SIO390: So Wait, Are There Aliens? What Were Those Hearings

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:18 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 390, and this episode's gonna be OUT OF THIS WORLD!

0:00:27 Thomas: I'm Thomas, and that over there is Lydia.

0:00:30 Lydia: I'm here.

0:00:31 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, crossover. I thought I'd have you on because you're an alien, so, yeah.

0:00:31 Lydia: Crossover. Right. Well, it makes sense. Yeah. I your whole thing is about interviewing experts.

0:00:38 Thomas: I don't know if we've mentioned that before. Yeah,

0:00:41 Lydia: So naturally, you had to have an alien expert.

0:00:42 Thomas: That's true. Yeah.

0:00:44 Lydia: Yeah? Here I am.

0:00:47 Thomas: We've got an awful lot on aliens and it's going to be fun because we've got Lydia to bring us up to date on whatever the fucking bullshit of this is in terms of Congress and all that and a lot of stuff. And then we've got other expert, Brian, to tell us about the science a little bit, it's gonna be a two-parter, there's a lot here, so I'm excited. I'll confess I am not really capable of paying attention to this in a serious way because my brain looks at this and says, oh no, there aren't UFOs because they're just fucking aren't, for a million reasons. Well, okay, I won't say that, they're obviously unidentified things, but like, that's not gonna be alien.

It's just not, it's not going to be aliens, it's not gonna be for a million reasons but I could be wrong. We'll find out from the expert, later. Uh, so I, I have a hard time getting that much into it because I know it's going to be one of two things. Be some fucking camera thingy that I don't really know how to explain, or maybe I do, but either way, like some, someone will explain that better. Some engineer or something will be like, "Yeah, no, it's because of the perspective and the something," or I really won't know how to explain it, but then I know it's not alien. So what am I doing?

0:01:28 Lydia: Sure little green green guys yeah yeah

0:01:55 Thomas: So anyway, I, uh. Fortunately have another employee at the company here to outsource work I don't want to do, too. So, oh, not get me wrong. I am very excited for what you brought us because I paid attention to the subreddit a little bit. And that is my favorite thing because those folks, I mean, I'm sure we'll get to it, don't misunderstand me. I am so excited for you to present it to me, that's why I don't know it. So it'll be great. Why don't you bring us up to speed on the aliens that are among us now?

0:01:54 Lydia: I think You're going to be really excited about this though, so but Just quick little sneak peek, you know, it's nice that this is a crossover because there is a little bit of a know classic where there's woke style debunking thing that I get to share. Do I get to say classic? It's been around for a couple months.

0:02:34 Thomas: Yeah yeah nearly three months old or whatever the hell it is wait

0:02:39 Lydia: Yes, yes. Okay, so what are we doing here? Aliens. Lot of people refer to this entire issue not as aliens, but UFO and ufology, unidentified flying objects, but there has been sort of a push to rename it to UAP, P, unidentified anomalous phenomena. But you'll hear, the you witnesses within the congressional hearings, experts kind of use those terms interchangeably. So that like marketing anomalous.

0:03:03 Thomas: Is that change, I thought it was unidentified aerial phenomena, did they make another change? Anomalous phenomena, that doesn't Huh, is that redundant and not anomalous phenomenon? Like, I guess, would you have no know, I guess you'd have like an identified anomaly like this is one of those expected anomalies that we totally understand

0:03:07 Lydia: No, it's anomalous, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. No. I don't think so. Because unidentified means you don't know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. We know which country is issuing this anomaly. Yeah. But we can't explain it. So this kind of all comes back, this resurgence of alien lore and being really excited about UAPs or UFOs. Back in 2017, three Navy videos were leaked to the press and The New York Times did a big reporting on it called "Glowing Auras and Black Money, the Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program." And this article just kind of grabbed a lot of the certainly by, and you had this huge amount of media that came out afterwards, beyond, I think, what anyone necessarily expected.

Article is pretty interesting going into, you know, how this program has been funded and how it's been hiding, and the Pentagon not wanting to talk about it, really, like, touches on those conspiracy theories, you, that I think drive a lot of people. And time, over the next three years, there's been sort of like this grumblings of people wanting to know more about, OK, what does the government know about UFOs? What are they not telling us? Right. Then we had a pandemic, 2020. Fast forward a

0:03:27 Thomas: Yeah okay that's fair in order

0:04:31 Lydia: Few years.

0:04:31 Thomas: To cover up for the aliens, I got you, I'm, I hear you, oh

0:04:33 Lydia: Yeah. So the coronavirus relief bill was like five thousand pages long. And in it, Trump included a requirement for a report on what's going on with UFOs. Um,

0:04:47 Thomas: I thought it was going to be like, we also need some additional doses of the vaccine for definitely not the aliens that we're hiding, that's

0:04:51 Lydia: No, it was it was literally a stipulation saying you have 180 days to issue a report defense agencies about, you know, what UFOs are are going on, you know, very related to COVID.

