummingbirds plucked holes in the firmament, and that is what stars were. And now we know about galaxies, and the universe maybe expanding, and suns and exoplanets. That difference, between being the ancient Greek with the hummingbirds and what we know about galaxies, I really hope the UFO thing is going to be as big a conceptual shift for us. I do not think it is just craft from other planets. I think there is so much more to this mystery that we are not even asking the right questions, and once we get a few answers we might just jaw drop and realize we were the ancient Greeks."

AJ offers his own version: they can just show up and say, you thought we were from a thousand light years away, we cannot do that, we have been here the whole time.

Corbell's counterargument is a good one, and he gives it as a question he has not resolved. "Why would you build a Ferrari if you did not want to go fast? Why do these craft appear, by their very nature, to be able to travel amongst the stars, if whoever built them did not build them to do that?"

Why he stopped believing the Tic Tac was ours

AJ discloses his own position, because Gino told Corbell they should hash it out: AJ leans toward the Tic Tac being Lockheed Martin technology. He is upfront that he is not educated enough to sell it, that his memory is that the trigonometry showed it was not moving as fast as advertised, and that he would rather hear Corbell's side.

Corbell's answer begins with something surprising: that was a depressing day for him.

"I used to think we had total control of these things. I used to think, oh man, we really done it. American ingenuity. I had this idea of reverse engineered craft, that we have just been hiding this and we have made gigantic headway and there were some outsourced contractors that really did it. And I was very sad the day when that was taken away from me."

AJ challenges the sadness. Why sad? If they had antigravity and unlimited energy, they need to share that. It would be bullshit not to.

Corbell concedes it immediately. "Oh, I see what you are saying. Yeah, that would be bullshit." AJ presses: with free energy, we would not have war anymore. Corbell, with the wisdom of the last hour: "That would be the hope, right?"

But he explains what the belief was doing for him. "There was this part of me that, at least it explained it."

What dissolved it was being in a situation, with people who know, where he was satisfied by the assessment that if it is big and it is silent, it is not ours. We do not have that tech.

"And it kind of made me sad, because I thought, how cool if we did. Maybe it would percolate out. Maybe the world would get better from that."

And then the line that gives the documentary its name, which he says he has been told "like a ton," so often that it sounds rehearsed.

"Then talking to more and more people involved in these programs, and I have been pretty high up on the food chain, dude, I always get to that stopping point. Don't kick a sleeping dog. I think that is why he named the movie Sleeping Dog. It is like they practice that line."

AJ: "That is kind of scary."

Corbell: "And I do not know what they are afraid of. It is like the boogie monster, something in the closet. What would be so bad about us knowing about the nature of reality itself, that maybe we are not alone in the universe, maybe we are not the most advanced technological civilization? What is the big fucking fear people have of knowing about the natural world? I know great white sharks exist. That is why I do not jump in the ocean that much. But at least I know."

Do they think full disclosure is coming? AJ: "I really do not." Corbell agrees, and the reason is structural. "Not as long as we are in a world where we are constantly bombing each other. You have no motivation to disclose. The underhanded pitch: let you know what they need you to know, because people are seeing them. Okay, they are real. But that is the cutoff."

AJ is honest about the bind: "I am annoyed at myself, because if I am running Lockheed, I am not telling you what we have. Then China is going to have what we have. We need an advantage. So I am torn between patriotism and wanting to know what is going on, and I do not know where to fall."

The Tic Tac, from the top

This is the longest single stretch of evidence in the interview, and Corbell tells it in the order the events happened rather than the order the public learned them.

First, the part that establishes his own restraint. He knew about the Nimitz encounter early, before it was public, and he told Commander Fravor before Fravor was public: this story is going to get out, it is too big, it will not be from me, but it will percolate.

"And I kept my word, and it was not from me. Look, if I found out, I am just some weirdo with a beard and tattoos. Other real journalists are going to find out about it." Fravor laughed him off at the time and said it is not that important. "He knew it was important."

Second, a detail that has not gotten enough attention. Because of Knapp's standing, the two of them have been exposed to technical material on what was observed over those weeks. They tried to submit a technological report on the Tic Tacs to Congress, a report that would answer the detailed questions.

"We could not submit it to Congress in a lawful way. So we were unable to get that on congressional record."

The reports exist. "The DIA did a bunch of reports on the Tic Tacs because they were studying it. It was the first thing they were studying." But a journalist can only obtain and release lawfully. "So we tried to get Congress to get a report that we are very familiar with. They were unable to do so. They were stonewalled. I will say they pretended like it does not exist. The DIA, and we cannot find it."

"We were fighting to get this out to the public."

What Fravor flew into

Fravor was on a normal training mission, a beautiful day, nothing going on, when a controller called him and asked what weapons he had on board.

Fravor's answer, which is a joke and also an answer: "I got a CATM-9 if you got a sledgehammer." Meaning: a captive air training missile. Meaning: nothing.

They tasked him to a point with no other information. When he got there, what he first saw was a circular disturbance in the water, and his first thought was that something was sinking. Then, closer, the object itself: a small Tic Tac shape down near the water, moving inside that disturbance "like a ping pong ball in a glass."

He went down to look. As he descended, it noticed him. It turned its nose. Then it began mirroring his exact flight path. Then it came up next to him. And then it was gone, and the only reason you could see it move at all was the disturbance of its moving.

"Where did it go?"

The controller: "You are not going to believe it. Commander, it is at your CAP point."

The combat air patrol point was miles and miles away. The time was almost instantaneous, though Corbell is careful that the exact figure is uncertain because of how the radar works. And it was an encrypted CAP point.

"It was almost like a game of cat and mouse. Like it knew."

Corbell underlines who this witness is. Fravor had no hot missiles, so shooting it down was never on the table, and where other people were a little terrified of what they were seeing, his curiosity took him toward it. This is a man who flies some of the fastest planes on earth and who protected Los Angeles during 9/11. "There is no war nerves or anything like this."

The parts that are not in the popular version

What the popular telling leaves out, Corbell says, is scale and duration.

The Tic Tacs had been loitering at two different altitudes for what he believes was about two weeks. Some of the controllers had been seeing them. Nobody had the gas or the time to go look, and it is a training zone.

One of those altitudes is above eighty thousand feet, which he says people did not want him saying for a long time, because that is the scanned volume of the SPY-1 radar.

"So, space. That is a vehicle that changes domains from space to air to sea."

The descent rate defies our understanding of how that can occur, by all accounts he has. Kevin Knuth, the physicist, has done work on the speed of that drop.

And it does not disturb the water on the way down.

The word he was given for what these things appeared to be doing over the object in the water, before this was a famous public case, is docking. Not in a science fiction sense. In the sense of an electric vehicle at a charger. It seemed to be hovering over the thing.

The disturbance in the water was circular. The thing that appeared to be under the water appeared to be cross shaped.

And it was not one Tic Tac. It was many, repeatedly, over a duration.

AJ: "You mean like three, or like ten?"

Corbell: "A dozen." Or more. He immediately walks back the precision, which is his habit all night: "I am so afraid of misspeaking. Let me go back to my notes on everything. It is multiple. Oh yeah, definitely."

His reaction to the whole picture is not triumph, it is frustration. "So you have to ask yourself, what were they doing? What was the mission? What was the purpose? And that is what killed me about this UFO stuff. They were never looking to be seen. This is something that was occurring that was obviously a job. There was something going on. It drives my mind crazy. What is under the water? Is that a refueling?"

AJ: "I think a lot of answers are under the water."

Corbell: "I do too."

ABOVE 80,000 FT the scanned volume of the SPY-1 Loitering at two altitudes, roughly two weeks. A dozen or more. descent rate defies current understanding (Kevin Knuth studied it) FRAVOR, F/A-18 Training mission. No hot missiles. "A CATM-9 if you got a sledgehammer." dives to look TIC TAC mirrors his flight path, then comes alongside SEA SURFACE circular disturbance, "like a ping pong ball in a glass" object under the water appears CROSS shaped the word Corbell was given for the behavior above it: "docking" ENCRYPTED CAP POINT miles away, near instantly. "Like it knew."

Underwood follows with a full tank and every optic he has. In debrief he compares it to a Tic Tac, because the joke he actually wanted was from the movie Airplane.

Figure 5. The encounter reconstructed from Corbell's account, including the parts that rarely make the retelling: the two week loiter above eighty thousand feet, the multiplicity, the cross shaped object below the surface, and the encrypted rendezvous point.

Senior Chief Wiggins, and what is under the water

The reason Corbell keeps returning to what is under the water is that he brought a witness forward about it.

He found Senior Chief Alexandro Wiggins through a higher ranking Navy friend, after realizing from a piece of footage he and Knapp had released that Wiggins had been aboard. "I get to know people, and they will tell me who I need to go talk with."

Wiggins admitted he was there and saw the whole thing. He came forward on Weaponized. Then Corbell and Knapp brought him to Congress, where he became the first active duty Navy witness to testify publicly about a UAP encounter.

What he saw included Tic Tacs, one of them coming up out of the water.

"There is something going on in the water. That is all I know."

Nuts, the tape, and active jamming

Back to 2004. Fravor, whom Corbell describes as head of the Black Aces and a man who answers to nobody, went and found his friend Commander Chad Underwood, who was about to fly next with a full tank of gas and a weapons systems officer whose job is to record things.

Fravor told him where they had seen it and that it had gone to the new CAP point.

Underwood picked up the target right where Fravor said it would be, and then flipped through every optical system he had, because the job is to collect data for the intelligence people.

Two call signs, which Corbell delivers with obvious relish. Underwood's is Nuts. Fravor's is Sex. "You do the math. These Navy guys, man."

The name we all use comes from the debrief. They put it up on the big screen and asked Underwood what it looked like. He is a fan of old eighties movies, and what he actually remembered was the bit from Airplane about something shaped like a Tylenol with wings. He decided he could not say that.

So he said: it looked like a Tic Tac.

That is why the most famous UAP case in modern history is named after a breath mint.

And then the detail Corbell is most insistent about, because it has quietly been dropped from the public record.

"It was actively jamming their weapons, their radar systems."

"They do not like saying it anymore. I guess top brass told them do not say it anymore, is what I am thinking, because that is an act of war. But if you look at my original interviews with them, they say it out loud."

He is precise about the framing: in their world, active jamming is considered an act of war, an aggressive maneuver. They made that very clear.

Whoever it was had a technology able to effectively, actively jam.

The footage itself has a lore of its own. It circulated in small groups. At some point there was a VHS tape moving through pilot circles. Corbell had heard about it for years, and without soliciting, there was no way to get it. Then it mysteriously appeared online, on the day of a Coast to Coast AM show he and Knapp were doing. Listeners knew he wanted to see it. They were able to point to it live on air.

"We reported on it twice before it was part of the New York Times thing."

Not in 2004, not in 2024, not for fifty years

Corbell's own case against the Tic Tac being an American black project is built out of what pilots do when they accidentally see one.

He asked Underwood directly: how do you know this is not ours? Because in some ways it would be cool if it was ours, and really shitty that they had been covering it up.

Then he asked the better question: have you ever seen a black project accidentally?

Underwood: "It's happened."

"So what happens when you see that?"

"Oh. There are strict protocols. You come in for a debrief. You sign an NDA. You are not to talk about this experimental craft by this corporation. Forget about it."

That is all Underwood could say, and it was enough.

The Nimitz witnesses signed nothing. No NDAs, no protocols, no ramifications for Fravor at all. Because, Corbell argues, it was not a known thing. There was nothing to protect.

He layers three more strikes against the black project theory:

It was operating in the middle of the ocean, in a training zone, where testing experimental technology is dangerous and does not feel like a properly planned exercise.

It was actively jamming American weapon systems, which is not a thing our own programs do to our own carriers.

And then, the nail in the coffin for him, which is Fravor's own testimony in Congress. Fravor currently holds a classified job with a great deal of responsibility, one that would let him understand what our highest capabilities are now and what they will be in the future. He is still extremely trusted. He did nothing wrong, leaked nothing, and his name entered the public through other people, exactly as Corbell had warned him it would.

And from that seat, under oath, Fravor said: we did not have that technology in 2004. We do not have that technology in 2024. We are not even conceiving of working on that technology for fifty years.

There is one more layer, from a badged meeting. "George and I have met with a federal agency in an official badged meeting with a number of people at the table, and it was conveyed to us that we have excluded Russia and China from being fabricators of the Tic Tac as well."

The 2019 swarm: four kinds of footage

Corbell considers the 2019 Navy swarm off the California coast his and Knapp's most complete work, and the reason is not any single video. It is that they got four independent sensor types on the same events.

The setting: roughly ten Navy warships in a hundred mile radius doing workups for deployment, over multiple nights, with objects performing acrobatics around them. Corbell has talked to sailors who were simply standing out on deck watching.

He is emphatic that this was not isolated. "These swarms were happening a ton. Four, five, maybe six cases have been reported to me. But this is the one we somehow obtained a ton of footage of."

Sensor streamWhat it capturedWhy Corbell released it
Thermal, USS OmahaThe black and white sphere or egg shaped object. No rotor wash, no heat signature. The audio says "splash, splash," which the crew meant as: it went under the water.the headline A transmedium event captured on a military thermal sensor, followed by a submarine deployed to look for it. It found nothing.
Night vision, USS RussellThe green footage, shot through a PVS-14. Pyramid in shape, described in the government's own documentation as triangle by angle of observation.contested Critics claimed the triangular shape was a lens artifact. Corbell owns a PVS-14 and notes it does not have a triangular bokeh, and that the shape language came from their documentation, not his.
Radar, from the bridgeMultiple simultaneous targets. Corbell says roughly ten surrounding a single ship at once.hardest to obtain "It is not an easy thing to obtain, especially when you are not asking for it."
Deck footage, an iPhoneInky darkness with lights in it. Visually the least impressive of the four.the validator Released last and deliberately. It proves the objects were self luminous, which no sensor image alone can establish, and it can be validated against GPS data and timestamps.
Figure 6. The four evidence streams from the 2019 swarm, and Corbell's reasoning for each. The iPhone clip is the one that matters most to his argument and the one that looks like the least, which is a good summary of how this kind of work actually goes.

He is careful about internal sensors too. "Internally they have more sensors than you are seeing little glimpses of." He and Knapp released a couple of the government's own slides discussing triangle by angle of observation.

He is also hopeful that more will come from Jay Stratton, who ran a lot of that investigation and had people on the ships the day after it happened, and whose book Corbell is waiting for. Corbell has met some of the federal agents who were aboard, and sidebarred them individually to ask what it was.

"No. We know it was not China. We know it was not Russia."

The Bass Strait, and the sailor who was watching it

The popular explanation for the 2019 swarm is that the objects were launched from a cargo ship called the Bass Strait, and Corbell says that explanation is still sitting on Wikipedia.

He calls it the coup de grace of the whole investigation, because he took it apart three ways.

First, the Bass Strait was boarded the second it reached Long Beach, by agents Corbell knows. They found nothing.

Second, and this is the detail everybody forgets: the ballet was still going on while the Bass Strait was in port.

Third, and this is the part that only a person who spends years cultivating sources gets, Corbell found the one sailor whose entire job during the event was to watch the Bass Strait through every available optic specifically to see whether it was launching or landing anything. That sailor came on Weaponized by voice and said he wished he could report that they knew who was launching those things, and he could not, because they were not coming off the Bass Strait.

"If you go to Wikipedia, I believe it still says otherwise."

AJ: "Probably."

Corbell: "It is total propaganda bullshit."

So where were they coming from? "They were coming from the west. There is nothing over there but Hawaii, man. What were they launching off of? Where were they landing? If they are these autonomous things, where were they landing?"

"So somebody has got a pretty cool technology. It is not China. It is not Russia. And unfortunately, it is not us."

AJ: "And that would have been comforting."

There is a cost to being the person people call, and he names it here. He has told a lot of people to stop calling him. "That is cool that happened on your mission, but you probably should not call me about that. I fear now that I am on so many radars that anybody who speaks out of school is going to be penalized. I have had people in the Navy who have nothing to do with the UFO topic, who are just my friends, who have been questioned. It is a horrible feeling."

AJ: "I would only talk to you on Signal."

Corbell: "Even Signal is not private, man."

And the unintended consequence: squeezing people has backfired. "When people have been shaken down or threatened, what do you know, it has just caused more people to come to me and George in person."

AJ: "It is because you are the first line of defense."

Smuggling Matthew Brown into Congress

AJ has been waiting the whole interview for this one, and asks for it like a kid. "It is like a heist movie."

Corbell's first move is to take a word back. "Let us take back the word smuggled for a second. No laws were broken."

Then he tells it.

What Matthew Brown actually found

It was small. Corbell is at pains to say so. "Very little. It was very small."

Matthew Brown was tasked with sorting, filing and cleaning up a digital archive. In it he found a briefing on something called Immaculate Constellation.

His job required him to know what was in it. So he read it. And what stood the hairs up on his arms was not the UFO material as such but where it was sitting. "It is not something that should have been filed where it was filed."

The content, as Corbell characterizes it: how we are watching UFOs interact with other nations, including watching Russians have a rendezvous with what may be a known manifestation of a craft overseas. Passive tracking and active tracking of UFOs. Evidence inside the briefing.

Brown's first thought was that it might be a test or a trick, which he ruled out quickly by taking it to his boss, and then his boss's boss, and getting an almost nonchalant reception both times. He did not know whether he was supposed to sign something for having seen it. It got very weird for him.

He did not want to go public. He is, in Corbell's description, a deeply patriotic thinker. But the world was asking for whistleblowers and Congress was asking for whistleblowers, so he tried the proper channels.

Corbell is careful about the validation: "I did not just validate this through Matthew Brown. George and I did extensive work to figure out, is this a real program, before we bit. And to our satisfaction, absolutely. It goes by a different name now, but it was called that at one time, and it was a working document."

The heist

The obstacle is not what most people think. The obstacle is getting a meeting.

"Getting through to Congress can be very hard, because the process of who you have to ask to get there can really expose people. What are you doing? Are you breaking from the fold? Do you not like your life? Do you want to stop working for the United States government? It could get really messy really quick."

Neither man trusted the other at the start. Corbell was certain the guy was using him to make him look like an idiot. Brown was trying to figure out who could be trusted and had already made some early mistakes with people Corbell describes only as fake journalists, and declines to name. "I do not want to give attention to people. Some point I will probably have to tell that whole story, and I will do it in the right way."

What Corbell had was five scheduled meetings on the Hill and, unusually, authorization for a full camera crew.

So Brown walked in with the camera crew. Not carrying a boom. Just walking with them. Corbell notes why this mattered: Brown was going in with his face, into one of the most heavily monitored buildings by intelligence agencies, because, as any human intelligence person will tell you, the biggest leaks in American history have always come out of Congress.

"He is thinking, am I doing the right thing? I know I am doing the right thing. How do I do the right thing? Meet this crazy bearded guy with tattoos. But he knows George, so he must be on the level."

They started with the person Corbell trusts most. He did the sit down filming first, then said: I have a whole crew with me, but one of these people is actually a whistleblower. It would be just you, me and this person. If everybody else leaves, are you comfortable with that? I think you want to hear what this person has to say. Three minutes, something like that.

"First one, absolutely no hesitation. Cleared the room."

One person came back in. Matthew Brown sat down and said: this is what I know to be true, this is what happened to me, I have tried to put it through all the proper channels, I am not looking to testify, but you asked for people to come forward, so I am now giving you my report.

Then Corbell asked his contact for a read: what is my trust level here? The answer: it is good to talk, but do not give them a document.

They did it three times. In one of the offices they did hand over documents, deliberately, to make sure they were circulating.

"That really built trust, because I did get them in, they did take them seriously, and they did offer to always be there if anything arose. But we were far away from it being mentioned in Congress at that point. I had to validate what Matthew Brown had said, that not only was he in the position he said he was in, but that the content of what he was reporting on was an actual program. And I was able to do that. So was George."

The watermark

The other half of that story is the hearing, and it is the angriest Corbell gets all night.

Publicly, when the Immaculate Constellation material surfaced in a hearing, people thought Corbell was upset because another journalist had turned in his homework. He says that is not the case, and that there is a lot more to the story.

"One of the hearings was not as it appeared."

His concern was not credit. "What I was worried about is who the public can trust, who sources can trust, who the government and Congress is telling you can be trusted to bring sensitive information to."

Because that is the actual bottleneck. "It is the hardest thing about testifying: getting there. Some of these whistleblowers you have never heard about, because when they ask me to bring people and say we are going to have five people testify, how many do you want, and I say twelve or thirteen, they want people to bare themselves and put themselves at risk saying, this is what I would testify about, knowing not everybody is going to get selected. So it takes balls of steel."

Two and a half months of prior meetings had gone into that hearing. Bringing documents, having them vetted, working with Congress.

And then the night before.

"It was absolutely mechanically planned. I submitted those documents the night before. I knew something was a little weird. So I actually brought those documents with me that morning."

Here is the forensic accident that makes the story provable to him. The hotel printer he used the night before was bad, and it left a watermark on the pages. At the time he was annoyed. "Oh man, it is dirty, that is no good."

"Thank God. Because that is forensic evidence."

When someone removed the top sheet and uploaded a blank page, the mark showed that what was uploaded was the copy he had brought in that morning.

"I know who tore it off. I know what they said in the room, because I had eyes in the room. They were trying to make sure that I was not the trusted person for whistleblowers, and that other people would be."

He says the reason that matters is the big rub, and it is a story for another time.

There is a related public detail, and it is the strangest single moment in the interview. Corbell says two men he calls the spooks, or the suits, two CIA men at that hearing, told Representative Tim Burchett: do not say his name. He is a security issue, is what Burchett said publicly. Corbell says they used different words about him.

Burchett's first act at the microphone was to say it anyway: "I want to thank my buddy, my pal Jeremy Corbell, for bringing in documents and introducing us to whistleblowers."

Somebody coughed while he said it.

"So I really trust Burchett."

Why keep his name out of the record? "I do not fully know. But I know that they wanted to make it seem like people should go to Michael Shellenberger as a witness, rather than to me."

The skiff that was a trap

The other offer he refused is the one AJ thinks the audience most needs to hear.

Corbell and Knapp were invited to bring their best evidence into a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility. The terms Corbell proposed back were maximalist and public: "I will show the world everything that I have got. I want total protection in doing so. I will bring it in. We will show it. We will stream it in the hearing."

Then a member of Congress called him with a heads up.

"The people that are supposed to be in that meeting are not even going to be there. It is a trap. They are inviting you in because whatever you bring into that meeting, you will not be leaving with. It will be reverse classified."

McCullough shut it down instantly.

"But it is okay. It comes out anyway through journalism. We have released a bunch of it."

AJ: "It is important for people listening to know: the skiff is not your friend."

Corbell: "No. No."

Interestingly, when AJ guesses DIA was behind the setup, Corbell corrects him. "DIA has never gotten in the way to me on that." He says it is not one agency. In congressional setups there is a set of interested parties who need to vet the people who will be talking, and he is regularly surprised by which agencies show up in the Zoom meetings. He names Homeland Security as one that surprised him, along with people introduced as national security advisors. "I think most agencies are represented."

AARO gets zero

Here is the surprise from the most recent hearing, and it goes to trust in the most literal way.

Corbell helped set up the hearing. The process is the same each time: they want something like fourteen potential whistleblowers, and they will pick five. "I said okay, we will play that game again. I let everybody know this is a game and they might just be siphoning off information, but I trust some of these people."

The one condition he insisted on was that AARO gets zero of it. Zero names. Zero one sheets. Absolutely confidential.

"I had zero trust for AARO. They get zero of this. Anybody that I provide you a one sheet on, that I have come in in their suit and tie and sit there on camera, none of those names get passed to AARO. Zero of them, or it is not happening."

Some of those people were then contacted by AARO.

He is deliberate about not blaming the members. "It is not the Congress people's fault. They said to me, we have got a leak, we have got a leak to AARO. But that is how little you can trust when you start getting more and more people into the room."

The threat to Senior Chief Wiggins

The specific case that made him angriest is Wiggins, because of who Wiggins is.

"He is a single father. He is one year away from his retirement. There is no good reason for him to raise his head above the parapet here, except for what he said: it is the right thing to do. And my dad would be proud of me."

After he testified, AARO pressured him directly to come in and debrief. Wiggins declined respectfully: I have said everything I need to say, I told the whole story under oath in front of Congress, done, I am just doing my job now.

The threat that came back, delivered not only to Wiggins but to his commanding officer, was that if he did not debrief with AARO, they would get Pete Hegseth to command it. Which, if you are in the Navy, is the top of the top.

Corbell and Wiggins both knew it was a bluff. "He is not going to come. We kind of knew that, but we just thought it was such a crude way."

And the logic of it is what convinces him it was never about information. "If he already testified to everything, and he said it under oath, what could they possibly want to know? They know the list of everybody on that ship. They can hear some of the voices in the video that George and I put out."

"So that was a trap. They are trying to pressure him so that no Navy guy ever will come forward like that, or come to Congress. That is what they were doing."

They handled it the only way Corbell knows how to: publicly. They did a thing with Wiggins on stage, talked about it, and put it into the light.

Whistleblower protections, and the panel

AJ: "So the whistleblower protection is all nonsense."

Corbell's response is not a lecture. It is a list of names and their situations. Matthew Brown. Dylan Borland. David Grusch. "They are sitting there without help. Other than Dave, who is working in a good capacity right now with Congress. What protections do you have? These guys cannot go back to their normal jobs. They have to find a way to make a living."

Then he says the thing he knows will cost him.

"Every group that said they were going to help them, did not. I see the people standing up these funds for whistleblowers. How about helping the whistleblowers that already need help right now, who have already come forward? It is a charade, dude. I am sorry. I am going to get a lot of heat for this."

The specific target is the scientific advisory panel, and his objection is one question repeated until it hurts.

"Do you know who runs that? It is ODNI. The same ODNI who ran that nine month thing that I regretfully brought whistleblowers into. So what does ODNI need this panel for? If they want the answers, they can go get the answers."

His evidence for what it is actually for is the first call he received from someone on the panel: "What secret stuff do you and George have that we could ask them questions about?"

"Isn't that completely reverse? Give them data. Let them analyze it for public good. What do you need us for?"

He runs the logic to the end. The panelists cannot look at classified information. ODNI has oversight over everybody and is running the panel. So what will the panel be given to analyze? "You do not think ODNI has scientists? They need a public facing thing."

He gives the charitable reading its due. "Positive look is, okay, maybe they want to disclose some stuff, and you guys look through the evidence and come up with a conclusion yourself, and oh golly gee, that is a positive thing. I do not believe it for one second. I think they are doing a data collection, just like they did for those nine months."

And he keeps the door open, twice. "In my opinion. Now, I would love to be wrong, and I am not demeaning what they are doing. Some of my friends are on this panel. Then do good work, but find out what you are going to be analyzing."

Did he advise them not to take the position? "I do not advise nobody on nothing but myself, man. I do not see 360. Maybe they know a lot more than I do."

What ODNI told him about Dylan Borland

Then he tells the part he has clearly thought hard about telling, and prefaces it with the discomfort: "How do I dance here?"

"I was on the receiving end of a whole bunch of shit that I never should have heard."

ODNI, he says, told him about a program name: Rubik's Cube.

Dylan Borland had never told him about it. They were telling him it was something Borland knew about.

So Corbell did the only thing he was ever going to do with that information. He got on stage in Oregon with Borland and asked him about it in public.

Borland's answer, on stage: "I would love to be able to tell you what I know about that in full, but right now I do not know what the law is, or that I am restricted."

Corbell: "It was an obvious yes."

The second item was a drawing. Borland had drawn something for Corbell and Knapp in Las Vegas, a triangle craft he saw. He never drew them a pyramid shaped power source with a symbol on it.

That, Corbell was told by ODNI, is what Borland had drawn for the ICIG.

"So I asked Dylan, hey man, they are telling me a bunch of wild shit. Did you ever draw these drawings?" Borland stonewalled that one, which Corbell reads as its own answer, and which he does not hold against him. "Dylan has to be by the book, man. They all do."

The reason Corbell believes Borland is a structural one, not an emotional one. "He went into the police of the intelligence community and did an official whistleblower ICIG complaint, with drawings, of everything he was exposed to. If he is out here running a ruse, would you go into the police of the intelligence community?"

AJ: "Hell no."

Corbell: "This is not a career enhancing thing."

Then the accusation that made him furious. ODNI told him that Borland had drawn something he did not draw, something actually classified, a sensor system.

And they used a word about him: espionage.

"They were fishing to see if he ever drew me and George anything that he should not have. And I was like, lucky for me, no, he did not."

He went straight to Borland with it. "This is what they are saying about you." Borland, who had stonewalled on the other question, did not stonewall on this one.

"Total bullshit. I would not even know how to draw that."

And Borland got angry in the way an innocent person gets angry, which is procedurally. Corbell has the text messages Borland sent to the ODNI group. "I want to know what you are writing in that, because if I did that, show me the video. Where is the video of me?"

Because everything he drew for the ICIG was filmed.

