Investigating UFOs: International research & Ross Coulthart's personal story | Backscroll

Good day and welcome back to Reality Check. I'm your host, Ross Kulart.

Well, what an interesting time it is right now around the world with mystery objects. Perhaps they are craft or drones. Perhaps not. But whatever they are, they are breaching highly protected national airspace over major airports and sensitive military facilities with apparent impunity. Currently, it's Denmark and Norway. Previously, of course, earlier this year, it was the United States and Great Britain.

Now, the long taboo subject of unidentified anomalous phenomena is increasingly becoming an issue of mainstream political concern. It's impossible yet to say what these objects are, but their apparent capacity to hover in position for hours, far longer than off-the-shelf normal commercial or military drones, suggests a highly advanced professional actor, perhaps a foreign state adversary. But there's no evidence yet of which country, if any, is responsible to date.

These drones are also showing apparent stealth capabilities. They quite literally just appear over often highly secure facilities without showing up on radar even though they're very large in many cases. And if they are radio-controlled unmanned craft, they're not receiving signals on any known frequency that anyone I've spoken to has been able to detect.

In the US, they've also apparently been able to change shape on occasion, making themselves appear to look like aircraft with jet or turbine noises, but they're moving impossibly slowly at extremely low altitude. They're also not hiding themselves at all, displaying flashing lights and often pulsing up, emitting a bright glow as they move, often erratically through the sky. Whatever these are, they're not ordinary drones, if they're drones at all.

Now, while the United States, Britain, and other Western countries, including my own here in Australia, have at times given wildly contradictory explanations for whatever these objects are. Some governments are taking the possibility, the possibility that these so-called drones might be some kind of unidentified anomalous phenomena very seriously indeed.

In late September 2025, I was approached by a Japanese online TV network called Niko Niko asking me if I was interested in interviewing a two-times former Japanese defense minister, Mr. Yasu Kazu Hamada in a live TV appearance with two other members of the Japanese Parliament, The Diet, the UFO Diet Members League.

In May, this new parliamentary UFO group in Japan submitted a proposal to the current Japanese Defense Minister, General Nakatani, on UAPs. They called for the establishment of an office specializing in UAP issues at the Japanese Ministry of Defense and for the collection, investigation, and analysis of UAP information. They requested information sharing with the United States, periodic reporting back to the Diet, the Parliament, and public disclosure. Its primary purpose was to demand that the Japanese government tackle UAPs head-on as a genuine authentic security issue.

It's extremely noteworthy that this UFO league isn't comprised by a bunch of fringe politicians. Mr. Hamada himself has been the defense minister of Japan in two previous administrations and the current prime minister of Japan Mr. Shagiru Ishibbo no less has joined the UFO diet members league. It's quite extraordinary. The prime minister is a member of the UFO parliamentary group and he has expressed a belief in UFOs previously and he said he's looking at how Japan's military should respond to the possibility of aliens under Japan's pacifist constitution. "There are no grounds for us to deny that there are unidentified flying objects and some life form that controls them," he's previously said.

So, when I was offered this unique opportunity to question Mr. Yasu Kazu Hamada, the chairman of Japan's UFO Diet Members League, and another former politician, Mr. Yoshiharu Asakawa on this live debate program. I leapt at the opportunity. One of the issues we discussed was an incident that took place on the 26th of July this year over the Genkai nuclear power plant in Kyushu, Japan, where three mysterious lights were observed lingering for an extended period. As you'll hear, the Japanese authorities also initially suggested these might be drones, but there's still a mystery about what these objects were.

"It's great to meet you again. It's nice to be back and it's an honor to meet the parliamentarians who have been responsible for the creation of the UFO parliamentary league. It's a very important step for Japan."

"May I ask where you are now?"

"I'm in Australia, very near to Sydney. I live very close to the city of Sydney. So thank you for being here so late at night in your time. Now I will give you the segment, this segment of this program to you. So please feel free to interview Representative Hamada."

"Can I firstly say to Representative Yasu Kazu Hamada how honored I am to be able to interview him for the TV network that I work for in the in America in the United States. I'm a correspondent for News Nation, which is a cable news network in the United States. Can I firstly ask you, sir, what is the feeling inside the Japanese government generally about the issue of UAPs? Is it taken seriously by the government or is it like in Australia, the government doesn't think about it at all?"

"So in our, so part of our activities was to make a recommendation to the defense department and I believe that the minister, the defense minister and also the defense ministry are very serious and they are very seriously making effort on this issue, but I do feel that there's a difference in the how serious we are so between the members of the parliament, parliament members of the national diet and the and people within the government and I actually think that they are not very proactive in their effort. So we think that we parliamentarians need to make more effort."

"Well, firstly, can I say I think it's very admirable that Japan is showing such leadership on this issue because by definition, any unidentified object entering the airspace of any country is a threat to national security and flight safety. So, it's to be commended that Japan is doing this. Can I, can I please ask what has prompted the strength of feeling in the parliament? I'm very surprised that, for example, the prime minister of Japan Shingiru Ishiba was involved as a founding member of your group. What is it in the issue of UAPs that has caused such a serious response from politicians in Japan? Why are so many strong leaders in Japan in the parliament so keen to see action on UAPs? What is the history that has led to this political initiative?"

"Prime Minister Ishiba is still our top council or advisor, and he is someone, he is a politician who has been doing a lot of work in the national defense and national security and he had dealt with many issues from the perspective of national security and for example, he said, what if Godzilla came, came, then how would we deal with Godzilla? Then in such a case, we all so need to be prepared, prepared, because we politicians need to be expect the unexpected and in case of UAP, it's very important that the fact, the very important fact is that we don't know what they are and the fact that we don't know what they are is something that makes us should make us anxious. We need to be prepared for all possible also not very unexpected possibilities. And Mr. Ishiba is someone who had such a philos political philosophy."

"During your time as defense minister, were you ever briefed about UAPs, about unexplained incursions into Japanese airspace that were not able to be explained in any way whatsoever? Did you ever have any contact with the Americans about UAPs?"

"There was no official communication that was reported to me."

"There's been no time in your history as defense minister that any report has been made by any of the military or civilian services about unidentified objects entering Japanese airspace. Is that correct?"

"There was no official such report when I served as the minister of defense."

"That's very interesting. The US government, of course, has publicly admitted that UAPs are a genuine mystery worthy of serious investigation. This means they acknowledge that there are anomalous objects in some cases apparently intelligently controlled and they're operating in our skies, in our oceans, and they cannot be explained apparently as human technology or normal natural phenomena. Do you agree, sir, with that analysis by the United States? Is, is the position of your time as a defense minister such that you think that the United States government is correct in that analysis that there is a genuine mystery worthy of investigation?"

"In our self-defense forces, there is a category called unidentified object or non-identifiable object, and but we don't know if the object there reported in this category were intelligently controlled. As I understand, they were most reported as natural phenomenon. For example, for example, a group of nine B, flock of B. Um, but I know that the defense ministry is working together closely with the US government and because we have not made any attempt to analyze the information independently of them, we cannot say much about this topic, but I, I have been reported that they are actually working with the US government and sharing information."

"That, that was my next question. I was going to ask whether you are aware if there is any collaboration or on gathering or investigating incidents of unidentified objects. It sounds like you're saying that there is collaboration with the United States. That's very interesting because the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon's UFO office, has testified to Congress that it intends to reach out to allies like Japan and indeed Australia to ask for assistance in gathering information on UAPs. Can I please clarify? Is the collaboration you are talking about a request from the United States for information to be kept by the defense ministry on UAPs?"

"Could you please repeat the last question?"

"Sure. I I'm particularly keen. I think it's very significant that the defense ministry is assisting the Americans and collaborating on collecting of data. What I'm keen to know is, is that collaboration because the Americans have asked Japan to assist with providing information on unidentified objects?"

"And so, this kind of sharing of information is not restricted to UAP-related matters and it's not that I have heard directly that they have shared the, the US government has asked us or maybe we have asked them to share information about UAPs. So, such concrete report is not something that I know of."

"The defense department in the United States has said in a report that Japan is a hot spot for UFO UAP sightings. They said this in about August 2023 in a report tabled in Congress. Do, do you know why Japan is such a hot spot? Clearly, from what you're telling me, it's not reports from military. There are a lot of civilians in Japan who are reporting UFOs."

"So, the places that the US military has the, the US, the department, defense department has designated as hot spots are the areas where the US military are very actively deployed and also these are the areas where they are very tense situations. So the US military activities in volume and also in their activity range are very high in the sky and also in the on over the ocean. And so, the Japanese self-defense forces have officially said that there is no case that should be made in public. So that's the official position. So, that's what I think that might be the case."

"Can I suggest, sir, that that, that suggests to me that the Americans are seeing things around Japan from their bases and perhaps they are not sharing that information with your government. If, if is there any other explanation as to why the Americans would know that Japan is a UFO hot spot? Because if it's not information coming from the Ministry of Defense, if it's not coming from civilians, as you say, it must be coming from the US military bases in Japan. It, it makes me wonder, is America not sharing that intelligence with Japan? And if that is the case, is that a concern to you?"

"So, we can think that the Americans have the high awareness and also the ability to detect such objects. Um, but it's up to Americans to decide if such information is necessary for us, for Japanese, and to be shared with the Japanese."

In November 1986, a Japan Airlines cargo plane, Flight 1628, encountered a massive UFO UAP while flying near Alaska. Three UFOs played tag with this cargo plane for 50 minutes while they were observed by the sometimes terrified flight crew. During the last 30 minutes, the objects were tracked on radar. The cargo plane's Captain Kenji Tarachi described the main so-called mother ship object as being two times the size of an aircraft carrier hovering in the sky. It was shaped like a walnut with a very wide brim.

An official of the United States Federal Aviation Administration, a very senior official, John Callahan, who was then an FAA division chief, personally investigated the incident. He confirmed the Alaskan radar evidence did show an anomaly. He went public with his allegations that America's external intelligence agency, the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, tried to suppress this incident by confiscating all data from the sighting, fearing it would cause mass panic if the public learned that UFOs were real.