0:05:00 Thomas: Awesome, well You say Trump, but I mean, that's so, like, a some senator wrote it in there or something, or he, he wanted it. Presidents don't write bills.

0:05:08 Lydia: He well signed by President Trump. Right, right. Exactly. So there's just been kind of this eagerness for answers to the extent that they're kind of bringing it into completely unrelated efforts. They just were shoving that bill with so many things. One of them was a UFO report. Days later, the report actually came out on time, June 2021. 21. I do want to share some popular press, how they were characterizing what to expect with the report. When knew that a report would be issued, the Washington Post did a big article and kind of explained, you know, the stipulations of the report. It must be made public.

0:05:10 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:05:44 Thomas: Also, it must have aliens in it.

0:05:47 Lydia: And And when it is, John Ratcliffe, the former intelligence director, said it will be big in a recent an interview. Says, frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Then within the provision itself, it says that it must include a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena, data, and intelligence gathered by a variety of defense sources. Saw that, I was like, oh, that's very interesting. You know, I wonder what what this report looks like. At least with the version that was, unclassified, you it's nine pages long. That's including the cover page, the Page that includes the scope and assumptions. There's not a lot here. There are some numbers, numbers listed, I guess. But essentially what it gets to is there are unidentified phenomena that we cannot explain. Is probably not a single explanation. Some of them might be natural atmospheric phenomena. Some OFM might be foreign adversary systems. Some OFm might be plastic bags, you know, that just are getting picked up on radar. And Yeah, and kind of expensive, 10

0:06:19 Thomas: Yeah those are unexplainable. There's

0:06:53 Lydia: Cents a piece, yeah.

0:06:53 Thomas: A race of plastic bags that's invading our planet.

0:06:56 Lydia: So Not a lot there, and I think, you know, unfortunately, what that did was, um, know everyone's appetite is wet, I guess, wedded.

0:07:06 Thomas: Yeah I think wedded is what you're going for.

0:07:06 Lydia: Um. Oh God, cut that, um.

0:07:12 Thomas: Stay, it's, keep, we're keeping it 100, I think you wanted to say either everyone's wet or everyone's all right.

0:07:22 Lydia: And there weren't a lot of answers within this report that was required via COVID, I guess. Then the, the following couple of years, there was just kind of opportunity after opportunity of trying to find out more information. Pentagon created a new group in November 2021 trying to help better identify the objects that are, you our aerospace that are unexplainable. May 2022, the House Intelligence Subcommittee had a hearing about this.

So what we experienced in July 2023 is not the first alien hearing in a long time, right? We had one last year, but it was with a different subcommittee. Was the first time we had a hearing about UFOs for over half a century. So there really has been kind of this increase in momentum there. That hearing, they talked about 18 different occasions of aerial objects moving very fast without visible means of propulsion. No unexplained wreckage, though.

No weird communication that was going on there, specifically just aerial objects moving in space that they weren't sure what they were, but they were moving very fast and they didn't know how. There was not enough evidence in this hearing from those who were witnesses to claim that the UAPs were extraterrestrial. Interestingly, Burchett out of Tennessee was an observer of this. He wasn't on that committee, on that subcommittee, not on the panel itself. That sort of sparked his interest.

And he is the one who led the calls for the hearing this time around in July 2023, '23. So then this hearing is coming from Congress, and maybe, maybe just Representative Burchett. I don't know. But Congress as a whole saying there's a lack of transparency over UAP sightings. Course, we had the whistleblower situation, and I'll get into that a little bit as well.

The Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs decided to hold a hearing July 26, 2023, and it was titled Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency. And I would love to have Representative Burchett sort of set the stage of,

0:09:20 Thomas: Hear, Representative bird shit I

0:09:21 Lydia: Yeah,

0:09:21 Thomas: Agree, or

0:09:23 Clip: Last year, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing on UAPs. They brought in some Pentagon bureaucrats who only had two answers to the questions they were asked. I don't know where that's classified. This hearing is going to be different. We're going to have witnesses who can speak frankly to the public about their experiences.

0:09:39 Thomas: Who can just lie about

0:09:40 Clip: We've had a heck of a lot Of pushback about this hearing. We had members of Congress who fought us. We had members in the intelligence community and also the Pentagon. Even NASA backed out on us. There are a lot of people who don't want this to come to light. I've even tried to introduce an amendment to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill, and all that would do would require the Federal Aviation Administration to report UAP sightings by commercial pilots to Congress. The intelligence, I was told the intelligence community shut it down. This is ridiculous, folks. They either, they do exist or they don't exist. They keep telling us they don't exist, but they block every opportunity for us to get a hold of the information to prove that they do exist, and we're going to get to the bottom of it, dadgummit, whatever the truth may be. We're done with the cover-up, we're

0:09:41 Thomas: What is it yeah

0:09:42 Lydia: Yeah.