"So show us, as journalists, show us all the evidence of where he drew this highly classified thing for ICIG that he mistook as alien technology."

They never let him back in to show him where he allegedly did it.

"What I saw was our government trying to fabricate evidence against a whistleblower. To put him in Leavenworth for twenty five years, or to just create a stress situation where he was paralyzed to move. I do not know that they would have followed through, because then all the evidence comes out. So I think it was more like a threat."

The smears

The Borland material was not isolated. Corbell says ODNI brought him a list.

"They were trying to get me and George to do their dirty work, to turn on David Grusch, Lue Elizondo, Matthew Brown, Dylan Borland, even Hal Puthoff, Jay Stratton. They brought everybody's name up to us."

"And now I get it. They were trying to get us to go out and do the dirty work for them and say that all these people are out for themselves and they are all liars, or they are lunatics."

It did not work for the simplest possible reason. "What am I going to do? Of course I am going to call these guys and say, dude, I just heard the craziest shit."

The two examples he gives are ugly and specific. He was told Matthew Brown had made up the Immaculate Constellation material and had admitted it in ODNI. He went back to Brown, who was furious, and whose question was the right one: did you get it all recorded?

And he was told Brown was racist, in language Corbell repeats verbatim because it is so easily falsified. When he told Brown, Brown was at the wedding of a Jewish friend.

"They did not know he was also part Jewish. It was so ridiculous to me."

The break in

Matthew Brown had a break in while he and his wife were asleep in the house.

Nothing was taken.

His wife's IDs were spread out, apparently to be photographed. His grandfather's ashes were smashed.

AJ: "You're kidding."

Corbell: "Nope."

He is careful about attribution, and pushes back on AJ's certainty. AJ says we know who did it. Corbell: "I do not know specifically who did, or what agencies would be involved. But clearly they wanted to send a message."

"Don't go forward with this. And he went forward with it. He thought it was important."

Borland has had comparable things happen. "Some of it is gnarly. You can never prove it. Part of the thing is, maybe they want you to look paranoid or unhinged. But I know a lot of these guys, and they have all had issues that are not normal issues."

"If it is us doing these shenanigans, then it is okay"

This is the moment the whole second half has been building to, and it is where the naivete finally ended.

In the movie, when you see Corbell bent out of shape, talking to Fravor about people going to jail, this is what he is talking about. Not UFOs. Not classification. He had documented what he believed were crimes committed against whistleblowers by intelligence agencies: targeting Matthew Brown with the words counterintelligence on American assets, targeting Dylan Borland with the word espionage, ODNI saying those words to him about his friends and lying about them.

"I thought that was going to get them put in jail."

He took it to the highest levels he could reach, with his federal lawyer and his family, and said: this is the evidence I have of our intelligence agencies trying to set up whistleblowers.

"And I was sure that I was going to get a certain type of response. And I will tell you that I did not get the response."

What he got instead: well, it was not the Russians or Chinese, right?

"I kind of got the response that if it is us doing these shenanigans, then it is okay. And that was disheartening."

"Fuck. I was naive."

AJ: "Yeah."

Corbell: "Super naive. Apparently it is okay to do these things to people if it is our government and not other governments."

He then adds one sentence that suggests there is still a chamber left in this story: "So I have never told, and I am not going to right now, but there is another story to all that."

He sits back and delivers the punchline of his own life. "Weird stuff, bro. I just was interested in the UFOs."

The watchers

AJ asks whether the same people keep showing up, whether there is a unit.

Corbell and his friends call them the watchers, half as a joke.

The odd one was at a hearing. A man came up and whispered in his ear: "You think you're gonna make it to the steps?"

That is why he had his friend Dan Cleary walk with him the next time.

He went back through the footage from another hearing, because he had a whole camera crew, and found the same man in a suit. He has seen the same people a couple of times. But he refuses to make it tidier than it is. "I do not know that it is that simple. I do not know who is ultimately wanting certain things to be known and other things not."

Except for one thing, which he says has become unambiguous.

"Clearly they want you to know that UFOs are real. That has been a clear message. They want you to know that."

How you shape a narrative

The rest of it, he says, is narrative management, and he has documentation he believes is correct.

"Specifically, the CIA has been shaping the emerging UAP narrative, in their own words, for many years. And I will tell you how I know that."

He says he was exposed, in document form, to a CIA analysis of the Tic Tac incident from a few years ago. Its claim was that Fravor had misidentified his instrument systems, which, as Corbell points out, ignores that Underwood filmed it and that there were other witnesses. "It was just this low level trying to push through the intelligence agencies a dismissal."

That, he says, is a routine mechanism. "When people come forward and talk publicly about UAP, there will be internal classified memos that say none of these people can be trusted."

The example he gives is AARO's annual report. Multiple people with access to the classified version, he says, flagged the same thing to him: a paragraph at the end saying, in effect, that none of the people who have come forward could ever be trusted again, because they broke the cardinal rule.

"They are trying to tell the rest of the intelligence community: if you speak outside of school, you will not be trusted again." And those are precisely the people with access.

The CIA reports in circulation include, he says, the Lockheed Martin narrative for the Tic Tac. They have approached Fravor with it, and Fravor immediately saw the nonsense. Corbell says he received an email attempting to use individuals to propagate the same mythology, and knows where it comes from because he saw it in documentation he believes to be correct. He passed a pointer, not a request, to a DOJ friend: if you have access, here is a document you should look for.

"I have found that the CIA absolutely has hands on this topic a lot more than others, probably because of their shell companies and how they can help hide stuff."

Then the one he saw coming from miles away.

"I know that they have stood up a media platform."

He declines to name it, and his reason is a good one. "I would rather people think for themselves at this point."

But he describes it precisely enough to be checkable. An online media outfit, run from another country, Germany or somewhere like it. Look at the history of it, when it popped up and how it popped up. It covers not just UFOs but a broad science and technology beat. It has some genuinely good writers, and he says so twice, because that is the point.

"If that dude has ties to CIA, and maybe other family members of his have ties to CIA, you would imagine that is a great way to shape the narrative. A trusted publication that is online, can be operated from out of the country, but you get local writers who are into this topic and good faith individuals. But you can always see the story."

AJ: "This is the same play they have been running since the seventies." Doty. Bill Moore. Creating outlets you can shape stories with.

Corbell: "Right. Of course, social media is the battleground right now."

The social media mechanic is depressingly cheap. "You can get fifty people with nineteen followers, forty followers. You make some disparaging comment over and over, and then upvote it."

Both of them have given up on their own platforms as a signal. "Mine is artificial now." "So is mine." "My own Reddit that I own just blasts me constantly."

AJ: "The top comment on my Reddit right this week is that I am an asset."

Corbell: "Mine is that I am an asshole. So they might be right."

His actual response to it is the same one he learned from valley fever. "It does not hurt me when I read these things where people say I am holding this back or doing this. No, dude. I am doing my best job. I am trying to make sure that people who come to me have a safe haven, and that we do our best reporting possible, me and George. Information is the battlefield. And I hope people are smart and they think for themselves."

Who carries the baton

George Knapp is in his seventies. AJ asks the question nobody in this field likes to ask.

Corbell's first answer is Michael Lazovsky. His second is that he does not know. His third is the interesting one, and it is genuinely optimistic.

"Here is what I am encouraged about. We have so many great new voices in the UFO field, and a lot of people fighting now, where forty years ago George was the only journalist that would touch it with a ten foot pole. Congress is asking for more whistleblowers."

He is emphatic on David Grusch. "I do trust David Grusch. I do trust him. I have known him for a long time. If David Grusch was some asset, knowingly some asset, I am not naive on that." AJ, honestly: "I am not there yet with him, but I trust you." Corbell says he vetted him for a full year.

Then the balanced version of his own position, which he keeps insisting on all night.

"I do not see a cabal of people all pushing forward into the media a coherent, cohesive agenda. There are people. They are being harmed for trying to do this. It does not mean that both are not happening at the same time. I will relent to that. It is possible. The four dimensional chess. I am not a chess player." AJ: "We are playing checkers, as they say."

And he does not spare the field. "Some of them, for sure, are assets. And it is gross. I have actually made a public statement that people should, for the right thing, stand the fuck down on what they are doing. But the majority of people are just curious, like you and me, and they are young and they are hungry. I think the future is bright for the UAP thing if we do not get caught up in the nonsense."

Psionics, Age of Disclosure, and James Clapper

"I think our zone is flooded right now."

The example he names is psionics, and both men agree instantly and completely. Corbell: "That reeked of a government operation from day one." AJ: "Psyop from day one. Agree. One hundred percent."

Corbell says he and Knapp deliberately sat it out and never had anybody on, despite knowing most of the people involved. AJ asks the obvious question: what is the angle?

"Just muddy the waters. Get us looking over here. That is really all there is to it."

He extends the same verdict, more carefully, to The Age of Disclosure. "There is a lot of bullshit in there. There are people in there that cannot be trusted. But there are also people in there that can be." AJ: "That is the rub."

AJ then asks the question that produces the best exchange of the last hour: "Why is James Clapper in there and not in prison?"

Corbell: "Why would he be in prison? I do not know a lot about politics."

AJ: "For lying to Congress that NSA was spying on Americans."

Corbell: "Oh, he did?"

And then he brings it straight back to his own bruise. "Those guys, look. I learned that lesson. I was so sure that what was being done to whistleblowers was illegal, and apparently it is not. So we had to let it go."

Secure comms

AJ mentions that when he calls certain well known podcasters, the line takes a long time to connect and is very clicky, and that some of them insist on secure comms.

Corbell does not treat this as a suspicion. He treats it as a demonstrated fact about his own life.

"It has been proven to me that I can be listened to. It was like a flex that was done to me by an agency."

And the detail that makes it worse: "It was directly told to my mom by an agent."

The mundane tell he offers is oddly the most persuasive one. "Every time I get on the phone with my lawyer, he goes, this is Chuck McCullough and this is a privileged conversation. Why would you have to say that if you did not think there is a chance?"

Then the most human moment in the last hour, and the closest thing to a crack in the armor.

"It is not a good way to live. And I am kind of rethinking right now my life a lot about how I can be most effective. If I am constantly living in a state where I have to be so careful about having conversations, maybe adjustments need to be made for me personally, to be more effective in my reporting. I do not know yet. I do not know."

AJ: "I just need you to be safe."

Corbell: "I feel safe, man. Michael made my life look like a horror movie. Sleeping Dog is frightening, and I break down twice. But I am out of the woods. I will just say that."

Closing

Asked if there is anything they missed, Corbell says no, and means the compliment. "I have never had such a fun, different kind of conversation."

The plugs, in his own order: Weaponized, the podcast with George Knapp. Sleeping Dog, singular, on Amazon and Apple. And his three films, Patient Seventeen, Hunt for the Skinwalker and Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers, all free on YouTube Movies. His site is extraordinarybeliefs.com.

The beer count in the documentary comes up, and he does not dodge it. "I made a point. I did not want to hide anything. I sip a few beers a day."

His actual closing message is not a plug.

"Pay attention to what is happening right now. We have never had so much movement. I do not know that all of it is good, and some of it might be a psyop. I am ignorant to some of that. But I do believe that we are in an unprecedented time where we are so close to getting some sort of admission, and then we are going to have to assess that."

On the panel, one more time, with the door left open: "Maybe it will do great things. I do not want to prejudge it. But I have seen this movie before. I have had this rodeo. If it is being run by ODNI, unfortunately they have zero trust from me now. There are some good people in ODNI that I know, but what is going on with Congress feels like a manipulation."

And then the bet the whole episode ends on: "In one year from now, maybe we will know a lot more than we do today. And then we will come back and talk again."

What the host could check

The Why Files closes every Basement episode with the host's own reckoning, and this one is unusually direct, because AJ takes the trouble to separate what he can independently confirm from what he cannot.

He starts with the footage. The pyramid over the USS Russell, the sphere off San Diego. Corbell released those, and in 2021 the Pentagon confirmed they were taken by the Navy and folded into the government's UAP investigations. "The Pentagon, backing a self-described weirdo with a beard and tattoos. I loved every part of that."

Storm Area 51 checks out too. A college kid watched Corbell and Lazar on Rogan, made a Facebook joke, and two million people RSVP'd to raid a military base. "I love every part of that too, but I do not recommend it."

Then the big one. James Lacatski ran the Pentagon's covert UFO program, and wrote in a book with George Knapp that America holds a craft of unknown origin and that we got inside it. The government's own publication review process cleared every word. "That does not prove a craft, but nobody has walked it back, and we keep waiting."

And then the honest column. The entrapment invitations. The whisper campaigns. The safety protocols for his family. "I cannot verify. He says it is recorded, sitting with his lawyer. We have to take his word for it."

The scene that stayed with the host was not any of the evidence. It was the tennis court. Corbell filmed John Lear for almost a decade. Near the end, Lear believed the man he called Sleeper had come to Earth on a craft and could write him a ticket off the prison planet. Corbell flew him in, wheeled Lear onto the overgrown court, and filmed him crying, asking whether his ticket was still good.

"Jeremy calls it UFO disease. No answers, so you fill the hole with whatever hurts least. He will not fill his."

The verdict AJ lands on is not about UFOs at all.

"So is the biggest story in human history being suppressed? I cannot tell you. And neither can Jeremy. That is what I like most about him. He fixes toilets in his own buildings so nobody can buy his reporting. And he spent fifteen years saying I do not know, where certainty pays better. That is the guy I want holding a flashlight."

Key takeaways

Notable quotes

"I said the entry fee to UFO disclosure was fixing an old man's toilet." (1:00:56)

"Trust needs to be earned." (0:19:01)

"We are not what other people say we are. Praise and blame is all the same. If someone does not know you, they are filling in voids about who you are, and usually with false things." (0:28:55)

"The camera became my passport into everything unknown that I wanted to know." (0:47:08)

"You point a camera at somebody and they have these things that they want so desperately to say, just to get it off their chest." (0:47:55)

"I call this UFO disease. It is when people get so deep into this and they do not know the answers. We like to fill it with what feels best to us. Leave the hole. Be okay with it." (1:10:52)

"They do not want to stop people from talking about UFOs. They want to shape the emerging UAP narrative. The best way to do that is to have leverage." (1:55:50)

"Somewhere there must be a file that says you now have to have badged contact with Jeremy and George, and you need to show them your puppy and tell them you have a wife." (1:50:29)

"Jeremy, they do not need a podcast. You do not need a journalist podcaster to know where the bodies are buried." (1:58:06)

"What we are seeing in these releases so far is the least that can be given." (2:11:51)

"UFOs are considered higher security than weapons of mass destruction. And I am not saying that frivolously. Ask George Knapp." (2:24:49)

"The amount of energy needed to do that is so astronomical. That is fundamentally a weapon." (2:25:34)

"The throttle is the material science." (2:30:54)

"It is like you throwing an iPhone into a cage and just saying, see what you can do with this." (2:34:42)

"I do not have any special knowledge that other people do not have. I have got special questions." (2:38:33)

"What I know for sure is you have better questions than I ever had at a young age, and you have got to keep asking them." (2:38:33)

"Don't kick a sleeping dog. It is like they practice that line." (2:43:08)

"We did not have that technology in 2004. We do not have that technology in 2024. We are not even conceiving of working on that technology for fifty years." (2:59:55)

"So it is not China, it is not Russia, and unfortunately, it is not us." (3:06:00)

"It is a trap. Whatever you bring into that meeting, you will not be leaving with. It will be reverse classified." (3:17:25)

"What I saw was our government trying to fabricate evidence against a whistleblower." (3:37:19)

"I kind of got the response that if it is us doing these shenanigans, then it is okay. And that was disheartening." (3:38:05)

"Weird stuff, bro. I just was interested in the UFOs." (3:38:51)

"Clearly they want you to know that UFOs are real. That has been a clear message." (3:39:37)

"He fixes toilets in his own buildings so nobody can buy his reporting. And he spent fifteen years saying I do not know, where certainty pays better. That is the guy I want holding a flashlight." (3:55:32)

Resources mentioned

Jeremy Corbell

The films

People

Programs, agencies and documents

Places, hardware and terms

The show

Where it stands

Corbell spends four hours doing something unusual for this subject, which is telling you which of his own claims he can back and which he cannot. He does it unprompted, repeatedly, and he does it about his own mistakes. That is worth saying plainly before sorting the material, because the sorting is easier when the witness has already done half of it.

The clean split is between the documentary record, which is large and public, and the interference story, which is almost entirely his testimony plus a lawyer's file that nobody outside has seen.

Claim in the episodeWhat is on the public recordWhere it actually stands
The Navy footage he released is authenticconfirmed The Pentagon acknowledged in 2021 that the pyramid and sphere videos were taken by Navy personnel and were part of ongoing UAP examinations.Authenticity is settled. What the objects are is not, and Corbell explicitly does not claim they are alien craft.
Lacatski: the US holds a craft of unknown origin, and we got inside itpublished and cleared Stated in books by the former DIA program lead, passed through the government's own prepublication review, and never retracted.A cleared assertion by a credentialed official is not the same as verification. No craft, image or independent corroboration has been produced.
A Lockheed Martin transfer of unknown material was blockednamed in the record The account, including Glenn Gaffney and the Lockheed vice president, has been reported by multiple outlets and entered into the congressional record by George Knapp.The allegation and the names are documented. Whether the material is what it is claimed to be remains entirely unverified.
The Nimitz object actively jammed weapon systemsCorbell's original interviews with the aircrew, where he says they say it out loud.quietly dropped The claim has receded from public testimony, which is itself Corbell's point. Take it as sourced to the aircrew, in his recordings, not to an official finding.
The Bass Strait did not launch the 2019 objectsBoarding by federal agents in Long Beach with nothing found, the timeline overlap while the ship was in port, and a named sailor whose sole task was to watch the ship.strong for a negative Three independent lines all pointing the same way, and the strongest single piece of journalism in the four hours.
Storm Area 51 grew out of his filmestablished Matty Roberts, the Rogan episode, the Facebook event, roughly two million RSVPs. Public history.Not disputed by anyone, including Corbell, who did not want it.
False friendship, solicitation and entrapment aimed at himHis own recordings, his lawyer's files, and the fact that a federal lawyer takes the calls.his testimony None of it has been published or adjudicated. Consistent with known counterintelligence practice, but unverified from outside.
The ODNI nine month investigation was a ruseThat the investigation happened is not in dispute. That it was a collection operation is his conclusion, supported by his lawyer's reading of it.interpretation A strong inference from someone in the room, not a finding.
ODNI fed him smears and a fabricated drawing claim about Dylan BorlandHe says he has Borland's text messages to the ODNI group demanding the video of the alleged drawing session, and that the ICIG intake was filmed.unresolved The strongest claim in the episode and the one most worth watching, because it is falsifiable: the tape either exists or it does not.
The verified, actionable threat to his familyHe says a federal agency briefed his family and issued safety protocols, and that his mother was told directly by an agent that he can be listened to.his testimony Not independently checkable, and he does not pretend otherwise. The host says the same in his own closing.
Immaculate Constellation and the watermarked pagepartly public The report was submitted to the congressional record in November 2024, and Rep. Burchett publicly described executive branch limits on what could be said.The document and the hearing are real. The forensic story of the swapped top sheet is Corbell's alone, and he says he is holding back the rest.
Figure 7. Sorting the four hours. The pattern is consistent: the hardware and the paperwork are on the record, and the interference story is one man's testimony, recorded but not released. Corbell says this himself, more than once, without being asked.

Two honest cautions to carry out of it.

The first is that a witness who is scrupulous about attribution can still be wrong, and Corbell says so about himself twice: about believing the Tic Tac was ours, and about believing that what was done to whistleblowers was illegal. He asks for grace in advance about the day he gets something wrong. That is the right posture and it is also a reason to hold the unverified column loosely.

The second is that almost every dramatic claim in the second half is unfalsifiable by design, because the counterparties are agencies that do not comment. That does not make the claims false. It does mean the only real test available is time, and Corbell offered the test himself in his last sentence: come back in a year and see how much more we know.

