Transcription
[Music]
Hello and welcome to this special edition of Reality Check, following straight on the heels of what I do think is one of the most important stories I've ever read. Jake Barber, you'll accept, is a very difficult story to take straight away, and I can appreciate people may be feeling some degree of ontological shock with claims of psionic influence on non-human technology.
We've been told for years by the US military and by very cleverly placed films in Hollywood and books that psychic phenomena is nonsense. But I am thrilled by recent developments like the telepathy tapes, which, despite the debunkers, continue to show quite interesting evidence of psychic phenomena. I've known for a while that there is a link between human consciousness and whatever the technology or intelligence is that's purportedly behind what we're seeing in our skies, our oceans, and in orbit.
So, to help me analyze the implications from this story, I'd like to bring in two very special guests. First up, Rear Admiral Tim Gadet, who's a longtime friend of the show. We've interviewed him before. He's a former head of the NOAA and a very senior retired military officer who's given distinguished service to his country. He's recently spoken out himself about how he believes that there is some kind of NHI presence engaging with this planet that seems to want to be heard.
Also joining us is a correspondent from The Hill, another good friend of the show, Merrick Von Renencamp. Welcome, gentlemen. Now, I'm not asking you to be nice; I want you to be brutal. I'm expecting we'll get the inevitable debunkers and trolls taking us to task, so if either of you want to make any comments about the show or ask me a question, fire away.
Well, let me start here. Thank you for having us on, Ross. I cannot say I can verify 100% that Jake is accurate and legit because I don't know him, and I don't know the fellow Air Force personnel that you vouch for him. But I do know John Blitch, the former Dev Gru officer, and so off the cuff with his endorsement and voucher, I'm inclined to trust and think that Jake is legitimate. That's my first spot on that.
Yeah, I don't know whether we made it clear enough just how distinguished a military career Lieutenant Colonel John Blitch has. He's a former Delta Force officer, so it's quite unique to have somebody from his background speaking publicly. He's also written extensively on the phenomenon, taken a very close interest in it, and he's got a forthcoming book coming out.
He's also, as you'll learn in an interview that we do with him later next week, an experiencer. He's had direct experience of the phenomenon, and it's quite chilling what he describes happened to him. It's interesting, you know, Tim, a lot of military personnel have actually said to me, including elite operators from the Special Forces, they've talked about their experiences with the phenomenon.
In one of the things that we did as a preparatory exercise for this story, we actually went to a field very close to Fort Bragg, where the very elite of the American special forces are located. We actually did C5 with some of the people who have assisted in the preparation of this film. They are very, very interested. A lot of these elite military operators do not dismiss it.
As you say, Colonel John Blitch is one of those people. The other two people, Don and Fred, who backed up Jake's story, have firsthand experience on the range with Jake, which is quite extraordinary. They are elite tier one military operatives, very highly trained, the absolute crème de la crème of the military Special Forces in the United States. It was an honor and indeed a real pleasure to get to know them. They're good human beings; they derive absolutely no benefit from telling me what they've told me and supporting Jake's story.
I find it intriguing because I freely admit when I first spoke to Jake and I said, "So how are we bringing down these craft?" He explains to me it's not the bringing down that's the issue; it's the summoning. How do we get them to come in the first place? As we all know, there's long been talk, notably Dr. Steven Greer, for example, has talked about something that he calls C5, where through meditation and some kind of trained meditative psychic involvement with the phenomena, it's been asserted that it's possible to attract the phenomenon.
Look, I'll be honest, I was a skeptic about that until I met people who could do it. I've been in the presence of people who were trained as psionic assists by the US military, and I've watched them do this summoning. I know it's confronting, but by golly, it works.
Ross, can I jump in? I'll say first of all congratulations on an extraordinary interview. I know you put a lot of time and effort into this, so congratulations. The allegations are truly extraordinary; I think everybody will agree on that. But if you haven't punched Jake Barber's ticket to another Congressional hearing, I think you spurred the Congressional hearing that Dave Grush made his extraordinary allegations and revelations.
If this does not spur another hearing that brings in more witnesses, then we have a major, major problem. I know you've spoken about this, but this is near and dear to my heart; this is a constitutional issue. Congress appears to be very much in the dark about these extraordinary allegations. The more people that come forward, the smoke is just overwhelming; it's overbearing at this point, I think.
Kudos to you. I think, Ross, when we spoke last several months ago, we talked about kind of a critical mass of whistleblowers coming forward. I think this is a major step forward in having that mass of individuals that is self-sustaining at some point. Hopefully, we will get more clarity and get more investigation, and true investigation.
You know, the hearings on the House Oversight Committee, while I think informative, I think we need something with teeth. We need subpoenas; we need some real steely-eyed, very hard look at this. If Congress isn't up to the task, then the incoming Trump Administration really needs to shake things up.
I agree with you, Merrick. I've had months of people, in some cases, abusing me or threatening me because they get angry that we're not just saying everything we know. I think one of the problems out there in the field of social media in the UAP world is a lot of people have no idea how hard it is to persuade somebody like Jake to speak publicly.
It has been over two years now; it's been an enormous job basically persuading him of the merits of coming forward and persuading him he can feel safe about doing it. But the thing I really admire about Jake, and I think we explained this in the story, but I want to reemphasize it, he explains in the story that the people he liaised with in the Pentagon's UFO office have confirmed to him that what he saw on the place he terms the range was alien tech, NHI tech, non-human intelligence technology.
That's key. What people need to understand is before we put Jake on television, we've actually gone through the process with him of watching him give evidence. We've been with him when he's gone back, and actually, I was consulting with him on the weekend when he was actually telling his aerospace employer that he was concerned about the safety of himself and the safety of his men.