This is John Callahan's story and this is the questions that I put to the Japanese politicians about it. "There is a very important case where a Japan Airlines plane, Flight 1628, was flying from Paris to Narita airport in November 1986. And it's a very famous case because the captain of the plane, Kenji Tarouchi, reported seeing three objects, two small ships and a gigantic mother ship, a UFO mother ship hovering near his aircraft. And I'm aware that the Federal Aviation Administration in America, an official named John Callahan, he was the FAA division chief of the accidents and investigation branch in Washington DC, a very senior official of the FAA, he became aware that there were radar tapes that had recorded these objects on radar and the US military had apparently recorded these objects and that radar data was provided to the FAA by the Anchorage, Alaska air traffic control. It's interesting because I'm wondering whether the minister is aware of this case because what it shows, I felt sorry for Captain Tarouchi because he was given a difficult time for speaking publicly about his sighting. And allegedly the CIA, the American Intelligence Service, intervened, according to John Callahan, to try to confiscate all of the radar tapes, but Mr. Callahan kept a copy and provided it to the public and eventually it was made public. This, this is a disturbing case because it suggests that the intelligence agencies of the United States are trying to suppress evidence even when a good person like Captain Tarouchi comes forward with evidence of a UFO. It, it worries me. Is the minister, sorry, is the former defense minister, Mr. Hamada, are you, are you concerned at all that your American allies are perhaps not being fully open with Japan as much as they should be?"

"So this is not something that happened during my time as serving as a defense minister and unfortunately I don't have, I have not heard of the possibility of American intelligence agency involved in this and so and also I don't know much, I don't know enough about this case to make a comment so I'd like Mr. to talk about this."

"Thank you. So this is something that happened in 1986 and I was at the time a high school student and I remember that a very quality Japanese newspaper, Asahi newspaper, has dealt with the issue by just saying that it was a mistaken case of the sighting of Jupiter. And that was a very memorable incident and also people asked me about this incident in Mexico when I visited the congress and also at Seoul when I visited them last year. So this is a very famous, a world-famous incident. So, um, I asked the government when I was a member of the national diet if they have any information regarding this and they said simply no disclosure."

"And as you pointed out, this case, more details about this case were revealed at the event by the Disclosure Project and so I think that that this case also proves that UFO issues are a very important and significant political or military or national security problem."

"Maybe we can, we could say that that was some kind of the newest weapon at the time developed by another country, but when we think of the technology at the time, it's very unlikely."

"So, um, whether the, whether the information regarding this issue is still in the government preserved is, we, I don't think that that is likely, but if we have witness testimony and also maybe the data from the US government, we can re-examine this issue and it's, it's not good that we leave something that unknown just as unknown. So we personally, I think that we should work on it."

"Music to my ears, sir. Thank you very much for your answer. I'd like to move on now to the Genkai nuclear power plant incident in July. I noticed that the police have made the finding that these objects were high altitude aircraft. But my reading of local news reports suggests that not everyone agrees with that analysis. Does Representative Hamada or anybody in the panel have a view as to whether the finding that these were just high altitude aircraft to explain the luminous lights seen over the Genkai nuclear power plant? Does that meet your expectations? Do you, do you concur? Do you agree with that finding?"

"I believe that when something like this happens, the question whether we at the government are prepared to respond is questioned. And as you know, we have had a special hearing on August 7th and we talked with the Kyushu Power Power Company and we also from the officials of the related ministries and agencies and we will actually talk about this later in this program and then you can also figure out what actually are problems with this incident and this is an issue that many people are interested in, not just members of the parliamentary."

On March the 11th, 2001, a powerful earthquake and a subsequent tsunami disabled the Fukushima Dai nuclear power plant in Japan, leading to the meltdown of three reactor cores and the release of large amounts of radioactive material. A huge area was and remains evacuated. There was extensive contamination of the surrounding land and sea. Around about 10,000 people were evacuated. The accident was classified as a Level Seven event, the highest possible on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. It signified a major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects.

I was intrigued by reports at the time from Japanese media and civilians with mobile phones who suggested that around the time of the Fukushima meltdown in 2011, large numbers of people, including TV media witnesses, saw UFO or orb-like objects over or near the critical reactor meltdown site. There was this video published online showing multiple white dot orbs hovering over or near the plant. By way of background, there were similar sightings also at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown in Ukraine in the Soviet Union in April 1986. The former Soviet official newspaper Pravda reported that hundreds of people witnessed a UFO hovering over the Chernobyl plant for roughly 6 hours during the disaster. It even reported claims that the UFO might have been responsible for a significant reduction of the radiation levels released by the destroyed reactor. I was intrigued to know if this former Japanese defense minister had ever heard such claims about Fukushima.

"One of the reasons I'm very interested in the Genkai case, sir, is because it has been reported that there was an earthquake in the Saga Prefecture at 9:00 p.m. that evening, just three and a half hours before the sighting. The earthquake hit. Um, there was an earthquake at 9:00 p.m. on the Saturday evening. Um, and there were reports over the facility at Fukushima as well of craft over the Fukushima facility. And I'm just wondering whether there's any possibility that there is a link here with earthquake phenomena. Have you considered the possibility that what we are talking about is some kind of non-human intelligence being concerned about nuclear power plants possibly being under threat from earthquakes in a place like Japan where obviously there is a great deal of seismic activity?"

"So, I have heard that there could be some kind of light as a natural phenomenon when an earthquake happens. But we don't know if these UAPs were had any relationship with the earthquake. So, about regarding the nuclear, Fukushima nuclear reactors and UAPs. So they say that they have seen UAPs on TV camera and I actually know someone, a journalist who has been there and filmed the UAPs and also had seen them with his own eyes. I'm, but I'm not sure if we can think about this and the Genkai incident at the same level. But I'm aware that ARO has said that there is some kind of, there might be some kind of relationship between nuclear facilities and UAPs."

"There certainly is. That's very interesting. That's a very interesting answer. Um, I'm very interested in that. Can I ask Mr. Hamada, is there any mandatory reporting system for pilots in the defense force or civilian aircraft? Is there any requirement that UAPs be reported? One of the big problems in America, I have found this as a journalist, is many military people feel that it would damage their career to come forward with a sighting of a UAP. So, they often see these objects, but they don't report them. Is there a mandatory reporting requirement for UAPs in place in Japan? And if not, do you think that that would be a good initiative for the defense ministry to follow?"

"For the civilian pilots, there's no such mandatory system. For self-defense, for pilots belonging to self-defense forces, there are a variety of report systems and they are mandatory and according to the ministry in charge of transportation at this point, there is no such worry. So that will be my answer. But Mr. now says that I should read out some, the PowerPoint that he's now showing to you. Oh, good. So in 2020, September, Taro Kono, who was at the time defense minister, has made a special order. He had directed the self-defense forces how to respond to UAPs and that is, so there are three points: they should make sure that these cases are reported, that's the first point, and the second point is, as far as possible, they should try to make a photo or try to make some kind of record, and the third point is they should analyze the cases."

"Can I ask, just to double check, I wanted to be clear. So even though they have those rules, the mandatory reporting rules for military pilots, is it the case that to your knowledge there have been no such reports made by any military pilots since those rules were made?"

"When I was a member, Mr. Sakawa says when he was a member of the national diet, he asked some questions to the defense minister Hamada and also defense minister Kihara and he had received a very epoch-making answer. One of the officials of the defense ministry had said there is nothing that we could share with the public at this point. So that suggests to me, sir, there is data. They're just not letting the public know about it. Is that correct?"

"So I've received this answer after many questions and so my understanding is that they're saying that there might be or would be something that could be publicized or shared with the general public when certain conditions are there. And this is actually related to the Chinese balloon incident in Tohoku."

"So the defense ministry and the self-defense forces knew that there were Chinese balloons, reconnaissance balloons, but they ignored because they didn't want people to know that they have the ability to detect them, according to his own understanding. They didn't want to lie. The official said that it's not something that at this point we cannot answer, but maybe we will be able to answer later in some future."

"Thank you for that very interesting answer. Very interesting. We have five minutes left now. So if, please keep asking questions if they are important questions."

"Can I please ask both Mr. Hamada and Mr. Esakawa individually? Do either of you have a view as to whether you believe that this planet is or has been visited by a non-human intelligence? What do you think of the likelihood that we have been visited by a non-human intelligence? And do you think there is any good reason why, if governments somewhere do know about them, should we know about them or is there a good reason to keep it secret? If you knew about it, would you tell the public?"

"We need to understand what is visible right in front of our eyes. And there are possible things and unlikely things. But when there are things that we have not been able to see that are increasingly being seen by us, maybe we need to admit it. But if it is possible that such there is such existence, then that is something that we need to investigate and in our UAP parliamentary league, such things should be our main concerns and if we, so we should, we need to confirm, we need to investigate and if we can confirm, we should be able to share and we are willing to share the information. And Mr. about another, and he says that we are surrounded by China and Russia and North Korea and these countries are more hostile to us seemingly than the space aliens."

"Very good point. UAP Japan is a UAP hot spot and it's possible that these countries will send us also some kind of reconcentrated and analyzed. And we need to create laws to make such changes in our government. And we need to collect information from civilian pilots as well. And we need to find out if these objects are from hostile countries or maybe from outer space."

"Well, I, I thank the honorable representatives for their answers and can I say I very much admire the fact that Japan has created this UAP parliamentary league. It's a very important step and I think you are showing a progressive initiative that is way ahead of Australia and I think even some in Congress. I, I think you are shining a light for other countries and I very much admire. I know a lot of people would show great respect for the efforts that Japan's politicians are making to get to the truth of this very interesting mystery. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for your kindness in giving me this time."

"He has a final suggestion. Maybe someday News Nation and Niko Niko can together have a joint project where politicians from the United States and from Japan can gather together and discuss UAP issues."

"I love that idea because something tells me that it will be the Japanese politicians who are holding the American politicians' feet to the fire. I think you guys are way ahead of the Americans. They have their head very much in the sand in Congress. I'm sorry to say."