0:10:29 Clip: Not gonna bring you in a saucer, a little green man, that's not what it is going to be about, and I know y'all, every, every time you play this interview with one of us, you play the thing from X-Files. I get it. But the reality is the American public deserves to know.

0:10:42 Lydia: Yeah. So yeah, I appreciate it. I mean, I guess there's a self -awareness there, right? Like I think a lot of people feel like this is pretty freaking ridiculous, But the dadgummit, that got me. I thought that was great.

0:10:42 Clip: Okay,

0:10:43 Thomas: Well, Also, I want to believe, yeah.

0:10:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:10:58 Lydia: Let's talk about what this hearing was then. And, you know, he had a problem with the witnesses from the previous hearing that I mentioned from 2022. So who were the witnesses for this hearing? Included Ryan Graves, David Farver, and David Grush. David Grish was the whistleblower that sort of kicked off the most recent push of this momentum. From their statements, I wanted to share just a little bit about what they were hoping to accomplish.

I would like to center our discussion around three critical issues that demand our immediate attention and concerted action. As we convene here, UAP are in our airspace, but they are grossly underreported. The stigma attached to UAP is real and powerful and challenges national security. Government knows more about UAP than shared publicly, and excessive classification practices keep crucial information hidden. That's really what they were there to talk about.

The individuals involved in this, Ryan Graves, kind of a name in this sphere, he's been talking about this stuff since 2019. He has shared in a lot of media settings, articles, interviews, TV shows, podcasts. His team saw UAPs. He He has said that I never personally saw one. He said that on a podcast dating all the way back to 2019. will say from the videos and some of the interviews that I've read and watched, it's a little misleading, some ofthe language that he uses.

He himself has stated he has never personally seen one himself. What he is reporting on are not firsthand accounts of his. They are shared to him by others. Farber has been talking about this stuff even longer since 2017. and actually his, experience is even older than that, but he really came out in 2017 with that New York Times article. And experience is that he personally saw the Tic -Tac UFO. I don't know if you remember hearing about that. Like,

0:12:48 Lydia: Yeah, the UFO shaped like a Tic Tac. In 2004, he has said in hundreds of interviews, podcasts, articles, appearances, that that encounter lasted five minutes.

0:12:48 Thomas: Which is Longer than a Tic Tac usually lasts.

0:13:06 Lydia: Dietrich, said that the whole thing lasted 10 seconds. And she was actually there, too. If it were five minutes, she said they would have run out of fuel if they were just holding right there. So he continued to repeat that in this hearing, by the way, that it had been five minutes just uninterrupted watching this tic -tac floating in the air. And then David Grush, getting to him, he is our whistleblower. Include that there is a secret program in the government that recovers crashed UAPs, that in this recovery effort, non -human bodies have been brought back, and that aliens have killed human beings. Is another one of his claims.

0:13:09 Thomas: Wow. Okay, If

0:13:43 Lydia: Uh-huh. In the hearing, he said everything that he he had said as part of like that whistleblower complaint, things that were already well known. And anything new that was asked by representatives that were part of the subcommittee was responded to as, you know, I can't respond to this in a public setting. Or if you can arrange something, you know, private and secure, I'm happy to talk about that more.

0:14:04 Thomas: You can range dinner, maybe, yeah, yeah.

0:14:07 Lydia: Yeah. AOC was was one of the people who asked him some questions. You know,

0:14:10 Thomas: I saw a really good, good AOC, like, don't know, TikTok or some shit, whatever she does afterward, because I'll always watch AOC if I happen to see it. And she was like, yeah, I Don't know about any whatever alien stuff, but, uh, we, if it's about funding, like we can actually go out and check, like where's this money going? And it's like, Yeah, okay, fine. Do that.

0:14:18 Lydia: Of course.

0:14:31 Thomas: That sounds good.

0:14:26 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Her question was really around, like, if I Were to go Looking to out what's going on here. Can you tell me, You know departments titles positions, you Know, like what, where am I going to look and he would not respond to that in the public setting.

0:14:40 Thomas: Yeah. I I would ask like, are all TikToks aliens or is there just a sum of them aliens? Which flavors are aliens?

0:14:47 Lydia: Yeah I also what's really interesting thing about David Grush is that he is also clear about this. It is not his firsthand account. He has not witnessed anything. It's people have come to him that he believes are honest actors that he trusts implicitly.

0:15:03 Thomas: Is this the same guy who just said that or a different guy that's saying that okay so

0:15:05 Lydia: Nope. Different guy. So, yeah. So Ryan Graves never seen anything, but his team has and told him about it. And Ryan Grave's is like created organizations.

0:15:14 Thomas: Did anybody who testified has actually seen anything, okay? He's the tic -tac, yeah which

0:15:18 Lydia: Farver, who saw the tic -tac for five minutes when his pilot said it was 10 seconds, So those are our star witnesses for this hearing.