There had been a confrontation that we're not going to go into a lot of detail about, but basically, his team came to the conclusion that their lives were under threat. It doesn't get any more serious than that. They also came to the conclusion that they believed that people they knew have been murdered to protect this secret. Moreover, there's been ongoing threats and intimidation of people to protect the secrecy of a program that frankly I know Congress has not been properly briefed about.
Just to address one thing you say as well in your commentary, yes, Jake has given evidence to the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence. But the way they do this is very interesting. I think there's a cordon sanitaire here; they protect the politicians by bringing in witnesses like him who are so explosive, and they sit them down in front of the staffers. Yes, it's all recorded; it's all done according to the proper form in a skiff, and they're properly attended by all of the very senior staffers.
But what concerns me, the reason why Congress I think is aware but also not aware at the same time, is because you have this ridiculous situation where Congressional representatives are frightened, they're scared of this UAP issue, and they're intimidated by it. They send their staffers, often their legal counsel, along so that they have legal professional privilege to protect the secrecy of what they've been told.
There may very well be a private briefing; I know because I've spoken to senators in particular who have been briefed about these allegations. But what's happening, I think, is a timidity, a fear. We know, I mean, I'm not going to name names, but we know that there have been people at very high levels in some of these committees who have basically misused their positions to suppress public awareness of this issue.
I agree with you; at the heart of this, this is a constitutional issue. I mean, when somebody like Tim swore an oath to serve as an officer in the US Navy, which he did, and reached the absolute pinnacle of the US Navy, he swore an oath to the Constitution, not to the US Navy. He swore an oath to the Constitution, and the lawyer in me, the attorney in me, feels that that's an extraordinarily important obligation.
When I've talked to the military people, and believe me, there are dozens more than the people that I've put on TV today, when I've talked to military people who have basically told me about what they know of this legacy program, they're torn because they're patriots just like these men that have spoken today. They gain absolutely nothing by speaking publicly like they have today. All they gain is a whole lot of hell; they're going to suffer the slings and arrows of trolls and debunkers.
There'll be the inevitable attacks on them; you know every little detail of their personal lives will be dredged through, and they'll be looking for and they'll throw it at them just like they did with David Grush. Frankly, it's a disgrace. I think part of the problem at the moment is the UAP community needs to take a hard look at itself and stop treating this like entertainment.
It has to acknowledge that this is serious; we are talking about egregious breaches of the law, including the criminal law. Congress, the mainstream media, the president, the incoming president, they all need to wake up to themselves and realize the significance of what this reveals.
Tim, I guess I don't expect you off the top to endorse, and I would be shocked if you had done. I don't expect, and I never expected either of you to endorse the credibility of Jake Barber because it's been a proving process for me over literally years. One of the things that I've had to do is talk off the record to people at a very high level in the military.
I'm sure you've had this experience as well, Tim, and I'm not asking you to name names, but there are good people I'm talking to in uniform, patriots who are in very senior roles in government, who are praying that this story makes a change because they do genuinely want the public to know. They're absolutely terrified about the consequences of an unchecked national security state being allowed to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money without proper accountability.
I think the intimations behind what's described by Jake and his team about the threat to their safety, the fact that they feared they would be murdered by their own employer or people associated with their employer, that is a very grave implication. So I guess, Tim, are you hearing the same desire for change inside the national security establishment that you've come from yourself?
Oh, everywhere, dozens of people, and the list is growing every day, Ross. In fact, that's why I wrote the op-ed I did after I testified in the last Congressional hearing, where I contrasted my testimony and that of John Koslowski's, stating the fact that the government is keeping UAP largely classified. I think it's time now for the public to know, and I do that out of the sense of patriotism that you just mentioned, Ross.
As does Merrick; he served in the government too, and we want the truth. That's what we're pursuing here. I will go and say a few comments about Jake; I am inclined to believe him because I don't think this psi topic is weird or controversial as I guess most people would say.
Think about it: the CIA had the Stargate program, and they've claimed to have disestablished it. But like so many of those programs that have been uncovered, they still continue, most likely in a classified version with a different name. If you look at Joe McMonagle's interviews, the validity of the remote viewing phenomena, which is telepathic and psi, is really 100% documented in scientific papers.
You have institutions like the Department of Perceptual Studies, I believe, at the University of Virginia, which has rigorously examined the psi phenomena for 50 years and documented them very well. I think the reason we're not being more open as a public is because the government has tried to suppress this and cast a stigma on it, including UAP.
So I think there is a connection; there's a large body of scientific evidence behind it. What I'd like to see, and I truly hope for, Ross, is that this interview is going to be one of many, and the other operators or contractors that are working with Jake will come out or have worked with Jake, and then we'll start really seeing a groundswell.
My desire is that this really will lead to a new scientific revolution for our understanding of reality, where we're not the center of the universe and we're not the only form of higher-order intelligence life. Just think about all the different research efforts in universities and institutes to explore the nature of this new intelligence.
It's just the technology and the, again, the psi phenomenon, which is not being explored as widely as it should be. You know, Tim, the thing that really shocks me is I'm talking to people, both military personnel, individual civilian personnel, and particularly scientists inside the legacy program.
I'm in the ridiculous situation where I'm one of the few journalists that worked in mainstream media covering this issue, with the exception of somebody like Merrick, for example. It's a very rare area to get involved in, and I've had the most extraordinary people reach out to me. They are sitting watching this; they're waiting with apprehension this weekend, and they're terrified that there's not going to be a response from the new administration.
They're skeptical; they think President Trump will wimp it. They think that there's every probability that, like every president before him, he's going to accept the lame national security arguments that the public should be kept in the dark about this for another 30 or 40 years. That's certainly what the gatekeepers are trying to do.