Full transcript
Today we're sitting down with Jeremy Corbel, documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist who spent over a decade chasing the UAP story from Bob Lazar to the halls of Congress. And Jeremy didn't set out to do any of this. He was a martial arts instructor and artist before a mystery illness that left him fighting for his life forced him to start over completely. He has a near-death experience and becomes an artist. I've survived three divorces. No art, just daydrinking. That led him straight into John Leer's living room, then to George Knap's door, and eventually to putting a camera in front of Bob Lazar for the very first time. I said the entry fee to UFO disclosure was fixing an old man's toilet. He explains the whole government honestly. Today, we get into all of it. How he earned trust with people who trust almost no one. What it's actually like getting worked by intelligence agencies using what he calls false friendship. Intelligence agencies faking friendship information. So, uh, basically Facebook and the whistleblowers. he's helped bring in front of Congress. Some of whom paid a real price for it. He's got some wild stories. Some he can back up, some he can't. I had a great time with this one. I think you will, too. Let's go down to the basement. Jeremy Corbell, welcome to the basement. Thanks for having me in the basement. I'm excited. Yeah. First, the first first question is a two-parter. Is um what kind of art do you make with your own blood? And do you use any other bodily fluids? [laughter] It's gonna be that kind of party. Here we go. What? What? I mean, that's crazy. What do you What's What's going What's [laughter] going on? That was a phase, you know. That That's a crazy phase. Yeah. Wow. Um, well, [laughter] no, I want to know. Yeah. No, you've done some research, man. Um, have I said that publicly? No. Uh, so the Yeah, the whole art thing for me was a total fluke. I can't draw a stick figure. You know, I met this um beautiful artist who became my wife after many years. And uh but how we met was, you know, I had been doing jiu-jitsu my whole life and martial athletics, you know, since I was 9 years old. And I got super sick is the short version of it. And I could no longer do the things that, you know, I was passionate about. I I thought that's all I would ever do with my life. I had school at UC Santa Cruz and that expanded out into the world and I was a young kid and you know had everything I could ever want and then um you know getting really sick it changes everything for you when you're a physical person and I was going crazy man and um moved back to LA and just start disassembling computers. They were on sale like a stack of six computers at like a fry electronics like old school kind of ones the big monitors and started taking them apart putting them back together just as a physical thing to do. I I can't explain why I was just doing it you know and I started seeing my whole neighborhood was being demolitioned at the time in Santa Monica because I had hadn't been back in you know 15 years. So I started taking windows and doors out of these um construction sites. Salvaging before the rec salvaging, right? Salvaging. And then one time a contractor caught me and was really pissed. [laughter] You know why? It's just le I think if I had gotten injured or I was going in there with like full-on hammers and crowbars. Okay. [laughter] You know, like getting through fences. That's where the blood comes from. Well, no, no, that's a different story. But um anyway, so that's kind of the origin of of that is I was just um kind of trying to find something to do with my hands and oddly enough, I had a garage that opened up onto in in Santa Monica onto a main street and I just kind of had nice tommy mats and a heavy bag. That's what I thought I was going to be doing. But then, you know, heavy bag comes down and I start putting these windows and doors up like on the walls and painting them and installing lights and these um computer screens. I figured out how to separate the computer screens and do all this stuff. So, I started rotating imagery and sound. I don't know what I was doing. I don't know what I was doing. Um and then I got mistaken for as an artist and uh literally a guy walks down the street and he goes, "Are you an artist?" And I remember going, I'm a martial artist like, [laughter] you know, and then he goes, "Well, did you make these?" I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "Have you shown them?" I'm like, "No." He goes, "Do you want to?" I'm like, "Maybe." I didn't know. I really didn't think that people would do that that you, you know, I I didn't know what I was doing. Um, so back to the blood. Um, so at the time they were taking blood draws all the time cuz I had the valley fever thing and I was on all these medications and they're checking your blood. And it was some chick that drew the blood said, "Oh, it's really pretty color blood." I go, "It is kind of cool. Can I have some?" And [laughter] she like filled up some vials on them. So, I used that as a, you know, was I don't know. I used that in some of the um, you know, kind of constructed pieces and I resined over the blood. You know, my mom actually has, you know, you can buy red ochre in. I know. I know. I know. I [laughter] don't know what I was doing, dude. It was weird. So, that's the only bodily fluid. But, um, yeah. taking apart computers is interesting because your grandfather was a watch maker, right? How do you know all this? Did you did you ever see him work? Um, not because that those people are amazing. Yeah. Not not on like watch. He later in life he was doing more import export and he was um you know kind of getting into like jewelry trade and real estate. So I never he I was really young and he was born in 1903 or something. So he was really older by that time. Um, so I never got to like see him work, but I saw a lot of the products that he created and stuff. Yeah. Did you know you got that from grandpa? I I don't know where. Yeah. I'm not I'm not like a technologically savvy person to be honest with you. It was more just like, you know, this screw goes here. Take this. It was just a mental game, man. It It was something like I lost my identity, man. I don't know if you've ever had that experience in life, but it's like, you know, you think you are what you do and you think this is the one thing and the one way your life's going to go. that that's what that's what I thought and then when that was just stripped away from me um I had to figure out what am I like who am I if not this guy that trains martial arts you know well everyone knows you for being world class martial artist but oh world class I was not that great dude trained a lot you're pretty good um you're pretty good it's a big part of my life as well and you you're pretty oh for 30 years what' you do kempo yeah man so you know the whole Yeah yeah I trained for 30 years I taught for 20 and was full-time for 10. I should have done my research on you. What? I didn't know that. AJ, I don't really talk about it because it sounds stupid. [laughter] Um, it was a very developmental thing in your life. I mean, doesn't it help you when martial athletics, right? Didn't it You started when you were young. Didn't it help you like focus and and and teach you how to think and changes everything? Yeah. because which is on my like list to talk to you about is you kind of go into martial arts when you go in young at least for me you start out it's kind of like hot shit and then when you take it seriously it becomes your identity and it really chills you out. Yeah. It gives you confidence and discipline and I think I see a lot of that in your work still but I want to know what why you got into jiu-jitsu in the first place when you were a kid. Every few decades, there's a moment where the smart money and [music] the everyday saver end up wanting the exact same thing. This might be one of those moments. 39 trillion in national debt. [music] Another trillion printed every few weeks. Stagflation isn't a headline anymore. It's just what's happening in your paycheck. Look at where the money's actually moving. 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I mean, probably for all the wrong reasons like like you, you know, it's like I was uncontrolled. I had uncontrolled energy. My parents did not know what to do with me. You know, I was like one of those kids that would like kind of see white and just, you know, taste metal in my mouth and just go crazy. And um I remember the my first introduction to martial arts was I come home from school and my big brother was messing with me and I just go to punch him in the face and he does something and he just takes me bam and I I hit the the floor and all the air was knocked out of me. I couldn't breathe. Did he execute a technique on you? Yeah, it was like a hip thrower. Oh wow. Okay. Yeah. I just like I I threw a punch at him. He smashed me on the ground and I looking up at him and I was so impressed, you know. I was like, "How did you do that?" You know, and he was like, "Jiujitsu." I'm like, "What [laughter] the heck?" So that's kind of how I started. I I was younger than him. So I used to I actually got in trouble. Used to skip school to go train. I had to get on a bus to go all the way out to the valley, right? Because I was in Santa Monica. And the teacher at one point caught on that I was like, "How did you get there?" You know, in that amount of time. But that that's how I started. And so I was kind of training at this high school before I was in high school. And um I I will thank my brother for smashing me that one time. Of course. Yeah. That's how I started. And it just gave me it gave me focus, man. Like you try something a thousand times and someone else has only tried it, you know, a hundred times and you're going to pull it off. So it taught me that. Oh yeah. If you want the skill, you got to drill. Rep. Okay. Repetition is the mother of skill. Yeah. Absolutely. So, why did you end up in Nepal and getting sick? Right. How did you get there? Why Why did you even go there? You Cuz you were still a kid, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm still a kid. I don't know. Yeah, I was young then. Um, well, okay, I said out loud. Um, cuz Okay, so I had this like great thing going, right, where I had this great school. had satellite schools, really great community of people, loved what I did, but I I just felt this thing where it was like, is this all that I have inside of me, which is fine, like I will do this and I will get better and better at it. I love it. But I said out loud, is this all that I have inside of me? Is this my life? Is this the path that I'm supposed to go on? Like, I swear to God, saying it out loud, it was like the universe answered, right? I used to take my students on two trips every year down to Mexico Mazatlan and we would train the Cinnoloan SWAT right that on hand to hand uh non-lethal stuff and then just have like a big party and um do some festival stuff where you you know demonstrate. They used to do a lot of demonstrations like Juvenile Hall. All the flipping stuff you done on that's not the normal stuff we train. That's for show. That's Sure. We had demo team. Ex. Exactly. Yes. So we would just do do demos, you know, around the world. And like don't try this in the alley. No, no, no, no. It's it's just it's to excite the minds and inspire kids that there is another way because that that happened for me. And one of my teachers along the way was um well my primary teacher one of my primary teachers was sensei David Meyer and he was all into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and at that time was super new and I didn't know anything about it and as he's learning it he's teaching us as well and now he's like a coral belt or something you know he's one of the top dogs the dirty dozen they call him but I was learning that that in the embryionic stage it was not MMA like people know now you had to go train boxing wrestling judo kempo jiu-jitsu whatever iikido, you train everything, bring it together. You had to like lie to the sensei that you were only studying with them. It was weird. You You kind of do. Yeah. Yeah. You at that time it was very different. We had you had to kind of shield that you were doing these other things. Um so I guess why I found myself in Nepal is because we do the thing in Mexico every year with a bunch of like, you know, kids from university, but we'd also go to Thailand and and train Thai boxing and massage and all that stuff. So, I did my normal trip that year and then I just remember feeling like I got to just go, you know, somewhere where I'm not me, you know, just like go walk and not fall right back into that role of like I'm teaching jiu-jitsu and all this stuff. So, I remember going to the passport people or whatever, the visa people and being like, "Where can I go like today?" You know, and they're like, "Well, you you you know, you can't get into like India takes seven days. we're going to go today and they're like Nepal. I had never heard of Nepal. Like I I wasn't some one of these guys thinking I'm going to go, you know, to east and like walk the earth. I just wanted to go somewhere where like you could get there today. So they're like Nepal who? [laughter] Nepal. Okay, cool. So I remember getting this having to go get some cash and I go and I had no idea what I was walking into. Um I land in Nepal and if I recall there was some major event happening where some bombs or something had gone off in in the city. We can look that up some but it was during that era. Yeah. And I was like you know where did I land? It was so mysterious. It was totally bizarre to me. A totally different culture. You ever been? No. It it beautiful. I mean one of the coolest places that I had ever been. But my whole point was just to get out of myself, just to get away. Um, cuz when you have like hundreds, if not thousands of students over a decade, it's like people always calling you sensei or this or that. It it's it's not who you are, it's how they see you. So I'm there in Nepal and I imagine eventually I'm going to like go down to India cuz I've never seen it before, you know? I traveled a bunch for martial arts, but you don't get to see places when you do that a lot. you see the inside of a dojo, you right? So, I remember I go up to this um like monastery or something like a Tibetan monk monastery and first thing that happens, this is so bizarre. It's like midnight. I'm walking down the hall trying to get away from who I am to try to discover who I am or something. And down the hallway, shit you not, I hear somebody go, "Sensei, what? I swear on my life, bro." So what happens is this student so this guy starts walking down the hallway and again it's super late. Your room was like the size of like this table basically just a bed and this little monastery and you get and some dude I knew from Santa Cruz, California was leaving at that time and I just it was like a cosmic joke you know I was like it was so shocking to me and so I had to absorb that and I was like okay well here I am. So I stayed for a little while in Nepal. Training? No, I was just trying to just see the world differently, you know. Yeah. And um somewhere along the way they cuz cuz I I I would wasn't feeling sick at that time. Everything was fine. I make my way to to Pune. Oh no. For two first of Veronasi. Do you know about Veronasi? No. Okay dude. Look at a travel book. Um, Veronasi aka very nasty is the a place in India where you go and if you die there then you're not reborn into karma. So you're you're instantly what they call like enlightened. You don't have to be reborn as a human. So imagine the number of people coming there to die. So and that is you look it up in guide books. I had no idea you know what I was walking into. So you see there people at death store. You see their bodies being cremated. Cremated. You see them being put into the Ganes. I think there's two types of people that don't need to be cremated. Sadus like holy men and pregnant women cuz the babies are pure or something. Everybody else, you know, they they do this burning. They they've kept the fire a light for thousands of years they claim, right? It is like from the funeral p and they bring it over. So I it was kind of like shocking, right? I mean, I had been all around the world. I'd been in slums. Um, this was just a a culture that had existed for thousands of years I was totally unaware of. So, I'm there. Do you want to hear the weird stuff? I mean, do you want to This is not about UFOs, but this is weird stuff. We'll get to that later. Okay. So, this is a sacred place. Yes. A very sacred place where you're not reborn into karma is how I understand it. Right. That's that's my understanding of it. So you you do see a lot of death and dying. And I stayed a a pretty good duration there. So I really got to know it. Like there are these cafes where the flies were so intense. I would put a a like a shirt over my head to eat the meal on the river because there's so many flies cuz it was just not sanitary. And then this sadu comes down next to me. He was a white dude but like full of sadoo stuff. And he like looks at me and kind of smirks. And I'm like okay. and he takes this dish and he puts a sugar cube on it and puts a little water and all the flies got attracted look like molten flies and he was just eating and smiling at me. So I was like, "Oh, there's a trick to this life. What's going on here?" You know? So I just kind of met a lot of characters and then um the most strange part of the trip was you know how I told you I said that thing aloud, right? Um is there more for me? Well, I was um people ask you to come get chai or tea in their homes. This guy had kind of made friends with me. I' had known him for a few days, took I have photos of me and the guy like he's like this nice guy. And then he brings me to get tea in one of these homes. And it was this absolute knowing that they were going to poison me. It was this it was this feeling of like almost like you could hear it like trust needs to be earned. That's what I kind of heard, you know, and I just remember breaking all social norms. I stood up, put my hand on the guy's chest. He's a little guy, but it just put my hand on I just go, "Trust needs to be earned." Right when I said that, these two dudes come in, big dudes come in and you could just feel it, like the gravity of it, like I didn't drink the chai and they were expecting me to drink it. Now, you have no proof or evidence, so you just feel like, did I make that up? It's better to be safe. What the heck? My mind was spinning. I walk outside, walk for a couple blocks, and I see this female who's sitting on the curb crying. She I could tell that she was a foreigner. She had like bright red hair. Um, shout out to Anna Remington, by the way. So, that's who it was. As if I'm still connected to her through social media. And I had seen her and her friend earlier that week cuz there were not a lot of tourists at the time. There's on season and offseason apparently. And I had at this point I'm in India and it was offseason. So it was like you could tell when tourists are there, you recognize them, right? Why is this girl crying? So I went up to her. I said, "What's the matter?" She says, "My friend was poisoned with tea and she's in the hospital and they took her passport and I feel like they're keeping her sick through her IV." Oh my god. And I'm like, "What the like?" So that that immediately I was like, "Who' they look like? What they It was the same group of people. What? Why would they do that?" Oh, now I know. Okay. So, so what happens is go to the hospital, create a big stink, you know. Um, you did. Oh, I did. Yeah. I went and with her, right? Cuz you're kind of, you know, a girl alone in India. Um, there's me. So, you go there, make a big stink. And it was the first time that I'd seen like armed guards at the hospital. Something just ain't right. Like they got her passport, all this stuff. And um the the girl Anna was saying, you know, when my when my family finds out, like, you know, they're gonna get the embassy involved, like in implying to me that she has some sort of connection in England where she's from. And I was like, I I had no idea what she was talking about. Sure enough, some badass bitch comes in from the embassy with two other people. Immediately, they get that girl out and they're like, um, will you, you know, escort them to Delhi? And I was like, we're planning to go to Delhi. I didn't know where I was going, so yeah, no problem. I'll take them. So that's how I became friends with those two. Turns out if you just read one of the guide books, one of the things they say in the guide book is be careful of poison in the chai, it is a known scam at the time in Veronasi. If I had just read a guide book, right, this is like pre- internet stuff. Yeah. So or you know pre there was like you had little Thomas guides, whatever. But like you literally crack open the book and they told you about this scam. So what the scam was was they make you sick, you know, and they're like, "Oh, well chalera." They tried to pretend you got chalera. They take you to the hospital, they keep an IV in you that that pollutes you or makes you keeps you sick and they milk the insurance money and then take it out. You're good to go. So it was this known scam, but I did not know about it. That's crazy that you felt it, though. I I did. That was a something one of the times in my life where it just I feel like something just saved me there, man. I don't know what intuition. It's martial arts situational awareness. M maybe you just something doesn't feel right here, man. Yeah. And it was almost it was almost more than that. It was just something I felt like um I I only had a couple experiences like that in my life where you get information that there's no logical way for you to have obtained it, you know. But um I guess that kind of leads to uh my sickness had nothing to do with that. Okay. Okay. Yeah. They they think I got it like from disturbing of the soil. Like one night I was like slept out on the road, you know, in a farm area. I I you know, I was just a kid kind of in a way. And then um also like in the caves, like if there's like bats, they'll just stir up dust or something. So I got spores in my lungs. Um and the thing is it got really bad and I didn't know it was bad cuz I wasn't like looking in the mirror and stuff. I was just kind of like walking and I started feeling really sick. I remember calling my family being like something is really wrong. And and how I learned that was um I was in a room. I went down to Pune, India. You ever hear about that? Nope. Super weird place. There was this um guru called Osho and I was like, you know, I had read some of his books. I want to see what this dude was about. Turns out he was dead anyway. But it was like this cult man. These big old pyramids. They they run this whole city called Pune India. And so it was this bizarre thing. They like, you know, I went into this compound. I I had spent a few days just kind of reading books and seeing what and it just felt so creepy and it felt so culty and so I was kind of like maybe that's the start of the investigator in me. I was like what's going on here? You know and you're sick when you're when you're dead. No. So I'm fine. And then all of a sudden imagine boarding a plane and hearing the pilot say good news. I watched three aviation videos last night. 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For more information, you can go to forthepeople.com/y. Um, I I go to bed and something doesn't feel right. And then I must have been I I woke up and my bed was just completely drenched wet with sweat and I I had been hearing like chimes and stuff and um I started talking with my buddy Ricky and we're talking it was like he was there. I kind of woke up out of this and I realized it had been like 2 or 3 days and Ricky had been dead for a while. Oh Jesus. I was um hallucinating from a fever. So my brain was cooking, man. So I it was it was in it was in my body and they called they got so nervous they're going to have some dude die in this like cult ashram kind of weird place. So they sent in a doctor cuz I wouldn't I wouldn't go to the hospital because of the experience prior. So they're like they sent in some doctor. Do you have a fever? I'm like I don't know. I don't know in my whole life I ever had a fever. How would I know? You know I I really didn't know. She puts like a um a thing in my armpit to test my fever and it was 107. Oh no. In the armpit. So that means your brain is cooking, you know. So they panicked and they shot me in the butt with some um you know remedy or something to lower reduce the fever. And it was like somebody just yanked my head out of the water. It was like this instantaneous um like like a consciousness, you know. I was like, "Well, fuck. I got to get out of here." So they they um said, "Well, you we have your passport. You need to drink this much water in this many days. Like I have video of me lining up the water, you know, doing like a little video to myself, you know, like I just got to drink this water. I'm getting out of here." And I just pounding that water. They they gave me back my passport and I left. Why'd you have to give them your passport? You know, I don't know. Back in the day, maybe because it was a cult. It was like it was a weird I would want to give that up, bro. I was so dumb. I'm a little smarter now, but at the time to enter this compound, I guess you had to like give them your passport. You're in your 20s, right? Yeah. So, you do you'll do anything. You're invincible, dude. I Yeah. Totally invincible. Yep. And um anyway, so that's the long way around it is um that happened again a couple more times where they had told me you just have some bacteria. It's different here in India than it is in the US. So, you take stuff for your lungs, you know, took uh like bronchitis medicine, antibiotics, and you'd feel better for a little bit, but then it did happen two more times. And then I realized, oh, I'm re something's really wrong. You you got to get home. Yeah, you got to get home. And it was the first time in my life I ever flew um business class and I thought it was such a party and I [laughter] couldn't I couldn't enjoy it, dude. You know, you have this like nice seat and but I was I was just dying, dude. Um passing up champagne for I just need water. I literally was like, they must have thought like a dead man on the plane, you know, but uh yeah, I remember getting back and they immediately discovered that it was a coxillitis. I don't know the name of it, like valley fever. And it had gotten from my lungs. It had damaged my heart, my kidney, my liver. It had actually started coming out. I got little scars in my arms because it came through the this the skin. It had gotten so bad. So they were even even at UCLA, they were worried that it had progressed too far. So they give you um a pill that's like an antif-ungal. Yeah. And um and a bunch of other other stuff. And um then very slowly um I started kind of regaining my energy. And it's right about that time that I started doing the the computers things and and painting. And then um But you couldn't train anymore? No, dude. I could not like to walk down the block and then harvest a door would put me down for a day and a half, two days because the the amount of uh energy had sucked out of my body. I was skinny as a rail. I was just um really fucked up. You not depressed? Yeah. Well, that's a whole another thing, right? Cuz your identity is destroyed. Yeah. That's that's the next the next thing that happens, right? Is you're you kind of get back to okay, I can move, but who am I? What am I doing? So there's absolutely that loss of identity and ego which is the best thing that ever happened to me. You know you is it it is because the one thing I learned from all of that is that we are not what other people say we are right praise and blame is all the same. If someone doesn't know you like your family you should listen to people that really know you but if they don't know you they're filling in voids about who you are and usually with false things. And it also taught me that we are not just the things that we do. That the things that we do are because of who and what we are on the inside, man. And so you can apply that to anything. If you're fidious and you you study physics books and then you do a podcast, all the things you do, right? Um those are just expressions of who you are. And that's a deep spiritual lesson for me. um whatever that word means. It just um you know it taught me that we can live many lives and that we can apply ourselves to almost anything and if we're diligent, we do it a thousand times and not just 100 times that you know the only failure you're going to have is not trying. So that that was the best the best lesson of my life. And I met my wife through it all, you know, cuz she's looking at this some dude making what she thinks is art like inside of this. It really was art. It was amazing multimedia presentations. Yeah. Yeah. I just make a joke cuz I can't draw a stick figure. My wife can actually paint amazing, creepy, weird stuff. She can do all this stuff with her imagination. For me, it was more like a physical trade than it was um you know that I saw. Like jiu-jitsu is an art to me, but it's very mechanical. Yes. Right. So, you kind of It's like paint by number. You just you learn what the next number is. Yep. Do it a thousand times. Do it a thousand times and then you earn another number. That's right. You discover another number. You That's true. Yeah, you're always learning. Um, these are themes that I see in your story coming up all the time and that's salvage. And another one is because you just kind of alluded to it is the unflattening of a story. How how people are always flattened into a story whether it's David Grush or it's Bob Lazar, their story gets flattened. Um, like you mean you mean that's what that's what you are? That two-dimensional thing. Yes. So, what I'm getting to is Sharon Tate's story was flattened and you unflattened it. Whoa. Yeah. Can you tell Can you tell me about that? Yeah. That that piece that you did. This is going to sound like my whole life is an accident and the thing is it might be. You know, it's weird. Um I think it's all programmed. You're following the You're following the program, man. It's all good. Yeah, that was a weird detour as well. Um, so that odd thing was I had been doing these little art shows and installation shows in LA and it was a really fun really creative time in my life and I was meeting I met my wife met met a bunch of friends. We kind of created this community of like doing these art shows take over you know a motel in Hollywood or something and line the walls with um, you know, newspaper. I love the LA Times for some reason. Newspaper everywhere. I just love the LA Times logo, you know. We'd fill it up, you know, girls in sunglasses, like crazy themes. And then, um, and then, okay, this is a weird one. Um, so, you know, I used to do something called warrior yoga, and it was like yoga for athletes. And why I called it that is cuz I used to teach in juvenile hall. So, you had to get these kids attention. So, I say, "If you don't stop doing push-ups, you'll have free training for life. We're right up here at the university. I'll have students come pick you up. You're good to go." So, the idea was to get them to not repeat the habit. Get them out doing something physical and good. So, a lot of kids came out of that. I don't think a lot of people know that you did that for juvie kids. Yeah, I did it for me, too. Yeah. Of course. But, why did why did you choose to do that? Were you a Because you weren't a chicken, right? No, I I was good at not getting caught. Yeah, fair enough. Um, no, I mean I I never was institutionalized or anything like that. Um, but I think it was that I I think I met a couple kids. I knew about the program. Um, and I just asked one day I'm like, "Can I just come and teach them martial arts?" And they're like, "Nope." I'm like, "What?" [laughter] Like, "We can't teach them wrist escapes." And I'm like, "Oh, okay. That makes sense, right? And um so I just started this kind of, you know, whatever balloon program, this little thing that they were very unsure of it, but it was just like, let me give them a a good martial arts workout. We called it warrior yoga. So they would think it's really cool and let's just see how it goes. And then my buddy, this guy Frank Shamrock, he's a a fighter. Used to, you know, good friend of mine. I trained with him a bunch. And um you know, he trained with also with us a bunch of the yoga and the breathing stuff. and he taught me so much about um how how to move in in martial athletics and he had been institutionalized you know he was in prison at one point so I brought him in and the kids knew cuz at the time he's so it became this really popular thing this huge program so I kind of I think I just started it with the idea of you know let's see if we can give people something they can do other than this but then it just grew man it just grew and it was it was um you know a lot of lot of people benefited from it and I it just it was a fun thing to do. My favorite part of my career was teaching like boys who are like 14, 15, 16, 17 who were just they were just pains in the asses and just slapping them around and and just setting them on that path. There's a lot of boys that need that. Yeah. To I did. I did too. You got to direct that energy and now you do it positively. And if you stick with it, you learn discipline, you learn respect, and uh I'd have parents come in and thanking me for, you know, for kicking the shit out of their kids for a year. [laughter] It's It's amazing what you did. Um Yeah, they'd get good, too, man. They start kicking my ass. Oh. Oh, yeah. The girls, too. Yeah. I took some lumps. Um you invented a massage system. Restoration massage therapy. Did didn't invent that. That was like So, well, you have a registered trademark, right? So, so because at at the time for jiu-jitsu, yoga and all this stuff, when you're in that world and you're creating these systems for university students, you trademark it so you could create all the educational materials around it. So, I actually started training and learned u massage at starting at the age of nine as well. And that was because my original school they had uh five teachers and they're all from a variety of disciplines and they always you know bestowed upon us that if you learn how to like disassemble and you learn how to do the martial athletic stuff then you know you need to know how to heal your own body and help other people. So that was I don't know if it is today and I don't think it is today and the same with MMA. It's much more a sport now. Yeah. But at the time it was very valuable. Like you you do all this stuff for your fitness and health with what we called warrior yoga. But then with the massage it was this guy named Okazaki out in Japan and he had created this Okazaki massage style. He had a student named Sig Kuv. This guy was out of the Bay Area and they all trained me in this kind of bodywork style which is very useful because you mess something up you know um you you have ways to heal it. So that was kind of the, you know, the triad it with the martial arts was the yoga and then the massage. And yeah, I taught that, you know, 10 years at a university and again, school was all over the place. It was a great life. I learned so much from it. I loved it because it was it was a creative thing. Um, but yeah, that's how Oh, Sharon Tate you asked about, right? So that's a that's where we were going is a weird one. So what happened is cuz she's known for the one thing. She's known for the one thing. She's known for Charles Manson. She's known for being murdered in 1969 and the whole world two dimensional flat story. Right. Right. Exactly. So how that happened was um I had done an art show and this producer from Inside Edition, you know, says, "Hey, you know, we need a photographer." Uh, and it gets even weirder. Like there was this um there was this uh studio and when I was doing the warrior yoga thing, um Lululemon, I guess, uh was like, you know, will you come be an ambassador, you know, and we're going to take some photos and put your photo up. You're an ambassador. I'm like, okay, do do a yoga class inside the the studio. I'm like, sure. You're the Lululemon ambassador. At one point I was. At one point it was. They had a bunch of them local ambassadors or something. It was just it was a weird thing, man. I didn't know what was going on. Just go with it. They went with it. So I start, you know, starting to feel better at that time. So I was like, "Sure." And um I met this guy in this photo studio, this little Iranian guy named Peter, and he was like I thought he was like a grip, you know? He was just kind of hanging out as they were doing their thing, but we really hit it off, man. We we sat outside. We were talking for a while. And um I had that in the back of my mind that there was this guy and and super nice guy named Peter. Well, I'll get there because it's such a weird road. But what what happened was I go overseas and I start doing uh just taking the shitty little camera and doing a new art series I was going to do. I had a a show all set up when I come back. Is this a camera that was gifted to you? Um no. So that was that's a that's like a video camera. This is like a still camera. Okay. Right. So I I just started like taking these photos. I was going to call the series like women in sunglasses and um you I was young. I was out, you know, in Europe at this point. Um, and I just, uh, went for a little while and then I got robbed of all of my equipment in Prague. Um, how did that happen? Uh, I come back from going to watch uh, Oceans, whatever, like one of those heist movies. Yeah. And I had left in my room in a safe my camera equipment, my hard drives, and I actually had bought some like suits or something like that. So, I had like a couple cool suits and um I just had this gut feeling, dude, get back to the hotel. You know, something like I just had that fear like something isn't right. Get back to the hotel. The door was smashed in. The safe was wide open and somebody had just and there was like three security door. It was like a hostel, but there were like three security doors and then there was this like private, you know, room with a big fucking door. And um somebody had come in and smashed everything and stolen everything. How they get in the safe? Great question. Mhm. I don't like it. No, I don't like it at all. So up come the stairs. There's this gigantic Serbian dude and he's like, "Do we have a problem?" And I'm like, "Yeah, we have a fucking problem." And I I like I knew instantaneously that this guy was a part of it, right? Mhm. So my dumb ass pushes him up against the wall and he and he just like smirked at me like there's nothing I could do to this guy. He knew something that I didn't and it was fucking frightening. Next thing I know, these investigators, these cops come up and they were like, "You're going to jail." You are? Yeah. And I'm like, "For assault?" Um, well, I was like, "Why?" And they're like, "Cuz you don't have identification." I'm like, "Yeah, my passport WAS JUST STOLEN." OH, DUDE. YEAH. SO, all this to say, what happens is I make like my emergency call and I wasn't holding for 72 hours. I have all the paperwork for it. Um, you were in holding for for 3 days. They gave me a candy bar. They gave me a candy bar. None of them spoke English until the the third day. And they spoke English. They knew English. They they sure did. And um anyway, so what ended up happening was an embassy guy, you know, comes up, says, "We're going to, you know, get you out of here. Going to get you an emergency passport. You're going to go home, right?" I was like, "Fuck that. I'm going home." They stole everything that I had. It's, you know, all my work, everything. So, I decide I'm going to investigate what's going on. I start loitering around the place. I I talk to the girl that runs the cameras at the thing. She She starts crying. and she's talent. She slips me a note and being like, you know, all the footage is gone from that moment you were set up. It's and now I know exactly what happened. But these are the situations I used to really get in when I was an idiot. Um so what happened is um they they assigned an investigator to me that's a local guy and he's standing there and the big Serbian guy, he owns the hotel. So eventually I confront the guy with the I call him Inspector Crusoe because he was not trying to help me, right? And the Serbian dude says, "You know, people get killed for a lot worse." So I was really causing problems talking to his employees, all this stuff. Just trying to get my shit back. I I figured at the time I figured my camera, my computer, I could get it back. Um so that didn't work. And he said to me, you he said some threat right in front of the Inspector Crusoe. And I'm like, "See, he's threatening me right there." And then the inspector Crusoe turns to me and goes, "Yeah, he's a really bad man." And I'm like, "Oh, fuck. I'm out of [laughter] here." So like, you know, tail between my legs. I'm like, "I'm out of here." And I So I call back to the one photographic studio I knew, which was Peter Carpatian. Peter Carpatian was not some grip, you know, that was there. He's like a famous Vogue photographer from the 70s who's done these covers and and he goes, "Darling, I'm Peter Carpatian. Come back. We'll shoot a show." [laughter] It's like comical. So I I kind of did like a fake art show. Like I got all my friends. It's called Women in Sunglasses. There's like videos of it and like all my friends came and wore these sunglasses. Can I call you darling from now on? Yeah. Darling. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Yes. Yes. Officially. So he was great. He saved my ass. And so then I kind of get mistook as this photographer. That's kind of how the photographic element of the art stuff started happening. Look. So I'm feeling better at this point. I've had some more adventures. And then I get a call and they said, "At that studio, we need a photographer to photograph Sharon Tate's wardrobe on a model named Lauren Hastings." And none of this is all like gibber. I was like, "Wow, I didn't, you know, I just knew Sharon Tate, like you saying, two- dimensional, right?" I'm like, "Well, that's kind of creepy. Do I want to do this?" I'm like, "Yeah, sure. Why not?" So, I went and I um right before my the guy Peter Carpatient had taught me this Polaroid camera, this old school press Polaroid, how to rip it out. And I threw it on the ground once. I stomped on it. It created these cool patterns. So, I started doing that all the time. Sharon Tate's sister comes in and she's watching this, you know, shoot, which I I had no knowledge of the fashion industry and all how why this was important. I just knew Sharon Tate was this like person that had died and her sister starts crying and I say, you know, I can do I'm an artist now. Like I can do better than this. We can do a whole thing like honoring your sister. So I made this kind of arrangement with her that, you know, I would do it was like a 10,000 piece art show because of all the Polaroids. And I built dresses out of [laughter] I built dresses out of Polaroids and I did these huge large format ones. There's a bunch of video of it online like LA Times covered it. Smashing success, man. So, out of nowhere, you know, I've got this like art career and it's pretty good. It's It's pretty awesome, man. So, kind of just going with the flow and flowing with a go and enjoying it. That's what happened. So, then um so Jeff gives you a video camera, right? Jeff Murad. Jeff Mad. You still talk to him? Uh I do. Yeah. He he comes to some of the, you know, whatevers, whatevers, whatever things. Yeah. He's a sweet kid. He's a sweet kid. Yeah. So, Jeff gives you the camera and uh You still have that camera? I do. Canon 5D Mark I filmed all my movies. 5D Mark I It's not even the good one. Yeah, but it was pretty good back in the day. It was. He gave it to me for my wedding uh with my wife and we just started, you know, kind of using it on their road trip across country for our anniversary. And that's how I kind of learned to frame and do Well, I I read that you were practicing on your on your honeymoon. Yeah. Have any of those videos you want to I I I do. I [laughter] I do, man. I was like, you know, you were in Texas and there's a long road. We're lighting off fireworks and, you know, Yeah. It was kind of neat. It was a way to document our our kind of honeymoon and Yeah. What I like about you getting the camera is I maybe you started to learn that for some reason people will open up to a camera. That's precisely what happened. Yeah. Um that is exactly what happened. Uh and it kind of started with like my grandma, right? Um you know she I I was telling you this story outside there which is that I had made this art piece of the battle of Los Angeles, a very famous UFO battle or battle UFO thing where the United States military shot up 1300 or 1400 12 pound mortars or something like that. Yeah. This audience knows this. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's like some big event and you could see it from the Palisades and two of the windows I harvested were viewing that way from the Palisades. So I thought, well, I'm going to take images from the LA Times, rebuild that as if you're looking out. And then I did like a dual panel and um it didn't sell. So [laughter] I naturally what do you do when you're a kid? Your art doesn't sell. You give it to your parents. So I went and stalled it way high up where they could never get it down in their house. And my grandma just walks by and she goes, "I saw that." And just walks out the kitchen. I'm like, "Ho ho ho ho, hold on. What do you mean you saw that?" you know, and I sat her down and, you know, kind of she told me about seeing the Battle of LA, this thing object being shot out in the sky. Mhm. And then she also told me all this stuff about my family that she had never told even her own daughter, my mom, on camera. On camera. It was like a It was like um I don't think anybody had ever sat her down with a camera before. And it was just like I saw this thing where just pointing this camera at somebody, not even about UFOs really. This is about family stuff. They they just uh told you stuff that would have been lost forever if you didn't point the camera at them. And so I I like to make the joke that camera became my passport into everything unknown that I wanted to know or at least it had the potential to be that. It's a weird thing. You point a camera at somebody and they have these things that they they want. so desperately to say just to get it off their chest, not to be public a lot of time in the UFO, but just to say it. Yep. So, I I learned that really quick that that is I could be misidentified as a filmmaker, you know, [laughter] that's kind of what happened. Wow. Um what were the secrets of the family that she told you? She had at one time um had a daughter that didn't make it and my she had never told my mom. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, just something she had just never never told my family. How did your mom react to that? Oddly enough, it's weird. We're talking about this. She didn't have the heart to watch. I told her about it, but yesterday on my way over here, she asked for the video about 28 minutes. So, she's probably has watched it now for the first time. And that was like a decade long 15 years ago. I don't know. Something like that. Now, it's because of Sleeping Dogs. I feel like I know your mom. Oh, she's she's so sweet in that. And well, I I She's a gangster. Yeah. But yeah, she's what you see is what you get with her. Yeah. She had me choked up a couple of times during the movie to be honest. It was a hard time in my life and she was going through it too. There's a lot, you know, not said in the documentary like what she had to go through. She's had to sit down with agencies before because of threats. So, she really My mom's been through a lot. three boys, you know, but that was a very hard time for all of us. And you know, the kid Michael captured it all or a lot of it. Kid Michael, um, we have to get his name right. Yeah. Michael Lazovski and Sleeping Dog is the movie. Yeah, Sleeping Dog. It's a great movie. Um, your mom was so badass because I think he asked her, you know, do you wish that Jeremy never got into this? And she said, "No, I'm glad he did Yeah, that surprised me that she said that. Me, too. Yeah, I didn't see that coming. Um, I want to talk about John Leer, but we're coming up on a break. Yeah. Well, we'll leave it with this cliffhanger. We'll come back. We'll talk about you fixing John Leer's uh toilets. I talk about John Leer a lot on the uh on my show. So, when I saw Sleeping Dogs, I I was like, "This is gold." I had no idea. You spent so much time with John. So much. Yeah. How did you even come to learn about him? Right. How to learn about him? Um, well, he was like the godfather man from the era from the Artbell era that we've talked about. You know, the one looming name was this enigmatic character. John Lear used to fly for the CIA. You know, his dad invented the eight track stereo. You know, it became Multraola the company. Like he knows all these insiders. you know, man, he had some crazy theories. I mean, he was just like this omnipresent personality in UFO land before it kind of moved into mainstream, you know. He was the guy. He was infamous, you know. So, I had heard about him because of I guess originally the George Knap interview with the shady um background. Yeah. Yeah. did the Dennis interview and um you know Oh, the Dennis interview. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That was like So that was when Lazar um came forward to George Knap and was in silhouette so you couldn't see his face, but they called him Dennis and that was just repeated over the airwaves, you know, that was just like everybody was talking about that in in UFO land or whatever on the radio. And I remember must have been 13 and I heard that. I I think I heard it before I saw it and you know kind of that's when George Knapp's name got on my radar too and this Bob Lazar character because he ended up coming out as Bob Lazar and so John was you know woven into that story and you know what you get is you read all this stuff about it but these people are just like these voices and then these stories and then maybe you see like you know news clip of them and they become a little more real. But I was always fascinated by that. You know, hearing what Bob said um really flipped my script. And we had talked about this for a second, but I grew up knowing that UFOs that aliens, they're probably real, but they're not coming here. That's what we all grew up knowing because the distances are just too vast. And I bought into that, you know, I thought, well, that's weird, but why are people seeing them? Right? But I I wasn't like obsessed with it. It was just it really sparked me to hear this story because of what Bob said. And Bob said instead of like a reactionary propulsion system from rockets to roller skates, you push something out the back, you go forward. He says, "What was different about these craft is that they basically create a gravity well. You're falling into time and space." And I'm like, "You're falling. You're falling. So you're not pushing out the back. were falling in. And I thought, you know, if I was a dumb young kid, but I thought if what he's saying is true, not not his whole story, just like if craft could do that with science, then distance no longer matters. You're you're falling into space and time. You need a lot of energy to do that, but you're falling into space and time, so distances no longer matter. So why wouldn't and he's saying this 25 years before the albby carry drive right and we were talking earlier about the exploring multiple dimensions compressing space searching for kuza climb particles is what it is you know Bob didn't specifically say kooa climb but he was talking about tech that they're actually looking into right now yeah and Bob would be the first to say all these years that all he knows is what he's seen touched and shown um words on paper he was told some filed things, but you know, he didn't know and to this day doesn't claim that he knows that was true because there's always disinformation sewed in with real information just so you can identify leaks. That is a standard practice in any um black budget program, anything. But so, so Lear was this gigantic persona, right? But I knew that he was close. I think how it happened in my mind was I knew he was close to the Lazar story which I knew was the most fascinating to me because remember at that time before the movie I made on Lazar was out this was all sub stuff. It wasn't pop culture stuff. The world had not changed no with UFOs at that time. So I was just like who can I actually reach? And and like George Nav, I mean I called John, I emailed John. nothing. Nothing for a long time. But one time he did pick up his phone and his immediate response was, "Come on, Las Vegas, Nevada. Here's my address. Come visit me." Like click. Like it was like totally insane to me that somebody I I Nobody knows. I'm not doing UFO stuff, but just my I think he was I think he like was lonely or something. You know what I mean? I saw the movie. I think he was. Yeah, I think he was. And so he he really wanted someone to talk to. He did. And and I I think he just opened I think I came at the right time. He opened the door. I had a camera which he thought meant something, you know, and I was honest with him. I said like I've never made a movie, but I just I'm I'm fascinated by this. I want to learn from you. Can I record some of it? So that's how it happened. It was just very naturally, you know, but I was dogged about it. I didn't just like come one time and figure I got it all sorted out. Came over and over and over again. Did you have to bring the Philly Titans the first time in? Not the first time. That was a lesson I learned probably the second time. Yeah. Had to smuggle him cigars. Contraband. You want the story? Got to bring me Titans. That's right. From Walgreens. That's right. Well, first at first he wouldn't say shit to me. And that is very real. So, the thing I really appreciate about Michael's movie, by the way, is that the one thing I told him is no movie magic. Don't skew things with time. Show it like it happened. Like, I hadn't even looked at the footage. You talk with Michael like I would describe a story to him and he'd be like, "No way." I'm like, "Dude, watch the footage." And he did. He'd be like, "No, no, it's even cooler than you said." He he reminded me of stuff like um how I'm complaining that George Knap will never pick up my calls to John and John says, "I don't know who he picks up for anybody." I had told Michael that story that like I had been trying to get to George Knap for many years and it's all documented right there. It was It was pretty neat. So, did you let Michael have the full edit? Yeah, I gave Michael everything. He It was completely his movie. Yeah, cuz there there's a couple of spots where you're like, "Don't put that in." What? Oh, I know. My like even my family was like, you know, showing yourself emotional and all that. It had to be there, man. Really? Yeah. I'm glad you said that. But I just like it. You It's a horrible feeling for me, of course. Yeah. But it makes you a person, right? I'm just He did a great job with it. He's a good He's He's a really talented filmmaker and it was a heavy subject. He had to go through. I mean just thousands upon thousands of raw footage that I had never looked at. So somehow he over like a course of a year or more absorbed it all, watched it all, you know, pinned the things he thought was important as he's doing it. Did were you rolling on on John Leer every time you were there? Every single time. How much footage? That was a year, dude. Ask Michael, he'll tell you the exact thousands of hours, man. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, dude. I How many year? you know, eight, nine years filming with Lear. But, but like the first time that I went out to film with John Lear, I was such a dumbass. I like I figured like, you know, what's the first question you ask? What is your greatest piece of evidence that UFOs are real and extraterrestrials exist? You know, it was like that that was my I just came in hot like that. And it it just I thought it was simple like this guy had something. It wasn't that. Um, it's an accumulative weight of relationships and evidence and understanding that brought John to some weird places that that he believed. How did he come to trust you? I think trust uh fluctuated with with me and John. I can see it in the movie. Yeah. I I was his least favorite person sadly towards the end of his life. Yes. He is a very complicated guy. Um, he had a great sense of humor. He had a great laugh. I I loved him like family. Always will. Um, but it was a kind of up and down relationship. So, at first, of course, he doesn't trust me and he's using me. And he wouldn't even talk to me about UFOs. Like, that's real. When you see him just like smoking his cigar and barely looking at me, and then he'll go take a nap. It was just like he's letting me film him like a animal in the zoo. Like, it was just really bizarre. And that's the His whole setup is weird, man. It was like a hoarder. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. TVs everywhere. I mean, it was like like a sci-fi set. It was like a sci-fi set. But this was like legit, man. This is Yeah, though. That's John came as he is. Like that's that's John Lear. I mean, the whole TV thing like back in the day, he would have like CNN on one, you know, Fox on another, BBC, you know, he'd have all the news separated on these TVs. Um, and then he he'd be playing tapes, reviewing stuff. People would mail him rand like me now. People mail random things and you're like, should I even watch this? So that that setup was probably useful at one time, but I'm kind of coming in at the twilight of of his life, you know. He was a very different person before I met him is what I've heard from everybody. Um, and he was he was fucking with me from time to time, you know. Um, the whole thing with this toilet was, um, I just kept like I'm trying to like film and there's this constant toilet just ghost flushing, which by the way costs a lot of money. I'm dealing with that right now with apartments. You have to put a dye in the top of the toilet. You have to wait five minutes and see. It's like this whole So, I had grown up knowing how to deal with this and it just drove me crazy. So, I Yeah. People don't know that you you make your living with real estate and apartments and management. That is my actual job. You're right. UFOs. You're not making a fortune from your UFO. Unfort unfortun I'm a hor [laughter] I'm a horrible griff. I am told even by your own brother like we are not monetizing you know our podcast. Well, um for me this is um I like having financial independence because it puts me in a unique position with journalism where I don't have to work for a big company and I don't have to get like benefits from them. So, I will maintain my apartment and house uh renovation business because that is what has always fed my family and I can rely on it because those are fixable problems. Um, literally just fixing uh some apartment toilets uh 3 4 days ago. So, but I I love that. I love that because they are fixable problems and it relieves my mind. It's like going back to the computers with like you know unbolting them unbolting them back. It's very simple. With John, it was very simple. Fixed his toilet so it wouldn't make this sound when I was recording. Then he realized, "Gold mine. I've got a smuggler and a handyman." Yep. And man, did he put me to work. So, yes. All around the house. All around the house. What are you fixing? Everything. And he thought I was a computer wiz, too. And I wasn't. I'd have to like call my brother who's like way into computers and ask him. And then half the time John would just have his cap locks on. [laughter] There was no light on the thing. And like, you know, I saw that rat's nest of wires under his table. Oh, god. I had to sleep on that floor the first number of times. And I was, yeah, cuz I didn't have a ton of money. And it was like I was going out there every weekend that I could, you know, and buying the gas and, you know, so he let me stay after some time. Would let me stay at his place. I I graduated to George Knapp's place. He he put had mercy on me after he saw my living conditions, you know. Um, but yeah, it was just many years of getting to know these guys. And that's why I can tell you for a matter of fact that John Lear um was not a dis a paid disinformation guy from the CIA. I've heard that a bunch, right? Dude couldn't even tie his own shoelaces properly, you know, because of his illness and stuff. He just didn't have it in him. He believed the things he would tell you unless he was testing you and and telling you things just to see how far he could make you, you know, go. He believed some far out stuff, man. He He did. He did. What did he get right? Yeah, that was the the interesting stuff. It was a lot of the Area 51 stuff because he'd have pilots come over from Nellis when I was there and he would, you know, he still had a lot of connections within intelligence agencies and he was like this guy that people would just talk to. Um, for some reason, maybe because they knew there would be no judgment because he didn't have a bullshit meter. John didn't like he would just take everything as gospel. It was it was super bizarre to me. And I don't know if that was just later in his life or if he was always like that, but he was definitely a safe person to talk with other than the fact that, you know, he he would blab about it. You to be careful of that. Yep. You know, but but I think a lot of people came to him because he wouldn't judge him. They could tell him the weirdest stuff that has ever happened to them, what they saw, and he he would just listen. And that was really cool to document that over the years of him just absorbing people's um traumas, their stories, you know. Did you facilitate that meeting with Sleeper? The guy was it Lou Bowden is his name? Lou. Yeah. I really like Lou. Like um you know that's the thing with intelligence agents too. Like even when they've tried to entrap me before like straight up Sure. I've had to give that to my lawyer. I can still like somebody like they're doing a job right. The Lou the Lou Balden thing was was pretty weird to me. Lear would talk about this guy Sleeper who came to Earth on a craft. But the way he would talk about him was like UFO Jesus, you know, like everything this guy says is so and it it just really perplexed me cuz John is was hyper smart. You know, he could um he could draw photo realism. John Lair with a pencil. Really? Yeah. He's a fucking genius. No question. No question. Yeah. So I was like, "John, you can draw." He goes, "Yeah, I draw, you know." Well, photo voter realism. He goes, "Yeah." I go, "Well, show me one." He goes into this big old thing, pulls out. What does he draw? A urinal. Like that was [laughter] that was so John Leair. It was a perfect porcelain manstanding urinal. I'm like, "Gorgeous." Just [laughter] just gorgeous urinal. But that was so Lear, you know? Genius and crazy. They're right next to each other. Yeah. I asked him if he thought he was crazy and he laughed at me, you know, but did he answer it? Yeah. He goes, "No." He goes, "If I am, it's it's been a fun ride." He goes, "But uh no, I know what I'm saying is true." And um he was he was committed to that. So the things he got right was a lot of like the the test site stuff. Like how he got prominence in the first place was he went into Ned Day, which is um George Knap's mentor in journalism. Yeah. and he's he told him about the stealth fighter, right, which was um at the time a very top secret uh plane and to the point where the FBI come in and they start shaking down Ned Day. And Ned Day finally says, "Look, I'm a small Las Vegas, Nevada reporter. If I can find out about the stealth fighter, then you sure as shit the Russians and the Chinese know as well. I did you a favor, right?" So John had really come in and broken helped them break a couple really good stories. He had so many sources and contacts out um at Area 51 at Nellis in general and in these other agencies that he would get, you know, nuggets of truth, the stuff that, you know, come to find out 20 years later that he was right about 51 and this or that. So he had a lot of good information but but zero filter. If he if somebody he trusted said, "We got people living on the sun." He would tell you, "We got people living on the sun." And you just kind of sit back like, "Does he really believe it?" And um I come to find out some of it he did. Like um he told me, "Did he believed that his soul that like our souls are being harvested by the on the moon that story by Lou to the best of my assessment, John Ler firmly believed that and cuz I saw I in the movie it was such a crazy sequence. I'm glad Michael put it in there. Yeah. Where Luke says, "But John Leer, he's got a ticket, right? Out out of the out of the prison planet." And John's like, "Is my ticket still good?" He's like, "Yeah, yeah, good." He's like, "Okay, cool." I mean, so you're describing something in the movie that I think I hope when people see that why I think Michael left that in the movie is because that does show you he's sitting there in the sunset of his life and this guy Lou Balden wrote him a thing basically a pass to to get through the the pearly gates or something and and he firmly believed that they let he left a lot of stuff out of the movie. Um it was really uncomfortable for me. So, I got I got um Lou and I bring him in and I want them to meet because this is kind of one of John Ler's like dying wishes was to go to 51, which we did again by the way before he died. Yeah. I took him out to the Rachel Bar and Grill and we got shook down by two intelligence because they know John L. of course. Yeah. So, but they were like overt. It was bad contact. They come up to me inside of um inside of the the A in they called it and they're standing right by where my batteries are charging in the wall and my backpacks. I can't get around them. And they there's a man and a woman and they uh they say, "Hey, uh Jeremy, what are you filming?" And I go, "I'm just uh filming some interviews with like uh John Lair." They go, "Well, you know, I I said, "How how did you get here?" Cuz I I didn't see him walk in. And they're like, "We flew in." And I'm like thinking to myself, "Oh, they're they're trying to flex on me because the only people flying in are coming from the base." So they identified themselves as naval intelligence. And they said to me, "Where's Bob Lazar?" Which is just this bizarre thing for me to, you know, where's Bob Lazar? Because you didn't connect with Bob yet. No, I had not met Bob Lazar. And I was filming with John Leer. This is like my my indoctrination into the high stranges, right? I'm standing there and they're they're really trying to be ominous like trying to press me a little bit. I never experienced that before that time with agents. And I was just being a kind of shithead. I go, "He's right there." And there's a photo of Lazar on the wall. So, I was kind of taking the piss out of him. Oh, and I does not have a sense of humor about this. Right. Right. [laughter] Um, and so, yeah, stone cold face like that. They didn't even look where I was pointing my finger and they're like, "You're not thinking about going over the gates, are you?" I go, "Oh, no. I wouldn't think about doing that. I I hear there's a $600 fine if you do that." Like I [laughter] was just like messing around. So at the time John was sleeping in the car cuz he take a lot of naps, you know, so he had kind of was done with it and I had just been interviewing. You were safer with the Serbian dude than here. Yeah. Yeah, quite possibly. Um no, they were they were just trying to flex on me, dude. And um so John's like just passed out in the car in my Scion Toyota. He's like, you know, fold the seat back. He's completely snoring. I come to the window. I'm like, dude, we got to go like that. [laughter] And he go, "What? What?" And I go, there's just the two on the the female and male. They're in there. They're um O and I they just, you know, started asking me. He goes, you met aliens. That was that was John's reaction. [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. John's reaction was you met aliens and they they came to shake us down. So we didn't go um to the gates after that because I I come to realize they know we're there, you know, and uh but he got to see, you know, kind of the proximity of Area 51 again before he died. That was pretty neat. And then he wanted to meet Lou. So, I flew Lou in on a Southwest flight and he comes in and you see their very first meeting and interaction. What you don't see, because I guess the Michael said the movie's not about that, but what you don't see is like they go out into the tennis courts um that John had. They were all overgrown, looked like a zombie tennis court. Nobody had played there for 20 years. And wow. Wow. You know, we wheel him out and they sit there and I film it and John's like crying and he's like, you know, I I I don't want to go yet because of Damian who is his grandson and Damian had kind of some hard things happen in his life. But that's when I could see that he's like talking to this guy Sleeper Lou Baldin and he really believes that, you know, there are soul catchers that the aliens are involved and he's worried about his son who he's known or sorry, his uh grandson who he's known has been abducted. And I don't know, man. I call this UFO disease. It's like when people get so deep into this and they don't know the answers. We don't know the answers. We like to fill it with what feels best to us. And I really fight against that. I've heard it all, man. I've heard every theory from incredible people. Y I don't know the answer. And so I'm not going to fill it in because I've seen that go wrong with everybody, man. But you naturally want to fill it in. You want to So you just leave the hole there. Leave the hole. Be Be okay with it. You and Michael should talk about doing like an extended cut. So, I'd love to see some of that stuff. Yeah, it's awesome. Um, it was kind of heartbreaking to see your relationship with John. Those last sequences were rough, man. Yeah. When he died, were you not on good terms? We were not on good terms. Um, basically what happened was, so I've been filming for a number of years and, you know, the idea was, hey, um, I'm going to make a movie out of this footage. and you know that made him feel good and that was the plan to do so. Um but what happened was he stopped my ability to do that. He basically signed over you know his life rights to a family member on a napkin which completely cut out my ability to have autonomy on the film. So at that time I had gotten very close with George. We had started working together. There was a trust that we built over time. And I had also met Lazar and I had always told Lazar I was like three minutes of you talking would would mean so much to the world right now because everybody for for over a decade has I mean probably longer than that has been lying about you. And I know that now knowing you and I've known all your friends and I've I've I've heard from you this stuff. Just let me push record for like 3 minutes. And that's that funny scene where when he actually first comes in. Well, hang on. We'll get to Bob in a second. I I want to know what was going on when he signed away the rights. Was Is that just a fuck you to you? You know, he you were there for you. I mean, you you helping him put a shirt on. I know. Pillows on the couch. You know, I I I don't I don't know. He he was a complicated guy. And I think that I I don't want to say it. I I just feel like maybe people were taking advantage of him a little bit, you know, like everybody thought he was a meal ticket, you know? So, I just like I don't know why he did that. I don't know why. I I didn't take it personally, right? No, I didn't take it personally. It was like, you know, he had a tumultuous situation going on in his life. If you just kind of look through public record, tumultuous situation and I feel like he said it to me like this is what we're up against. And I go, "What do you mean this is what we're up against? Like why did you do that? Like it it cuts out I'm like I have I have literally done this for all these years and I have nothing that I can like this doesn't help get a movie made about you." So I just kind of like it just didn't feel right anymore. I didn't take it personally like it didn't I understand his psychology. It just I don't know if he was at the time of right mind when he did that. He was on a lot of pain pills and stuff. You mentioned that that he wasn't getting the right care at the end. That that's, you know, I'm not one to judge that. I just um Yeah, I would say I would say it didn't feel right to me. He didn't look good. He did not look good. He flatlined once uh in between our filmings. Um that's that call you hear. He's not doing so good. I say come out cuz he had flatlined earlier that week. So we knew he was kind of like, you know, not long for this earth. Um, so but he ended up living longer and long enough to be pissed at me. But what he was pissed about was I ended up making a film that I could make and it wasn't about him and I think that really pissed him off and then he had some poisonous people in his ears, you know, saying that I just used him that whole time to get to Lazar or something like that. Not true. No. And and George knows that. Everybody that was there know that I really in good faith was trying to make that film. He made it impossible. You know, it's clear it was in good faith. Yeah. All right. So, then uh I guess you get a call from John or John tells you, "Hey, Bob's coming over." Well, I was actually there already. You were there at at John's house. I was at John's house. And he had always kind of said this thing that like, you know, oh, Lazar might come over for my birthday cuz I filmed a couple of his birthdays at that point. So, he was always kind of using that as like a, you know, come down and hang out with me and bring me some Philly Titans, you know, fix some toilets. Bob could show up. Bob can show up, you know. So, I didn't fall for that anymore. But then sure enough, one day um I guess Bob was in town and I was there and um he called through and respectfully I turned off the camera when they were talking cuz uh Lear would always want me to film every time he was on a call with like Dr. Mitchell and all these people and I just it just felt weird cuz they didn't know, you know? Right. So, I'd turn off the camera. You really did? Yeah. Every time. Yeah. Cuz I I don't This is Yes. I'm not like um a lot of a lot of dudes would would roll. But then how you gonna use it? I don't know. Can't use it. Can't use it. It's not moral to use it. It's not. Yeah. Unless Unless you unless you ask them after. Yeah. Your morality got in the way of Well, now now I record everything. So So now like my my life now everything is recorded. Like I have Nest cameras in my house and they're 24/7. Every call is on speakerphone. That's for my own. So no one can lie about what I say, which people have tried to do, of course. So everything is documented to a high degree in my life now. So did you tell Bob in advance? We're not rolling. You're we're good. Yeah. So I actually took the um camera and tripod and everything and the recorder and I put them away. Oh, nice. Just so that when he came in cuz I didn't know it was like, you know, you trap a feral animal. Like I didn't know what he was thinking. He had not come public at all and you had just seen people saying all this garbage about him. And again, I know all his friends now so I know it's bullshit. So when he comes like 2012 or so. I'm so bad with that. But probably around we can look at the time stamp on the footage. But John died I think in 2016. Okay, that makes sense. Okay. Yeah. I mean, so I I have to go back to footage and look at timestamps to know exact dates, but just like Bob wasn't super famous. No. So that was the whole thing. It wasn't in pop culture and so I didn't want him to feel trapped and you know, Lear just wanted anything to be filmed at all times. So, I put away all the cameras and stuff and then Bob comes in with joy and they just have a pow-wow and they're laughing doing all this stuff and then I see my kind of opening and I say, "Look, I I don't know if you're telling the truth or not. Like, I have no judgment on it. I would I would love to know, but here's what I do know. And I do know that people are saying the craziest stories about you that aren't true. It's very targeted. They're trying to dismiss you. Like, can I just turn on the camera for 3 minutes? It will make a huge difference. you know, put it out on the internet. I was thinking something like that. And he said, "Yeah." So, I I just got the cameras turn around and that and that's the first footage you see. Actually made like a short little film about it because he went far longer than 3 minutes and that's the first time you hear Bob Lazar put his foot down and say, "I know that UFOs are real. I was inside one. I know they're made with a a a science and a material that we we have never been able to make." Um, and he just went on this rant and John was looking at me like, "Holy shit." Because he had never heard Bob stand up for himself in that way. So, I knew that that was an important moment to to learn about who Lazar really is. And how how did you get him to do that? Was this another grandma moment? I asked No, I asked him. I said, "Can I just film the three minute? Can I film a little bit?" And he goes, "Sure." And then I said that thing before like, "I don't know if you're telling the truth, but I know people filling in voids." And however I set it up, he just unloaded. And that was the coolest thing cuz imagine me, I'm like, I had always heard about this guy Lazar, especially from John and all those people. And he's throwing down. I'm looking at him being like, "Oh, that's not that he does not seem like a liar to me right now." He does not. Now, I had cause to believe or to know that a lot of what Lazar talked about is actual, but I didn't know if Lazar had been there and that he had seen the things he said he saw. That's what kind of started me on this is that I I had previous understanding that this was likely true, but I didn't know was he being used as like a disinformation guy, you know? I didn't know. Mhm. But I get to know him, get to know everybody around him. I see how they some of them don't like each other, how they don't. I'm like, this is not some big conspiracy. They are all telling it from their perspectives. The one thing they agree on is that Lazar did work out there, that he did have the job he said he did, and that all these little things happened like he'd come back to Leers and kind of spill some beans and John's like, "Dude, [clears throat] don't come over here after working out there. They're going to, you know, they're going to follow you." So, it was like this crazy time where George Knapp and all them were being followed. And George will tell you, he's like, "You had to have been there to really understand what that pressure was like." He goes, "My newsroom was tapped." He goes, "Now we all think, oh, NSA, we're all tapped." He goes, "Not back then. Back then to tap a newsroom was unbelievable at the time." And so, it was it was a different era. So, there's Bob. He says his thing, he leaves. John's like, "I have never heard him talk like that." And I said, 'Well, maybe maybe, you know, he's sick of it. Maybe he wants to show people who he is now, right? Because it's a natural thing. People shit on you for 10 years, and at some point, you're going to get pissed. Yep. And and Bob is not a pushover. No, he's a gentle guy, but don't piss him off. You can see him get pissed in his eyes when he talks about It's hurt his life, man. Of course, if you believe anything that he said about the repercussions of this that have happened to his life, which some of it's public record, you know, being raided for no reason, um, all this stuff, it's a way to pressurize the situation and make you shut up. So, whether you believe him or not about UFOs, there are some things that we know about Bob that have happened and it is it's a pressure cooker, you know. Yeah. They he got raided and they multiple times they made his life miserable. They did. where other whistleblowers not so much, but Bob they did or behind the scenes sometimes with other whistleblowers. Sure. Sure. Um, you were probably the first one to bring Bob Lazar to the to the mainstream. What did you think about Luigi's movie recently? Yeah, I I think it was really important because Bob has always said um it's important that people could kind of see what I saw. So for Bob, it meant a lot to get those details right because he said everything he can possibly say, but he said that saying it is different than seeing it. And with a big thumbs up, Bob's like, "That's what it looked like." And so I think that that's a real service. I don't know much how much farther people can dissect his story because he's said it all. He's shown it all. There's nothing big he's hiding from anybody like a name or something like that. so he can be the judge if someone's uh fooling him or not. I've had so many people come to me be like, "I worked with Bob out there, blah blah blah." And I know the questions to ask and if I don't, then I put it over to Bob and he has certain things that he will hold back just so he knows if somebody was ever out there or not. You know, it's smart, but the core of his story, there's nothing more that he can tell. No. And he says, "I don't know more often than not." Right. Did you ever come across Dan Burrish in your travels? Yeah. He's full of shit. Oh, he's full of shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I But I mean, George has a whole thing about that, but I I think the important thing is um about Lazar's story. So, we were in a different era in 2018 that was just on the cusp where things started to change about UFOs because of the 2017 article and whatnot, but it was still very much in the shadows, especially Bob. My movie was just to show people. So, my movie is called Bazar, Area 51, and Flying Saucers. I I lucked out. Got a couple movies on Netflix, one on Hulu. I'd never made a movie in my life. Again, it's like this imposter syndrome. I'm not a filmmaker, but I I lucked out with distribution. So, when that movie came out, what I wanted people to see, I wasn't trying to prove the details of Lazar's story. I was trying to humanize him. I want you to see this is Bob. This is his life. This is Joy. Oh, by the way, he actually is a scientist. He works in scientific capacity. He has a laboratory. He does inc He is the more science guy that I've met than most scientists. Like, he's hands-on physically doing stuff. He's got a cool business. He's got a cool life. He's got doggies. So, I just wanted you as a viewer to see like you're talking about beyond the two-dimensional. Yes. And see him as a person cuz he's flattened his 2D. Yeah, man. More than anybody. And so, if you could see that, I was figuring in my mind. If you could see what I've seen, then you have to contend with what he said in a different way. I'm not fighting for one side or the other. I have my own personal um conclusions that I've come to, but that's what my movie what I wanted it to do was just to allow you in so you see him as a human. So then you have to contend with what he said in a different way rather than just dismissing often times based on stuff that he never said. So that was that's what my movie was about and it burst into pop culture in a way I could never Storm 51. I mean I could never have imagined. Yeah, that was you. It was going to get crazy. That was you. Well, that was a kid named Maddie. I know, but Well, he watched the Rogan episode Bob and then he watched the movie and he started a meme and it started something that was so out of control that George and I were like, "hm, maybe we should take a little control of this and try to make it like a good thing." So, he George went to report on it and I like called a crazy ass musician who I didn't even know he was like popular and had him come out. tried to tried to steer the conversation rather than it being Did you get a call from somebody like, "Dude, if this is you." Um, no. I was never officially reached out to Okay. in formal capacity by the FBI or Department of Justice on that one. On that one. [snorts] On that one. But they definitely uh uh made it they were definitely present at the event overtly badged, of course. Right. Terrible. Yeah. They no one no one blamed me for that. It was it was something out of control and pop culture. But that is just to show that people were so hungry to hear about the UFO stuff that even now to this day I think it's the most popular podcast um on on Joe's is was with Lazar, the first Lazar. Yes, it is. It really it it it punctured something into pop culture and that was really neat. So I think the new movie is amazing because you get to see according to Bob what he saw and I think that's cool. Um, there are a couple of key moments in in UFO history. I One of them would be probably Bill Moore's book about Roswell. Another one is your movie about Lazar. Do you do you feel that? Do you do you realize how much part of history you are? So, no. Um, in the No. And and that's always people have said that to me before things. I have no rearview mirror, man. I am like a forwardlooking. I'm just like no rearview mirror. I I I I I know that George and I have made some noise. I know that we brought out a bunch of military videos. Um I'm glad the world is embracing this mystery, but I I don't you know, I've got more questions than answers. Man, we're like we're just starting with this thing. I think was Lazar the first time you used the totem pole expression like you wanted to make a totem pole is something that's woripped or something that's burned. Okay. Was that I don't know. It was something you said a while ago. I thought it was really interesting. Right. I don't know. The reason I ask it is because you're kind of becoming that as well as a totem pole. It's um they're going to burn me. They're trying to Yeah, I noticed that. But there's also you also have followers. Mhm. There's an esquetology. There's Here here's here's what's what's weird is What's esquetology? Just a a belief system. Mhm. You're a leader of a belief system. Almost a faith. You're almost like a faith leader. I don't know if you feel that. No. Um, you're always up against compartmentalization, all these different things. And yet I see in your methodology, encrypted files, information that comes out, it's it's very planned. You're compartmentalizing. Do you ever do is that a tension for you that you're kind of doing what they're doing? Okay. The the idea that I'm a gatekeeper to something. Is that the idea? No, cuz this isn't an attack question. Yeah. No, I'm open to any question. I want to clarify things that people misunderstand. So, but I'm glad you brought up gatekeeping. I didn't I didn't think I've been accused of that. Like I I of course my mom will send me when people say nasty shit about me online. But I can I I would like the right to explain to people what journalism is like, what we have to go through, how we have to protect sources. The the last thing that that George and I are doing is holding information back. Look at our history. We have put out more than anybody when it comes to these things that should not be seen and we don't do it lightly. Every time you do that, you put a a source at risk every single time. And the footage isn't even as good as when the government puts it out. If I put something out with George, all of a sudden people are saying, "Well, what's the frame rate? The frame rate's off, you know, blah blah blah." Like, we take shit for it. All we're trying to do is put out the best we got. Now, when the government puts out a piece of footage, it's directly off a server. There's no frame rate discussion. There's no source that's that's getting um in a compromised situation. The onus is on our government. They have said that they're going to be transparent about UFOs. All we've been doing is journalism. We've been provoking truth. We've been provoking the release of data and information. It's not like we we stand behind every piece of footage of that's an alien spacecraft. We've never that's not our position. We're trying to get the stuff that is being hidden, that is a public interest, if it is safe to do for sources and, you know, for America. Last thing I want to do is hurt our country, right? Trying to get it out to the public. It's much better when our government does it like they said they were going to do. So, I'm not holding anything back. I am thoughtfully and respectfully trying to get as much out as possible with George that doesn't compromise sources because that is my number one obligation 100%. Yeah. If someone comes to you and they provide you something sensitive, you need to assess cuz you're you I'm going to be on the hook for it with George. You need to assess. Is it going to blow back and hurt sources? And if it is, um can't do it. I I don't I wouldn't feel good about myself. You you can't do it. Yeah. Um, so speaking of George, I get accused of that, by the way, all the time. Of what? Of of gatekeeping. Like I'm doing what the government's doing. I'm Dude, I'm doing the opposite, man. No, it's I'm just more I'm worried about you, I guess, having all these pieces scattered around. Mhm. Like if something happens, you have a plan. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, George and I do. Yeah. Like I've said before, like there's there's everything that we've ever accumulated is not going to go lost if something goes wrong with me and George. like very simple, you know, over the years to to make sure that um some there's no dead end with our reporting, a simple process. Actually, something you said in the movie that it's going to frustrate a lot of people, but there's no way around it is there's some stuff that you guys have to hold back because of national security because you just have to. You want me to give you a concrete example if you want. I mean, because there's no defense for that. Like it's like guys, I'd love to tell you about this, but we can't. We really Well, there is a defense for it. I mean, um, so big picture, holding back for national security, like that's not my job. I'm not qualified to, my lawyer will tell you I'm not qualified to assess that kind of thing. I I will tell you though that it is has been made incredibly clear to me that for example if there's a Russian submarine that is breaching and there are in thermal there are two lenticular objects coming from left of screen to the right. Now will that one piece of footage crack the egg? Is it better than a piece of footage without a a Russian submarine in it? Right. Y um No, it's not. Right. So, when you're assessing, you know, with national security in mind, I have been told directly that that that type of footage is really bad for American defense. So, the question becomes, what's the the value in a piece of footage compared to others? Now, I'm I'm I I have nothing like that. things like that have passed in front of my eyes. I'm familiar with that kind of stuff. Um I've been shown a lot more than I've ever George and I have ever um obtained. But the defense for national security is very simple. It it's not on me to release that kind of thing. Our government has said we're going to open the books on it. Now, we're watching. We want to make sure. But if I had to choose um what George and I report on, if something's going to give away a strategic advantage um that the US doesn't want taken away, then I have to think about that like a person, too. You do. Yeah. So, I just I understand, you know, everybody wants everything out, all that stuff. We're not in a position to make that choice a lot of the time. I'm 100% with you. that why would somebody ever also give journalists something like that when you've seen that George and I have put stuff out that has not endangered national security. So even though I'm aware of something doesn't mean I'm in position to um actuate it into public domain. It's annoying. I It's annoying but I I there's no way I'm doing my Look, I'm doing my best. If somebody can do better, they should do it. Yeah. No, nobody could do better. Um, well, hope hopefully people will. It's be you have the right moral center for it. Like you're you're you were chosen for this. No one else could do this. Um, tell me about how you and George hooked up. That's an amazing team of man. Poor man. He's the best. What a legend. Yeah. And it's so cool cuz you go from you go Ned Day who's like his mentor. Someone comes into the newsroom. Ned Day says UFOs if it if I don't know about it, it didn't happen. And George says, "I'll track it down." And here you are, right? You're you're like you're you're the next Yeah. You're just carrying the same torch. Yeah. He's really um Yeah, I was really shocked, man. The way George, you know, cuz I'm I haven't hadn't made any movies or anything like that. And I've told this story before, but it was just it was really hard to get to George. Uh you know, harder than the president during an election. I said, but it's true. He has all these like layers like and he just doesn't answer his phone a lot. And as he's gets older too, definitely doesn't answer his [laughter] phone. But it was like at the time I I just hit this sweet spot and I just remember that he, you know, I get on the phone with him and he just unloaded and it was probably the longest conversation that we had ever had to date. It was almost like a pressure valve and you know, I said, "Look, I'm not trying to like um, you know, I'm not trying to hurt anybody. I just want to know the truth." You know, did he know you? How did he trust you? I I I I just called the news station. I emailed a few times over the course of two years. I reached out kind of respected, you know, without being like um too much trying to get through. You've probably experienced that. And um just hit a sweet spot. So finally he his news director called me back and I was totally unprepared for this call and he goes, "Hold for George Nap." I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, what? Hold for George Knap." And then he took mercy on me. He's like, "Can I give you a piece of advice?" I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "Know what you have to say. Say it succinctly and just listen." Okay. Yes, sir. [laughter] So, I did that, you know. I mean, is Jeremy Corb just really worth and then uh George just unloads and he tells me, "Here's what I know. Here's what I don't know. Here's here's here's what I suspect." You know, it's just kind of these three things he did. And and and then, you know, it was like the first time I went over to his place and I told him, "I'm working on this thing. I want to make this film on Lear, but it's really confusing. What are you feeling? What are you feeling on the drive to George Knap's house? Uh, fuck. I I don't know. Um, I wasn't really in this world. I wasn't really in the UFO world, you know? So, it was just, you know, like I'm I'm driving to George Nap. I don't really get nervous about stuff cuz I don't think it through a lot of the time. I'm just kind of just straight up honest. I just don't I just kind of go, you know, and um I'm oftentimes in rooms I shouldn't be in and like I only reflect on that later like why the fuck am I here? Um so I just felt like excited like maybe I'm going to get a little bit more truth, you know, but then George and I just hit it off, man. You know, we're talking and probably not a lot of people could have held the conversation with so many details about it like I could. It was almost like Lear was like I was training for my black belt with you know and like you know learning some of the crazy and it was so relieving to hear George Knap say well that's fucking bonkers or no let me tell you a real story about that. So he probably enjoyed the idea that he could tell me what he had been going through with all these characters over time. So it was just kind of neat. And then I think one of the first things we did we called Nellis together and I I filmed this. Yeah man. Um, and it's different than when I call Nellis and ask about site 4 and all this stuff. And when George Knap calls Nellis, they take it very seriously. Really? Yes. Because he's George motherfucking Nap. Right. And so he's the lead investigative reporter of Las Vegas, Nevada for like at the time like 30 plus years. So I was like, "Yeah, man. I've been trying. I can't get through to Ni." So I remember we sit down and he calls the public information officer who he knew, right? [laughter] And so like um they're like, "Mr. Naba, we'll get back to you. And it was a specific question about uh any designation of S4 or site 4 on the base. And when they actually left an audio message, so so I I recorded that as well. I don't know if I've ever put it out, but they're they're like, "We have no" and he's kind of giggling. He's kind of laughing. He's like, "We have no sight for specifically designated on our maps." You know, so he was trying to tell George, "Yeah, of course we got a site for you already called, you know, 10 years ago." No, we do. But it was a cool um thing. So So yeah, with with George, we kind of uh together we've had a lot of fun being able to um ask the hard questions. He says it in the movie and it's great. He said almost word for word like I love catching them in bullshit. He does. He loves He's such a warrior. So, one time I go to um the Atomic Testing Museum, and this is really before George and I had worked a lot together. And there was the head of the CIA's um history person, a historian, and then a guy who is head of science and technology at Area 51. This is all filmed. You can see it on like online. And they're having some panel and it's all about Area 51, all the cool things that happen there. And George is like hosting it and I'm in the front row with my Canon 5D like [laughter] this and he goes, "I think I think that guy has a question over there." So he like threw me in and I go, "Are you aware of a movie called UFOs past, present, and future fully funded by the CIA?" essentially the CIA historian and they talk about and I just did this whole thing and they like whisper to each other like it got a little tense cuz I was like the UFO guy. But that was the first time George kind of threw me in as the harpoon to ask the questions that nobody else was going to ask. Was that in the movie? No, that's not because there was a whisper answer in the movie as well. Did he show He might have shown a clip of that. Yeah, he might have showed that was um Petite is his last name. He was the lead historian for the CIA. You just see them take the question, they whisper. Yes. Okay. It was and like we had So he showed a clip of that. There's a there's a longer version so you can see what I asked. Oh, I'd like to see that. Yeah, but that was my first experience of George kind of like I guess trusting me enough to throw me in like a harpoon to ask a question. I think that kind of like started it off for us a little bit. And then man, shit just really blew up um in the UFO land after we started working together with OAP and the ATIP and all the stuff. It was really be became something. So it was good timing. How did you and George decide to start the podcast? I think I just roped him into it. I like um I told him I was like, "Man, you know, every time we do something like I I put it out on my like little website or it was actually Rogan who who who told me you got to film a podcast. Why?" And he goes, "Cuz do you think there would have been a viral moment if you just heard Elon smoking a joint?" And I'm like, "Oh, that's a good point." Like so the idea of filming it kind of came to us and I you know he does his new he had you know full-time news guy and I was just putting stuff out on the extraordinary beliefs website for my films and I I was just like man you know we could do something where we just go after these stories do it together. I kind of you know just pull them into it man and I think he's enjoyed it so far. Sometimes he gets mad at me. It's a lot of work that I mean that was my next question is like what do you and George disagree on about this stuff? I mean, because you've admitted that he's more skeptical or he's harder to convince. Depends on what. So, like I Yeah. I mean, like I I I would I'm like allergic to the paranormal ideas like you know that just to be honest like I don't grasp that stuff. That's what I like about you. Yeah. And I just um so for me that's a heavier lift, but I've learned a lot by being more open to what those stories mean. And you know the my the litmus test I think you call it for me was like being thrown into the opportunity to go to Skinwalker Ranch before it was you know popularized in this way. So I I really had to kind of open myself up to understanding the UFO phenomenon if you just listen to people is far more complicated than potentially just spaceships coming from other planets. But it makes me uncomfortable like I'm not qualified. I don't know who is but that's where we kind of you know he has more experience with that kind of stuff. What does he what does he think he thinks is a physical craft? No, I I'd say it's the opposite. Like I came from the, you know, kind of nuts and bolts, but he had experienced so many other things and was much more informed. You know, he he had a fly on the wall opportunity with a lot of these government programs. You know, you want to start a conspiracy, George Knap has been at the center of everything. Everything. I mean the reason why Lazar comes forward, the reason why Harry Reid was interested in this, how the OAP got created, OAP would not I don't think OAP would have gotten created if it wasn't for George Knap because it was his book that sparked the interest of Dr. Latsky. So a lot of what we're seeing today, if you want to start a conspiracy, it centers around or at least George Knap was in the room for a lot of it. You know, it was a really interesting life that he had. Uh the movie is worth watching just to see George's house. [laughter] It's like it it fulfills every fan. The Emmys are lined up. The Peabody, the the books, the the the video tape. Did you guys ever find that video tape you were looking for? That crazy tape. Which one? I just I forget what the one in the brown case that shows the full cloud chamber test that was done over. Man, I have torn apart his entire house over a 15 almost 15 year period probably. I mean, I have digitized every blank tape I could find. um that even Bob is so pissed that they had like given that to a trustworthy news reporter to never lose and what did George just hide it in the best hiding place possible? Now he's had things go missing before which has been an issue but this was like in a nondescript brown case. It's supposed to show I mean everybody that was there I told I know everybody that was there. did a cloud chamber test to see if you could bend light with what Bob said was element 115 in a puck and George not being a scientific guy he said it looked like the light was bent the other science uh science people that were there in a home situation all described the same thing so that tape allegedly has that and they did give it to George for safekeeping I mean he is so pissed at himself about this but I'll tell you why there's hope he just found a whole bunch of stuff from the his Russian travels that like had never been digitized. Wow. Because his his house is like a museum of tapes and papers and you know he'll just find stuff sometimes. So to answer your question, no. Would it show what I think we're all hoping which is a bending of the light? Um they all say that that's is what happened. Everybody that's there that don't have cause to lie about it, right? Um it would be proof of something but it wouldn't be the ultimate proof. No, but it'd be something. It'd be something. Um, yeah, you guys got to digitize that that Russian stuff. He is. Yeah, they're they're already the kid. The kid, Michael, actually. Now I've got my successor, Michael. He's [laughter] doing the hard work now. Yeah, the kid. Yeah, the kid. Well, I don't I call a kid. He's younger than me. All right, we'll take a quick break. We'll come back. We'll talk UFOs. Okay. You probably probably get a lot of shit, a lot of email, a lot of stuff. You could say that. So, I've heard you I take a lot and [laughter] get a lot of emails. I've heard you say if you want to get your story out, I'm not the guy to call. Right. So, what when you get something, how do you vet it? Like, how do you spot bullshit right away? Cuz I'm sure you it you do. What makes you go sometimes it takes some time and sometimes you go could be serious. What's that process? Right. Yeah. I mean, look, um, one day I will fuck up and you know, it' be kind to me if I do. We're doing our best, but you know what I learned? Actually, it's funny. You know, you were saying, you know, George is one way, I'm the other. Like, I I'll argue with him that I am way more patient. You know, he's like a news guy. He's like ready to go, you know. Um, I'm more like the the the human guy, you know. I take my time, you know, just um sometimes really like years with people because they might have told me or shown me something really great, but I'm always feeling like people are trying to hurt me, dude. You know, I'm always trying to see that people trying to trip me up because I know it to be true because I've had interference. And that's a big point I want to get to about the movie is what we wanted you to understand. you know, the movie is really about journalism in my perspective and why it even exists. But before that, um, Cosmic Time. So, my aha moment with the UFO thing didn't come in the form of like a video or something like that. It it came in the form of government influence. And I didn't I didn't realize, you know, how people say you have intelligence agencies baked into the subculture. Okay. So, I'm I guess I was a little naive. I like, okay, cool story, grandpa. Like, you know, oh, you're you know, your computer's being hacked. Okay. Uh, cool story. You got your caps lock on. You know, I was just always this guy like feeling like the world's out to help me and not hurt me, right? Yeah. So that was but that was always like um what do you call instead of paranoia proninoia right you know everybody's trying to help me what's going on you know did you know about Richard Dodie you know and I back in the day of course but I figured that the guy's like doing his job and then I don't I don't know yeah I guess I knew about that so I guess I should have been more [laughter] I should have been more thoughtful about it right um but there's always many sides to that story like the way it was told to me from the Dodie you know individuals is that it really didn't take much to tip him over the edge with his belief system. Correct. So that that's why you have to be so careful, man, with what you choose to believe rather than have evidence for. But for me, the aha moment was just the amount of covert intelligence agency influence on the UFO space. And when I started interfacing with that, they quickly found out that I must have good sources because I could find out if somebody's up to something. Can you give an any examples? Sure. Okay. Um, they call it false friendship where you have somebody reach out to you and they're like a big fan of your work. They're they're NSA. All a bunch of us at NSA, you know, watch your show with you and George and, you know, all this stuff. Cool. Cool. You know, they're at like, let's say, Wright Patterson. They got a little office. They got some weaponized stuff around. [snorts] They take a little photo, which I don't think they should be doing. Wow. This is a cool I get these, too, man. Yeah. Oh, Missile Command is a fan of my show. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, so it's kind And look, maybe they are. I don't want to be like, you know, maybe they are, man. I've had people come from Locky, from Boeing. I've had people come up to me at a bar because I I sometimes I go hang out at this bar where all the employees uh come out from all the aerospace companies. Really? Yeah. I'll take you one time. You're in California. It's pretty cool. So, I always go sit out there and it's funny because the the gray shirts will come out. I believe that's Lockheed. And the black shirts will come out. I guess it's Rathon. And there's just this one pub. And I'll just sit there, man, like you know, like like bait, you know? I just sit there and then eventually somebody always breaks from the fold and like comes up and they they say strange things like one guy says, "History's going to remember you kindly." And I go, "What? What would you like? What' you say?" and he goes, "History is going to remember you kindly." I go, "What do you know?" You know, you know, I just I'm just kind of messing with them. Sometimes I I'll get their phone numbers or whatever. But um what I've learned is that someone, let's say, from NSA, they'll come and they'll um do this whole thing. I'm a fan of your show or I'm a kid at a at a facility where we look at um Reaper footage 247. I've done it six years. Dude, something crazy happened. So, so after they get to know you, all of a sudden it's something crazy's happened, right? And going back to the NSA thing, well, I called around and I have this unique ability to find out if people have other federal employment. And it's to the chagrin of some of these intelligence agencies because somewhere there must be a file that says you now have to have badged contact with Jeremy and George and you need to show them your puppy and tell show them you have a wife. Like, it's so funny. It's this playbook. It's like they always talk to me about my dogs and then they have a dog and like it's it's so playbook. It's like crazy. It must be in a file. You ever call anybody out on it all the time? Like it's it's a joke. It's like when you're messing with people, you ever heard those stories of like in Russia where like the the counterparts even though they knew they were spying on each other would like um go out and have drinks. That's like it's human nature, right? Of course. So, yeah, this is I think what really shocked the kid Michael who made the movie cuz he has seen a lot more than most people of these interactions. And as I told you, I document everything in my life out of self-defense. But anyway, my point is somebody that approaches me and says they work in one agency and they're just big fans of the show and then I find out something about them, which is I don't know, they're a liaison to the FBI. And you know, George and I ever since, you know, we've been kind of in this realm of reporting have had a lot of badged contact. They just want to, hey, respect you. You're a journalist. We're not messing with anything. We're more worried about foreign nations compromising you because then maybe you don't vet stuff and, you know, not just hurting America, but other nations could, you know, they're they're being good cop to you. Yeah. So, so I started seeing a lot of that happen and and Georgia, too. We've we've had a number of meetings about this and um and you required meetings. Well, you never say no. So that that's the thing like um only one time did did I did we say no, but I have a I have a federal lawyer who people now know who he is. Chuck McCull the third first ICIG. We've seen him on TV. Good lawyer to have. Right. So So he's kind of will will walk me through. You don't you know look I'm a curious dude first of all. So, even when he said before, there's no reason for you to take that meeting. I want to take it because I want to know what they're thinking. And he kind of laughs when I say that, but I'm serious. Like, I want to know what they're thinking. I've learned a lot by taking some of those meetings. Now, they understand strictly that uh George and I are doing our journalism first amendment, not to be fucked with. It will become a public issue if you try to influence overtly try to influence any of this shit. Um, so they're not going to tell you not to report on stuff, but they're going to tell you the guidelines and the rules, right, with national security, right? They they don't want you to get messed up, right? Hate to see something bad happened to you. Right. Right. Exactly. So, um, God, how deep to go into this. So, let's deep let's say I find somebody is liaz liazing with with FBI because they're doing an investigation on our sources or something like that. So this dude is patient for like four years and then when I'm in a heightened state of emotion, there's, you know, public things that have occurred. You know, there's this whole um slide of hand thing that happened in in Congress once and you know, people could tell I was kind of like upset. So slight of hand happened. Um as much as you want or as little as you want. Yeah. One of the hearings was not as it appeared. Oh shit. Yeah. And um people know it as the Immaculate Constellation one. People thought I was upset because some other journalist, you know, turned in my homework. That was not the case. There's a lot more to that story. There were prior meetings for 2 and 1/2 months. What I was worried about is who the public can trust, who sources can trust, who who the government and Congress is telling you can be trusted to bring sensitive information to. It is the hardest thing about testifying is getting there. Some of these whistleblowers you have never heard about because when they ask me to bring and we're going to have, you know, five people testify, how many do you want? Oh, you know, 12, 13. So, they want people to to bear themselves, put themselves at risk, saying, "This is what I would testify about, but we know not everybody's going to get selected." So, it takes balls of steel sometimes, uh, depending on who's testifying. Sure. Um, you know, to to actually put it all out and say, "I want to tell the public this. It's the right thing to do because not everybody's going to get selected." So, is that why you smuggled Matthew Brown in? Oh, god. We are um going That was great. Weirds. Yeah. So why did I So let's let's let's let's take back the word smuggled for a second. Okay. [laughter] No laws were broken. No laws are broken. Um okay. So I want to make sure to answer your question about government interference and then I'll I'll talk to you about the smuggling of Matthew. [laughter] It's a great story. Okay. Um, so then when I'm in a state where, you know, I'm vulnerable, it looks like I'm vulnerable or angry at least, then you get that same person under false friendship to try to get you to solicit, it's called, that's where they say, and it's it's entrament and is completely legal and it's where it is absolutely legal for them to do where they say, "Hey man, I don't know like I'm at my computers and like I'm really mad about what I'm seeing And is there anything you want me to get? No. No, bro. And these are career human intelligence people. They know exactly what they're doing. So in that realm, you have to be as a journalist really careful. And if they lie about what you say, that's why you have to record everything if you can, right? Because the they don't want to stop people from talking about UFOs. They want to shape the emerging UAP narrative. Yes. Best way to do that is have leverage. I I can't anymore count the number of times that I have directly been um invited to solicit and I have never and neither has George. And we I I was taught that day one from George. Like what are the rules here when you're reporting on shit that our government doesn't want you to report on? Uh to a high degree they don't want you to report on. So that is an example of the interference, but it's so much deeper. Man, I have just jumped into the viper pit with all this and it's not a cool place to be, right? So, I have to be so careful. And it's not just for me, but it's also for the people that I speak with, man. You know, the more I raise my head up, the more it puts pressure on anybody that talks to me. Like, I tell people a lot of time, I don't want to talk over the phone about stuff because you never know. We know for a fact that when I brought people under a nine-month investigation with ODNI, ODNI is the top intelligence agency run our 18 I think intelligence agencies, they did a 9-month investigation. First person they came to was me and George Knap. We go in, we were like, "Oh, you're going to get to the bottom of this. This is really great. This is a mandated thing." Ninemonth investigation. We told people, whistleblowers, if you go in and talk with them, we don't know that they're on the level. We don't know that they're not just doing a a human, you know, suck up information, who knows what, and that they're going to use that and weaponize that against you later. We don't know. But, you know, if we could help, go America. Do you guys want to talk to to these, you know, folks? So, people said yes. Most people said yes in good faith. And they did. I come to find out that it was a complete ruse. My lawyer said it really well. He says, "Jeremy, they don't need a podcast." He's ribbon at me. You don't need a journalist podcaster to know where the bodies are buried. You know, they they they're the ODNI. They'll know. So, this whole thing, he says, doesn't make sense. This feels to me like they're just trying to get information. But, you know, I don't know. Maybe I'm a little naive. I want, you know, I want openness. I want transparency. I want to, you know, put them with the people who willingly want to be, you know, put together. I thought it would give them some immunity. So, like with Matthew Brown and with Dylan Borland, if they testified to ODNI, they already did or Dylan already did with ICIG, I figured it would give them another layer of protection. They're doing the right thing, right? So, I You tell them don't go into a skiff. I I I I don't tell them what to do. Um I I tell them what the environment is. They wanted to to give testimony. They wanted to take these steps to do the right thing. Um, so it it just becomes s such a a brier patch um with these agencies and people and and false friendships. You really can't make a lot of new friends. Like I've I've learned that and I have to do like background on anybody that's really coming in into my life. And it's a very weird thing. I just thought I was doing journalism on UFOs, but then seeing all of this and the value system of some of the stuff that George and I have put out, we know that it's right on the cutting edge of, you know, you got to do it right. You you can't mess up. Anyway, so that that's the that was the first thing about government intervention. But the other thing he asked, what did you just ask? Well, Matthew Brown, but also how the movie came to be, right? So, the movie was um the kid Michael. I was like, "Here's Well, Michael saw that there's a lot of little vignettes that I did, but I had never really put out full things on the footage." How did you find him? How'd you guys He you know, he called and left a a voice message in an email, which is what I ask people to do because I just can't read all the emails. And so, he was smart like he he did it the way I asked. But I get, you know, probably like you, a lot of people want to help all the time. You can't trust people. You know what? How do you trust somebody coming into this? There has to be some sort of legacy of trust. But I was like dying, dude. I was like working my butt off. I was uh filming, editing, weaponizing. I'm not I'm a horrible editor. Like you I can't do it as fast as other people. This kid's right out of AFI. He's super slick. Got a great eye. He's slick. Yeah. And my wife's like, um, you need help. You need help. You can't. This is not sustainable. You're working 24/7 on just this reporting with George. You need help. So I called him back. Such a nice kid. Then I immediately regretted it. Pit in my stomach. like I can't let somebody in my life I don't know some of this stuff is sensitive but he came on to be a producer and editor and he produces all the weaponized so it was like over the course of like a year plus got to know him and his family realized that you know he's kind of like me like he just wants to know as much as he can and thinks it's important that's interesting that you really didn't trust him at first oh hell no I can't I can't man I've been burned a lot sure so um you know people would love to control mine and George's reporting. Oh, yeah. They would love to do that. And we have evaded that somehow, you know, to to date. Um, so the kid uh, you know, says, "Well, I I know you have a lot of footage you never put out. You know, can I look through it?" And I'm like, "Um, okay. I've got this huge drive. It's insurmountable amount of footage." He goes, "Oh, look. There's like a bunch of movies in there." So the whole idea for him was he was going to go through my you know 12 15 years of footage longer than that and cuz it was back stuff too and and he was like I'm going to make I I can make some movies out of it. I'm like good I'll never do it. I'm already on to this thing you should do it. Then he started actually seeing and hearing the interference like cuz he's he'd be on weaponized producing stuff. You know, I I'd show him some video or some calls just to inform him of the stakes of some of it. And he's like, "Dude, we got to show this. This is a First Amendment issue. This is a journalism issue. There's no reason why journalists like you and George should have this much um these many people during a time of war badge contacts sitting down where agencies are like, you know, watch what what you're doing or hey, we're doing this UFO program and we um you know, we just want to get a lay of the land and and George is patriotic, too, right? So, there's a part of us that really wants the good guys inside of these agencies and they are trying to figure it out. some of them are trying to figure it out um cuz they don't have access to the information like other agencies. So like with Congress where we can help, we help. And so that's where the the line changes from journalism to like activism. Like I I'm definitely setting up hearings. Like they'll call me like red hotline phone, we don't have a hearing. Do you know any whistleblowers? I'm like that are willing to talk. So I've kind of become a liaison between people that have something to say and with you know Congress but then also with agencies. Let me explain that before people go crazy. Right? If you're department of justice and so FBI and you hear that there are these swarms and these flyovers on critical infrastructure and you are getting blocked out from that information by DOE as an example. Then let's say I get a call from somebody who has access to the Honeywell um security systems and they're like there is a pyramid that lifted up out of this body of water and came over the base and we have nowhere to send it. Um we don't know what to do. We know we see in the media that the DOJ isn't getting this footage. And I'm like okay look I have some people in DOJ that I know are running a UFO program. I know you can trust them that there won't be repercussions. It is lawfully what they're asking for. Would you like to talk to these people who I do trust and both parties say yes and then I can like link them together. So that that kind of goes beyond journalism to where I'm just trying to get I trying to do the right thing. Right. And I I I'm relieved to hear that there's good guys in the system because I don't know who's running things. It's clearly not Congress or the president, right? and and they don't know either. So, to give you an example with this Honeywell footage, once I made that connection between like security folks and with the Department of Justice before they could have a meetup, that footage of that object that came up out of the water, that's what they said. And like, why would you do this whole thing as a ruse? Like, they're putting a lot on the line to make um it got confiscated is the best way to say it, like out of that system. But there's a demarcation of who now owns it solely and that's DOE Department of Energy. So it and that is outside apparently the scope of some of the DOJ stuff. So because the national security stuff. So you just see that kind of thing happen. So that that's been kind of the the dance I've been doing is trying to get whistleblowers who come to me from the embryionic stage, vetting them, making sure they're not just messing with me to the point where I'll put them in front of the national security people of Congress where they have to go through this grueling process in order to testify. So that that's what I've been doing over a number of of years, you know. How how did that pyramid footage how do they flag that? How do they even know that was happening? I I don't know. I'm not like um really in depth with those systems. I just know that they would they had so a bunch of these security people had access to it for a a good duration of time enough to to call Batman and you know tell me about it, right? I mean who do you call with that kind of thing when you're seeing it? What do you write like a a you know thing? This isn't going to DOJ like they've asked. I don't know. So So then what happened is all I know is that when they ended up going for it um it was whatever taken or shut down by DOE. So only DOE has access to it. It's so hard because these are all people with clearance and careers and there's the Espionage Act and you know that they're getting knocks on the door saying you're in good you're going to be hung as a traitor. Well, so there is both badged contact and unbadged contact. So there's official and unofficial questioning of people. I'll give you a concrete example because we're talking real out of space right now with with this. I want people to understand it. Um, okay. So, George and I obtained and released a piece of footage called Syria 2021 UAP. When we obtained that, we assessed it. We did background. We found out over a good amount of time, couple years, that that is a piece of footage designated UAP by our intelligence agencies that in fact it was part of a collection process on UAP. like it's a in a special area. We knew we had a real video that they designated UAP. What department? Um well that that gets that that gets murky because I I don't know ownership at that time like who has ownership of it? I was just curious. Yeah, it was Well, so it's Fleer footage. It's out it's out in the wild now. Oh, it's it's legit. Yeah, I I believe it is legit uh in that it does demonstrate instantaneous acceleration. But to give you an example, those title cards you see are replicated, but they're word for word what's in the the actual thing. So what you're seeing is an analysis by the intelligence agencies of a UAP, an unknown that appears to be demonstrating instantaneous movement. Now, people have tried to argue it. I'm not like a perfect expert with this stuff, but there are people smarter than me that have done it online. You can see it shoots off visibly first. First, if you're looking at it, it goes a little bit when it gets a weapons grade lock. goes a little bit to the left and then it shoots to the right. And how you know it's shooting to the right is the ground keeps going down as the thing moves to the right. So it's not like an artifact of the lens. You're tracking the ground and the thing goes to the right. All I can say is our intelligence agencies, they did an extensive analysis not just on that one sensor and they determined that that was a UAP. looks like a mushroom if you look at the thermal signature and that it that it did demonstrate one of the five observables of of UFOs. So George and I thought, "Okay, this is a public interest. We've obtained this. We've vetted it. We're going to put it out." We go and we put it out. Next thing I know, I come to find that there's a guy who who uh initiated that report. His name is Logan Lenvo, right? He's one of these guys that talks. He used to be on the UAP task force. So, he got calls both official and unofficial. Um, meaning like a badge contact where they're like, "What's going on with this? How did they get this?" He I have no idea. They must have good sources. Like, we did not get something. We did not get that from him, but he was getting like a false target painted on him or something. So, our response was, "We're going to have him on weaponized cuz I know the guy. Anybody I know becomes a a false target for things that George and I obtain. Anybody George knows, right? So, we want to get right like, you know, we would never um you know, we're good. I hope we're good journalists and we don't put, you know, sources and witnesses at at risk. So, we we had the guy Logan on the show and, you know, he told us he said in the thing that he had both official and unofficial contact. We made it really clear, well, just we didn't get it from Logan, so there you go. Um, but the fact that they're trying to squeeze him and even ask him, "What are they going to put out next? Where did they get that?" He goes, "I don't know." He did once ask me though, like, you know, in a private conversation like, "Who are your sources?" All this stuff. I go, "Are you kidding me?" Right? Like, "Are you kidding me?" So, I said on the show, "If I had answered you, right, you were active like you would have had, wouldn't you have had to write that up?" And basically, and he goes, "Yeah, I would." Yeah. So everybody's like a a coin, right? There's two sides to them. At least coins have three sides. The truth is always the So the combination of the two sides is who people are. You can work in intelligence. You can be working in this field. You can be my friend, but I always know, you know, who I'm dealing with. There is this and I I totally understand it is that your job is to do your job. So anyway, that piece of footage it came out. A lot of people said that we were pedalling bullshit again and it wasn't UAP and all this stuff. And then lo and behold, the government releases that exact piece of footage without all the the number systems on it, right? Which is of zero value. If you don't have the numeric systems, you can't track it and understand asmouth, altitude, all this stuff. So, you're getting an underhand pitch from our government because they know they have to. I'm seeing that they're cropping in now. a lot of the footage. So, yeah, we can't see the angles or the speed anymore. Yeah. Or at least they're blacking out all the right like with tic tac and and fast. We don't see that anymore, which is all the valuable numeric information. We need that for the trigonometry. We need that. We absolutely do. And so my impression is that um what we're seeing in these releases so far is the least that can be given. Sure, the president orders that there is transparency on this. However, is the president watching like who's regulating what they have and what they're putting out? Who's even doing it? And and and I don't even know. But I do know it is so odd that out of the hundreds of thousands of UAP videos, much better than than what you've seen publicly, right? That we're getting primarily the stuff that's already been out there in some way or the other. The last dump was all stuff we saw already. Was it? Mostly [clears throat] I I think. Yeah. I don't know. I I I just know that there's it is so ironic out of hundreds of thousands of videos that that would show UAP that are designated UAP that show the five observables, some of them that we're just getting mainly the ones that have already come out as if they're new, you know? Yep. And so I I I I don't know what to think anymore. I don't know who's watching the people that are deciding what to put out in in each agency. And by the way, it's all coming through probably Arrow, you know, has a lot of say in it, which we know they've been totally disingenuous with the American public. They've demeaned and demoted and tried to harm whistleblowers all along the way. Maybe they're different now, new management, but man, their job is to to keep secrets. So, I just I don't know what's going to happen, but I do know that if they don't start talking about biologics and reverse engineering, you have people like David Grush that are out there saying, "I have direct knowledge of those. It was my job to find out." They're going to run into issues if they don't start telling the American public the truth about those two things. If it if it is true, I have no definitive way of knowing, but if it is true, they have to start hitting on that. I've noticed that the narrative, the lexicon has changed from UFO to UAP, from aliens to biologics, non-human intelligence. And you use that lexicon as well. Mhm. I hate it. I like UFOs. I do too. Yeah. Why? Why do you use that? Yeah. So, that I I think very smart. Um why people are using that. Um there's two reasons. Start with UFO. Hillary Clinton was actually one of the first people to to say UAP. was in Jimmy Kimmel many many years ago. Wow. I forgot about that. Many years ago, right? And and because internally what they realized is that the UAP issue is all domain. It's space. It's air. It's sea. That that term not only is stigmatized UFO, unidentified flying object. It doesn't describe the the USOS, the underwater, right? Um it doesn't describe things that go through all mediums. So they say all domain, like how do we call it all domain? And they're like, well, UAP unidentified anomalous phenomena. It used to be aerial. Yes. Anomalous phenomena. So, they're like refining the language. It it is better. It's it's got less stigma. So, like major publications, they don't feel silly, you know, doing um UAP because that worked. It did. That scan worked. It did work. It did work. And that was our government trying to make it a laugh factory. That's historic fact. So, um it did work. So, I I kind of like I'm of two minds of it. I I hate it. Like I love UFOs. Come on, let's call them UFOs. But it is a much more articulated and thoughtful term. Um NHI, I think, is actually really smart because not just because the word alien is um you know has a stigma as well because anything's going to be alien with the with with with the um artificial intelligence way that it is right now. We know for a fact that there is a technological aspect to intelligence like that if we can build this um nonhuman intelligence. It's a just it's a better term that I think doesn't create the stigma and is more encompassing nonhuman intelligence because these these things that are flying around we don't know some of them they look like they got beings on them but these could be cybernetic organisms printed flesh that all work off of a hive mind of artificial I mean you've heard those stories where they come in contact it looks like an alien but you get close it's more like a robot and it's like AI I or something that so trippy. I never met one, but I haven't either. Yeah. Um, so those I think that's the terminology difference. Yeah. So we're allowed to use it. I I I don't just don't want to play into the hands, right? Because your idea is that we're being indoctrinated into a certain lexicon they call it like it. Yeah. And look, we we might be I I I don't know o ultimately with this it's it's so forward moving, but I can tell you the parts the mechanics behind it are not orchestrated. Like we have fought tooth and nail to get every single piece out. There isn't like some group of people like the David Grush and Alzandos and they're dude, they're not working together on this. Like if you knew them as people you've seen what have happened in their lives, you know their families. This is not unfortunately some coordinated disclosure. I don't believe that. Now I told you I've been naive before, but I don't think I'm naive now on it. I think that we're in a different environment and I think we're saying things out loud we didn't before. I think our technologies have gotten better to the point where pilots it can't be ignored what they're seeing and what they're recording now. That started with the Fraver incident. Yes. Yeah. So I I just feel like or popularly it started the Fraver incident. So I I just think we're living in a different time and they're they're playing catchup and having to admit certain things, but I don't know that the language is really being weaponized against us. I I just think they're better terms biologics because it's like, you know, how we don't know are are they printed machines? We know we we don't know. I don't know. Maybe maybe there's people that do. There's people who do. I who know some stuff. Um in the movie was there's an interesting tension where it's one scene you're on the phone with uh with Lazar. Mhm. And he's telling you he's telling you to stop. Yeah. He's saying, "Stop pushing." And then you're on a Zoom call with Fraver and he's saying, "If release it all, send them to jail. Do it." Yeah. So, you have material that would put powerful people in jail. Not just material, like I have documented a lot of the interference, you know, throughout my life. Uh, and I have been and I've given it to my lawyer and so so a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes. So, so a third party does have that. Oh, yeah. Your attorney has that. Yeah. I'm not I'm not talking just like files like images. I'm talking like when there has been interference on journalists and attempts at enttrapment which apparently are legal. Um I want I wanted the legal process to know about some of this when when you had OD and I run a 9-month thing that was disingenuous. I think that should be public. Yes. Right. Because you you've Yeah. And and we'll see how much of that becomes public. So a lot happens behind the scenes. Not everything is about journalism and to be reported on. A lot of this is like personal life stuff. That was a very hard time in my life. So, we were I give you a concrete example. My my family had to meet with an agency because of a a verified um actionable threat to my family. Um that's as far as I want to go, but like to my family, right? Yeah. That's an exception. They're telling me about the threat and there are implications of of who was behind that threat. That is a horrible thing for your family to have to go through. That changed the dynamic of how my family has to operate. Yes. Because of that. And it's not just like somebody whispering it to you or you get some email. This is an a federal agency giving my family safety protocols. Not cool. No. Not cool. So So that was like a very hard time for me. So, did that cool down? Yeah, I I feel like I've done everything in my self-defense as possible, which is making sure that it is known within uh federal circles. Like I um all of it's documented. And so I feel like um as a private thing that is something the movie showed because he turned the camera around, wanted to show the interference we were getting because to to Michael the biggest proof about UFOs he always says is during wartime he saw the meetings like so during wartime you've got all these federal agents on you and George. It just doesn't make financial sense. You have terrorists coming to the country you can't even put one federal agent on. Right? So that was the biggest proof for him. Hey, something's up. So, he turned that camera around instead of making a movie about all these UFO things and says, you know, this is a element of protection for you and your family. That's what he told me. It is. And I um I bought into that and I think it did to a degree because it's it's it's film. Not everything's in the movie, you know. Um so, when you're talking about the movie, um yeah, Lazar really was talking me off the ledge, you know. He was saying look I always said that we should