0:15:28 Thomas: By The way, I don't really think it matters if it was 10 seconds or five minutes. Like, if it was a real craft that was super fast, like, if anything, it disappearing super quickly would be like more alien-y than like just sitting there. So even if that's some sort of lie, it doesn't really matter, there's no point to it. I

0:15:39 Lydia: Yeah. But I think it does kind of inform about the person.

0:15:49 Thomas: It would make you think like, oh, you had more time to like, you'd be more certain that it happened, I guess. Yeah.

0:15:54 Lydia: Yeah as opposed to you know an eight to 10 second thing that's very quick.

0:15:56 Thomas: Like a quick quick flash yeah

0:15:58 Lydia: Yeah Yeah. Know, this is not necessarily my area of expertise, but, you know, This Was Super Interesting kind of kept, again, going down that WTW rabbit hole and stumbled on Mick West, who is a skeptic. His area of expertise includes UFOs. And he was supposed to be at QED, huh? Yeah, we could have met him. Yeah. But I will say he lives in Sacramento now.

0:15:58 Thomas: Oh Really? Oh yeah that's right ah he got abducted by aliens

0:16:23 Lydia: No, know, abducted to Sacramento. Yeah, he lives here. So maybe we'll we'll try and have our paths crossed at some point.

0:16:23 Thomas: Oh he does, wow well shit, let's just go right to his house, oh

0:16:31 Lydia: Yeah. I do want to share, you know, after the hearing occurred, of what the feedback was on like, OK, what did we learn? And

0:16:39 Clip: Let's talk about evidence, because that's been the main thing that's been lacking the last six years. Is a lot of stories, a lot of photos with stories behind them, a lot of videos with stories behind them. But it's really been lacking on evidence of non -human intelligence, of aliens, of extraterrestrials. So it all led up to today. Today's hearing, there were a lot of expectations for evidence. Did you see, were you convinced, was any evidence presented? There was almost no new evidence. Uh, Professor Arby Loeb was running the Galileo Project, which is a scientific project to look for, uh, UFOs basically in our airspace. So a couple of days ago, we need real evidence, not what, what people said. And really, all we've got from these hearings is what people said. David Grush basically is going by mostly what people told him. And then we have these eyewitness accounts of Fravor and Graves, and then they tell us that there's more information. We need to get to that real evidence. You could

0:17:45 Thomas: A good point when you bring up, like, hey, there's a person, like a serious person, who wants to find aliens and he's like, nah, this is bullshit. I do like that.

0:17:52 Lydia: I think that's know some of of those interesting skeptics in this space is, you necessarily saying that there aren't aliens, but there's no evidence. Like, show us show us the evidence. The other piece that I thought was really interesting from this interview, you remember how I sort of introed this with this all kind of kicked off in 2017 when The New York Times wrote an article. Well, it's not Michael Powell.

0:18:11 Thomas: Yep don't Tell me it was Michael Pal- oh okay

0:18:18 Lydia: That would have been amazing.

0:18:19 Thomas: If it was that, it'd have to be some way that the aliens were like bad for Democrats or something. It'd Not Michael Powell, what, what is the New York Times tie-in? Then are the aliens trans and The New York Times is like, we don't have to give them health, healthcare, okay?

0:18:24 Lydia: Yeah. Or So it's not Michael Powell, but it's no, but it's some of that same sort of pattern that we see, you know, particularly in the Michael Powell article, sure, but also in some of the ways that information has been shared in the New York Times and trying to be a little more skeptical of what we're reading. What I have learned from this, you know, random alien deep dive I've gone on, is that the the individual who brought this to the attention of The New York Times to talk about is a advocate. And is the third author listed underneath two other people who are, you know, real and legitimate. So kind of that is something that was never skeptically looked at necessarily. New Year Times has never issued certain corrections or explain certain things from But they get into this a little bit more in this video. So if you want to go to time, too.

0:19:22 Thomas: Oh

0:19:22 Clip: Lot of folks today, Burchette, Fravor, Graves mentioned it, a few others mentioned it. That the genesis of either their personal interest or the general interest in the public and Congress goes back to the 2017 New York Times front page article on the Pentagon's UFO program, AATIP. Multiple times this was brought up today. A groundbreaking 2017 New York Times report. Like many others in 2017, I saw the New York Times article. New York Times article, and I would encourage everybody to read that.

And that was just shocking to me, because through my reporting, we've demonstrated that that article was factually inaccurate, you know, deceptive. That story is mostly false and wrong. And to hear congressional leaders, witnesses, everyone still saying it all goes back to this article, uh, it shows that, shows me that people still haven't caught up to what's going on, really going on in the story. People just don't know the facts, the basic facts about what's coming on.

Uh, were you shocked to hear, do you think you could be shocked to know about the 2017 New York Times? Oh, no, I, unfortunately not, because it's something that just comes up all the time as being, you know, essentially like a red pill moment for people.