One of the things I've noticed, by the way, is there are trolls who are building Twitter accounts trying to use the algorithms of social media to run public opinion on social media to try and direct adverse comments about Jake. We've been tracking it, in fact, we've been tracking it in quite a sophisticated way for the first time, and we're already aware that there are people who are almost certainly connected to the intelligence community who are involved in disinformation, active disinformation, to try and spread lies basically about these people and about these allegations before the public even hears them.
It's fascinating to see a coordinated public campaign, and I believe it's being run from sections of the defense intelligence community. If you remember, Tim, you'd know your law: Executive Order 123 forbids the running of intelligence operations against the American public by any intelligence agency in the United States. Merrick, you're probably aware of that as well.
I think the implications of this story are enormous because what it suggests is that there has been an intelligence agency for whom Jake worked and acknowledged that he worked as a non-official cover, basically working through a private aerospace company. They are essentially administering a program which is being kept from Congress and from the knowledge of presidents.
To me, I think that is the bravest implication behind what we've exposed today. Absolutely, and if these allegations are all true, we're looking at, number one, just as you said, a constitutional crisis, but also this potential intelligence operation against American citizens, right?
So, two strikes. Nothing short, if this is all true. I mean, you could easily see a Church Commission 2.0, right? This is the famous Congressional committee that was stood up in the 70s to investigate abuses by the intelligence community. You can easily see something like that being stood up as these whistleblowers continue to come forward.
I just want to make one point to your listeners and your viewers, Ross, and that is that I think it's easy to get lost in the hype around one whistleblower, in this case four. But this is much broader, right? We've had Chuck Schumer, previously the Senate Majority Leader, put forward 64 pages of legislation that alleges exactly what Mr. Barber alleges.
We've had Dave Grush, whistleblower, go under oath to say the same thing. We had Lou Elizondo go under oath to say the same thing. Admiral Gadet, right on this call, went under oath, and I don't think you had firsthand knowledge, but I think you testified to the fact that you believe that these alleged programs do exist and that that extraordinary information is being hidden from the American public.
It's not just those individuals; we had very credible people in Congress, Senator Marco Rubio, likely to be the Secretary of State in the incoming Trump Administration, sounds like he's going to sail through the confirmation process, has said some extraordinary things and vouched for the credibility of these whistleblowers.
So look, it's easy to get wrapped up in one story, and this is a huge story, Ross. Again, kudos to you. But let's keep the bigger picture in mind. I just want to add one thing: I can confirm with Dave Grush, and again, most of your listeners and viewers might know, but briefly, Dave Grush was a former high-level intelligence officer who conducted a lawful investigation of these alleged retrieval and reverse engineering programs.
He testified under oath that he had 40 witnesses that he built a case on over 40 years. I spoke with Dave, and this is interesting; he mentioned that Jake Barber is not one of his 40 witnesses. However, Barber is clearly, and all of the three individuals, the operators that corroborated his story, at least vouched for him, are clearly high-quality witnesses that are saying the exact same thing.
So unless somebody's writing some extraordinary fan fiction for who knows what end, these are all allegations that we need to take extremely seriously precisely because we're hearing the same thing over and over and over again.
Yeah, let's then, Merrick, spot on. I want to pile on that and address the incoming Trump Administration. As you pointed to, in addition to Secretary Rubio having spoken out about UAP, we also have John Ratcliffe, of course, who's likely to be the CIA director if confirmed. He's done the same, and then Mike Waltz has also done that, and he is likely to become the next national security adviser.
Those are three real positive potential allies in this effort. I can say this with authority because I was a Trump appointee; he is disruptive by nature. I think no one's going to argue that. If anything could be more disruptive for the status quo, it'll be UAP disclosure.
So there's an inclination there. He's also tended to stack his administration with innovators. For example, the next director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, a good friend of mine, an ally when I was in the administration, he was the chief technology officer in the White House.
I could see him looking at the technology spin-off potential of this being great. The other thing, and there is a desire, there was in the last administration, there's a desire in this one to show American leadership. I mentioned that in my Hill op-ed that this is an issue where we really stand to do that in the whole world.
When opportunities are presented like that, they're likely to be moved forward. That's actually a role I'm taking on. I made this recommendation for the Trump Administration specifically in my op-ed, and as people start getting into office next week, I'm going to be engaging them.
One of the things with Tim, I really admire you as such a senior retired military officer for taking the courageous step to speak out. A lot of people watching this, and I know I've got friends who I spoke to before this program, encouraged me. They're in uniform, very high levels, and they encouraged me to go ahead with the story.
One of the things I always do as an investigative journalist is I go to sources and I say, "Look, I've got this story; for God's sake, if there's something I need to know, I know you know there's top-secret SCI compartmentalized clearances. There might be something I don't know; for God's sake, let me know."
Tim, one thing I want to ask you: a lot of people wrestling with the decision about whether they should come forward or not are looking at you because you've taken such a strong leadership role in such an admirable way. Have you suffered blowback? Has this damaged you at all in your standing amongst your military peers? Have you suffered threats or intimidation of any kind for taking the stand that you've taken in so courageously speaking out and revealing your knowledge of the existence of this possible NHI phenomenon?
Well, the answer is yes and no, Ross. In fact, I was at a professional society meeting this week, and a few people I know talked about it, but it was all in terms of support. Otherwise, my reputation as a scientist is really kind of unchanged because some of these communities in ocean science and atmospheric science aren't necessarily following this topic at large.
So professionally, no, it's only been in some of these media outlets that these professional trolls, as you mentioned, whose credibility and integrity are near zero to me, and who I really don't take any stock in, that's been the only source of blowback. That's just going to happen; it goes with the territory. I testified in front of Congress probably 12 times in my life, so it's just what comes with the territory. I can handle it.
So, Merrick, help me here, my friend. You know The Hill; you know the politics. What are those jelly-backed weak politicians going to do when they get this story? Are they going to respond? Do you think there's going to be any change?
Ross, that is the million-dollar question. I like the way you framed it; thank you for that. I'll say it: I'm down here in Australia, so they can't get at me down here.