"Maybe the US Congress is already assuming the existence of NHIs."

"I think there are some, there are definitely some good politicians in Congress who are trying to get to the truth. But sadly, we have learned today that yet another year is going to happen where the laws that we need to be passed to allow greater disclosure before the Congress, they have been blocked once again by the same people in the Congress who do not want this story to be investigated. It's, it's very frustrating because there are many good people in Congress. There is an oversight committee led by Representative Anna Paulina Luna. It has members like Representative Eric Berles, who I know has spoken to your group before. It also has Representative Tim Burchett, and they are doing good work to try to get to the truth. Unfortunately, there are some in Congress and they have the numbers who are trying to stop this story from being properly investigated. I think maybe it will take leadership from Japan to get this story out."

"Mr. Thank you very much. And I have recognized in this program that maybe I do not, I do not have, I still do, I still need to learn more about these issues and I'd be very happy to work with you again."

"We would be honored to collaborate with your TV network. It would be good fun. We can both try to find out the truth. Thanks for joining us for what was an intriguing opportunity to question a two-time former Japan defense minister about his interest in the UFO mystery. I know the Japanese politicians who are members of this Japanese parliamentary UFO league want to liaise with other politicians around the world to share information and help develop protocols for how to respond to this mystery. Exciting too that the Japanese prime minister, the existing prime minister, is himself a member of this UFO league. Such remarkable candor and transparency on the UAP issue is to be commended. And maybe countries like Australia, the US, and other Western nations struggling with this ongoing drone mystery could take a leaf from Japan's book. We'll keep you posted on developments. And if you'd like to ask me any questions in our weekly Q&A, you can get hold of me at realitychecks.now.com. Thanks very much."

Hi, I'm Ross Kulart. Welcome to Reality Check here in America on assignment for News Nation. I've come here to Rocket City, Huntsville, Alabama, to the conference of the Scientific Coalition for the Study of UAPs. They're a bunch of scientists who believe it is possible to investigate the phenomena of unidentified anomalous phenomena, and they're going to hear me present the keynote speech this year at their annual conference. What could possibly go wrong? Here goes.

"I want to thank you all and welcome you to Huntsville, Alabama. We got a great, great conference for you here over the next couple of days. And with that, I would like to now introduce our keynote speaker. I have a few words I'd like to say about this gentleman who has traveled a great distance from long, long, far away to be here with us this evening. I think most of you probably who have seen him on News Nation, you know a little bit about Mr. Ross Coltart. Ross is a multi-award-winning investigative journalist and author with over three decades of experience in newspapers and television, including reporting for Australia's Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, ABC TV's Four Corners, the Nine TV Network's Sunday program and 60 Minutes. He currently works as a special correspondent for NewsNation, but he also contributes to the Australian 7 TV network's Spotlight public affairs program. Trained as a lawyer, and you'll see that that's plainly evident here soon when he begins speaking. He's covered wars, investigated corruption, scandals, and public interest stories for over 35 years as one of Australia's top investigative journalists, and really now also an international one. Ross is a five-time winner of Australia's top journalism prize, the Walkley Award, including the highest award, the Gold Walkley, among other awards that he has received. The list is too long to go through them all here. He's a best-selling author of six books, including In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science. In June 2023, Ross also interviewed a gentleman by the name of David Grush on NewsNation, someone, of course, a name that's probably familiar to most of us here, and he now hosts a regular segment on the UAP topic there on NewsNation. Last but not least, Mr. Coltart is also a gentleman I consider a colleague, and he's also a fellow member of the SCU. So, please, without further ado, would you join me in welcoming Mr. Ross Coltart?"

"Thanks very much."

"Thank you very much, Micah. And thank you everybody for having me here. It's an honor and frankly daunting to be invited as a journalist to speak to a room full of scientists. You know, I'm expecting to be thoroughly peer-reviewed and skewered by the lot of you. But I also want to pay a special recognition to the gathering of government, industry, defense, military, intelligence types who I'm sure are sort of back there in the background. One of the things that I think makes this event very special is that it does offer a portal, a respected portal for that discrete nexus between the government, private aerospace, and the scientific community to talk about a topic that despite overwhelming admissions from the US government, I mean frankly, it's a lay down misere that it's real. Whatever it is, there's a there there. It's a subject that's still treated with such ridicule and stigma. And I, I think the great thing about SCU is it's an organization that represents an attempt by science to deal with the subject objectively and rigorously and to give it solid skeptical peer review. And that's what this should all be about."

"Now, as Michael acknowledged, as you would all know, I was involved in interviewing David Grush last year for the News Network News Nation when he went public. And he tells me he was here in 2022 very discreetly up the back. And if there's anybody here in the audience from the intelligence community who wants to tell me where the TR3B Aurora is in that particular cave in Area 51, I'll be in the bar later. It is very, very daunting sticking your head up and speaking about the UAP issue because there is a hostile intolerance, a disdain in much of establishment science for the notion that the subject of UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena or aerospace phenomena, is rich acknowledged whether it should be taken seriously at all."

"My Aussie journalist mates and some more maliciously inclined folk took great delight in the fact that I was the unsolicited recipient of the 2023 Australian Skeptics's Bent Fork Award for being supposedly the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of pseudoscientific or paranormal pil. And I'm proud of it. And this was all because the skeptics asserted dismissively I was claiming UFO conspiracies. Now I want to deal with that in the course of today's address. Another lowbrow Australian newspaper tagged me as a UFO truther on the same basis. Just a wee hint there that I'm a UFO nutter. Both factually smirking, smirking institutions made a very simple mistake. They didn't do any research at all before they made the criticism that many commentators have done on the UAP topic for decades. They defaulted to derision and ridicule on a subject that frankly no longer deserves that kind of of treatment."

"There's a conga line of attention-seeking social media influencers and unhappy incels living in their mother's basement who spend their days trying to increase their likes and Reddit credits by attacking online anyone who takes this subject seriously. But I also think there's something more sinister going on and this should be acknowledged. It's an official deception and manipulation going back decades. And establishment science, as well as the mainstream media and social media, have really no idea just how much they're being manipulated."

"10 days ago, as many of you would know, Colonel Carl Nell, whose bio is formidable, ex-US Army Space Command, ex-Northrip Grumman, ex-Loheed Martin, ex-Bell Labs, ex-multiple three-letter agencies, ex-UT deputy CTO for a $2 billion company, a former reserve army brigade commander, a former senior adviser to the vice chief of the army, um, a deputy chief of staff to combatant commander, the Army, the guy who advised Army Futures Command on the reorganization of the Army Reserves, the biggest change since the 1970s, formerly also with the Pentagon's UAP task force. He told a UAP investor crowd at the Salt Conference, quote, 'Nonhuman intelligence exists. Nonhuman intelligence has been interacting with humanity. This interaction is not new and it's been ongoing. There are unelected people in the government that are well aware of that.' And then he was asked by Alex Clous, how confident are you that this is true? And quick as a flash, he was ready for that question. He said, 'There is zero doubt.' And his comments that were then backed by a retired US Navy Rear Admiral Tim Galedet. And he said, quote, 'I know he's correct with complete certainty.' Why has society not taken this world-changing reality seriously? Partly because of a deliberate and systematic disinformation campaign by the US government which has perpetuated the stigma associated with UAP."

"Like Carl Nell, I'm privileged to know both men. Tim Galedet is an exemplary former US military officer and public servant. He commanded the US Navy's Special Warfare Center. He was the superintendent of the US Naval Observatory. He served on the staff of the chief of naval operations and eventually became the oceanographer for the Navy. In civilian life, he's been the acting under secretary of commerce for the oceans and atmosphere and acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. Neither of these two well-respected individuals with many years of distinguished public service in our military are the kind of folk who recklessly propound conspiracy theories. So, I think I'm in good company. And as they have done, I believe also that there is a nonhuman intelligence that's been engaging with this planet for a very long time."

"Implausible as it may seem to many, I've on the evidence that I've been shown by firsthand witnesses, I've been independently apprised of sufficient evidence to reach the conclusion that there is, as confronting as I find myself saying this, there is a very high likelihood that the United States and other nations, particularly China and Russia, have recovered NHI technology, non-human technology, including craft and biologics. Yes, aliens. And there is there is an ongoing secret cold war to harness reverse-engineered scientific advancements from that technology. Big call. But what Nell says, what Tim says, I totally agree with it."

"And of course, the inevitable response from the critics, and it's understandable and quite reasonable to ask this question, is where's the evidence? On its face, asking for the public airing of evidence to back such an assertion about a secret UAP retrieval and reverse engineering program sounds perfectly reasonable. Just as the scientific method demands empirical evidence to prove any hypothesis, we all want to see the data to back these extraordinary claims. We all want to know every bit of detail about this alleged secret program. Why is it secret? Who oversees it? Who knows about it? Does the president know? What crimes, if any, are being done in America's name without Congress being properly informed? Are there agreements? Is the Admiral Tom Wilson memo authentic? Did the boss of Loheed Martin Skunk Works, did the boss of Loheed Martin Skunk Works and two top Pentagon generals really tell Tom Dong, the rockstar, 'It was the Cold War and we found a life form.' I find that an incredible story. And the amazing thing is that whole saga is revealed in a Wikileaks leak. Emails from a White House staffer recording the fact that senior Pentagon generals were having a conversation with a rockstar prior to the Trump-Clinton election campaign discussing the possibility of disclosure. That's irrefutable evidence that requires investigation. And that's all I'm saying I feel as a journalist I'm obliged to do, to investigate it."

"If this is all true, it's indubitably a very cleverly kept secret. And as the gatekeepers well know, so much of that evidence, that data is locked up in highly classified programs. Most of the people overseeing those programs, I know, have no idea what's behind it. And the best trick of all until recently has been the way we've allowed ourselves to be so brilliantly deceived. The novelist Margaret Atwood once wrote, 'The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend that there isn't one.' And that's what I suspect unelected officials chose to do with what we will call euphemistically the program. They've very deviously convinced opinion leaders in politics and the media and their shills on social media for years that there is no secret, that everyone's come forward and deluded themselves or that they're lying, that they've dreamt up a B.S. story about recovered alien technology, and for reasons best known to themselves, they're destroying their reputations by coming up and promoting a wacky conspiracy theory. Believe me, this is not good for your career."