0:20:50 Clip: Uh, it was for Gresh himself. Like, he, he got interested in UFOs starting with that particular thing. And so many people have told me that, you know, that was their introduction, uh, to, to what was going on. You know, they, they read the New York Times story and so they get, they get sucked in because of that. And this New York Times story is just given, it's the kind of authority of the New York Times said this, the

0:20:49 Thomas: Wow What a, what a good comparison you're making there, hun. That's, yeah, it's like, I, it's so endlessly frustrating to me, that's why I did, you know, 1400 hours on the James Webb telescope, because it's endlessly frustrating for me to be, to, to me, just like the mismatch often between like how big of an impact this thing has, this New York Times, this institution, can have, and like how badly it can be messed up or intentionally kind of pointed in the wrong direction, how much damage that causes.

I mean, there're, there's a lot of journalists who think that they're just doing like a passive reporting on, they're not steering anything. They're just passively reporting on the world. And it's like, no, what you choose to put in there makes such a big difference. Choosing to put that on your front page is a, a choice. There's nothing that makes you do that, you know, like there's no like scientific fucking fact about the world that that determines you had to do that, it's a decision you made and it has immense consequences. And wow, that's, that's really interesting. Also, let's make sure to say who this is, or we can

0:21:21 Lydia: Yeah. Right.

0:22:23 Thomas: Link, whatever

0:22:23 Lydia: This is a reporting from Stephen Green Street, who's been following this a lot. And,

0:22:27 Thomas: By the way, I gotta point out, apparently works for the New York Post, which, is I actually believe in aliens now, like the New York Post is so fucking horrible that I, I believe I'm on the other side. I don't even care, I'm, I'm sorry, I know you didn't expect this, hun. But I'm now pro aliens I'm in the favor, why would you work for the New York Post voluntarily, why is that a choice? Any legitimate person, I believe you, that Stephen Greenstreet is legitimate and everything he's saying here seems legitimate, and he's speaking to Mick West, who we also know is pretty legit, but like, why is this on the New Year's Post YouTube channel, is it, that's okay, okay, call attention to that, that's terrible, stop doing that.

0:22:40 Lydia: I know it's a problem. Whoops.

0:23:05 Lydia: But I'm wondering if it's because this topic is so ridiculous that any, like, real journalistic enterprise is like, we're not going to bother, like, we're not talking about aliens, even if it is on that side of things. Don't know.

0:23:17 Thomas: Good point. There like a left -wing crazy newspaper? Guess not.

0:23:25 Lydia: No.

0:23:26 Thomas: Yeah. What

0:23:27 Lydia: I thought that that corollary right on The New York Times was really interesting. And when you look at the article itself, the history behind everything that's happening here is nuts. It's insane. And it's, you a lot from Green Street and all the reporting that he's doing. Essentially, you know, just to kind of dial into like a little piece of it. Is related to a place called Skinwalker Ranch. Do you know Skinwalker Ranch?

0:23:52 Thomas: The hell is that? That's something I've heard.

0:23:54 Lydia: Yeah. So it's a it's an area in the state of Utah, a ranch in Utah, like 500 something acres. And it is a place where very paranormal things happen. Happen. Unexplained things happen all the time. So this is something apparently Harry Reid was was friends with the guy who owned this ranch, Robert Bigelow, who I'll get into in a second, too. Someone went to the ranch and like had an experience that they couldn't explain, called Harry Reid and Harry Reid Was like, you're right, need we to start doing some investigation out there. I'll, you pull some strings in Congress and will fund some projects. Skinwalker Ranch is not just about UFOs. That's where people go ghost hunting and people talk about werewolves and ridiculous things.

0:24:04 Thomas: I'm sure, yeah.

0:24:34 Thomas: What are the odds that they would all... Is that like their international airport or something? Why would they all meet there? There's ghosts, there's aliens, they're like for some reason that's their main hub of transportation

0:24:41 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, it's so weird. They're like crop circles. They say like cows get mutilated all all the time like that. Just a cow.

0:24:49 Thomas: Crop circle do they have to specifically grow crops just to make sure they have them there for the crop circles they're, like, building we're gonna build old houses and stuff and, like make sure there's plenty of habitat for the, the you ghost flora And fauna to come, I'm like inhabit, yeah.

0:24:55 Lydia: Yeah they have to prepare it for the crop circles that are inevitable. Yeah, Plant corn while you're at it. Poltergeist.

0:25:10 Lydia: There was reports from people in the area saying.

0:25:13 Thomas: We're also putting in a trailer park so that the aliens will feel, you know,

0:25:19 Lydia: Cows that were fine one minute and then the next minute looked like they had been struck by lightning, and but there was like nothing around them.

0:25:26 Thomas: They could have been struck by lightning.