That's right. Look, I mean, if it were up to me, every alarm bell on the Hill would be going off, and every office should be going off. Again, I fear that most people just—there's something in the government called agenda inertia, right? There's always some other pressing issue. There's always China; there's always Ukraine; there's always the Gaza potential ceasefire.
There's always another issue, and I can see how UAP is continually downgraded, intentionally or not, because there are other burning issues at play. I fear, and I'm going to go back to what I said earlier, that people lose the big picture of where we are and what has happened over the last five, six years on this extraordinary topic, much thanks to both of you gentlemen.
I hope that people on the Hill, staffers, do not view this in isolation and realize that there is a heck of a lot more to this. There are many other individuals that have come forward already and that, Ross, you clearly are in touch with, that are thinking about coming forward.
I just want to quickly take a minute to echo, Ross, your kind words about Admiral Gadet because he's demonstrated extraordinary leadership out of uniform. As I think many people know, he took this very seriously when aviators off the east coast were observing UAP.
This is something that alarmed him, and he is standing up for those guys that maybe because of stigma or because of a lack of process or procedure or what have you were not able to stick up for their own air safety needs, their own safety of flight needs. So, credit to you, Admiral Gadet, for bringing your voice.
It's not every day we have a chief meteorologist of the Navy, I believe, and a former acting head of NOAA, which is just an extraordinarily important institution and government agency. So, thank you for that.
Well, thank you, Merrick. I want to say kudos back to you for your courage to speak out. I know you're taking the same risk, but you made a couple of points, and I want to add to one of them about all the wrong that is in covering up this issue of UAP and another is the use of our taxpayer dollars.
If any of our taxpayer dollars are being put forward to pay these contractors that are engaging in corporate warfare, they're a problem. That is not how Americans want their tax dollars spent. So, another opportunity that the incoming Trump Administration has is to restore trust in the government because it is at an all-time low.
For years, it's been declining. I think the last four saw a degree of dishonesty that shocked a lot of Americans. So, there's a chance to change that, and I think coming forward with UAP in a deliberate, controlled fashion might go a long way to restoring that trust.
So, Tim, one of the things I've been wrestling with is an explanation of how something as monstrous as this kind of cover-up could possibly be perpetrated without the public knowing about it, without it being officially disclosed. You've worked inside the defense establishment. How do they keep this sort of stuff secret? I mean, why hasn't it leaked before?
Well, this is why your interview with Jake is so interesting to me because you could tell without him coming out completely the levels of compartmentalization, if you will, how compartmented that effort was. He was just security and logistics; he didn't talk about the operators on the ground attaching the sling to the object or whatever the exploitation that's going on afterwards.
That was interesting; it just showed how compartmented that is. That's one reason it's been difficult to get out. Money, power, all those reasons are factors. Again, I think someone else has said this before; I have too, that there are a lot of technologies and modes of operation and tactics, techniques, and procedures that the public does not know, and we don't—I don't want them to know—in terms of how we conduct intelligence and counterintelligence.
That has not come out, so we're not great, but we are pretty good in some areas about keeping things under wraps, so it doesn't surprise me. However, when you look at what's being revealed now, things like Roswell not being a hoax, other UAP crashes occurring, and we're seeing and hearing about largely being reported by terrific journalists like you, I think we're seeing that what's happened is things have come out.
However, the government has done a very good job at stigmatizing and putting disinformation out to discredit the information that has been reported. One thing I wrestle with is, as I said earlier, I went out of my way to give anyone a reason for me not to run this story.
You know, is there something that's so sacrosanct about the retrieval program that means it shouldn't be revealed? One of the arguments that I've had very weakly put to me by somebody quite junior in the CIA was, I suspect a speculative comment, they suggested, "Look, maybe what this is all about is protecting technological advances that have been made using this technology that's been recovered, and we don't want to show our adversaries that hand."
Tim, I'd like to get your comment on that. I'm going to promote you: you're the president. You're sitting in the Oval Office. You've just been elected, and a carping journalist like me from outside is begging with you to reveal the UAP program. The head of the CIA Office of Science and Technology walks in the door and says, "Mr. President, if you reveal this, you are going to blow open the biggest secret in American history, and you will jeopardize the biggest technological advances of our time."
Do you believe, Tim, Mr. President, that the disclosure of NHI, the existence of a non-human intelligence, is possible without compromising the kind of programs that we're talking about?
Absolutely, I do. That was the whole purpose of the Schumer Amendment, the UAP Disclosure Act, also called that. It put forward a process for the president to approve controlled disclosure. I am absolutely on board with protecting technology secrets, national secrets, for national security, of course, yes.
But the public can know and should know that we are not alone, and we should be researching that and getting a better understanding of where we're at. How are we going to advance with a national strategy of ignorance, as Chris Mel would say?
Merrick, I'd like to get your view. You're the vice president; you've got to make the decision as well. What would you say to that? I mean, I'm really interested because at the heart of this, there is this argument that continually is raised by outsiders that the most plausible reason for the continuing cover-up is the argument that it's a slippery slope.
If you disclose the existence of NHI, you then disclose inevitably the existence of these programs. I don't buy that on the level I know from my own sources that the Russians and the Chinese already know that we've recovered technology. In fact, I'm told that in the very early days of glasnost, we actually collaborated with the Russians on a retrieval of a craft in Russia.
Now, of course, things have frozen since then, and there is obviously hostility between Russia and America. We are sadly on the brink at times of war or possible conflict. But Merrick, do you think that disclosing the existence of NHI would inevitably jeopardize national security projects of enormous significance?
So, assuming there is NHI and all these programs exist, I've got to be a good journalist and be objective here. I agree completely with Admiral Gadet that no, I think that it can be done. However, if these allegations of contractor-on-contractor firefights, I mean, if anything like that is remotely accurate, the gatekeepers of these programs, these alleged programs, I can see them fighting tooth and nail.