"But clearly, the insiders advocating disclosure know something. They're not legally allowed to tell us about it. And even if they want to, they can't. And what most of the commentators also fail to understand is that it's not the general public that has to be convinced. The American public, frankly, at the moment, is mostly irrelevant in this ongoing debate, except for the fact that you all vote. What matters most right now is that members of key oversight committees in Congress and the president and his national security committee wake up to the fact that this is real. It's a major public interest issue of concern and they start doing the job that we entrust them to do. That's the only forum where the full story of the program can legally be investigated and exposed. And that is starting to happen."

"As we all know, there's a new attempt that's just come out in the last day for a new UAP disclosure bill. It's so important. So much of the evidence that would finally make Congress finally wake up to what's been going on is highly classified. It can't be discussed publicly by those who've been read into it. It's a very, very clever catch-22. What do people want Carl Nell to do when they demand that he publicly reveal his evidence? He'd risk a prison term for revealing the classified details of what I'm absolutely certain he knows. If it's all true, of course. If it's all true, it's probably the biggest secret in human history."

"Clearly, Colonel Nell knows a lot more than he's letting on. And as David Grush has explained, most of this program is hidden inside what are called waived, unacknowledged special access programs, WOAPs, and they're funded by black budgets that are meant to be funding other defense projects. That's why David's pointing out that this is illegal. It's a breach of the accountability rules in Congress."

"Now, remember last year the Pentagon failed to properly account for an astonishing 63% of its $3.8 trillion of assets. That means $2.4 trillion of the public money spent on defense assets is unable to be accounted for because, according to the Government Accountability Office, quote, 'Auditors were unable to obtain sufficient appropriate evidence to provide a basis for an audit opinion.' This has been an issue for GAO since 1981."

"That's why we're here."

"And yet, for most of the media, it's a big yawn. Hardly worth the story. If Congress just started asking questions about why the Pentagon can't balance its ledger, the secret would break wide open."

"What Nell, Tim Galedet, and the other high-profile commentators on the UAP issue, Luis Elizondo, Chris Mellon, Eric Davis, Hal Puthoff, Jim Latsky, Colon Kelleher, Kip Green, J. Stratton, and David Grush. What they're all constrained by, and the gatekeepers of this secret know this all too well, what they're all constrained by is the national security oaths they swore to protect. If what they say is true, then the irony is excessive government secrecy is being improperly exploited by the gatekeepers of this secret to conceal a national scandal from the Congress and the American public. These former defense and intelligence community insider commentators speaking out for UAP transparency, for your right to know, they're patriots. They think it's wrong that, as I've heard from one haughty, very senior aerospace executive on one occasion, so that some of the people guarding this secret disdainfully refer to the president, the president, for heaven's sake, as a temporary employee. That's the attitude. They assert he or she has no right to know."

"At the heart of David Grush's allegations is the incredible claim that things are being done in America's name in collusion with private corporations with taxpayer money that may in fact be gravely immoral, illegal, perhaps criminal, with flagrant disregard for accountability to Congress. In fact, deliberate evasion. There are allegations here that must be fully investigated. The people pushing for UAP transparency respect the notion in Article 1, Section 1 of the US Constitution. I warn you, I'm a lawyer. 'All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.'"

"232 years ago in 1792, a Major General Arthur St. Clair led an incredibly disastrous expedition into the Northwest Territories in which 700 federal soldiers were slaughtered by a confederacy of Native Americans. A special investigation was established and that congressional inquiry created an extremely important legal precedent. It enshrined in law the idea that Congress does have the power to inquire into executive power. Before that time, it hadn't been realized that the Congress, which essentially makes laws, also has the right to inquire that the executive in government heeds those laws, obeys those laws. This oversight is at the heart of your constitution."

"I studied to be a lawyer before I became a journalist and I, I think the US Constitution is a thing of beauty. It enshrines rights that in my country, Australia, as in many English-influenced parliaments, they're not codified at all. Rights such as your incredibly beautiful First Amendment constraint that 'Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.' My Australian Constitution does not explicitly protect free speech or freedom of the press. It's just implied very, very weakly in case law. I suspect that under English law, well..."

Colonel Cal Nell and Chris Melon and Lu Alzando, they'd be in the Tower of London by now and the Lord High Executioner would have chopped off David Grush's head.

About 8 years ago, I started thinking about writing a new book. Books are a bit like babies. You only start thinking about writing another one when you've forgotten the pain of the last one.

I've I've I've had a very interesting career so far in uh public affairs, TV, investigative journalism, and broad sheet newspapers. And I I started thinking about what was the subject that was the one that everybody told you you shouldn't look at, the most stigmatized, the most taboo, but also the one that had the most obvious leads for investigation. And that story, of course, was UFOs, unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAPs, as we call them now.

There is no story more stigmatized in journalism. If it's covered at all, it's treated with ridicule and contempt. And I could never understand why, frankly. Yes, there are some mentally ill people who are drawn to this subject. But it's always struck me how so many UAP sightings witnesses that I meet are credible, often highly intelligent people describing something anomalous that baffled and sometimes even scared them.

Numerous times in the last few decades in my career, I've taken calls from people, firsthand witnesses, telling me they've seen UFOs, UAPs. Many claimed to have seen intelligently controlled craft, clearly not human technology, and I have to admit, I treated them with ridicule, dismissiveness, and stigma.

I remember very early in my career, there was a a woman who rang the news desk of the newspaper I was working for, and she said she'd seen a UFO while she was hanging out her washing on her washing line, and she'd run inside, grabbed her film camera, and taken three shots, and she said she still had the film in the camera. And so I said, "Oh, that's interesting. Bring it in." And so the photographic editor developed the film straight out of the camera as we all waited outside. And out he came with this huge big blowup of a metallic disc hovering over this woman's washing line. And I freely admit I was a young buck in the newspaper and I was very excited and I took it to my editor later in the day and I said, "Look at this. We've got a great story." And he scoffed and he said, "Rosco, we don't do stories about UFOs." And I said, "Why not?" And he said, "They're nonsense." And for days afterwards, I was doing little tinfoil hats on my desk. And you learned very quickly as a journalist, you don't cover this subject. And frankly, I found it perplexing because I'd found the woman credible.

And time and time again in my career, I was given very clear indications that contrary to that perception, this was something real. I was I was doing a story for an Australian public broadcaster on the Royal Australian Air Force and I was with some very very senior officers at the end of a day's filming. And after the second beer, one of them leaned across the table and said, "Why don't you chaps do stories about UFOs?" And quick as a flash, I came back and I said, "Oh, because they're nonsense." And uh he said, "No, they're not." And in the course of an evening, he was calling pilots across from all over the room in this officer's mess at an air base and saying, "Tell them, tell them what you saw." They're going, "You sure, boss?" And he goes, "Yeah, tell them. Tell them." And all these pilots had seen these weird objects and they were talking about them and they were thrilled, almost relieved that they could talk to somebody like me about it. But would anybody go public about it and talk about it? No way. There was so much stigma.

So, I set out investigating UFOs. And one of the first things I did 8 years ago was read Nick Cook's excellent book, which I all commend to you, The Hunt for Zero Point, which frankly is the definitive beginning for me on the search and the explanation for what really lies behind this mystery. He's a respected aerospace journalist, Nick. And he began similar investigations to mine about a quarter of a century ago with the premise that around 1956 a group of scientists and uh a group of aerospace engineers had started talking very openly in the popular press about anti-gravity propulsion and how it would soon become a reality. The G engines are coming, we were told. And those articles referenced the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Corporation, Bell Aircraft, Leah Aircraft, and as Nick wrote, several other American aircraft manufacturers who would not spend millions of dollars, as they were, on researching science fiction.

There was also mention of an elusive George S. Trimble who was the head of advanced programs and vice president in charge of the G project at Loheed Martin which was at the time Martin aircraft but it later became Loheed Martin. Back then, Trimble led Martin Aircraft's RIAS, the research institute for advanced studies, the pre predecessor to what became skunk works. And it was also clear Trimble had a background in highly classified advanced physics concepts. And Nick, to his enormous credit, pieced together that Trimble had put together a team in 1957 researching anti-gravity. And yet 2 years later, all these stories started appearing in the popular press where Trimble was making the extraordinary claim that the conquest of gravity, quote, could be done in about the time it took to build the first atom bomb.

Now, there were also fascinating early references around this time in academic journals to electrogravitics research, tantalizing suggestions from excited scientists that developments were underway in secret that had profound implications for the human race. Respectable scientific journals were referencing the work of Thomas Towns Hender Brown claiming that in experiments which had been peer- reviewviewed he'd achieved anti-gravitic effects cutting weights by as much as 30%. And one very interesting aspect of TT Brown's work was that when he'd arrived at the best shape for an anti-gravitic craft intriguingly it was discshaped. Yet that supposed scientific breakthrough didn't happen. It's never happened. And if you allow 5 years or so for an equivalent program to the atomic program, it should have happened in the early 1960s. And so Nick's book had left us with the tantalizing possibility probability that there'd been sometime in the mid-50s a breakthrough in anti-gravity propulsion that was quickly suppressed by the military or by the government. For a very brief moment, scientists had talked openly about it and freely about the dawn of a new age, huge implications for mankind. And then bang, the door closed and everybody shut up about it.

My dilemma as an as an investigative journalist was that assuming such a secret program existed, how on earth could I possibly track down these scientists, private aerospace workers, military and intelligence officials who might be involved in such a program? And moreover, how could I make them receptive to a quiet chat? and how could I protect them as sources if they chose to speak to me? And I was only too aware of just how totally compromised modern communications are. I was involved in Australia in breaking a a world exclusive story about the existence of a a communications spying system called Echelon where under the Yukuza agreement agreement the UK USA agreement in which Australia, the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Canada participate. There'd been a secret codereing agreement since the Second World War. But that had also morphed into a communications spying system where quite literally we were tapping not only the undersea cables, we were also intercepting satellites and listening in randomly to communications and sifting through billions and billions of communications all over the world with this sophisticated computer system that could pick up not only words but even accents. And that revelation shocked me that how wide open modern communications are.