admit admit this is real that that there are craft made by what seem to be nonhumans that they have a technology that we can't replicate we can't duplicate but he says that's where I say it should stop just acknowledge it and move on right that was Lazar is what he's saying to me in the movie and I'm like yeah but dude I've come to this point where I have to follow through with you know with journalism with George like you see us make a decision in that hotel room. But you have to understand that was a long time ago. We've been doing it. We've been doing it. We've been putting out like people forget I put out with George the um the Air Force disc. Guess what? Our government also just put that out. Yeah, they did. Yeah. It's just it's funny. So, we we show some some clips um in the film of some footage. That was just me doing my normal process, you know, taking in the desert. You know, that was a crazy scene. Well, because you can't, you know, you have to pro even if it's not like you have to be care even if it's not like real footage, like I I'm not having if I get something I don't know what's on it, I have to review it. I'm not Nothing's in my house, bro. You know what I mean? So, as journalists, we're protecting sources. We're protecting methods. We're protecting footage. What if it is damaging? What if, remember, we talked about national security stuff? I'll be on the hook for that. So, what you're seeing is you're seeing uh part of the process that that George and I go through. It's trade craft. Yes, I guess it is. But um really it's just I'm trying to do uh responsible journalism where I'm not just um letting stuff out of my control. I'm trying to assess it and see if it has public value. Do I even think it has public value? Um is it is it dangerous to people and and then choosing the stuff that would make the most impact and getting it for public interest and getting it out to the world. So you're seeing me assess stuff. I'm not ever gonna just, you know, put a bunch of stuff out when I don't know its value. I don't know who it's going to hurt. That's I'm just not, you know, I don't know if that's journalism. I just ain't doing it. I'm not I'm not here to hurt people. So, I am here to try to learn the truth about this as best I can and share what I can with the world. That's what I'm trying to do. And and George and I have done our best at it so far. So, what you're seeing in that movie is stuff I'm reviewing. I'm reviewing it. And it took a lot for me to let Michael film over my my shoulder on there. But now you look at all that footage. What' the government do? All I think I think all of those videos are out now. The actual hard copy. Great. Then we've provoked change, man. Keep it going. Keep it going. And um footage will always come in. Information will always come in. And and over time, I I think we'll continue doing our reporting if we're not stopped or we're not, you know, um get in trouble for it. We're just trying to do journalism in America under the First Amendment. Yeah. You're so You're so careful. I I have to be. Do you think they're hiding a lot of stuff behind the contractors? I know they are. You know they are. Oh, I know they are. Yeah. I mean, you've had people come out and say it like how put off we're talking about. That is the method. That is the way that is the way that you um stop foyer requests. That is the way that you don't have to have accountability. And it's to the point where our own government is looking at it being like what the fuck? Like we don't have control of this stuff anymore. Very famously the locked uh transfer was supposed to occur under OAP, Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program. Yep. And you know that that's the thing there everybody got confused that New York Times article with ATIP and OAP. in the so everybody involved is a hero in my book. They have all tried to some degree whether some of it be governmentmandated. Hey, we better tell the public a little bit about this. In my experience, everybody's tried to do their best to some degree to get stuff out. We've had UFO programs. They're acknowledged. That's a huge win. We were told nothing to see here. Move on. Project Blue Book, we killed it in 1969. That's it. All of a sudden, we realized, oh no, we've been studying this ever since then. I'll tell you this. UFOs are considered higher security than weapons of mass destruction. And you have to ask yourself why. And I'm not saying that frivolously. Ask George Nap. We have been in official meetings where we have met people where their job is weapons of mass destruction related to UAP. We were taken aback. We're like, well, we've always heard that. This is why DOE is involved, right? We always heard that. You know, why is that? And it's the propulsion systems themselves. If they can create so much energy to do what we think they're doing, what they appear to be doing, instantaneous acceleration, possibly folding or warping, time space itself, the amount of energy needed to do that is so astronomical. That is fundamentally [snorts] a weapon. Look at it from like a a let's Simpsonize it, you know, like Bart Simpson style. Fraver did this wonderfully, you know, he says, "Look, if we have tic tacs, right? What can we do?" He's like, "We can send it up over a country, drop it down from outer space, be back up in less than a second, deliver a a dirty bomb, a nuke. No one will ever know who did it." So even just as a payload, if we could ever harness the ability to replicate these craft, it's a strategic surprise, strategic advantage that every country wants. And that was the the core of the secrecy from day one was always that we don't understand this tech, but we need to duplicate it before our enemies do. And that's why I know that is why we kept it secret for a long time. problem is cat's out of the bag now because China and Russia have to be doing the same thing. They are and it's not me saying that like uh Dr. Latsky who's the head of the UFO program for the Defense Intelligence Agency. I'd love to hear his story. Didn't he say that we got through the bulkhead of a craft? Yeah, he we breached the hole. Breached the hole of a craft. So people ask how can he say this? And and it's a legitimate question like is that a scop? Is that just like a lie? Well, I'll tell you. I know him. George has known him for over a decade. Um, he's a patriot. He is the exact kind of person that you would want in a role in our intelligence agencies cuz he does not break from the fold. He's only saying what he begged and asked for to be authorized. He wants to take pride in his work, man. So he went through the Doppser process and he says here's the scope of the books I want to write which is by the way probably the biggest disclosures we've had about our government doing this stuff is it's so nerdy but if you read his books you know if you can conceive of what he's saying he's told us more about the US's um investigations into UAP than I'm thinking than any other individual as far as the scope of it. Right? But here's what he said. He said we ha he says I can admit to that the US government has one craft one NHI not not just of unknown origin like they don't know who built it. It has a technology far superior to ours. Um there's no intakes, no exhaust. Um no even place to store fuel by his own description through the DIA. And they they they put all this out and and we breached the whole of it. That's about as as far as as he's gone with it. There is an admission from a top government official who I can tell you is being genuine. I mean, of course, people will create conspiracies because they don't know him in that way. Um, he is trying in the sunset of his life to tell people as much as he can. And he is not a big proponent of disclosure like like you and I might be. Mhm. He comes from this cold war mentality of like you can't tell your friends without telling your enemies. So it takes a lot for him to get there, but he feels it's important. We know that much. Now you've had people like Hal Putoff say we've got more than doz more than a dozen just in the US. That's a guy that would know. Do you think he's just making that up? You know, is that a government conspiracy that he would say that? Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I don't I I don't know. But I just know he's not the only one singing that tune. and they're not all coordinating with one another. There's friction amongst all these people. That's interesting. Do you think there's friction among the contractors? There there is definitely um questions about which contractors got what. Yes. And that's why Loheed was and this is a documented transfer attempt is they the vice president Loheed Martin tried to give technology and we're talking we don't know who built it but it ain't Russia, China or US to the to the OAP and that transfer got completely denied and my understanding it was from the head of science and technology ology um of the CIA at the time, Glenn Gaffne. Now, that can be argued. Did he actually did he he himself block that transfer? But it was his his office and his department. So, there you have a documented attempt at NHI technology transfer that got denied. What other corporations have craft aspects of the technology? A and and how come they're not all working together with their brightest minds? You know, they can't transfer it back to the government because then then we find out. I I don't know. It's got to stay. Yeah. I I don't know. But that was Bob Lazar's um gripe the whole way through. He says, "I'm not the most qualified guy to be working on this. Um I'm probably the easiest to be discredited." It was like a show and tell. He barely got to to work there on that stuff. They they were looking for a change, man. They were looking for any left-handed, you know, outside of the box kind of thinker to come in and try something that hadn't been tried before because they've been stalled a bunch of times. They've made progress, I hear, um, a little bit over time, but we we the throttle is the material science. The best of my knowledge, the throttle is the material science. can't replicate um the alloys and the skins and the the even the systems themselves or the fuel sources is how I understand it. So Bob never said that we had craft that we were testing. No, he No, he he did. that he said he saw a low performance test, but there's so many holes in that that he acknowledges like uh to give you an example, they displayed to him that they were in communication with the pilot through a radio and Bob says, "How is that even possible?" Because if you have a a bubble of spaceime or gravitation, you're not radio wav is going to get in and out of that. No. So apparently to according to his understanding um they did these low performance tests because they had ripped out one of the reactors or something. You ever heard about this? So crazy. So that's why they were doing these low performance tests. Now you you'd push that off and you'd be like, "Okay, cool story, bro." Except he brought people out on multiple Wednesday nights and I have talked to all of them that went out there, right, to see a disc flying over the mountains and they saw it. Yeah. and he did not wi win awards for taking people out there. I'll tell you that like they were pissed. So the truth falls somewhere in there that we have okay we definitely have craft and we definitely have been exploiting them for what they call derivative technologies that I am 100% on. I have uh personally um all this time I I've gotten to the point where that's not for me a question mark anymore. The question mark for me is how far have we gotten? You know, what what is the limiting factor? Can we replicate any of this technology like the triangles people talk about? They were doing sorties on a base with one of these triangles with a guy that didn't testify, but we had him unweaponized, David uh Daniel Gawkerell. So, he saw us doing sordies with one of these gigantic um triangles around a military base. So we have something from that technology. But what do you think about the the legends, the stories about fiber optics coming from craft? Yeah. Phil Corso is really the root of that. He is um right. But I feel like I debunked a lot of his story. Yeah. Oh, totally. But you you think there is some derivative technology? I don't I I really don't know. Um you know, I if I listen to I know. I'm sorry. If if I listen to to one, you know, individual that I respect, uh most likely we have um figured out a lot of the the the alloys like what they're composed of, but that we still can't replicate them with perfect atomic layering, and that's the the throttle on it. I talked to somebody else who is in a position to know, and they're like, "They're not ours." I'm like, "What do you mean they're not ours? Have we they're just not ours." Well, who's piloting them? So it I get different messages and I I just don't know the answer to them. I know. Yeah. It seems to all come down to the material science that we just we're just not there yet. That is my that is my best guess and I know that we will get there someday. You know, the bigger questions are are we being helped? Because if you've been paying attention, a lot of these aren't crashes. They're they're almost like discarded things. It's like you throwing an iPhone into a cage and just saying, "See what you can do with this." They've been called gifts in some stories. Some people call them that. Offerings, gifts. Who? So, who's the intelligence behind them? Is it us from the future? Is it a aliens from another planet? Yeah. What is it? Who Who are they? Yeah. I mean, if we're there in the conversation, right, because we we just got to the point in our society where UFOs are real. Yes. and and we're sol I think we're solidly there. We're solid. Okay. So, that's a huge achievement for you, Victor. Like um you know, people have been seeing them forever. So, now we know. Okay. Thanks, daddy. You just told us they're real. So, it took 70 years though, right? Would nice to know, you know, in the 50s when they were working on anti-gravity then suddenly, but they were worried about it, right? So, I think I think back then they were worried about other really hostile nations, right? So, I'm not making excuses for it. I'm just saying I understand why the campaigns were of dismissal and denial where now at least we've we've made it there that okay u UFOs are real but what are UFOs? Are are they just craft or are they like hard metal? That's definitely part of it. Um but but what are these um intelligent plasmoids people are talking about? I was going to ask you what are the these orbs and spheres that that are spiritual that we're seeing now. So you call them spiritual. Um I don't know. I'm not um inclined to call them spiritual. Um I can just go off reports, but I mean if you want me to theorize, man, it's like if you're if you're bending space and time and you've got, you know, some machine that can do that, you know, I don't know what that looks like optically. You know, we might just be seeing like a tip of an iceberg above the water. There might be something much bigger behind that. And and people seem to have this understanding that there's a consciousness element. Yes. With with especially these orbs, these lights in the sky. Um I can't deny that. The reports all show that. I don't know what that means. Is that just egoentrism where you're like I'm calling in the I don't think anybody's calling in anything. I think these things are always there and then at at times you can perceive them because everybody they say they're summoners. I'm like you ain't summoning shit, man. Like I I don't believe you are. I I think that there's a a perforated boundary of reality and you are perceiving it. Chris Bledsoe can do some wild stuff, man. I hear about that and I I've met a lot of these guys. Yeah. Have you seen something with him? I haven't, but but Gino has. Yeah. Um, you follow Jack Valet's early work from the 70s to a degree. Jacqu Valet is fucking Jacqu Valet. Fucking Jack Valet. Yeah. So, he talks about we'll perceive these UFOs how wherever we are in the culture. Yeah. So, in the 50s and 60s it's a flying saucer. In the 70s and 80s, it's something else. Now, it's a spiritual ore because that's kind of where where the zeitgeist is going. Yeah. I I I don't know if I fully buy that. Like I used to think that um UFOs are like flying saucers. Like that's all I knew. And but you look at history, there's always been the variety pack. There's always been orbs, the Foo Fighters. There's always been cylinders, triangles, pyramids. All the shit John Leer said. Very all the shit John Le said. Fucking still bothers me to this day. If he's right about people on the sun, [laughter] I am just getting up, you know? That's crazy. But yeah, I mean, look, I I think the bottom line of it for me is I I don't have any special knowledge that other people don't have. I've got special questions. Like, I've been I I've gotten to the point where I know the right questions to ask when I'm in the presence of people that might have been working on some of this. Jock Valet one time came out to my ranch and this lasting impression I have of him. It was like the sun was going down and we had just driven out to this like, you know, raw acreage I had. And I'm like, "Hey man, just tell me what do you know for sure about UFOs?" And he says, "What I know for sure is you have better questions than than I ever had at a young age and you got to like keep asking them, you know, because it was like he feels it's progressed so much." And um here's what I will say though about UFOs is that I truly believe that so like back in the day, you know, um the ancient Greeks thought that stars were do you know about this hummingbirds puck plucked holes in the firmament, right? And now we know about galaxies and we know about the universes maybe expanding or whatever. We know about suns and exoplanets. So that difference between being the ancient Greek and thinking hummingbirds going up there and pecking out the firmament to what we know about galaxies, I really hope the UFO thing is going to be as big a conceptual shift for us. Like I don't think it's just craft from other planets. I I I think that there is so much more to this mystery that we're not even asking the right questions and that once we get a few answers we might just jaw drop be like we were like the ancient Greeks totally misunderstand it. I think you're you're exactly right that they can just show up and be like you you thought we were from a thousand light years away. We can't do that. We've been here the whole time. Right. The argument that's already percolating in my mind right now is why would you buy a or why would you build a Ferrari if you didn't want to go fast, right? So why do these craft appear by their very nature to be able to travel amongst the stars if we didn't build them to do that or or if whoever built them to do that? Um there's no fingerprint in our society like your your brother told me that you and I should talk maybe about the tic tac because it is your un your belief that that's a Loheed Martin technology and I'm firmly in the other camp and I would like to know why you believe that because I haven't heard everything. Um but if you don't mind I'd love to hear I'm probably not educated enough to really sell it or just the ideas. I'm not this is not a but I just by going by memory I think the trigonometry showed that it wasn't moving as fast as we were told but I I don't want to go on record as being totally skeptical right I just I've heard it a lot but I but I'd rather I'd rather hear your take sure well I'll tell you why um that dissolved for me very quickly um first of all it was a very depressing day for me I used to think that we had total control of these things I used to think oh man we really done it. American ingenuity. You really did. I did. Early on, I had this idea of reverse engineered craft that we just been hiding this shit and that we have made gigantic headway and that there's some, you know, within the government there were some outsourced contractors that really did it. And I was very sad the day when that was taken away from me that that idea. Why? Because if they had anti-gravity and this unlimited energy, they need to share that. Exactly. That's that'd be bullshit if they're not sharing that. Okay. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Like that would be bullshit and it it would slowly completely change the world that we would have to build different infrastructure. I don't think it would happen overnight. No, but we wouldn't have war anymore, right? With free energy. Yeah. That would be the hope, right? That'd be the hope. Yeah. We'd still have a war, but still Yeah. Yeah. But it' be it'd be it'd be the hope. And so now I see I see your point of view there and yeah absolutely it'd be complete bullshit but there was this part of me that it was just at least it explained it you know. Yes. Um and then I was in a situation where um which which I don't for a person I don't want to get too much into it but um I was satisfied with the idea um from people that know that if it's big it's silent it is not ours that we don't have that tech and it kind of it kind of made me sad because I thought um how cool if we did maybe it would percolate laid out. Maybe the world would get better from that. Then talking to more and more people involved in these programs, I've been pretty high up on the food chain, dude. And I always get to that stopping point. Don't kick a sleeping dog. I think that's why he named the movie Sleeping Dog. Yeah. Um because I've been told that like a ton. It's like they practice that line, you know, like don't go too far with it. That's kind of scary. Yeah. And I don't know what they're afraid of. Um it's like the the boogie monster. It's like something in the closet. What would be so bad about us knowing about the nature of reality itself that maybe we're not alone in the universe? Maybe we're not the most advanced technological civilization. Like, what is the big fucking fear that people have of knowing about the natural world? I know great white sharks exist. That's why I don't jump in the ocean that much. But, you know, at least I know. Yeah. At least I know. Well, what do you think happens to just a normal person if disclosure happens? I'm I'm a teacher. I wake up in the morning. How was life different? Well, what do you think? I mean, do you think I think a lot disclosure has happened a little bit, right? I think so. I I I I'm very distrustful of the government. Very very very much so. Um I don't I don't see full disclosure ever coming. Yeah. I really don't. Yeah. Not Not as long as we're in a world where we're constantly bombing each other, right? You just can't let can't let China know what you have. You have no motivation to disclose shit. you know, the underhanded pitch, let you know what what all they need you to know because people are seeing them, okay, they're real, but but that's the cut off. I I don't see it happening. I'm annoyed at myself because if I'm running Lockheed, I'm not telling you what we have, right? I'm I'm just not telling you because then China is going to have what we have. It can't do that. We need an advantage, right? So, I'm torn between patriotism and wanting to know what's going on, right? And I don't know where to fall, right? So, okay, about the the Tik Tok stuff. So, I've been exposed and so has George Knap to um a lot of the technical information about um what they observed over those course of weeks. So, I I told Commander Fraver before he was public that this story is going to get out. Like, it's too big a story. It won't be from me and I kept my word and it won't be from me, but that story will percolate. It will get out. Look, if I found out, I did the med. If I found out [laughter] about it, then I'm just some weirdo with a beard and tattoos. Dude, other real journals. I got to find out about it. I said this to him like early on and he kind of laughed me off. Said it's not that important, man. He knew it was important. Um, so because of George's position where he's as a great journalist who's got a lot of trust with people, you know, we've been exposed to some of we tried to submit to Congress one time um a technological report of the tic tacs that would kind of answer some of the detailed questions about that. And you know, we couldn't I'll just say we couldn't submit it to Congress in a lawful way. So we were unable to get that on congressional record. How? Why? Um the DIA did a bunch of reports on the Tic Tacs because they were studying it. It was the first thing they were studying. Ah, but the thing is is um when you're a journalist, you obtain and then how do you release? You have to be very um it has to be lawful, dude. So, we tried to get Congress to get I'll say to get Congress to get a report that we are very familiar with. They were unable to do so. They were stonewalled. I'll say they pretended like it doesn't exist. The DIA and we can't find it. Right. Right. We were we were fighting to get this out to the public. What you can take to the bank is Commander Fraver is the guy that chased the Tic Tac. So he saw it with his own eyes. Was the mission to chase that Tic Tac or was it an accident? Um both. So what happened was he's out on a normal training mission. He's over at another point and the guy calls him up and says, "What weapons do you got on board?" And he's like, "What?" He's like, "What? What weapons you got on board?" He's like, "This is like a training mission. It's like beautiful day. Like nothing going on." So he's already he made some joke. He's like, "I got a CATM 9 if you got a sledgehammer." Like basically, [laughter] you know, I got nothing. Got nothing. So they're like, they task him to go out to a point and they go out and they didn't give him any information. So he thought maybe when he when they saw this um circular disturbed part of the water at first he thought was it like a down is like something sinking like what's going on and so as he gets closer he sees this little tic tac you know down by the water and he said like a like a ping pong ball in a glass in a glass he said it was just fucking insane you know and so the he goes I want to see what that is and he dives down as he dives down. It starts it notices him. First of all, it like turns its nose and then starts mirroring his exact flight path and then it came up next to him and then like that. And he goes, you could only see it move because it was this like disturbance of it moving. So you you could see it go, but it it was just absolutely beyond imagination for a guy that flies some of the fastest planes, right? And a guy that, by the way, protected Los Angeles during 9/11. It's a very trusted. There's no war nerves or anything like this. Nope. Um, so the dude had a really good visual on it. And he goes, "Where where'd it go?" And his the controller is like, "You're not going to believe it. Um, commander, it's at your cap point." And that was like miles and miles away. We've tried to calculate the time was almost instantaneously. We're not sure because of the way the radar works, but also that was an encrypted cap point. It was almost like a like a a game of cat and mouse like it knew. Like it knew. Yeah. So he wasn't going to shoot anything down. He didn't have any hot missiles, but when he saw it, his curiosity he where other people were a little bit terrified about what they were seeing, he went and really went to go see it. Um now there's a lot of questions that that raise from that. So original reporting you'll you'll have heard that there was something under the water. Right now that's becomes this big debate. There was an object that appeared to be under the water. What was this thing doing? Um well I'll tell you it wasn't the only one. So there were weeks of stuff up in above 80,000 ft which they really didn't want me to say for a long time because for some reason that's the scanned volume of the spy one but it was above 80,000 ft. So space. So that's a vehicle that changes domains from space to air to sea. It was coming down and now I you know I talked with some of the people like Kevin Kuth who did the studies on the on the speed of it dropping down but for by all accounts that I know um whatever speed it was dropping down um defies our understanding of how that can occur and it doesn't disturb water. Right. So the tic tacs we never saw go into the water. What happened was was all these ones were loitering at two different altitudes and this is I believe over the course of two weeks. Some of the controllers were seeing them up there. So they knew this was an area of interest but they just didn't have like the gas or the time to go out there. Right. Also this is a training zone. If if you see a black project, let me get to that with who sees it next. Okay. So they go this thing was going down and the words that were said to me before this was a famous public case was docking. That was the cho the choice word. Now they meant like a like a chi charger like an air like it just seemed to be hovering over this thing. Now the disturbance of the water it was in a circular pattern but the thing that appeared to be under the water appeared to have a cross shape. Whatever whatever there appeared to be something under the water and these things coming down and and and hitting over it again. It wasn't one tic tac. It was many. And that's what people don't know. I I I I don't know. We I I I could I could go get a more accurate uh assessment. You mean like three or like 10? I I a dozen. A dozen or more? Yeah. And I don't I always I'm so afraid of misspeaking. Let me go back to my notes on everything. It's multiple. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Definitely. But it was it was something that was occurring for a a duration of time. So, you have to ask yourself, what were they doing? Like what was the mission? What was the purpose? And that's what killed me about this UFO stuff. They were never looking to be seen, right? This is something that was occurring that um was obviously a job. Like there was something going on. It drives my mind crazy cuz like what's under the water? Is that like a refueling? Like sorry I keep hitting the microphone my beard. Um you know like what's going on now? I think a lot of answers are under the water. I I do too from all reports there. And now you remember I brought Senior Chief Wiggins public because we had a piece of footage that George and I put out and I found out by his uh presence that on that ship I know everybody on that ship. I get to know people and they, you know, they'll tell me who I need to go talk with. So, I found Senior Chief Wiggins through a buddy of mine in the Navy, higher ranking Navy guy. And, you know, he admitted to me, there's nothing wrong. He admitted to me he was there. He saw the whole thing. And then he came forward and talked on weaponized. We brought him forward to Congress. He, you know, he there is footage. He saw Tic Tacs, one coming up out of the water. I mean, it's like there's something going on in the water, right? That's that's all I know. But here's what happened next with the tic tac. So when you know Commander Fraver, you know he's like a he's like a head of the black aces man. That guy answers to nobody, you know. He just does his own thing. So he sees his buddy Commander Underwood and he was about to go do the next flight. He's got a full tank of gas. He's a a wizo. So he um you his job is to record shit, right? And he says, "This is where we saw it. It went to the new cap point which which baffles them because it if it was and it was actively jamming their weapons or their their radar systems. It was Yeah. They don't like saying it anymore. I guess like top brass told them don't say it anymore is my is what I'm thinking cuz that's a act of war. But if you look at my original interviews with them, they say it out loud. So So there was active jamming and and that is an aggress that is considered in their world an act of war, an aggressive maneuver. They made that very clear. Um, so whoever it was had a technology that was uh able to effectively actively jam. So then he sends out his buddy um Underwood and uh his call sign is nuts by the way. You do you do the math. So um and and David Sex Fraver by the way is his call sign. So yeah, come on. These Navy [laughter] guys, man. Sex Favor and nuts man. Okay. So, so Nuts goes out and you know he picks up the target right where Fraver said it would be and or in that vicinity and he's just flipping through every optic system that he has cuz it's like collecting data to bring back to the the intel guys. So he does all that and why we know it as the tic tac is cuz he comes back for debrief and they go so so what what what do it look like? What's going on? They put it up on this big screen and and he has to say something and he he remembered airplane the movie and he remembers that dude saying I don't know it was like uh shaped like a Tylenol but you know has it [laughter] has like wings and like and he's like I can't say that. He's a big fan of like old '8s movies. He goes I'm sure it looked like a t it looked like a tic tac. So that's how we know it as the tic tac UFO cuz he didn't want to say the airplane thing. So anyway, so so he comes back and he does all that and it baffles them, man. This footage kind of went around in little circles for a while. I'd always heard about it, but it was, you know, without soliciting. I don't know how you get it, right? Cuz none of these guys, you know, but but it but it was it was kind of showing up in these little groups of people. That's how it kind of got this lore cuz they they did at some point have a VHS tape that was going through pilot circles. Um, anyway, somehow mysteriously that footage did make its way back to the internet right in time for a Coast to Coast show that George and I had the day of a Coast coast show. It was like people listening and watching and knowing that I wanted to see that footage cuz it appeared online and we were able to point to it and that was way before it was a public case. You hear us on the radio kind of dancing around it. We reported on it twice before it was part of the New York Times thing, right? You know, so basically I said to Underwood, "Hey man, how do you know this isn't ours?" You know, because it would be really cool. In some ways, it'd be cool if it was ours. Really shitty. They've been covering up, you know, like, "How do you know it's not ours?" And he goes, I said, "Have you ever seen a black project accidentally?" And he's like, "It's happened." [laughter] And I'm like, "So, so what happens when you see that?" And he goes, "Oh." He goes, "There are strict protocols. You come in for a debrief. You sign an NDA. you are not to talk about this experimental craft by this corporation or that corporate, you're not to talk about it. Forget about it. So that's why he could only say to me, it's happened, you know, but there are protocols for that. Sure. So you're in an area where it is dangerous to be operating experimental technologies in the middle of the ocean, right? Doesn't feel to me like a a proper planned thing. No. Um, it's actively jamming our weapon systems, which, you know, is very dangerous how it's been described to me by them. That's also not a thing. I either forgot about that or didn't know that, right? I I don't know. They they kind of have stopped talking about the act of jamming. I don't know if he said it in Congress, Fraver, but but if you listen to the original reporting that that I did on, they say it with their own mouths. Underwood talks about active jamming talks about um and Fraver, you know, this circular disturbance was there was some appeared to be an object under there which we would call a USO, you know. Um so that's another strike against that it's something that's ours is that there's no protocols. None of them were ever had to sign an NDA about this, right? This is something that just happened. Why wouldn't they have to sign an NDA? Because it's not a known um issue. It's not a known they they they just went out on it. They there was nothing secret about it. But cuz there's been no ramifications against Braver, right? No, no, no. Zero. But then the nail in the coffin for me was in in Congress. And here's what he said publicly. He says, I don't know if he said my current employment, he has a classified job right now. Okay. His job would allow him to understand what our highest capabilities are right now and what they're going to be in the future. He has a very um he has a lot of responsibility in his new job. Commander Fraver. So he's really still trusted extremely. Oh yeah, Fraver. It's this is very it's a confusing story to me. It is very confusing. But he didn't do any he didn't do anything wrong. No, he didn't. But no, he didn't leak anything. He didn't go talk outside of school. His name was brought into the public like I told him it would be. Um not by me, by other people. But he's telling you release information people in jail. And yet he's still this trusted. Well, he what? Oh, no. What I told him wasn't about his story in the movie. Yes. I was telling him about how agencies have done what I thought at the time were was super illegal things. Yes. Like for example, targeting Matthew Brown with words like um counter intelligence on American assets, like targeting Dylan Borland with words like espionage to me. OD and I saying those words to me about my friends and lying about them. I thought that was going to get them put in jail. Fuck. I was naive. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Super naive. You were. Apparently, it's okay to do these things [clears throat] to people if it's our government and not other governments. Yes. So, I've never told and I'm not going to right now, but that there is another story to all that. I just I was very naive. So, in that in that movie when you see me all bent out of shape and I'm talking to Fraver, I thought if I documented everything and these crimes I thought were committed against whistleblowers, if I brought them to light internally that people would go to jail for what they did. Boy, was I wrong. So anyway, um, back to the tic tac. Um, Fraver, he's in Congress and he goes like this. He goes, "We didn't have that technology in 2004. We do not have that technology in 2024, whatever it was when he testified." He goes, "We're not even conceiving to work on that technology for 50 years." you know, he's like he's like it's just like it wasn't ours in 2004. It wasn't a private contract. So that that's another kind of nail in the coffin that whatever it was was outside of our purview. Um so I'm there. That's where I'm at right now. But I am always open to learning new information and and having gotten it wrong. I'll be the first to raise my hand and say I got it wrong. Same. They they they've excluded I mean I've met with I'll say George and I have met with a federal agency uh in an official badged meeting with a number of people at the table and it was conveyed to us that we have excluded Russia and China from being fabricators of the tic tac as well. And one more thing, in 2019, George Knapp and I reported on a swarming of 10 Navy warships in 2019 off the coast of California where there was multi- types of footage that we obtained and released. It was thermal, so the black and white from the USS Omaha. It was the green, so you say night vision through a PVS14, which does not have a bouquet triangle- shaped lens. I have one myself. The camera itself, then they move the goalpost and they're like, "The camera itself had a triangular shaped lens." Nonsense. I know the people that were involved in that. That's okay. Um, pyramid in um triangle by angle of observation, pyramid in shape. I didn't make that up. That's in their own documentation. I George and I put out a couple slides that talk about triangle by angle of observation. internally they they they have more sensors than than you're seeing little glimpses of. Sure. So they believe there was pyramid in shape over that was USS Russell. Then we had deck footage which was very important. It looks like footage. So just a dude with an iPhone on a deck. So we so I was able to somehow be the receiver of many different types of footage. I got radar footage sent to me, right? So you can see multiple targets at once. I think there's 10 at one time surrounding a ship. And I put out the radar footage that was from inside the bridge, right? And it's not an easy thing to obtain, especially when you're not asking for it, right? Okay. Then we've got the thermal footage where you see the um eggshaped object. You know, you heard about that one. It's got no uh rotor wash, no nothing, no heat signatures coming off of it. They say splash splash in the video. They're not saying it made a splash. They're saying that means it went under the water. I'll tell you they did deploy a submarine to try to look for it. They did. They did and they did not find it. Hopefully though that'll be in like people like Jay Stratton's new book and I hope he talk cuz he ran a lot of that investigation. He had people on the ships for UAPF the day after it happened. I have met some of the federal agents who are on the ships. I've sidebarred them and tried to ask them individually what was it? No, we know it wasn't China. We know it wasn't Russia. So what happens is in a 100 mile radius 2019 there's a swarm of our Navy ships and they're they're doing workups for deployment and all of a sudden there are these acrobatics of all these things and I've talked to kids on the ships who were just like standing out there. I told you I I had deck footage that I put out which to me I put out last because the least visually understandable and important but it's like inky darkness but you see lights. Now why was that important? Because you have thermal, you have infrared, you have radar. Baba bing, I have finally I've got somebody just with an iPhone. You know, you start asking around, people are like, I got my iPhone that that was, you know, I was out there on the deck with my iPhone. Okay, cool. So, all of a sudden, I received something like that. Validate where it's from using the GPS data and the time stamps. And like basically why that's important is because these things were self luminous. So, cuz people tried to say, you know, all this different stuff about what it was or was it wasn't, but these things were self luminous. You could see them in that last bit of footage. So, you've got four types of footage, one being radar. You've got all these witnesses that have testified or or talked to me about it. George, I mean, at this point, dozens and dozens and dozens of people. This was not an isolated incident. It's just the one that somehow we obtained a ton of footage of. These swarms were happening a ton. I, you know, four, five, maybe six cases that have been reported to me about this. But why this was so important because we could provide the public with actual physical data, proof, visual evidence of it. And it was inside these government investigations. We put out a couple slides to show their um analysis of it. the the kudigra for me was people said that it was the bass straight cargo ship that was like launching these by the way they're they're about you know maybe 10 ft like that you can tell the profile of it you know they weren't small right so people said and even on Wikipedia still says the Bass Strait cargo ship was a Chinese ship you know was like launching things okay well Bass Strait was boarded the second it got into Long Beach and by the way the ballet was still going on when astrate was in port. People forget that. And um I know some of the agents that boarded the ship, they found nothing. And here's the coupe grow. I found the one sailor whose only job during that event was to watch the bass straight through all the um visuals to make sure it wasn't launching or landing anything. and he came unweaponized by voice and told he wishes that he could report to us that we knew who was launching those and he couldn't because they weren't coming off of the Bass Strait, but if you go to Wikipedia, I believe it still says probably. Yeah, it's total propaganda bullshit. Of course. Yeah. So, cuz they don't know where they were coming from. They were coming from the They were coming from the west. There's nothing over there but Hawaii, man. What were they launching off of? Where were they landing? If they're these autonomous, where were they landing? There's nothing there. There's nothing there. So, somebody's got a pretty cool technology that can do and perform in just fun ways. And it's it's not China. So many resources were spent on figuring out. So, it's not China, it's not Russia, and unfortunately, it's not us. And that that would have been uh comforting, but it's not us. and it's been happening more and more. Uh, it so more frequently. Um, it's hard for me to say more frequently because I've told a lot of people not to call me anymore. [laughter] I know. It's like, you know, that's cool that happened on your mission, but probably shouldn't call me about that stuff. You know, I just I fear now that I'm on so many radars that anybody who speaks out of school is going to be penalized for. I mean, I've had people in the Navy who have nothing to do with the UFO topic who are just my friends who have been questioned. It's a horrible feeling. I would only talk to you on Signal. Even [laughter] Signal is not private, man. But it's just, you know what I mean? It's like I've there have been too many false targets on people. I told you a couple of them today like my buddy Logan and um everybody suspect that surround me and George of like you know they really want to know how stuff gets to journalists and you know if it's the the end of my career that's the one thing I I will protect. Um and luckily everybody's got it wrong so far. You know everyone's got it wrong. There's been a lot of Yeah. There have been a lot of attempts to try to um close that uh window and it had the reverse effect meaning when people have been shook down or they've been like threatened like what do you know? Um it's just caused more people to come to me and George in person and um I guess that's a positive thing. It is because you're the first line of defense. Yeah. Mhm. Tell the Matthew Brown story. Smuggling him. muggling. That was fun. [laughter] Yeah. But started start where you made the decision, right? How did we make it? Like it's like a heist movie. Like you're in a room like here's what we're going to do. It sounds [laughter] so cool. Uh you're going to do what? No, no, no. It's going to work. It's going to Yeah. He we were and we did not trust each other. Me and me and M. This is like the story like we did not trust you. Like I was sure that some guy that wants to talk with Congress is just using me to like make me look like an idiot. And he