As they say, the cover-up often is worse than the crime, right? We're dealing with a massive scandal, so I can see why certain individuals would be fighting tooth and nail against disclosure to the point of potentially blackmailing or threatening politicians, lawmakers, and so on and so forth.
But bottom line, to answer your question, no, I think that the two can be bifurcated. I want to maybe just quickly touch on what I think, putting on my kind of national security, my geopolitical hat here. Regardless of whether China or Russia have recovered these craft, the Senate Intelligence Committee put out language basically suggesting that.
It didn't make it into law, but it did come out of the committee. We haven't had a single substantive discussion about the geopolitical ramifications of that announcement, let alone the financial, the economic, the social, the cultural. But the geopolitical—that's something that I grapple with, and I really struggle with because nobody has had that in-depth analysis conversation.
What does this look like globally? How do our adversaries respond? Are we all going to sing kumbaya because we're not alone in the universe? I don't know; that hope is not a strategy, right?
This raises a host of questions, and I suspect, frankly, that what I just discussed is a reason why a president or a vice president or whoever is a decision-maker would be hesitant, shall we say, to disclose this to the public without having that intensive tabletop exercise, that red team exercise to talk through what the ramifications of that disclosure are and how it's done.
I suspect it's easier to keep the cover-up and not have to reveal embarrassing secrets and corruption and probably impropriety. I mean, I think the thing that's always fascinated me about this is Donald Rumsfeld literally one day before 9/11 reveals, I think there's a two or three trillion—I’ve forgotten the exact number—two or three trillion dollars unaccounted for inside the Department of Defense.
Auditors basically can't explain that incredible amount of money. The implications that I'm hearing from many, many people is that there are underground facilities that have been built to house these facilities. I even know the locations of some of them. I've been exploring witnesses who've told me that they've been inside those facilities.
I'm very interested in hearing from people who are aware of those facilities, and the government needs to know that this is being talked about. If this is important national security infrastructure, they have to provide a very good reason very quickly for why the public shouldn't be told this.
Because I know a lot of people out there in the UFO social media world think everything should just be recklessly released, and they think there should be catastrophic disclosure, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. I don't agree with that. I've got friends who've been injured in service because of information getting out and being publicized in a way that compromised them in a very dangerous situation overseas.
I can understand the need for sensitivity on national security operations, and it's important; it's part of my ethical duty as a journalist to pay respect to that and make sure that we check it on the way through. Those are balances that need to be made.
But I agree with both of you; I do think that it's ridiculous for the continuing—if it's true, and I do believe it is—that we are aware and have long been aware of the existence of a non-human intelligence engaging with this planet. It's time to stop lying about it.
The thing I find grave is that, without naming them or embarrassing them, there are public officials that have been induced by the gatekeepers within the last few months to put out statements and to even give evidence to Congress flatly asserting that there's no evidence of this kind of extraterrestrial engagement with this planet.
It may very well be they're playing with semantics. Maybe we know they're not extraterrestrial; they're not off-planet. Maybe they're on-planet, as Tim sometimes suggests. Perhaps they're underwater, or maybe they're interdimensional. Whatever they are, I think we've got a right to know about them, and I think the public impatience is going to mount as a result of today's story.
But I don't expect it to be the definitive moment. I'm certainly grateful to both of you for giving your contribution to today's show. Thanks to both of you.
Thanks so much for having us.
Okay, so I'd now like to bring in scientist Dr. Jim Sigala to get his commentary and expertise on some of the things that Jake Barber has described in the story. Jim Sigala is a physicist and engineer who's spent much of the last few years researching anomalous phenomena, especially around the winter basement where the Skinwalker Ranch is located.
He's got a PhD in physics and advanced degrees in engineering. He's been involved in anomalous phenomena research for decades, and he's got many connections with most of the well-known scientists in this field. Most interestingly, of course, he worked very closely with the ORAP BASS program studies that were run out of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Skinwalker Ranch, where a lot of experiences reported anomalous phenomena.
So, Jim, welcome to Reality Check. I'm obviously really keen to hear from you whether you think there's any similarities between the kind of things that Jake Barber described, the anomalous engagements with whatever this object was, this craft was, and also the lesions and the injuries that he's describing.
Yeah, so it was actually quite fascinating. I watched the whole film, and it was actually quite interesting. As you get to certain segments of it, you say, "Okay, I've seen that before. Yep, yep, I've seen that before." It's all very... One of the nicest things is that somebody put it in the context of somebody with boots on the ground handling something that was obviously anomalous or unknown in nature.
Where most of the interactions that I've investigated with other scientists, the actual object that created the phenomena wasn't local; it was someplace else. It might have been buried; it might have been someplace else. But this time, it was something that was very, very local.
What's great is that you get the same kind of reaction, the emotional reaction from the people and the physical reaction of your physiology changing or your medical injuries coming to bear. So let's just have a quick look at the clip that we're talking about. I think this is the one where Jake describes the experience of escorting an unknown object in a box from somewhere in Africa back to the United States.
Let's just take a quick look to refresh our memory of that clip.
"We transported what we called mystery boxes all the time. I have no idea; it could have been empty; it probably wasn't empty, but we don't know what was inside the boxes."
"And what were you told? If somebody tried to seize that box, what were your orders?"
"We maintained the authority to use lethal force if anyone tried to seize those boxes."
"So whatever that box was, it was extremely valuable to the US government?"
"That's correct. After this particular mission, me and everyone on my team got extremely sick, like physically ill in the hospital. Within weeks after this, I lost every hair on my body, and I also lost the skin on my arms."
"So the skin's actually falling off your body?"
"Yeah, like not just falling off; it was lopping off within a couple of days, like a severe sunburn. I ended up developing a severe heart murmur that I never had before."