0:25:27 Lydia: No, they said there was no earth around them, it was, um, this very like insane, insane combination of things. But what Harry Reed did to present this, as like, through the defense budget, of course, was specifically talking about UAP and leaving out all the stuff about werewolves, all the step about ghosts. This place is nuts. Like, trying to figure out exactly like how to describe it, but it's like, it's literally people who go there ghost hunting, and it's huge on the History Channel, of course. Um, there's... there's, you know, documentaries about it and TV shows about it and everything. It was owned for a long time by this millionaire. Maybe he's a billionaire. No, he's probably like a multimillionaire. Owned the budget hotel or motels, you know, that chain.

0:25:31 Thomas: Oh, like that, yeah.

0:26:12 Lydia: Yeah. Name is Robert Bigelow. And he is all in on aliens and ghosts and werewolves and everything, but with aliens, he He did this interview with 60 Minutes and they were like, you you ever meet an alien, you would that be like? And he's like, You know, I don't have to I don'T have to think about it. Probably.

0:26:12 Thomas: Okay, he's like I already have, yeah.

0:26:29 Lydia: Yeah, probably already met some. Already here. He's just like,

0:26:30 Thomas: Oh, he's saying like, not like, oh, I had this experience, like, oh, that's you could be an alien, yeah.

0:26:33 Lydia: No, he's saying they're like part of our life. Yeah. Yeah. So he's crazy. And a fun little side note. He's the greatest benefactor of Ron Desantis' campaign.

0:26:38 Thomas: Yeah. And that guy is definitely an alien, so I, that makes sense. He would be my first guess of any, it would be Mark Zuckerberg and that guy that would be, that, actually, again, I think I'm on the side of the aliens now, I, I Don't know if that's, yep, because I think about those two guys and I'm like, like, yeah, no, I see it.

0:26:50 Lydia: Oh, wait. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Again? Yep. Yeah. He apparently in one month never backed down. Ron DeSantis's PAC, that they had raised 30 million dollars. Robert Bigelow was 20 million dollars of that. So, So, yeah, he loves this guy. Recently, But he had said, I'll give him more money and go without food, was a quote that he said.

0:27:19 Thomas: Wow. Jesus Christ.

0:27:27 Lydia: But I just recently saw like an article from the last few weeks where he said, yeah, totally. He said he's going to hold back now because he's waiting until DeSantis can get some other contributors.

0:27:29 Thomas: I now not only believe in aliens, but also in mind ray technology.

0:27:43 Thomas: Even under the mind rays, like, yeah look, I want to do it, but you're so bad.

0:27:47 Lydia: Can you please?

0:27:49 Thomas: The mind ray can't even, it can't make magic happen. Like, it could only do things that my brain would actually do. By

0:27:55 Lydia: Yeah. But there might be, you know, kind of a fun little crossover the other way, because Bigelow is super anti-woke. And that's kind of what drew him to DeSantis. He said, you previously he used to support both Republicans and Democrats, but but went all in on DeSantis last summer because he liked his economic conservatism and his attacks on woke culture.

0:28:16 Thomas: Way, not a super great... like, fide or whatever, to say, "Yeah, I used to support both Democrats and Republics Okay, so you just had no moral compass and just supported whoever maybe would benefit you, but now I only support the really shitty ones. Cool. I don't, that's barely anything, man. Okay.

0:28:25 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He says, I fully agree with him on all the wokeism.

0:28:37 Thomas: Here's my new plan. We need to convince these people that the aliens are woke. We should be like, "Yeah, they told me that they're non -binary for..." what Look at their bodies. Yeah. What do you think they're? Yeah.

0:28:37 Lydia: Yes. They probably are. Yeah exactly. Exactly. Gender is the construct. Look at aliens. A great idea.

0:28:48 Thomas: Yep. And we need them to be dressed like women and say they're, you know, like something that really messes with these, these people's brains, these anti-woke people's brands, and then that'll either get them to be okay with wokeness or they'll stop with the alien crap. I think either way it's good. How did we get on this guy exactly? I don't

0:28:55 Lydia: Oh, yeah.

0:29:06 Lydia: Yeah. So this guy's a piece of work and, you he was receiving government funding to investigate, you aerospace anomalies at Ranch and Skinwalker Walker Ranch was put forward as a place where, you know, there's interesting UFO paranormal things that are happening with regard to UFOs, but not about ghost hunting, like all these other things that have happened. So every like governmental entity that has come across, they partner with Bigelow Aerospace that actually it just went under with COVID. But for a long time, they were partnering with them and he was getting multimillion dollar contracts contracts. To look into all of this stuff. Just one little thing. Skinwalker Ranch close out before we get into our last little piece here. Grush, the whistleblower, his boss with the UAP task force, Jay Stratton. Stratton is responsible for bringing David Grush onto the task force. Stratton is also big into Skinwalker Ranch ghost hunting. He's He's been doing it since 2009, and he says that he is at his house haunted by ghosts and werewolves. So, yeah.

0:30:10 Thomas: Know what this fucking ranch is, but couldn't you put cameras literally everywhere? It's one place, apparently, that they are, so just fix, figure that out.