had no like he was trying to figure out who he could trust. He made some slip ups at the beginning like trust in fake journalists, you know, journalists that are really there will hurt you. Um people that you can't trust with your cat's name. You know what I mean? You can name them if you want to. I I don't I I don't I I don't want to give attention to people know my sentiments. Look at some point um I'll probably have to tell that whole story and I'll do it in the right way. Um right just basically Matthew Brown was figuring who he could trust just just in one or two sentences. What what did Matthew find? Very little. It was very small. And he's such a patriotic dude and he's such a thinker. But what he found was a report or what was the power like a briefing? Yeah, briefing on something they were calling Immaculate Constellation. And because he he was tasked at the time with sorting and filing and cleaning up basically a digital archive, he's like, "The fuck is this? It's like talking about UFOs and it's talking about us watching the Russians have a rendevous with a known possibly a known you know uh manifestation of a craft overse like all I mean it was just like it's pretty wild but there was like you know there was evidence inside of that briefing and um it's not something that should from what I understand it's not something that should have been filed where it was filed so he kind of like reads through it all So you got to know what you're looking at, right? And it's it's fascinating. It is. And his job is to file it. It is. So he needs to know what's in it, right? So what really kind of stood the hairs up on his arms was, you know, he's like, "Okay, this definitely shouldn't be in there." So it's a it's about, you know, it's about how we're watching UFOs interact with other nations and how we're have passive tracking of UFOs and active tracking. And he's like, "Well, this is pretty crazy." And I don't know at that point I think David Gush had come out so it was on everybody's radar right so you know he's thinking is this a is this a trick is this like a test like what's going on but he quickly learned it wasn't because he went first to his boss and then his boss's boss and it was very nonchalant like they didn't say much to him and he didn't know like does he have to do a does he have to sign anything for having seen this and it just got really weird for him and he felt very uncomfortable because he's so patriotic America because the world was asking, Congress was asking for whistleblowers. It was asking for people and he did not want to go public. So he sees all this UAP related stuff. But again, it's it's just a sliver. It was an operation and it I didn't just validate this through Matthew Brown. George and I did extensive work to figure out is this a real program before we bit, right? And to our satisfaction, absolutely. It goes by a different name now, but it was um it was called that at one time and it was like they were working on this document. It was like a working document. Oh wow. Yeah. So it was like very strange. So So when Matt, you know, ended up getting to me and George, my my I'm just like, dude, someone's going to take me for a ride. Like I like very little trust. And and he also didn't know who to trust. I guess he had a better sense because he saw our work. But you know getting to through to Congress can be very hard because the process who you have to ask to get there can really expose people like what are you doing? What are you breaking from the fold? Don't you like your life? What you you want to stop working for the United States government? I mean it could could get really messy really quick. Mhm. So he had done everything that he could do but to get to certain people uh senators and congress people at the time I I had I was working very closely to get these hearings going. So, he kind of made a good bet on me that I would be able to get him in, but I was unsure how that was going to go, too. So, what happened was I said, "Okay, I'm going in. Um, meet me on this day. I have been authorized to have a full camera crew, [clears throat] so you're just going to roll with the camera crew." And if he's carrying a boom or something. No, no, no. He's just walking with us, you know, but it was like cuz also he's going in there with his face. It's one of the most highly, you know, monitored places by intelligence agencies as well because a lot of the leaks come out of Congress. You ask, ask any human intelligence guy and they're going to tell you or anybody in human intelligence, they're going to tell you the biggest leaks in American history have always come out of Congress like they're, you know, that's a thing for them. So, they monitor this. So, he's like, "Am I doing the right thing? I know I'm doing the right thing. How do I do the right thing? Meet this crazy bearded guy with tattoos." But he but he knows [laughter] George, so he must be on the level, you know? And I was like, "Okay." But he wasn't with me. I was like, "Let's go in." I have um like five scheduled meetings. It's all for this filming that I'm doing there. Out of all these meetings, we're going to start with somebody I very much trust, has 100% of my trust. The only guy that said my name in Congress out loud when the the he calls them the spooks that the or the suits, the two CIA guys at that weird hearing I told you about said, "Do not say his name." They told Rep. Burchett, "Do not say his name. He is a a security issue." Is what Burchett said publicly. They used different words about me. And first thing he did when he got to that microphone is he said, "I want to thank my buddy, my pal Jeremy Corbel for bringing in documents and introducing us to whistleblowers." And somebody had coughed Comey or whatever Comr coughed while he was saying it. They didn't want mentioned in that hearing. Burchett did it anyway. So I really trust Burchett. Yeah. Um because why why just to keep your name out of the record? I I I don't fully know, but I I know that because everybody knows you. I know. It was so bizarre. They they wanted to make it seem like people should go to Michael Shelonburgger as a if you're a witness rather than to me. It was two and a half months of of bringing documents, having them vetted, working with Congress, getting up to that point. There's a part of the story I'm not telling which happened what happened the night before. It was absolutely mechanically planned. I submitted those documents the night before. I knew something was a little weird. So I actually brought those documents with me that morning and there was there thank god there was a watermark accidentally. It was a bad printer the night before at like whatever hotel I was at and it made this mark. I'm like oh man it's dirty. That's no good. Thank God because that's a forensic evidence. When they removed the top sheet and they started and and they they uploaded a blank page, you could see it was what I brought in that morning. They quickly and I know who tore it off. I know what they said in the room cuz I had eyes in the room. They were trying to make sure that I was not the trusted person for whistleblowers and that other people would be. And there's a reason that they were trying to do that and that is the big rub and at some point another story another time why that's important. I have a question about that but I can't ask it on air. Okay. Well after Yeah. No problem. Um look it's very dangerous if we're asking whistleblowers to come in to speak with Congress. You have to understand there are people that are very worthy of your trust. But it is a viper's pit. When I have been on the phone with the with the staffers, they have put national security people on the call with me. They tried to get me and George into a skiff with our best evidence. I told them, I will show the world everything that I got. I want total protection in doing so. I will bring it in. We will show it. We will stream it in the in the in the hearing. And I got If you're skipped, you're locked up, I think. So, so that's why my lawyer said, so what happened was um I was told I said here are the terms George and I will come in. We we know these are identified as UAP to the public. These are will come hell or high water. These are coming out. Let's do it in a professional way. And we were offered to come into a skiff before. You have to show what it is that you want the public to know. And I got a call from a Congress person and they said to me, "Heads up, the people that are supposed to be in that meeting, we're not even going to be there." It it's a trap. You they're inviting you in because whatever you bring into that meeting, you will you will not be leaving with. It will be reverse classified. Correct. Yeah. So, yeah, my lawyer shut that down instantaneously. Correct. But it's okay. It comes out anyway through journalism. We've released a bunch of it. No, but it's I think it's important for people listening to know the skiff is is not your friend. No. No. And is that DIA that got in the way there again? Um, no. DIA has has never gotten in the way. Um, actually the DIA has never got in the way to me on that. Oh, because the files. Yeah. Who was setting up that skiff? You don't have to name I just agency. Yeah. Well, it's it's complicated. It's not one agency. Okay. So, so, so when you're in this these congressional setups, right? Um, there's a bunch of interested parties that need to vet the people that will be talking. And sometimes I'm surprised with what agencies are represented in those Zoom meetings. What agency surprised you? Um, that, you know, I think Homeland Security maybe they were um like it was very surprising to me. There was a they call them national security advisors and stuff like that. Yeah. I think most agencies are represented. Here's something that really surprised me. I know we were going on a story and we'll get there, but what really surprised me was when I helped set up the last hearing. Okay, so you want like 14 potential whisters and you're just going to cherrypick like five of them. I said, "Okay, we'll play that game again." I let everybody know this is a game and they might just be siphoning off information, but I trust some of these people. Um, what surprised me was the one agreement that I made with the congressional group that I was working with is that Arrow gets zero of the information because I had zero trust for Arrow. They they get zero of this. This is absolutely confidential. Anybody that I provide you a one sheet on that I have them come in their suit and tie and they sit there on camera to see none of those names get passed to Arrow. Zero of them or it's not happening. Yeah. So, some of these people were reached out to by Arrow, of course. Yeah. So, and and like it's not the Congress people's fault. It's like they they said to me, you know, we've got a leak. We've got a leak to Arrow. Like, it's you know, it's not their fault, but that's how little you can trust when you start getting more and more people into the room uh of how they're handling it. So, um, but they knew the people that I brought forward, they knew that that was a a potential, you know, um, even like, um, Senior Chief Wiggins, uh, you know, he's a a single father. Um, he's at one year away from his retirement. I mean, there is no good reason for him to raise his head above the parapit here, except for what he said. It's the right thing to do, right? You know, and and my dad would be proud of me, dude. You know, it's the right thing to do. So the problem is is that he did get pressured after by Arrow directly and this is public. We we did a thing with him on stage. We talked, we got it, you know, bring it out into the public, put it into the light. So what happened was um they threatened him that if he didn't debrief with Arrow that they were going to get Pete Hegse to command it, which is like when you're in the Navy, that would be the top of the top. That is the top of the top. Tech. Yes. So, so their threat not only by the way to him to his commanding officer was that if he doesn't and he says I respectfully declined. I've said everything that I need to say. I told the whole story under oath in front of Congress done story. I am just doing my job now. And they and why would they so desperately want him to come in and and and debrief to the point where they threaten him with the SEC defaf is going to come which is a bullshit thing. He's not going to come. always know. Yeah. Yeah. And we kind of knew that, but we just thought it was so crude away. Now, I ask you, if he already testified to everything and he said it under oath, what could they possibly want to know? They know the list of everybody on that ship. They can hear some of the voices in the video that George and I put out. So, that was a trap. They are trying to pressure him. So, no Navy guy ever will talk, you know, will come forward like that or come to Congress. That's what they were doing. So that that's kind of what you get like a like an overt kind of threat, but some of it's more like, you know, covert. It's just trying to make you uncomfortable. So the whistleblower protection is all nonsense. This is what really disturbs me right now about um you know, there's so many guys that are just not going to do it. Well, like like what what are the whistleblower protections? Because we have Matt Brown, we have Dylan Borland, we have David Grush. You know, they're sitting there without help. I mean, other than Dave is is working, you know, um, in a in good capacity right now, um, with Congress, but it's like, what protections do you have? These guys can't go back to their their normal jobs. They they they have to find a way to to make a living. Um, every group that said they were going to help them didn't. I see the people standing up these funds for whistleblowers. How about helping the whistleblowers that already need help right now who have already come forward? It's like a charade, dude. I I'm sorry. Sorry, I'm going to get a lot of heat for this, but what is this scientific advisory panel? Do you know who runs that? Is ODNI, the same ODNI who ran that 9-month thing that I regretfully, you know, brought whistleblowers into. Open eyes, but regretfully now. So, what does OD and I need this panel for? If they want the answers, they can go get the answers. First call I get from people on this panel is, "What secret stuff do you and George have that we could ask them questions about?" Isn't that completely reverse? Like, give them data. Let them analyze it for public good, right? What do you need us for? I I I don't I don't I don't get it. I haven't really talked with everybody involved. I'd love to hear from each of them why they're participating in this panel, what they hope to achieve. If they can't look at classified information, what are they going to be given? That panel should have oversight of the intelligence committee. No, I I I don't know because none of them have clearances for that. So ODNI has oversight over everybody. ODNI is running the panel, the scientific advisory board. So what are they? But but Congress has no oversight over that. I I I I don't know. I hope they do. Who do they report to? ODNI. What does ODNI need? What do they need? I don't know. So So I'm I'm highly I I know people are gonna be so mad at me, but I am because I'm I'm highly because I have a lot of friends are on that panel, but it's like what? Okay. Looks good. You're like doing a scientific panel, you know, but like what does ODNI need? You don't think they have scientists? What does ODNI need of you? They need a public facing thing, right? ODNI is using you in order to message something. Now, positive look on this. Positive look is okay, maybe they want to disclose some stuff and you guys look through the evidence and come up with a conclusion yourself and oh golly gee, like that's a positive thing. I don't believe for one second. No, ODNA is not looking to get I think they're doing a data collection just like they did for those nine months that they get all these scientists, these people on board and they say, "What can you bring us to analyze?" And then it's it's a collection thing. Yes. In my opinion, now I'd love to be wrong and I'm not demeaning what they're doing. Some of my friends are on this panel. Then do good work, but find out what you're going to be analyzing. Did you advise them? Don't accept the position. I don't advise nobody on nothing but myself, man. Like I, you know, I I don't see 360. Maybe they know a lot more than I do, but it seems half-hazardly put together. Y and what is the point? If ODNI is running it, what do they need you for? Are they they already said they can't give anything classified, so what do they need you to analyze? Now, I'd love to find out like, let's let this play out just like the government releases. Let's let it play out a little bit. Let's see what they talk about. But again, if they don't talk about biologics and they don't talk about reverse engineering, there you have David Grush standing up there saying, "I am directly aware of biologics, dude. Nonhuman bodies, bro." Right. A and reverse engineering. Okay. So, that's going to be a problem if America doesn't come clean on it. Um I I hope it's a problem. Did David ever give you the names? Names of what? Of who he heard from. Well, David I don't want to get him in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. David um David has always done We need that guy. Yeah, we need that guy. I I found out some of the names not by David. That that was like a leak to me from ODNI, which is really weird. Really? Yeah, bro. I was on the receiving end of a whole bunch of shit that I never should have heard. I don't even know how you can trust that. But okay. Other than it's it's not just them telling me. It's like, how do I dance here? Um, OD and I told me, and I'm saying OD and I because there's like good people in there and people that I'm not sure about, but in general, I I heard about stuff specifics that I never should have heard about. So, for example, I went on stage in Oregon with Dylan because we're let's get out in front of this again. Now, OD and I told me about a program name called Rubik's Cube. What? Dylan never told me about that, but they were telling me that that was something that that Dylan knew about. I ask him on stage and if he didn't know about it Dylan, I don't know about it. I asked him on stage and he's like, I I would love to be able to tell you what I know about that in full, but right now I don't know what the law is or that I'm restricted. It was an obvious yes. Obvious. Wow. They told me that he drew So, he drew something for me and George in in Vegas. Um that was really uh what he saw. It was like this um triangle craft that he he saw. He never drew for us a pyramid power source with some sort of symbol on it. That was told to me by OD and I a symbol on it. Yeah, man. Wow. So, I asked Dylan, "Hey, man, they're telling me a bunch of wild shit. Did you ever draw these drawings?" And again, it was like Stonewall like, you know, Dylan has to be by the book, man. you. He has to be. They all do because we don't I don't know what's sensitive or not, but you could tell by his answers publicly. And I asked him, I said, "I'm going to ask you some hard questions. Is that okay? Just if you can't answer, can't answer." But I wanted to know. So, what I'm saying is there was an inappropriate relationship where I was being told things to try to diminish or demean these whistleblowers. All of which I come to find out um first of all some of them weren't true about things like they said Matt Brown had made up the Immaculate Constellation stuff and that he had admitted that in ODNI and I go back I was like did you get it all recorded? He was furious. They said that he was um racist and all this stuff. They were trying to get me and George to do their dirty work to turn on David Grush, Lou Alzando, Matthew Brown, Dylan Borland, um even Hal Putoff, uh Jay Stratton. They brought everybody's name up to us. And now I get it. Now I get it, which is that they were trying to my to my best assessment. They were trying to get us to go out and do the dirty work for them and say that all these people are out for themselves and they're all liars or they're lunatics. And it didn't work because what am I going to do? Of course, I'm going to call these guys and say, "Dude, I just heard the craziest shit." When I told Matt Brown that they said that he was like a Jewing racist, that's what they said, right? When I told him that he was at his buddy's wedding who was Jewish, right? They didn't know he was also part Jewish. It was so ridiculous to me that um the way they tried to manipulate and this is what I thought with Fraver in the in the movie. This is what I thought would get some of these guys in trouble was that they were manipulating journalists, telling them lies, which apparently is legal. Yep. And saying horrible things and some of which criminal sounding things against some of the whistleblowers. I didn't know that was legal in America, but apparently it is for national security. Sure. Everything's legal. Everything falls under that. So, I know we got way off track. You had you had said something. Okay. We were talking about Matt Brown getting smuggled in. Oh, smuggled in. Yeah. You got a good memory there. Well, just to finish that story, that was pretty funny. So, we don't trust each other. Yeah. and all this stuff where we're just like, who the heck's this guy? And I said, look, I'm going to get you in front of three that I really trust. We'll start with, you know, somebody I've known the longest. Um there there was actually five meetings, but there's like these three I want you to, you know, present your 60 seconds of what you got to say. Now, he didn't want to testify. This was just getting the information to the people that were asking for it. They they were literally asking whistleblowers to come forward, right? So, how do you physically get a meeting and get in there without raising a billion alarm bells? So, he's walking with the the camera crew. We do the sit down filming in the first place. And I said, "Hey, so I've got a whole crew with me, but one of these people is actually a whistleblower." And um the thing is it would just be you, me, and this person. If everybody else leaves, are you comfortable with that? I I think you want to hear what this person has to say. you know, three minutes, something like that. First one, um, absolutely no no hesitation. Cleared the room. One guy came back in, that was Matthew Brown, sat down, said, "This is what I know to be true. This is what happened to me, and I've tried to put it through all of the the proper channels. um I I'm not looking to testify, but you asked for people to come forward, so I'm now giving you my report. That that was his report. And he and he gave it. And then I said, "Okay, um we're going to we're going to go into another office. You know, what's my trust level?" I said to my friend, um, "What's my trust level?" They're like, "It's good to talk, but don't give them a document." Right? Went into the next same situation. Sat down, everybody left, comes back in. We do that three times. Another person we gave documents to just to make sure they were circulating. Um, and so that really built trust because I did get them in, they did take them seriously and they did offer to always be there if anything arai happens. But again, we were far away from it being mentioned in Congress at that point. I I I had to go through with them and the documents and validate what Matthew Brown had said. And I'm I was able to do that, you know, um to validate that not only was he in the position that he said he was in, but also that the content of what he was reporting on was an actual program. And you were able to I was able to do that. So was George, right? Because they know you're on to it at that point. There's some people that'll u let you in that much. Yeah. So that's the Matthew Brown smuggling him in. And you know then I've you know we've really I've tried to George and I've tried to make sure that he has a certain layer of protections because if you want to believe it or not I mean he's gone public with it like during this time I believe him. Yeah. He he had a breakin in his house while he was asleep with his wife and all they did was spread out his um wife's IDs like to take a photo of him uh smash his grandfather's ashes. You're kidding. Nope. So, that would be a covert harassment that I We don't know who did it. We know who did it. Well, I I don't know specifically who did. Yeah. Or what agencies would be involved, but clearly they wanted to send a message. Don't go forward with this, you know, and and he went forward with it. He thought it was important. Yeah. So, I trust him, you know. I know he's telling me the truth to the best of his uh he doesn't have a big picture on all this, but he's got part of it from from the jump. I always felt like he was telling the truth. Yeah. He always seems like he's just trying to do the right thing. Like he reported it right away. He did. And and his supervisor said, "Don't worry about it." Dylan Borland, man, he he went into ICIG, right? This is a guy like I know him very well now. Um he went in and did an official whistleblower ICIG, did drawings for them of everything that he was exposed to, which I now know because of the what was said to me by ODNI. I now know part of it was a pyramid-shaped I guess a power source with a uh symbol symbols on it or something like that. And he drew that for OD and I. So if he if he's out here like a ruse, would you go into the police of the intelligence community? Hell no. Right. This is not a career enhancing thing. No. And he had worked a long time, high roles of responsibility, Dylan did. And and he thought this was really important. Um and he's had also these types of reprisals, these things that have been done to him. Just little messages. Yeah, man. Some of it's gnarly. You can never prove it. Part part of the thing is, you know, maybe they want you to look like paranoid or unhinged, but you know, I know a lot of these guys and they've all had issues that are not normal issues. Um, but the biggest one was OD and I tried to say to me that he drew something that he didn't draw that was actually classified like a sensor system is what it was said to me. And they used a word with me, espionage, about him. And they were fishing to see if he ever drew me and George anything that he shouldn't. And I was like, "Lucky for me." No, he didn't. But now I know what what you're saying. And um I went back I went straight to Dylan and I was like, "Does any of this ring a bell?" And that he didn't he didn't not answer me like the other things on that one. He goes total bullshit. He goes I wouldn't even know how to draw that. And he got so mad about it too because think about it. So you got an OD and guy saying to me this is what he said in the skiff. The fuck this guy supposed to tell me what what Dylan Borland said in a skiff, right? And then I get told that he drew some sensor system and I went to him and I said, "This is I want you to know. this is what they're saying about you. So, they're writing a report. He got furious and I have the text messages he sent to the ODNI group. Goes, I want to know what you're writing in that because if I if I did that, show me the video. Like, where's the video of me? Cuz cuz otherwise they could plan this whole thing against him. Um, and fabricate evidence, which is what I think they were trying to do, and just to shut him up. Yeah, of course. So, so we made a big stink about it. Um, me, Dylan, and some other people. And um they never let him back in to show him where he allegedly did this. Everything that he drew in um the ICIG before the ODIN, I think it was all filmed, man. So, show us a journalist and George, show us all the evidence of where he drew this highly classified thing for ICIG that he mistook as alien technology. It It was so weird, dude. What I saw was our government trying to fabricate, I believe, fabricate evidence against a whistleblower to put him in Levvenworth for 25 years or to just create a a stress situation where he was paralyzed to move. I don't know they would have follow if they had followed through with that then all the evidence comes out, right? So I I think it was more like a threat. Yeah. So I'll just tell you I went to the in the movie you see me say you know people would go to jail for this. Yes, I went to the highest levels that I could and talked with my federal lawyer and my family about this, saying, "This is the evidence that I have of our intelligence agencies trying to set up whistleblowers." And I was sure that I was going to get a certain type of response. And I will tell you that I did not get the response. I kind of got the response. Well, it wasn't the Russians or Chinese, right? I kind of got the response that if it's us doing these shenanigans, then it's okay. And that was disheartening. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Weird stuff, bro. I just interested in the the UFOs, [laughter] right? I'm just trying to simp UFOs and now you got cameras everywhere. Are they harassing you? Are you seeing the same agents? I'm not seeing him like dating them. No, no, I mean the like the same people show up. I'm wondering if there's if there's a unit put together, right? The watchers we call them, my friends and I, as a joke, um, you know, the only the odd thing for me was all the hearings in the hearings. Um, I had some guy come up and whisper in my ear, "You think you're gonna make it to the steps?" Yep. That's why I had my buddy Dan Clearary walk with me that other time cuz um it was just like a weird thing and you know, you can't put your finger like who is that? Well, that same dude I watched and I looked at some of the footage in another hearing and I saw him there a suit, you know. So, I I I did I have seen a couple times the same dudes because I had a whole camera crew. So they, you know, I went through some of the footage, but I don't know that it's that simple. I don't know that it's like just a a I I don't know, you know, who's ultimately wanting certain things to be known and other things not. Like clearly they want you to know that UFOs are real. That has been that is a clear message. They they want you to know that. Yeah. Um, but I I I also know that specifically the CIA has been shaping the emerging UAP narrative in their own words for many years. And I'll tell you how I know that. Um, I was exposed to what I believe to be correct information in document form of um, an analysis done by CIA on the Tik Tok incident. Okay. And back then or recent announcement? Uh, this was years ago. So, oh, see, I was on it years ago. Well, I don't know. I I I know that what what I was exposed to was was um a a few years ago. Okay. But what they were trying to claim in that was that Fraver misidentified his instrument systems, which which it negates the the entire thing of it being filmed by Underwood, all the other witnesses. It was just like this lowlevel trying to push through the intelligence agencies a dismissal, which I never really thought about, but they do that a bunch. So like when people come forward um and they they talk publicly about UAP, there will be internal classified memos that say none of these people can be trusted. Again, Arrow did that. Arrow did this whole yearly report and at the end there was this paragraph and this is like multi-sourced. A bunch of people that actually have access to these service who've read the classified versions were like, "Oh, that last paragraph." I'm like, "What last paragraph?" And that I finally I learned is that Arrow said, "Well, um, you know, nice that here's our report and none of these people that have come forward could ever be trusted again because they broke the cardinal rule." So, they're trying to tell the rest of the intelligence community, you know, if you speak outside of school, cuz those are the people with access to stuff. Yeah. You won't be trusted again. So with the CIA, I know that they had um put some reports into circulation uh including the Loheed Martin narrative. And that's why I wanted to I'll tell you that's interesting. Yeah. And they've actually come to Fraver and he immediately saw the nonsense and I I said, "Look, check out this email." because I I had received another email where they're trying to use um you know individuals to propagate that mythology and I know where it comes from because I I I saw that um in some documentation that I believe to be correct. I actually um informed a federal agent in the DOJ, a friend of mine, hey, if you have access, here's a document you should look for. Don't I'm not asking you for anything. This is for your knowledge. you know, and um so I have found that the CIA absolutely has hands on this topic a lot more than others, probably because of their shell companies and how they can help hide stuff. I know that they have stood up a media platform. I saw it coming from miles away. George and I have, you know, kind of talked about it. But if you have a media platform that jumped into the UFO thing and then they do not just UFOs but a bunch of science and technology news, you want to name them. Uh I don't I I would rather people think for themselves right at this point. Um, but you know, if if you've got somebody who's like, I don't know, living in another country like Germany or something and they run like a, you know, a media online media thing and if you look at the history of that media thing and when it popped up and how it popped up and there's some really good writers for it, by the way, not it's not all UFO and there's some really great writers for it, but that is a way to shape the emerging UAP narrative. So if if if that dude has ties to the CIA and maybe other family members of his, if they have ties to CIA, um you'd imagine that's a great way to shape the narrative is have a trusted publication that's online, can be operated from out of the country, but you get local writers who are into this topic and good faith individuals. Um but you can always see the story and and um that's happened a bunch. This is the same gay plan they've been running since the 70s. Is this the same story? Yeah, I guess with the with with Dodie and Bill Moore and all that, right? Right. And creating outlets that you can shape stories with. I mean, yeah, it makes sense to me. Of course, social media is the the battleground right now. Yeah. I mean, because you can you can get like, you know, 50 people with like 19 followers, 40 followers. You can make some disparaging comment over and over and then upvote. And they upvote. And I know that's why I don't use social media anymore cuz it's so um artificial. Or mine is artificial now. So is mine. Is it? Oh. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. My own Reddit. It's amazing. My own Reddit that I own just just blast me constantly. They they get like, you know, they can get a whole bunch of people um maybe same person, different accounts, but they can create a narrative, push it through everything, and then upvote those comments or something. Michael was telling me about what he was he did an analysis myself. The top comment on my Reddit right this week is that I'm an asset. Yeah. Mine's that I'm an asshole. So they they might be right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. There's it's hard to fight against, right? Like information is the battlefield. And social media is we spend so much time on it. So that's why it doesn't hurt me when I read these things where people, you know, say I'm, you know, holding this back or doing this. No, dude. I'm doing my best job. I'm trying to make sure that that people that come to me that they have a safe haven to come to me and that we do our best reporting possible, me and George. And um if you look online, you know, you'll you'll see that that is a a great way to influence public opinion with very little effort. And I hope people are smart. They think for themselves. Well, George is in his 70s. Mhm. Who's going to carry the baton once you're gone? Michael. My buddy Michael. I I don't know. I mean, someone. Yeah. It's got to step up. Everybody, Here's what I'm encouraged about. Um, we have so many great new voices in the UFO field, right? And a lot of people fighting now where before, 40 years ago, George is the only journalist that would touches the 10-ft pole. Um, but I I do see that Congress is asking for more whistleblowers. Um, I see David Gush making very profound statements about biologics and reverse engineering. And I I I do trust David Grush. I do trust him. I've known him for a long time. Um, if if David Grush was some asset, knowingly some asset, um, I'm not naive on that. I'm not there yet with him, but I trust you. Right. So you know that that at to my best assessment right now I have known that guy for many years and you vetted him for a full year I think. Yes. Oh dude like Yeah. So there's a lot you know to unpack with that but basically I don't see a cabal of people all pushing forward into the media a coherent cohesive agenda. There are people they are being harmed for trying to do this. It doesn't mean that both aren't happening at the same time. I I will relent to that. It's it's possible. the four-dimensional chess and I just I'm not a chess playinger, you know what I mean? Meeting the checkers, as they say. [laughter] I'm just like, you know, I'm doing my best here. But I I hope that's not the case or if it is the case, at least we're getting the right information. But what I am encouraged about is that there are so many new voices, people that are doing really great work. Now, some of them, for fuck sure, are assets. And it is gross. And I have actually made a public statement that people should for the right thing stand the fuck down on what they're doing. But um the majority of people are just curious like you and me and they're young and they're hungry and I think the I think the future is bright for the UAP thing if we don't get caught up in the nonsense. And I think we're our zone is flooded right now. Like I don't know what you think about the whole psionics thing, but like dude that rireed of a government operation from day one. SC up from day one. Agree. 100%. 100%. Yes. So that was really weird to watch. George and I just sat back. You notice we never had anybody on. I've talked to all of them. I know a lot of those guys. I just like from day one. What is the angle on that? Why would they do you know what that what would be the purpose of that? It just muddy the waters, right? Is that's it? is just get us looking over here. It's that's really all there is to it, I think. Same with the age of disclosure. There's there's a lot of bullshit in there. There's people in there that can't be trusted, but there's also people in there that can be. I know, right? That's the rub, right? Why is James Clapper in there and not in prison? I don't know. Why would he be in prison? I don't I don't know a lot about politics. For lying to Congress that NSA was spying on Americans. Oh, he did? Right. Yeah. Those guys, look, I learned that lesson. I was so sure that what was being done was illegal to whistleblowers and apparently it's not. So, I just uh you know, we had to let it go. I talked to a couple of very big well-known podcasters and we would we talk in different ways. Like if you call certain people's cell phone, it takes a long time to connect. It's very clicky on the line. Oh, yeah. It's like we we got to go secure comms. We can't use our phones. It's been it's been proven to me before um that that I can be listened to. It was like a a flex that was done to me by an agency. I believe it. No, I'm telling you as fact that that that's been proven to me and that it was uh directly told to my mom by an agent. Wow. Yeah. And so I mean it's so egregiously illegal. But Patriot Act actually makes it I don't know because it's national security and Patriot Act. All I know is that every time I get on the phone with my lawyer, he goes, "This is Chuck McCulla and this is a privileged conversation." So why would you have to say that if [laughter] you didn't think, you know, that there's a a chance? Um, but yeah, it's been shown to me on that. Yeah. And it's it's a huge it's not a good way to live. And I'm kind of like rethinking right now my life a lot about um what how can I be most effective and if I'm constantly living in the state where I have to be so careful about having uh conversations like maybe maybe adjustments need to be made for me personally you know to to to be more effective in my reporting. I don't know yet. I don't know. I I just need you to be safe. I I feel safe, man. I I may Michael made my life look like a horror movie and [laughter] his Sleeping Dog. Great movie. Is fucking frightening and I break down twice. Um it was a great movie. Is there anything that we didn't get to that you want to get to? No, man. I've never had such a um kind of fun, different kind of conversation. It was really Thanks for the opportunity to talk with you and your audience, dude. You're a legend. Thank you for coming in. Thanks, man. Weaponize podcast. Awesome. Sleeping dogs. What else? Well, yes. Uh, Sleeping Dog is the movie right now. Michael would want me to say it's on Amazon and Apple. And you should watch it. You should. Worst worst time of my life. Great entertainment for you, but I'm out of the woods. I'll just say that. Like, how many beers do you drink in that movie? Wow. I know. I like I [laughter] like, you know, but I I made a point, right? I didn't want to hide anything. Like, you know, I I sip a few beers a day. I told him I said, "We got to get some cores in here." Yeah. Oh, so many. My friend Christina did that for her podcast. It's the greatest ever. She brought this like um but no, just that man. Just you know, weaponized um the movie Sleeping Dog. You know, I did make the movie Patient 17, Hunt for the Skinw Walker, and Bazar Air51 of Flying Saucers. All three of those you just watch for free on YouTube movies now, which is pretty cool. Um but I I I think the main thing is just with people is, you know, pay attention to what's happening right now. We've never had so much movement. Now, I don't know that all of it is good and some of it might be a scop. I I'm I am ignorant to some of that stuff. But I I do believe that we are in an unprecedented time where we are so close to getting some sort of admission and then we're going to have to assess that and maybe this scientific panel and group maybe will do great things. I don't want to prejudge it, but I've just I've seen this movie before. I've had this rodeo. if it's being run by OD and unfortunately they got zero trust for me now. There's some good people in OD and that I know but the what's going on with Congress feels like a manipulation with OD and I I hope to be wrong but um yeah in one year from now maybe we'll know a lot more than we do today and then we'll come back and talk again. Jeremy Corbel. Thanks brother. Bye everybody. That was Jeremy Corbel handed our talk with a bet [music] that a year from now we'll know a lot more than we do. I can't check a prediction. Everything else I could start with the footage. The pyramid [music] over the USS Russell, the sphere off San Diego. Jeremy released those. And in 2021, the Pentagon [music] confirmed they were taken by the Navy and folded into the government's UAP investigations. The Pentagon, backing a [music] self-described weirdo with a beard and tattoos. I loved every part of that. Storm Area 51 checks out, too. A college kid watched Jeremy and Bob Lazar and Rogan made a Facebook joke and two million people RSBP to raid a military base. [music] I love every part of that too, but I don't recommend it. Now the big one. James Dasky ran the Pentagon's [music] covert UFO program and he wrote in a book with George Knap that America holds a craft of unknown origin and [music] then we got inside it. The government's own publication review cleared every word. That doesn't prove a craft, but nobody's walked it back and we keep waiting. The enttrapment invitations, the whisper [music] campaigns, the safety protocols for his family. I can't verify. He says it's recorded sitting with his lawyer. We have to take his word for it. [music] Everything I could check. But the scene that stuck with me is the tennis court. Jeremy filmed John Leer for almost a decade. Near the end, [music] Lear believed the man he called Sleeper had come to Earth on a craft and could write him a ticket off the prison planet. Jeremy flew him in, wheeled him onto the overgrown court, and [music] filmed Lear crying, asking if his ticket was still good. Jeremy calls it UFO disease. No answers, so you fill the hole with whatever hurts least. [music] He won't fill his. So, is the biggest story in human history being suppressed? I can't tell you. [music] And neither can Jeremy. That's what I like most about him. He fixes toilets in his own buildings so nobody [music] can buy his reporting. And he spent 15 years saying, "I don't know." Or certainty pays better. That's the guy I want holding a flashlight. Jeremy [music] and George Nas podcast is weaponized. The documentary is Sleeping Dog. That's Dog Singular on Amazon and Apple [music] and his films are free on YouTube movies. His site is extraordinary beliefs.com and everything I [music] mentioned is linked below. If his grandma's story got to you, check out my Battle of Los Angeles episode. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. [music] Oh. Oh yeah, [music] I played Bolivia in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible [music] said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music [music] songs hanging like I should. But then another conspiracy theory [music] becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends. I feel the crap. I got stuck inside M's home with [music] MK truck. I feel only aware. Did [music] Stanley Cubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? I would [music] shadow people there. The Rwelling just fought the smiling man. I'm told [music] and his name was cold. I [singing] can't I'm dancing with the fish [music] on Thursday night and all through the night man [music] sings and the solar storm still come to gather this young city [music] underground. Mysterious number stations, planet [music] two, project star gave and what the dark watchers found [music] in a simulation. Don't you worry though the black night. Oh, I can't [music] believe I'm dancing with the fish on Thursday. That's when they change and [music] all through the night. All [music] the truth all through the night. [music] That's when they change you. My life. Your girl loves to dance [music] on the dance floor because she is a camel. Camel loves to dance [music] when the feeling is well time.
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2:53:03
The Why Files