So, Jim, what's your reaction to what Jake describes there?
Well, it seems to me that he was in contact with some type of energy, you might say, that left a medical footprint on his body. That's not something that you can manifest in your head, so obviously something actually did happen to him. There was no question that something did, and there were a lot of other things that happened to him during that period that he narrates in his narratives that led me to believe that he was very earnest about this.
I mean, so I believe this actually did happen to him; there was nothing construed. To have those things happen was very similar to other types. What would cause, for example, skin to literally peel off somebody's body? What kind of exposure causes that?
So sometimes radiation will do it. If you ever have any problem with your skin, radiation—they do electrons, so they'll actually shoot electrons at your skin and get very localized radiation deposits into your skin, which would cause it to have local lesions on your skin. Sometimes you get enough of it, and it will start separating from the dermis; it'll start actually separating and coming and peeling off.
I've had many patients describe this and show this and talk to medical doctors. Actually, this was something that was pretty prevalent when people came into contact with dangerous types of objects.
The other thing that Jake described were lesions on his body. Have you had that experience yourself with witnesses and other experiences who've been exposed to anomalous phenomena?
Yeah, so what happens is that as your body absorbs this energy, it actually does something to it. Your DNA absorbs it; it actually will affect your DNA; it'll break it apart and turn it into almost like a cancer type of thing where it'll actually have a reaction.
So you'll get the dimples; you get the bubbles. It'll almost look like a herpes, but then when they look at it and they actually biopsy it, it's not a herpes. You'll get these lesions on your skin. Luckily, most of these things dissipate after maybe a week or so, but sure enough, there's a lot of people that have reported that they get these lesions, and of course, they're very frightened. Nobody wants to have these things.
Sure, there are a few photographs that you very kindly sent us before we went on air. Can you talk to those? What do they show?
So those are instances where people have, first of all, witnessed something anomalous, like they looked up in the sky; there was something floating by, there was an orb, there was a UFO craft. They were never alone; most of those people were not alone; other people saw it.
But these particular people came back like a day or two later, or actually 24 hours later, and started developing these bubbles on their skin. So these areas, these blotchy areas, have these pimple areas, almost like they very, very locally burned or actually had a radiation treatment very locally.
Then, of course, that led to discolored urination—all the signals that you get or all the symptoms you get when you have been exposed or absorbed some type of radiation.
One of the things that are very interesting: he talked about his heart murmur. One of the interesting things that happens when you have an interaction with these entities and you have this energy that's coming from them, your body reacts in a very sinister way.
You get into a fight-or-flight type of thing where your immune system kicks up; your capillaries shrink, so your blood pressure goes up. Then you start getting into this whole autoimmune reaction. When you get an autoimmune reaction and your body's trying to fight something it doesn't know what it is because it can't understand what this energy or this thing is coming into your body, it could affect your autoimmune responses, affect your heart valves, to the point where after a certain period of time, they could develop a murmur.
So when I heard that, I said, "Yeah, that's definite," because at this point, he definitely got something into his body that the body just did not understand, and it caused this reaction. So that's when I said that's pretty genuine what happened to him.
Wow, so you've seen these murmurs before?
Yeah, we have several people that actually went away. In fact, there's a great study right now that I'm working on with another scientist where we're relating people that have these experiences with the onset of autoimmune diseases that they're having. One of them actually leads to problems with the cardiac system.
So yes, I've seen a lot of this. I mean, there's no suggestion there that the energy that's caused these injuries is being intentionally applied. I mean, do you get the feeling it's like an incidental consequence of exposure to an object that might not be intentional, or do you think that the people that are being zapped are being deliberately zapped?
No, I think it's actually—to be honest with you, I think something is trying to communicate with them. I think somebody's trying to give them something intelligent. Some people can interpret it; some people can't. Some people just think it's like, "Oh my God, what's going on? I got a headache."
The other people actually say, "Oh, I just got a message from somebody," or "I feel about this thing." Jake actually said he felt great; he felt like all of a sudden he felt amazing. I think that might be the message.
So, you know, you're standing in the path of some kind of communication that we don't understand from some type of entity. We don't understand what it does to our outside body; it leaves lesions, it leaves marks, it leaves some medical footprints. What it does to our internal body, it gives us feelings, and it makes us interpret things.
Our particular brains try to rationalize everything, so you end up feeling amazing, or you feel scared, or you feel...
What happened to Jake is definitely something that somebody was trying to give him information.
So let's roll back a little bit. I mean, I think when I first met Jake, the biggest issue I had with his story was not actually the issue of the United States government secretly being involved in retrieving non-human intelligence spacecraft. I think I could cope with that.
The big thing for me that I found very confronting, and it's taken me two years to come to terms with it, is this idea of psychic or psionic engagement by human consciousness with some kind of non-human technology.
We don't even know if it is a technology; we don't know if these craft, so-called, are craft. They look like craft, but can you even begin to try to explain to us what's going on there? Are you familiar at all with the idea of the human mind making a connection with some kind of non-human phenomenon like that?
Yeah, so I think it's a conclusion at this point that whatever this is, is not a radiation source. It is an information source that actually happens to be absorbed by your body in a way that looks like radiation. But I think primarily, whatever this is, is trying to communicate to you.
I've done a study over the past three or four years through the Institute with Hal Puthoff, where we've actually put people in a situation where they were in areas that have UFOs or have UAPs present, and we took their narratives out and also looked at the surrounding signals around them.
Sure enough, they always claimed, and their narratives state that they felt like they were being instructed to do something, or they felt like they were being told that they should be doing something, or they were told that something is amazing and having a wonderful period.
They would go sometimes into a catatonic state where they would wake up hours later, feel amazing, or just feel completely drained sometimes. You know, feel that they've been in contact with something.