0:30:17 Lydia: Yeah, so Bigelow recently sold it to this ex -Mormon who is partnering with the History Channel to do a lot of TV about Skinwalker Ranch. He's set up a bunch of cameras and security equipment and things like that. So I'm sure we'll see some werewolfs soon. I'm sur. And so to close it out, I thought, you know, kind of going back to Mick West and and of his thoughts of the congressional hearing just, especially with regard to David Grush, the whistleblower and what he thinks might actually be happening. Sure.

0:30:17 Thomas: Yeah I

0:30:47 Clip: Guess a few of the points. Uh, yeah, I'm a skeptic. I was brought on for being this skeptic viewpoint, and skeptics, I think, would like this cleared up. I would like the government to investigate. Please, Congress, if you are listening, please investigate. I call upon Congress to, to investigate this thing. People are always saying, "Nick, why didn't you call upon Congress to investigate this?" It's kind of silly. It's not like you can't simply call upon Congress to investigates, but that's what I'm doing.

I agree with the calls on Congress to investigate. I'm not trying to stop it at all. Just pointing out how ridiculous the claims are. We need to look into the situation as a whole. Why do we have this situation? Why do you have people who claim to work in the program, which is what they call it, apparently, the program, and what's actually going on?

I mean, what I think's going on, I think it's probably the program is a crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, and I think what they are retrieving is crashed foreign craft, like Russian fighter jets, Russian drones, Chinese fighter jets, Chinese submarines, Russian submarines. You know, we once, I think it was like 1976, we spent $3 billion in today's money recovering a Russian submarine, top -secret program, and we would have taken that submarine and reverse -engineered the heck out of it.

And it would have been super -secrete, and the people working on that program might not have known what they were working on, because they'd be just like, "Hey, here's a bit of metal, like, you know, check it out." And then someone else would synthesize that data into the greater understanding of what was going on, but not everybody who works in the program is going to be read into every single thing that's going on, because you want to keep it secret, which may well be why we've arrived at this situation.

There's a secret program of crash retrievals and reverse engineering that the UAP task force wasn't allowed to look into because it's super secret, and what would the UAP task force need to know about Russian submarines and Chinese jets? So we've got this misunderstanding, and everybody's like, "Hmm, must be UFOs." And then people working in the program are like, like, "Yeah, I've got this really weird bit of metal, and you have this strange isotope ratio. I have no idea what it is.

I think it's UFOs." And someone else is like, "Yeah, did you hear about Mollström?" "No, no." "Mollström, yeah. The UFO shot down some nuclear weapons back in the 16th, 15th, long time ago." And I think this UFO mythology kind of gets into this whole situation, and these people start talking, and some people become convinced, and then they start reading stuff, they start folding in other bits of mythology, some

0:33:34 Lydia: I thought that was a pretty reasonable take on what actually might be going on here.

0:33:36 Thomas: Yeah it makes sense. I mean, definitely there's got to be so many drone type things. I mean, we had those balloons, I think many of them turned out to be nothing, but like, we we did have one, one Chinese balloon, I think. At least, like, yeah, there's going to be a government program in charge of that stuff. And it's, I mean, it's going be secret. If any, if anything in our stupid government is secret, it's going to be that, right? I mean.

0:33:48 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, I think there are some concerns too that, you have been instances in which a UAP was a foreign drone, you spy balloon or whatever. And everyone was really focused on, "It's a UFO, it's UFO." And how long did it take to actually identify it correctly? And what damage could have been done as a result of that? Because everyone is following the most sensationalist idea of what it could be, and kind of veering off course instead focusing on what's the most likely situation and addressing. No,

0:34:36 Thomas: It looks like you didn't get into the real dirt, hun, which is the Mexican, the cake one.

0:34:40 Lydia: Oh, my God. No, because the only thing that I like about that is that that gif where it says, is it cake?

0:34:47 Thomas: Oh, man, I just love it because I mean, we've already gone on too long, but my experience of this has just been kind of seeing the subreddit fly up to the top. You know, I'm not on the UFO subredit, but, you this stuff is happening, that like gets really popular and they're just all in. In. You know, they're just like, Oh, I knew it. Finally, they're talking about it. And then, like, what's funny is I, post started get like it would be these congressional things and then it'd be like, oh, check this video out, and it's a clearly fucking CGI'd, you know,

0:34:49 Lydia: So good.

0:34:58 Lydia: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:35:21 Thomas: Alien thing where like a jet, there's one where like it's like a commercial airline, and the best thing that ever happened for these alien people is that one airline thing that disappeared, what was that one, I Yeah, can't the Malaysian one, reason it just disappeared because they can just say that was aliens forever, so like people posted obviously CGI video of like actual little alien saucers, like, making it disappear, and everyone's like, oh yeah, no, totally, it's just, and what's funny is like, I, so ridiculous until it was the the the Mexican, uh, the fuck was that, like, Senate hearing, yeah, some sort of hearings and there's so obviously fake and ridiculous that, like, you still saw some people believing it, and then I think it finally got too absurd for even that UFO Reddit, because the posts that were starting to get popular were like, guys, that's not, that guy's a fraud, it's all

0:35:32 Lydia: The Malaysian Airlines. Yeah, mm -hmm. Yeah Oh my god. Wow. Bodies. Yeah presented by the government. Yeah Yeah.