More recently, I did a story for Australian 60 Minutes about a breach in mobile phone security that still exists called SS7, Signaling System 7. The story was eventually run on um CBS 60 Minutes here in America. And what that revealed is that there's essentially a hack built in to mobile phones that allows anyone with knowledge of this hack to listen in to any call and and we demonstrated it on national television. So um h how could I communicate with these people without compromising them? I I I reached the conclusion that the only way to do it safely was to find out who they are and where they lived and write them a letter. And that's what I did. I wrote 160 plus letters and mailed them. And it took months, but I waited.

So to to figure out who I was writing to, what I did was I read, listened, and watched pretty much everything I could that referenced this purported dark secret history of anti-gravity. I combed esoteric scientific papers for key words, and I looked who were the military R&D geeks, which companies won the most interesting looking contracts, who studied advanced physics at universities, reputable universities, and then disappeared. and and some of the same names started appearing. I just treated it like any other investigation, not necessarily with the assumption that this program existed, but if it did exist, how would I find these people? And once I'd compiled an open-source list of those scientists and commentators and anybody else who I thought might be useful, I I got the the list going and started writing letters.

And even at that stage though, I was still skeptical. I have to admit, what I expected to find at the end of the rabbit hole was a secret US black military program that was building conventional advancements in aerospace technology. I figured it was a good story to blow all this UFO baloney out of the water. I was going into it with the full expectation it was complete nonsense. Uh, I started getting letters back to my amazement quite quickly and a few of those who responded early on very sternly told me never to call them or write them ever again, which was quite instructive because I then realized who they were and where they were and I started intensifying my focus on those particular institutions. A lot of other people were very chatty. Some told me to talk to friends of theirs and I soon built up quite frankly an enormous database of names. And the important thing and I think this made a difference was that I left no electronic trail because the worst thing you can do as a journalist is burn a source. It it kills you. Nobody will ever trust you again.

Early on, I was astonished, absolutely astonished to see in my reading just how much evidence there is in public records in plain sight to show that very senior military commanders very early after the Second World War clearly concluded that the phenomenon behind UFOs was intelligently controlled craft. In fact, they were seen to be quote evasive when cited by friendly aircraft. I'm citing here the quite extraordinary Twining memo of September 1947 in which Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, the head of the US Army Air Force Air Material Command, acknowledged the flying discs being seen by many witnesses in US skies at the time were quote something real and not visionary or fictitious. And the general reported that the way these objects behaved clearly indicated that they were controlled either manually, automatically or remotely. And as memo records objects perhaps craft that multiple witnesses saw as metallic, elliptical in shape, flat on the bottom with a dome on top. Classic flying sauces confirmed by a commanding general.

I was also struck by how blatantly an active official deception operation on UAPs was admitted in the declassified military and intelligence archives. It's not well understood that the dismissive debunking strategy towards UAP sightings by the US Department of Defense is part of an official policy developed 70 years ago by the CIA's so-called Robertson panel. This extraordinary decision was made in secret by a group of scientists, military officers, and spies that public interest in UFOs, what we call today UAPs, should be disbun debunked and discredited. And a secret report was prepared for the CIA, recommending a mass media campaign that would strip UFOs of their so-called aura of mystery, the report said. and I quote, and it's an astonishing quote, "The debunking aim would result in reduction in public interest in flying sources, which today evoke a strong psychological reaction. This education could be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles. Basis of such education would be actual case histories which had been puzzling at first but later explained as in the case of conjuring tricks. There is much less stimulation if the secret is known. Such a program should tend to reduce the gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda."

Now, obviously, the official explanation for why the CIA talked explicitly about tricking the American public is this idea that all of this public reporting of UFOs was causing a huge drain on the Air Force's time because they were having to investigate them. And so, they were arguing that we should suppress this in the public interest because it was making a national security threat because then they wouldn't be able to focus on the real UFOs. But to me, that's a completely nonsensical argument because if you think about it, you want your public to be alert and alarmed. You want them to report any kind of anomalous phenomena. Why would the Air Force be interested in discouraging people in that era from reporting alarming sightings of objects and our skies that could very well have been a foreign adversary aircraft?

Also, should one bother to actually read it, the Robertson panel report admits that one scientist on the panel resolved that an extraterrestrial explanation was the only possible explanation for many of the cases and he was overruled by the rest of the panel. The Robertson panel was frankly a fix. It was a deliberate deception to suppress public interest into UAPs and it began the current contemporary attitude of stigma, ridicule and contempt for coverage of the subject. We've all been hoodwinkedked.

There are other red flags there in the historical declassified archives pointing to the idea that agencies within the US government were and still are trying to obfiscate and manipulate public opinion to play down the UAP mystery. After General Nathan Twining had recommended a study of UAPs, Project Saucer, later Project Sign, the first of the US Air Force investigations was established in December 1947. And that official report released a year later declared that these objects were not extraterrestrial. It didn't provide a jot of evidence to support such a claim. And it suggested without this evidence that they were possibly of Soviet origin. But then of course there was the intriguing testimony of uh US Air Force officer Edward Rupelt who Micah talked about. He'd seen a secret project sign report and he blew the whistle on it. Estimate of the situation which had declared secretly that these objects were interplanetary craft. There's a whiff here of a cover up.

Declassified FBI files also show that Ed Gahoover, Jed Gahoo, the FBI director, was briefed in 1950 about reports of 50 foot wide crashed flying sauces and small humanoid bodies being recovered from the New Mexico desert. And unfortunately for the UFI, the FBI, this UFO memo was written up by an officer, an agent called Guy Hotell. And it's become the most requested item in the FBI files. The FBI's at pains over the years to say that Hottle's memos memos allegations were never corroborated. There was never any finding that it was all true. But it soon becomes clear that the many compelling witness reports that provided the basis for these claims from purported crashes at Roswell, Aztec, New Mexico, and Kingsman, Arizona. They cannot be quickly discounted. Time and time again, witnesses reported being threatened, even told they would be murdered if they talked about this. Why? What was being covered up?

Even the Air Force couldn't explain the McMinnville case in 1950 when a a guy called Paul Trent and his wife photographed a classic flying saucer-shaped object. And the Air Force tied itself up in knots trying to find an explanation and they couldn't find one. And so they wrote in a memo, "This is one of the few UFO cases in which all factors investigated appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, discshaped, tens of meters in diameter, evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses."

And then there was Canadian scientist Wilbert Smith. I love this story. who managed to find people with apparent knowledge of the US secret program, including Robert Sabaka, a US scientist who'd worked for the US government's World War II Office of Scientific Research and Development, an eminent US scientist. And Smith declared in his once secret memo to the Canadian government, not only that flying sources exist, but this was the most highly classified subject in the US government, rating even higher than the Hbomb. He even outed Dr. Vanavar Bush as the head of the group running this secret program. And it makes sense because Bush was the presidential scientific adviser, the very very first during the Manhattan project. And it's significant that neither the Canadian nor the US government have ever made any attempt to rebut Wilbert Smith's allegations. And moreover, before his death, Robert Sabbaka, the US scientist who'd helped Wilbert Smith's investigations, actually admitted in a letter that he knew about the recoveries, note the plural, of flying saucer craft. And he described the extremely light and very tough materials that were recovered. He even talked about aliens that he said looked very like insects. And in his candid letter, he expressed his regret that this issue had been so highly classified and why the existence of these devices was so aggressively denied.

It's going to be very interesting to see what the Canadian government's Sky Canada project uh its report into more recent allegations of Canadian scientific collusion with the secret US UAP program finds when it's released later this year. I'm not holding my breath. What I should say is it's recently be suggest it's been suggested to me that I should investigate certain named Canadian scientists who've been working I'm told with the US government on retrieved nonhuman technology and it's a secret that's been kept by faceless bureaucrats from the Canadian prime minister and the defense minister. I sure hope they're not going to try and cover that one up because it's not going to go well.

The official public line for 70 years has largely been that there's been nothing to this UFO nonsense. It's a line sadly pushed today by yapping in curious lap dogs in the mainstream press. Recently, there's been a series of reports on UAPs, drones, if you believe the US Air Force, that's the new swamp gas. They're being routinely seen hovering with imparent impunity over nuclear and military installations. And I was surprised to see in the declassified historical archives considerable evidence showing there was grave concern about these exact same objects appearing in the 40s and the 50s over extremely sensitive US national security installations such as Los Alamos and Oak Ridge where America was making the bomb. Scientists and military working there were seeing these objects frequently and Air Force investigators admitted quote here we run out of even blue yonder explanations that might be tend might be tenable and we're left with numbers of incredible reports from credible observers. Something is monitoring our most secure national security installations. That's a scientific fact right now as the US Air Force's own paperwork shows and it's been going on for 7 decades.

Why is it not recognized as way strange that the US Air Force today reluctantly admits a worrying pattern of ongoing UAP sightings over key US Air Force bases and nuclear installation sites which are a clear and present national security risk and yet it cannot provide it hasn't provided a shred of evidence to back up its weak claim. that these are somehow drones from a supposed foreign adversary government. drones that have been seen to hover in the air against the wind at extraordinarily high altitude for days at a time in remote oceans hundreds of miles offshore miraculously avoiding capture by the most powerful military on the planet that I remind people has spent tens of millions of dollars on developing anti- drone technology for that matter why is so much of what the government knows about the supposed balloon shoot downs over the continental USA last year still so highly classified, especially that Alaska object, which I do believe was anomalous.