So what Jake was actually describing is not something that's unique to him. What's unique to him is that the object that made this happen was right next to him, and that was actually quite revealing.
So, had you heard the term psionic before?
I have, in the sense of a science fiction type of thing where people can communicate, and there's telepathy and things like that. It has a bad stigma to it where people say, "Oh, you know, you're just a bunch of crazies thinking you could do telepathy."
But everybody, I think, if you talk to guys like Gary Nolan and things like that, they'll claim that everybody has some form of ability to reach outside of their mind and connect with other things. I think that nature in itself, if we had this little bit of ability to go outside of our mind, it would definitely evolve and make it part of our initial being because that helps in our fight-or-flight type of reactions.
So can you talk at all to the science that might be behind how the human brain, human consciousness, could possibly engage, if it's real, with a non-human intelligence of some kind?
Sure, if you think of what our brain is, it's like a big ion-moving machine where you have all these ions. What ions are is these charged particles that move through your body, and anytime you have a charged particle, it could be affected by outside sources.
What's interesting is that charged particles could be entangled with other particles that might not be local to them. It might be outside of their head; it might be on the other side of the Earth. But we know for a fact that things like that, these particles get entangled.
So if you have a neuron, and that neuron happens to fire, and maybe that neuron fires and it says, "Oh, you're looking at a flower right now," but that neuron is attached to or entangled with somebody else that has a different feeling or an entity that might be able to control that, and they have this initial blast to you, you might say, "Oh, look at that flower," but there's no flower there.
So there's this entanglement going on between neurons and brains and all of these ions that are flowing in your head.
But I guess what I have difficulty with—I mean, it does sound like science fiction. The interesting thing is if it's true, if what Jake is saying is true, the US Air Force never stopped operating the Stargate program.
You talked about Hal Puthoff; of course, one of our friends, Hal, was long ago in the 1970s through SRI involved in groundbreaking research with people like...
Yeah, sure. Looking at the whole issue of telepathy and psychic phenomena. My understanding is that, and of course, this has been made into a Hollywood movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats.
Yes, my understanding is that the whole thing was poo-pooed and played down. But what really shocked me when I started doing the background research for this story, I looked at the history of the CIA Stargate program, and even presidents at the time, President Carter, for example, were acknowledging that there had been successful use of things like remote viewing technology to assist in the recovery of an aircraft in one case.
It does appear that while you've got the official position in modern science that telepathy, psychic phenomena, that kind of non-local engagement of the human mind with something external, it's dismissed as nonsense. Yet it's quite clear if you look at the succession of documents in the CIA archive, they've continued that research over many, many years. They never stopped.
Is this something you're familiar with? What do you know about the whole science of the idea that the human brain could possibly engage with something outside of the human brain other than just normal verbal or written communication?
So ironically, I worked for Hal and his institute in Austin for 11 years. One of the experiments that he asked me to do was, he said, "If I took two sentient objects and I separated them, and I convinced the other ones that there is no physical connection, like I put them in a Faraday cage, I put a barrier, and I do something sinister to one of them, will the other one react? Or if I do something really nice to one of them, will the other one react?"
So we took epithalamus cells and we put them together and let them entangle, separated them, and maybe we put a little Clorox or something bad into one of them. After enough trials, we found out that we can get two cells to communicate through a barrier, through either a Faraday cage, meaning that there's no electromagnetic signals, or we had them enclosed so there's no chemical signal, no fans or anything.
But we got them to communicate. We had enough statistics to show that there was actually communication.
So that's suggesting that there is something about sentient life, including intelligent human life, that has a capacity to communicate that we don't yet understand.
I'm just wondering, it's a long shot, but have you watched or listened to the telepathy tapes at all, which is this new...
I did not; I've been advised to. They said it was very interesting, and what I'd like to do is I like to kind of stay more down into the actual mechanisms that happen as opposed to how people are actually implementing this great science.
It's funny, you know, because when I first got into the Jake story, it's a bit like alien abductions. I don't for the life of me know how to report the allegations of alien abductions. It's one of those stories that I don't stay away from because there are many good people I'm talking to who tell me it's happened to them, but for the life of me, I don't know how to report it.
Similarly, with the allegations of psionic or psychic phenomena being behind how we are flying, actually operating in some cases, or perhaps remotely controlling these craft, or at least communicating with them, that has implications which are absolutely extraordinary.
But from what you're telling me, you wouldn't rule it out as a possibility?
No, I think the mechanism—I think that we can definitely say that it happens. What the actual underlying mechanism is, is it entanglement? Are our ion channels being entangled? We don't know because we've never actually been able to isolate that.
Do you find it plausible that sections of the defense and intelligence community could have secretly worked on psychic phenomena like this? I mean, the implications of this are that there are people, psychic assists, as they call them, who are working secretly with the US government.
I'm told, allegedly, a lot of them are people of indigenous Native American background. Do you find that even plausible, a secret like that could be kept in this day and age?
Oh, that's—you know, I have spent a lot of time in the government, and it's like everything is isolated, and there's a lot of pockets within the agencies that do special projects. I know that I've been on some with the DARPA initiatives and things like that where you don't talk about this with anybody.
So I would believe that there are these projects out there that might be looking at this, though. But, you know, do they matriculate up to the top? I don't know.
And have you ever heard stories of a retrieval program of non-human craft yourself during your work with BASS or ORAP?
Sure, with Hal. I mean, that's what he spent 15 years trying to do, is get the technology. So he had been, you know, I went with him to Congress, and I sat there in meetings with him trying to explain to the people that the Senate Armed Services Committee and those kinds of committees what we were trying to do and trying to get some of these items because that's what Hal's lab was all set up to do, was to investigate this.
So yeah, I've been in and watched how frustratingly trying to get a hold of this stuff.