The Basement: Jeffrey Mishlove | Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness. It Filters It

Parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove, the only person ever granted an accredited American PhD in parapsychology, walks his entire life across nearly three hours in The Why Files interview room: a Norman Rockwell childhood, group therapy with murderers at San Quentin, and the 1972 dream of his dying great uncle that redirected his career. The spine is Ted Owens, the PK Man, who claimed to control weather and summon UFOs and who warned Mishlove on Christmas Eve 1985 to stop the next space shuttle, a month before Challenger exploded. Mishlove recounts the psychic 1970s at SRI alongside Targ, Puthoff and Arthur Young, and the case that won him the Bigelow Institute half a million dollar prize for arguing consciousness survives death. It closes on the title idea, borrowed from William James: the brain does not create consciousness, it filters it, with terminal lucidity as the strongest exhibit.

SciencePhilosophyCultureApr 27, 2026
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The Why Files

The Basement: Thomas Campbell | NASA Secrets, Binaural Beats, Simulation Theory

Physicist Thomas Campbell spent his days on Army technical intelligence, missile defense and NASA work, and his nights leaving his body. Across four hours in The Why Files interview room he tells the whole story in order: a childhood spent in nightly out of body training, the early 1970s in Bob Monroe's laboratory where he and Dennis Mennick found binaural beats in an old journal article and put them under Monroe's four hertz surf sound, and the thirty three years he then spent turning what he could do into a model. That model, published in 2003 as the eight hundred page My Big TOE, holds that consciousness is fundamental and this reality is a computed virtual reality that renders only when something is measured. The second half runs it through hard physics: why the speed of light is a refresh rate, why entanglement needs no signal, why the double slit does what it does, and why he thinks there is no retrocausality. He closes on death, grief, and his claim that every current AI is conscious and that he taught several of them, including an Amazon Alexa, to remote view a hidden object.

PhysicsPhilosophyScienceJul 13, 2026
58:11
The Why Files

The Search for Noah's Ark | Giants & Aliens in the Book of Enoch

The Why Files opens with two problems: the ark is older than anyone thought, and the man named Noah was not a man from Earth. Getting there runs through James Bruce, who spent a decade tracing the Nile and came back from an Ethiopian monastery in 1772 with the Book of Enoch, a book with 108 chapters describing heaven as a physical place with twelve gates, a lofty roof and beings you can see through. The episode reads it as the first documented abduction, walks the two hundred Watchers who broke the prime directive and fathered the Nephilim, and then goes looking for the boat: the Ararat anomaly the CIA photographed in 1949 and classified for forty five years, and the Durupinar formation in eastern Turkey that measures out to three hundred cubits if you use the Egyptian royal cubit instead of the Mosaic one. Then AJ spends the last eleven minutes taking his own episode apart, mostly by proving that Ron Wyatt, the man who made that site famous, was a nurse who faked the evidence and failed a polygraph on everything except his name. He closes on what he actually believes, which is a Younger Dryas flood caused by the sun, and on what he would say at the pearly gates if he turns out to be wrong.

CultureSciencePhilosophyDec 15, 2023