Another sound reason to take this issue seriously is to look at the caliber of the former government officials who were coming out 70 years ago pushing for UAP transparency and suggesting that the government was hiding something. Carl Nell, Lou Alzando, and David Grush have illustrious predecessors. The founder of NIKAP, the US National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, was Thomas Towns Hend Brown, the chap I mentioned earlier. Um, the founding director of the CIA, this is the one I love, Vice Admiral Rosco Helen Cottter, a hugely experienced naval intelligence officer, a former commander of the USS Missouri within a year of leaving his CIA job. What does he do? He becomes a UAP transparency advocate. And then he was also joined by a top US Navy rear admiral Delani. Why are they doing that? Why did Helen Carter in 1960 become a UAP transparency and testify to Congress, quote, "It is time for the truth to be brought out in congressional hearings." This is a former DCI. What truth did Admiral Helen Cottter know in 1960 from his time in naval intelligence and as the head of the CIA?

The parallels today with that with David Grush, an exemplary intelligence officer entrusted with the highest presidential secrets are extraordinary. While on Nikap's board, Helen Cotter and Rear Admiral Farney also publicly criticized the fact that many witnesses had stopped reporting their sightings to the US Air Force because of frustration that their investigations went nowhere. And does that sound familiar? Of course it does, because it's exactly what the um the Arrow is doing today, the Pentagon's all domain anomaly uh resolution office. I mean, it's a ridiculous name. There's also something that that was done back then as well. When NIKAP started attacking the US Air Force, the US Air Force started attacking NIKAP to try and discredit them. Sound familiar? Yet again, it's exactly what the Pentagon's been doing to Lou Alzando and David Grush, trying to discredit them with sly, malicious, and deceitful leaks to selected tame media.

Just like Grush and Co. Former CIA director Hill Cotter did his homework. He got hold of a leaked memo showing that while the Air Force was publicly debunking UAP sightings, in secret, it was prioritizing the monitoring of UAPs. Why was a supposedly fictitious phenomenon being secretly acknowledged in a memo as serious Air Force business? The simple fact is there's a hefty weight of declassified government files that prove the bleeding obvious that sections of the US military and intelligence community know a hell of a lot more than they're letting on.

My favorites are the discoveries in cables from, for example, the US Air Force atache in Kabul, Afghanistan, reporting the discovery of a physical flying saucer 15 m in circumference with thick small glass windows. That doesn't sound like a satellite or space debris. And apparently the Russians beat the Americans to it. We don't know what happened to that object. There's also a heavily redacted CIA memo from 1968 describing a metallic discshaped object with a 6-ft base 4 ft in height that was found in a crater in Nepal. This is one of a series of documents that refers to a covert program known as Project Moon, which it's long been suspected was involved in retrievals not only of foreign adversary technology, but also of nonhuman craft. And interestingly, in light of the fact that David Grush acknowledged last year that there is an ongoing secret cold war underway with our potential foreign adversaries over retrieved technology. The files suggest this isn't something new.

And this is where things started to get interesting for me journalistically because my first breakthrough in the program was actually an Australian alleged linked UAP retrieval. details from an Australian Air Force photographer who some decades back was summoned by his commanding officer in Darwin and told he would be helping the Americans out with an unspecified overseas photography job. I've never spoken about this before and I've got to be careful to protect my ongoing inquiries. This military photographer though was told that the job was very secret and it was obvious the Australian commander had no idea what he was being asked to do. It was totally need to know. And strange as this request by a foreign military like America may sound, this is how Australia does things. We've been very much a surviile, willing supplicant to American intelligence and British intelligence for many, many years. And a lot of the people I know inside Australian intelligence are rightly quite proud of some of the things we've done to help defend Western democracy. But we've also done some stupid things. And one of the things I covered and reported for Australian TV in 1994 was a huge expose about our Secret Service, ASUS, the equivalent of the CIA. And ASUS had people who did technical bugging and tapping. We were very good at it, and we still are. And the Brits asked if they could borrow one of our chaps. And without asking what it was for, only too happy to please, our government's intelligence service said yes. And they sent him off. It was the aftermath of the 2003 Gulf War, and the Q80i government was putting out huge contracts for the rebuilding of U8. And what I learned from one of these technical operations guys was that he had bugged the u Kuwaiti government offices for MI6, the British SIS, so that the British could win commercial contracts. Oh, against the Australians. But it had been kept secret. And so when I finally broke the story, it emerged that neither the defense minister nor even the head of the secret service knew that their staff were being loaned out this way. And this is how plausibly deniable things have been done by America and by the UK for many years. And it's been an area of research for me as a journalist for a long time.

And so I am about to tell you about an alleged Australian involvement in what I suspect was a nonhuman craft retrieval. Because what this Australian military photographer said he was tasked to do was he was picked up by an American Air Force plane in Darwin, flown to a remote southeast jungle location, driven into a deep part of the jungle, and as he described it there in the jungle was a discshaped craft. Under intense supervision, he was told to photograph everything about it inside and out. He was then told to develop the negatives in front of his American supervisors. He then had to hand over the photographic gear and the camera and the film and make sure that he wasn't taking any with him. He was then warned not to discuss with Australian superiors what he'd done and what he'd seen. And he never did. I was the first person that learned about what had happened. As far as I know, the Australian government has no idea that this Australian serviceman was involved in a retrieval operation. And the interesting thing was when I first spoke even tangentially about this incident, I got phone calls from people I knew in special forces in Australia saying I should speak to certain people. And I was introduced to Australian special forces soldiers who'd been on secondment to the British SAS in Heraford. And one of them told me he'd been involved in a retrieval in a European country of a craft.

There are shocking allegations. If I was to accept what these alleged firsthand witnesses were telling me, there was and still is a secret cold war going on between the Russians, the Chinese, and the Americans to secure what I am told. And I have no way of definitively proving this. This is data. It's the start of an investigation. What I am told are retrieved nonhuman craft. There are even allegations that we are bringing down these craft offensively using weapons. And I know that sounds crazy. I'm telling you what I am being told. If these claims are true, then we have acted reprehensibly with a nonhuman intelligence in our avaricious effort to be the first to secure an advantage with their technology. It's a moral stain on what should be one of the greatest moments in human history. First contact. I can well imagine, and I say if, if these allegations are true, I can well imagine this awful secret is one that some in government have decided it is best to stay concealed.

Now, I know what many of you are probably thinking. This is sci-fi nonsense. Silly stories pedled by attention-seeking Walter Mitties to a credulous and gullible journalist. That's what I thought. I was skeptical. I still don't know whether to believe it. I do fear I'm being fed disinformation, but I've heard now the same story from so many sources, I'm beginning to think it might plausibly have some truth to it.

Then around this time in my research, a flood of letters started happening. It was first a trickle, then a flood. It took months for people to respond to my 160 plus letters. But after what I suspect was an agonizingly difficult decision for them to decide whether to engage, they did. And I began speaking to some extraordinarily clever, and I say this on their behalf, patriotic people, people who love their country, love and respect their constitution, honor their national security oath, but think you've got a bloody right to know about what they know. And I'm angry on their behalf. I will die in a ditch if need be. I'd rather not to protect the anonymity of the sources I spoke to and am still engaging with. But one of them I can name because he authorized me to. He called me on an open line out of the blue and I could barely believe who he was because if I was to think of the one person who I wanted to speak to me, it was him. His name was Nat Kobitz. He was the US Navy's former longtime director of science and technology development, their chief R&D scientist, their chief geek for many years, for over 30 years. He was a beautiful, wisecracking 92year-old Brooklyn Jewish scientist with a beautiful sense of humor. And sadly, when I caught up with him, he was dying from cancer. and faked dictated that I caught him at the perfect time. He was sitting in his Baltimore home, bored out of his brain with too much time on his hands. And here was this Aussie journalist asking him about the work that he'd done as part of the greatest generation with the US Navy's R&D division. He was fiercely proud of what he achieved, and so he should be. And over several months, he finally opened up to me about what he was on his own admission read into. He was briefed on the program and he told me that he had been read into a classified program involving retrieved nonhuman technology, recovered alien spacecraft. He eventually admitted that he was officially briefed that America had retrieved multiple nonhuman craft and that he was aware there was a secret operation underway for decades, in his words, to undertake to reverse engineer them. He admitted that most of what he knew was effectively hearsay, although from some excellent official sources. This is something he'd been briefed into in his official capacity. He did admit that on one occasion he was flown to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, literally taken deep underground and taken to a secure room and shown what looked like some kind of bulkhead from a craft which he believed was constructed in a way that defied conventional explanation. But the craft's skin and inner bulkhead were composites bonded at an atomic level. He suspected it was nonhuman intelligence technology. But being the scientist he was, infuriatingly, he wouldn't say to me it was alien tech. He would just say it was something he had never seen that any human could make. Nat was a patriot. He was a decent, honorable public servant. He respected the fact that this program was being kept secret for a reason. But as a scientist, he also recognized that the American public and especially Congress had the right to know what was being done with taxpayer dollars. And he frankly told me that as far as he knew, there was no good justification for keeping it secret. So, he never told me why he'd actually done this, but shortly after he passed from cancer in 2020, I started getting messages and calls and it turned out he basically told people to get in touch with me.

I found it very very difficult to accept a lot of what they told me. I still do. I I find it mind-blowing that I'm in this position as a serious insect journalist who spent his career investigating crime and corruption that I'm on the edge of what is the most fringe subject in the world. But every single one of these people that Nat put me on to was talking about one thing. The program, a highly secret, very, very, very carefully compartmentalized retrieval effort of nonhuman technology craft and an identically highly protected reverse engineering program being conducted in secret facilities across the United States. Retrieval teams rigidly compartmented. Operations absolutely need to know. mind-boggling secrecy. Multiple sources have told me that there was a very clear threat made if you talk about this you will be killed. And there are allegations David Grush has made them as well. I have been told by multiple people that people have been murdered to protect this secret. Make of that what you will.