What do you think is going to come out of Jake Barber's allegations? You've seen the story; what do you think will be the blowback, the result?
Well, I think the government's going to have to step back and say, "Look, you know, I think this stuff is starting to look a little real." Because now you've got a guy who we put in harm's way, and he actually had the same type of ailments that you would see for all the other claims that are of anomalous origins.
But now this guy was actually recorded inside of a vehicle with something that he didn't understand underneath him and had very similar symptoms as you would get if, you know, all the millions of claims that are out there in the world.
One of the other things about Jake's experience, particularly when he had some kind of psychical connection with the phenomenon, is an overwhelming emotion, a strong sense of emotional engagement. Are you familiar with that? Have you had that before from other witnesses?
Oh yeah, so again, we had this very, very long, very detailed study where we basically had well over 30 people on a day-to-day basis giving their interpretations of what they're going through on a day-to-day during their day.
A lot of the reports came back, you know, some very sinister, some very euphoric, but it was all about the connection they had to some other things. So there is this narrative that people stick to where they do get very, very emotional.
When your body receives information that it really doesn't understand, because it is kind of scary, if you think about it, nobody's talking to you. I mean, some people get ringing in the ears, and sometimes their eyes get blurry because it affects your optical nerves.
But it's a scary thing sometimes. The fallacy that it's always the sinister, mean thing is very false because more than half the time, the reports come back, and it's euphoric, and they're very, very happy about it.
You know, they've had a very good time; it's very awakening. They learned things; they learned other languages, believe it or not. I mean, so this is something that I've had a lot of experience with—thousands of narratives from people, and they all sounded very much like what Jacob was talking about.
So you're saying that people have learned other languages? What does that mean?
Yeah, so there were quite a few instances where they actually started doing some writings. So they would go into a state; they would wake up, you know, like several hours later, look down, and they've written this entire document that they had no idea what they wrote.
They would bring it to like a linguist and say, "You know, what the heck is this?" and find out it's an ancient language that they would have never had an idea, never learned that.
Do you know, it's funny; I suspect the skeptics and the debunkers will have a field day with the whole idea of psychic connections with non-human intelligence, and they'll mock it. You're not so quick as a scientist; you're a hardened scientist who has seen this paranormal phenomena up close. You think it's real, don't you?
Well, I'm not saying it's real. What I'm saying is that whatever is happening to these people is not a u—it's some information coming into their head in some form that we don't understand, and their brain is interpreting it.
It's not something that they're making up in their head; they're not being psychic within themselves. They're getting some signal from the outside. There's no way that these people have all these reactions.
Of course, we put equipment on their bodies, and then we record things, and then we find out during these episodes where they have these encounters, there are changes in the electromagnetic signals, the gamma signals, all these signals in their presence indicating that some vector, you know, a vector, something is coming into their body to give them this information.
There's just been very recently, of course, an extensive investigation into alleged anomalous health incidents involving defense and intelligence personnel who have been exposed to phenomena. Nobody quite knows where it's coming from, and it follows years of resistance from the defense department to the whole idea that there are any real physical injuries.
It's obvious that there's been dissent within government about what the public should be told or whether any admissions should be made at all. But I mean, do you find it plausible that Jake's injuries, for example, or the injuries of the people that you've seen could have been caused by a foreign adversary using direct energy, direct energy weapons of some kind?
Yeah, so if you go back to the Havana syndrome, obviously that's a big thing where you had people that were in a contained area, and they had symptoms very, very similar to the symptoms that you would see from somebody out in the world, you know, just interacting with some phenomena where they would have earaches, they would have nosebleeds, they would have all of these symptoms that are very, very similar to what you're finding.
If you put them through MRIs, they have very similar types of lesions in their head that get developed, just like people get when they're out here. So this is, you know, just because it happens to a government agency doesn't mean that it's necessarily from a foreign entity.
It could be something that we're all experiencing; everybody's experiencing, but it just happened to be concentrated there. So when it comes down to actually investigating these things, I think they're starting to take a little bit better picture of it.
Go ahead, Ross.
Well, I was just wondering if the explanation for these Havana syndrome anomalous health incidents might be that it's something anomalous rather than a foreign adversary.
Well, if you look at the National Academy of Sciences report that came out, it explained that there was actually another better report that came out afterward. They said it was electromagnetic in nature, some radiation beam from some entity, and they said unknown entity.
They actually said, "I don't think they actually said that it was ever going to be from some foreign weapon or something like that." They just said, "I don't know what the origin is, but it was definitely this."
Okay, so if I take away what you've said to us today, Jim, whilst you're not saying it's real, you don't dismiss outright the idea of a psychical engagement by the human brain with some kind of non-human technology, if it exists.
No, because we're, you know, I've seen so many patients that get this instruction; they get this communication from the outside world. We read signals that something just happened; we don't know what it is. They interpret it in a certain way, and they report it instantly.
They say, "You know, I just had this premonition; I just saw this thing," and then we get this data coming from our instruments to say, "Yeah, something actually was present."
The exciting thing I'll tell you about the implications of Jake Barber's Skywatcher initiative that he talked about in the show is they are now collaborating with the Pentagon's UFO office, Arrow.
I can reveal that Arrow has expressed an interest in accompanying the Skywatcher team on one of their attempts at summoning a UAP, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if they're there on one of the first experiments.
I have to say it reflects a refreshing openness on the part of the new Arrow director, Dr. John Klossy, who, unlike his predecessor, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, is showing a genuine scientific curiosity. A bit like you, Jim Sigala, maybe we should get you along on the same thing as well.
Sure.
Well, something tells me, Dr. Jim Sigala, that as a scientist showing commendable curiosity and actually doing the work to make an assessment of what's really there, you're way ahead of the pack.
So thank you so much for giving us your wisdom, and we'll look forward to talking to you in the future.
Thank you very much, Ross.
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