As we all know, politicians, scientists, intelligence community, and military whistleblowers are now openly accusing the US government of a massive decadesl long cover up. They're suggesting the world has been egregiously misled in a deliberate disinformation campaign designed to suppress interest in a phenomenon that contrary to its public position, the US has always in fact taken very seriously indeed. And throughout 2023, as we all know, there's been a determined effort by a bipartisan group of very senior US politicians to try and get legislation through the Congress to force transparency and disclosure provisions into America's annual defense budget. And what finally passed into law mandated some of what might help, a governmentwide UAP records collection to be held by the US National Archives. But I don't expect for a moment that the agencies allegedly responsible for this massive cover up are going to willingly hand over what they see as the crown jewels to temporary employees. That's the dilemma you face. It's not my problem. I'm not an American. It's up to you what you do about it. But I'm told this was hidden long ago in private corporate aerospace in full anticipation that the day would come when Congress would start asking questions. A key provision in the bill that was proposed last year would have mandated imminent domain, the confiscation of UAP related material and it was struck down. But the mere fact, the mere fact that senior politicians like Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, one of the most powerful people in the Congress, was prepared to put his name to a document in the Congress talking about the retrieval of nonhuman intelligence technology. We've passed a tipping point.

What is very very unusual about this push in Congress for this greater UAP disclosure on an issue that many people still regard as a fantasy is that it is backed by many high-powered politicians among them the Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Republican vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee Marco Rubio, the Republican Senator Mike Rans, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Cyber Security for the Armed Services Committee, and the Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who serves on the Senate committees for both intelligence and armed services. A previous highly respected Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the late Harry Reid also played a huge role in pushing Congress to make these laws and to begin aggressively investigating what the government knows about UAPs. Why would two Senate majority leaders, members of the so-called gang of eight, which is the one group in the Congress that is briefed into all of America's most deep secrets? Why would they put their reputations on the line to promote disclosure of a supposedly non-existent non-human intelligence and technology operating secretly on our planet? Politicians do not put their names to bills unless they have very good grounds for doing so. And there are also lower house politicians pushing for public congressional hearings into UAPs just as happened in the 1970s Watergate and Church Committee hearings where whistleblowers would get their chance to testify under oath. And after the Pentagon's UAP investigation office, ARO, issued a report in February categorically denying the existence of illicit UAP efforts with retrieved extraterrestrial technology. Senator Gillibrand pledged that she wanted public hearings. She said it's definitely not case closed. Her comments and those of other politicians suggest Congress suggests something is being concealed on UAPs and it's now determined to investigate.

There are extraordinary allegations that have been aired. As we all know in June 2023, almost a year ago, David Grush went public with his allegations. He basically alleged on both the debrief and also on NewsNation with me that the US is running a secretive UAP retrieval and reverse engineering program and that it is in possession of nonhuman technology including craft along with their dead pilots biologics. Yes, aliens. That's David Grush's allegations. and he filed in 2022 a whistleblower complaint with the US intelligence community inspector general and this has been so misrepresented categorically the US inspector general of intelligence and security sorry he's he's the US intelligence community inspector general he deemed all of David Grush's allegations including his allegations of a retrieval and reverse engineering program as urgent and credible. There's been an attempt to suggest that it was just in relation to his allegations of reprisals. That's not true. The inspector general of intelligence specifically found that it was an urgent and credible issue for investigation by the Congress credible that David Grush had made an allegation of a secret retrieval and reverse engineering program. Think about that. That investigation still ongoing.

David also gave hours of classified testimony. And in a secure room for the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, he named names. He gave locations. He's given Congress the names of he knows who are the gatekeepers. And he's made it very very clear that he's detailed everything about what he knows about the program. He specifically gave evidence under oath. Under oath. So he risks criminal prosecution if he's lied. detailing his allegations to the House of Congress Oversight Committee, explaining that his allegations were based on information he'd been given with individuals with a long-standing track record of legitimacy and service to their country, many of whom shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony. weigh that. Well, he also explained how he was tasked by the UAPF director to identify all the special access programs and controlled access programs, the secret folders around which this secret has been kept related to UAPs. and he said, "I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-deade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access to those additional readons." He also alleged that the programs he uncovered were operating in breach of oversight rules that mandated Congress must be informed about all such secret programs.

The US Defense Department has conspicuously not commented at all about Mr. Grush's specific allegations. They've used Arrow, the Pentagon's congressionallymandated UFO investigation office. But Arrow is only as good as the information that it's given and whether its leadership mandates a proper investigation. My impressions today suggest that most witnesses with direct knowledge of the legacy retrieval and reverse engineering program wouldn't go within Kuey of Arrow as we say in Australia. They just don't trust the Pentagon to investigate its own dirty secrets. Which led to Arrow declaring in a report earlier this year that it hasn't found any empirical evidence that any sighting of a UAP represented off-world technology or the existence of a classified program that had not been properly reported to Congress. It also went on to say that investigative efforts determined that most sightings were the result of misidentification of ordinary objects and phenomena. And then there was this line which I just think is incredible. Although many UAP reports remain unsolved, ARO assesses that if additional quality data were available, most of these cases also could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena. What sophistry arrow is suggesting that it's able to declare on its own admission it has no evidence to back such a claim, but it's asserting that most of these other unsolved cases would be capable of prosaic explanation. I'm sorry, but such a contention is unscientific and it displays a lack of objectivity. How can you reach any conclusion until the empirical data has been collected and assessed? It's an express admission that Arrow was prejudging the assessment. The report, frankly, was a total joke, and I know some ARO staff are extremely embarrassed by its findings. Many commentators have since criticized the report, including senior politicians in Congress because Arrow, the Pentagon, did not do a proper investigation into the allegations raised by David Grush and many other witnesses who've testified to the Congress in secret.

And conspicuously, this is so important, there has been no specific public response to David Grush's allegations from the Independent Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the ODNI. That's the independent intelligence ZAR that since the catastrophic intelligence failures of 9/11 oversees and coordinates all US intelligence agencies. In fact, its annual report in 2022 appears to directly contradict Arrow because it made the finding that UAP events continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity. It also said UAP pose a safety of flight and collision hazard to air assets potentially requiring aircraft off operators to adjust flight patterns in response to their unauthorized presence in the airspace operating outside of air traffic control instructions and standards. And it also said UAP continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat.

And then in December 2023, after Ohio Congressman Mike Turner led a push to block the key Schumer amendments that would have allowed whistleblowers to come forward and give evidence with more security to the Congress. The Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, no less, spoke on the floor of the Senate, clearly angry, and he confirmed that he believed the US government was refusing to share information on UAPs with the American people. Senator Schumer said, "UAPs are of immense interest and curiosity to the American people. But with that curiosity comes the risk for confusion, misinformation, and mistrust, especially if the government isn't prepared to be transparent. The United States government has gathered a great deal of information on UAPs over many decades, but has refused to share it with the American people. This is the Senate majority leader saying this. This is wrong and additionally breeds mistrust. This is the kicker paragraph. We have also been notified by multiple credible sources that information on UAPs has been withheld from Congress, which if true is a violation of laws requiring full notification to the legislative branch, especially as it relates to the four congressional leaders, the defense committees, and the intelligence committee.

And in apparent defiance of the Pentagon Arrows office to do its level best to downplay the UAP issue, the senior so-called J3 intelligence joint chief's staff, advising America's joint chiefs of staff are taking UAPs very seriously indeed. In an FOI act request obtained by researcher Douglas Johnson, there are orders that were sent out to all US military commands in May 2023 that mandated the collection of all UAP data. It it set out procedures for reporting and gathering data on contemporary military encounters with UAPs. And it reads, "The US government has observed UAP in or near the territory and operating areas of the United States, of its allies, and of its adversaries. And observing and identifying and potentially mitigating UAP has become a growing priority for US policy makers, lawmakers, and war fighters. The potentially ubiquitous presence of UAP defines the national security implications of those anomalies which range from operational hazards and threats to technological and intelligence surprise to adversaries strategic miscalculations. It is imperative that DoD provide UAP incident incursion and engagement for the department's detection and mitigation of potential threats, exploitation of advanced technologies and informing policymaker and war fighter decisions." That is not a Pentagon that is disinterested in UAPs. And the explicit reference to the national security implications of those anomalies in the Joint Chiefs document puts the Pentagon's most senior commanders in apparent conflict with the report from their own UAP investigation office. It's history repeating itself. While one arm of the Pentagon publicly dismisses UAPs, it's behind the scenes being acknowledged as a grave national security threat.

Now, you're probably getting very sick of listening to me by now. I sure am. But before I finish, I want to tell you about an initiative that I'm involved in back in Australia, the Nonhuman Intelligence Research Institute, nhirr.org. It's been founded with the extremely generous support of an Australian neuroscientist and businessman called Dr. Antonov. It's the first organization of its kind in the Australasian region. We plan to fund collaborative scientific research projects into unidentified anomalous phenomena and we are very interested in funding generously collaborations with scientists worldwide. We're already working with Dr. Beatus Viller who I know is presenting at this conference to assist her superb research into so-called astronomical transients. Another planned project is the construction of absolutely state-of-the-art observation stations that will be placed in UAP hotspots. These will be mobile using absolutely bestcase top-of-the-line technology. We hope they will collect extensive data on UAP. So if anyone here or anyone watching thinks they have a a scientific project that might help us crack the mystery of UAPs and you're interested in pitching for NHIR Institutees funding support and I can tell you Anton's deadly serious. He wants to support good science. Let's talk. We think it's time to stop waiting for governments to admit what they know. We plan to science the truth. There's a pile of my cards here. Don't hold back. Thank you very much. Um, I think you wanted questions. Yeah. >> Yeah. One more time. Ross Coltart, what an incredible way to kick off the 2024 AAPC

conference. Now, we're going to do a few questions. I think we've got just enough time, don't we? We're a little behind schedule, but hey, he had a lot to say, didn't he?

>> I'm so sorry if I webbled on. Yeah. Now, with the questions, I do want to quickly say, and I'll say a little more about this later, that we're all using the Hoova app. Most of you probably got emails about this with updates. It's probably the best way for you to include your questions, but there are also little cards on the table where you can do it the old-fashioned way like Ross would do, right? Write it down and put it in the mail. So, indeed, and that's obviously very effective. So, if you'd like to write on your cards and pass those up to the front, I think that Rich and some of the folks are going to be helping to get those up here to me. I'm going to start though on a few on the Hoova app. And I'm going to give you a little briefing tomorrow morning, by the way, about how that works. For the time being, let's kick off with this one, Ross. We have the following question. It seems that most people active in the UAP arena have given up on the on challenging the mainstream media's wholesale shunning of the UAP topic. Do you believe it's a lost cause or do you and they emphasize this, do you honestly think mainstream media can be brought around to cover the topic appropriately?

>> You know what? I don't think mainstream ma media matters anymore. One of one of the things that I'm fascinated by as a journalist is I think I'm personally responsible for the decline of hot lead in newspapers, film in television. Every single thing that I've used to report in journalism has gradually gone defunct during my career. And of course the real reason is because of the encroachment of the internet. What has happened is this incredible secret and it is a secret. It is real has been kept because at the very time that we need quality investigative journalism at a level we've never seen before. The money that used to provide rivers of gold to the great newspapers and the huge TV stations, it's not there anymore. And most of the media networks are just they're sniffing vapors. They're running on empty. They don't have the huge investigative staff they used to have. When I first started in newspapers, I was one of probably 20 investigative reporters in my newspaper. And now I'm often the only reporter doing investigative journalism in an entire TV network. There's no money anymore. And so when you go to a boss and you say, as I did once, I want to go to the United States and talk to a guy called Chris Melon, uh, who tells me that there's a really interesting story about UFOs. Not only did I meet with hostility to the whole idea because of the embarrassment about the stigma of UFOs from the boss of the program I was working for, it was also cost. These things cost money. Most of the people I've persuaded to talk, I've only persuaded them to talk by sitting down and talking to them. The process of travel, the process of exposition, that takes work. And that great era of investigative journalism where great papers like the New York Times, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, I mean, it's a beautiful period in American journalism, but it's over. And it's why you're not seeing a lot of good quality journalism anymore on a lot of issues in the American media or in my media. And so I I've given up lamenting the failure of mainstream media because it's not their fault. I've spoken to editors about this. A lot of my friends are now editors of major newspapers or TV networks and they're pained by the fact that they don't have staff to deploy to go out and investigate stuff. But what is interesting, and I've learned this for myself, I put an interview up with Gary Nolan late last year just almost just as as a filler. Channel 7 said to me in Australia, "Look, have you got any interviews you think are interesting that people might want to watch and we can put it up over Christmas?" It's been watched nearly 3 million times. The last time anyone in the media had ratings of 3 million was probably 40 years ago. What's happening is media is moving online and online is incredibly powerful. It's much more powerful than mainstream media. I routinely on podcasts that I do or on shows that I do like reality check on NewsNation. We outrate major networks on national television because there's an audience from all over the world that even if they're not getting it in mainstream media, they want it and they're interested. There's a wisdom of the crowd on this subject. They want to know what's going on and they smell a rat.

>> Indeed. Well said. Here's another question. This comes There we go. Yeah, we've got time for clapping. Uh, we've got a question that comes from here in the audience this evening. Uh, Ross, what does it mean for the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies methodical approach to characterizing UAP, the slow, steady, and empirical approach, in other words, the scientific method, and how long it often takes to evaluate things scientifically if what Ross describes turns out to be true. And I say if you know I always concede there is the possibility that this is some incredible mass disinformation program that the dozens of people I've now spoken to about this have been a setup by I don't know office of OGA and the CIA or whoever. I doubt it. But what does it mean for science? What it means is we've just got to keep on digging. I mean, it's there. It really is. I mean, I I I the the incredible thing is I've had conversations with scientists in the program who are angry that they can't do what we're all doing here, sharing and discussing ideas, which is the fundamental idea behind good science, peer review. My understanding is that a large part of the technological breakthroughs that should have happened with this technology, if this is true, haven't been able to be achieved because frankly we haven't been able to share ideas with other scientists, particularly in materials science, who might be able to advise how things are constructed. I spoke to one guy who told me he'd worked for 20 years on one particular object, but it was so compartmented he'd only ever been able to look at videos and photographs and descriptions of the object. He'd never been allowed to physically touch it. Think about that. And every year he would come to his office, sit in that office, and he wasn't allowed to talk to the people in either office, either side of him, and discuss what it was that he was working on. And neither were they. This whole program, if it exists, of course, is so heavily compartmented that it's constraining the discovery of scientific advancements that could benefit all of humanity, not just a select group of people in private aerospace, who I suspect have made the decision that this is theirs.

Our next question here, we're getting quite a few about some of the recent uh amendments and and the bill language that's appeared actually fairly recently. This one comes from folks online. What are the odds that Congressman Robert Garcia's proposed amendments to Majority Leader Schumer's UAP legislation will face significant revisions or get gutted again before it passes?

>> I think it will at the moment because there is a I don't know what it is. I I I mean I I love coming to America. I've come here pretty much every year, multiple times a year for the last 35 years, and I've seen a change. When I was a little boy, I loved the fact that there was this Apollo space program that had been achieved by this amazing country, America, that had made incredible technological achievements. And so much of it happened here in Rocket City. And I was given I was very lucky. A good friend of mine um organized a VIP tour of me for me of the Marshall Space Center this week and I went and stood by the test platform where Veron Brawn tested his first rockets here in America. It was history an incredible era where you know some of America's greatest generation achieved technological achievements that are just absolutely mind-boggling. But right now, America feels broken. It feels like it's lost its way. And and it's really interesting because what could singlehandedly motivate America? You need like a Manhattan project, nothing could do it more than to be able and and this is what I find bewildering. I've asked so many people, including quite senior people, who've rung me knowing that I will obviously, even though they're telling me things that betray the fact that they know full well, they're admitting the existence of a program. I've had conversations with people in private aerospace asking me what they should do. It's perverse. And I've said, "What's the reason? Why Why are you keeping this secret?" and they talk with just enough angularity, just enough detachment from any admission. But what they're skirting around is the fact that they're sitting on this monstrous secret. And to me, nothing could transform America more or humanity more than the realization that we are not alone. You know, we'd perhaps forget our differences in Ukraine or North Korea or China or Russia and think of ourselves as humans. Imagine what science could achieve, what humanity could achieve if we could deploy the minds of everybody in this room and anybody in the world to achieve technological breakthroughs. My understanding is that what we're doing with this technology, with this retrieved technology, is we're essentially piggy piggybacking on it. We're not reverse engineering it. We're retrofitting it in a way that allows us to use it. I won't go any further than that. I know a lot about it. And by the way, if anybody ever did decide to push me under a bus, believe me, every name of every person that I've been told, I haven't been able to verify it, so I can't publish it. Everything I know will be published by multiple people who I've sent copies of what I have all around the world. I'm mindful of the fact that I do know people have been murdered and that's a big call. I know people have been murdered to protect this secret. And so coming back to answer your question, this is the biggest secret in human history. And I don't give a toot whether people call me a conspiracy theorist. On a level of probability, I'm pretty bloody sure it's true. And what they're doing is they're misusing the laws of your country to hinder what is a constitutional right by Congress to oversight every arm of government. Now, if Americans don't care about that, then you can go another 60 years in ignorance. It's up to you. I mean, frankly, I I actually don't think the amendment will pass in its current form. I think it will be emasculated. And frankly, unless you, the American voter, can motivate politicians to actually do something about this, it's a complete waste of time. And just like Rosco Hill tried in 1960 and was publicly vilified for doing so, a former DCI of the CIA went public within a year of leaving office pushing for UA pay transparency. What the hell? What? Why did he do that? He did that because he knew about the program. He thought it was monstrous, outrageous that this secret was being kept. And I do, but I don't vote. But I happen to think that America, the greatest generation, showed in this town 60 years ago things that me as a little boy, I loved it. It inspired me. you as a country can do great things and you've lost your way. It's as simple as that. This is this is an issue that goes to the absolute heart of what you've all been told. You know, your country is great. That's a load of steaming right now. You you're failing. And you're failing because there's this monstrous secret that's being perpetuated. Trillions of dollars, I suspect, have been diverted from your budgets. You can't even fix your roads. What the hell? Why don't you vote these pricks out and get people in who are going to make a change?

We're almost out of time, but you know, on the heels of that, I think it would only be appropriate to get one more from our live audience here at the Rocket City Tavern. this question, Ross. What actions can activists take to effectively pressure elected officials to demand more transparency?

>> It really is as simple as I mean, I I know there was a the New Paradigm Institute, for example, held a demo in uh DC and, you know, only a number of people turned up. Good old-fashioned tub thumping political campaigning makes a huge difference. I can tell you, I've got friends that work in ministerial offices in government, and nothing works better than sitting down and handwriting a letter to a minister of government or a secretary of department complaining about something. If politicians started getting floods of letters telling them that this is an election issue, I mean, I know, for example, Trump's been briefed. You know what's going on? He's scared. He's scared they're going to kill him if he reveals what he knows. That's what I've been told. You have a situation where your potential president is terrified of speaking about the UAP issue because he's scared they're going to knock him. I'm not kidding you. I'm not making this up. This is serious. You know, you have a national scandal at the heart of this. It's not just about UFOs. It's about your country. It's totally screwed unless you resolve this issue. It should be the dominant political issue. If you can get this secret out, the world will change overnight. And I've heard that from people in the program. They're deeply, deeply angry that this secret is being suppressed. They see no good reason. One of the reasons it's being suppressed is because America has made weapons, dreadful weapons. Are you proud of that? Is that really what we want to do from technology that we've obtained by using offensive weaponry against a fairly benevolent non-human intelligence? Is that really how we want to define our first contact? Because that's what we're talking about here. And I don't know how to communicate this more seriously. You know, I'm I'm over talking about this as a possibility. You might notice in the course of my speech, I've used qualifications if this is true. And I will always say that we have to concede the possibility that it's disinformation. But too many people have told me that this is true. And frankly, if Americans don't care about it when they go to the polls in November, you're screwed. Sorry.

I think that's actually all the time we have for tonight, but I do want to ask everyone please to give us another round of applause for Mr. Ross Colt. Ross, you a long way to get

>> Thanks for watching. Go to joinn.com to find NewsNation on your television provider. And please don't forget to click that red subscribe button to ensure you get more of NewsNation's unbiased and fact-driven news coverage.