0:36:12 Lydia: Yeah.

0:36:12 Thomas: That's obviously fake, like they'll be like, this is taking attention away from the real aliens. Like, stop. This is, seriously, they're just like, you're making us look ridiculous, everybody. Stop upvoting these things. Those are fake, obviously. Let's talk about the real alien. So I've enjoyed that from afar. But the truth is it's none of it. Sorry, none of it's aliens. It's just not, it doesn't make any sense. For Thanks so much, hot correspondent from Where There's Woke. We should catch you on that Where There's Woke podcast.

0:36:29 Lydia: Yeah. That's funny.

0:36:41 Lydia: Yeah. Come check it out. Come check me out.

0:36:43 Thomas: Oh, I will. Got such a good, oh, maybe we should tease that. This is coming out. We have such a great podcast. Such a good series. We've released two or three episodes on it. There's so much more on a classic. This, this is exactly what we wanted Where There's Woke to be. It's a debunk of an an anti-woke horror story, a scare story of a law professor put a question on his exam, which, but it was blanked out. But it was so extreme that, you know, he was barred from campus and made and just fucking executed.

No, it's that kind of scare story. Totally canceled, barred from campus, made to do re-education camp. And it's a debunk. And there's so much, there is, I'm telling you, there's so much to this that is, just to the end. All I'll say is go listen to Where There's Woke. And if you are listening to that one, please, please please stick all the way through because there is stuff toward the end that is it's so, it's so good. It's so good, yeah, it is. It's amazing. So find us over there. Find Lydia over there, full what I was going to do.

I was gonna just divide this in half and do, you know, half here for part one, half for part two. But like, because Lydia part went a little longer than we thought, we actually have some things to tell you, folks, you fine, amazing listeners and patrons that we can put here. And then we'll just put all of the Brian part as part two. So, no worry, the Brian one, that's like 80 minutes. So it's a long, really fun scientific deep dive into space travel. You there be aliens? How could we get to aliens? You know, is it aliens? Why it's obviously

0:36:48 Lydia: Sure.

0:37:14 Lydia: Canceled.

0:37:35 Lydia: Oh, my God. Stuff I did not know. And, uh, yeah.

0:38:14 Lydia: Mm

0:38:15 Thomas: Never aliens, but you know, with science. So Dr. Brian Gillis, that is part two and don't hurry, you don't have to wait for it. I'm putting that out right away because I was late anyway since I was sick all week and couldn't do anything. So that'll be right out right away. So we're going to take the end of this episode time here and we've got a little maybe a little bit extra time to tell you some very important fun news.

0:38:36 Lydia: Hmm.

0:38:37 Thomas: First off, if you hadn't heard it already, I think we've mentioned it, but like officially official, Lydia Smith is now working for SeriousPod full time. She has left her job. She is doing this full time. Now, as I said elsewhere, is this the smart financial decision? No idea. It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant because it's the only thing that we could possibly do because I cannot keep up anymore. As I've said, I mean, it's just too much in this day and age when I have a family. To just put my head down, go to my room and just work until everything was done all the time that Lydia can attest. That's how I used to get it done. I'm just, yeah, she'd hang out with friends. I'd be like, yeah.

0:38:58 Lydia: The only decision. Yeah.

0:39:14 Lydia: It was very sad. Or

0:39:17 Thomas: No, I can't. I'm not going to do that. We'd have friends over sometimes.

0:39:17 Lydia: Myself. Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:22 Thomas: I'd like, I didn't know you're doing that. I have to work. And then I would just work the whole time. Very sad. But I do that anymore because instead of having friends over, we have kids over all the time. We're just like, should we have our kids, Phoebe and Arlo and Remy over? And then you're like that. We always do. Oh, OK.

0:39:34 Lydia: Don't Have a choice. Yeah. And

0:39:36 Thomas: I've just been not been able to keep up, especially because the work we're doing is just more and more interesting, too. Too. It's more and more time consuming, like the deep research we want to do all this stuff. It just have not been able to do it justice. I haven't been able to take the time that is needed to put out this content in the manner in which I want to, you know, and on time. And so Lydia, helping me with stuff and started coming on, you know, the shows and is just an absolute hit. Lydia is a smash success. Success, amazing guest and amazing worker.

0:40:06 Lydia: I've Been having so much fun. It's been really, really cool. Yeah.

0:40:10 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, I'm so glad. Yeah. That's that's fortunate because it would be funny if it just you hated it and you're like, yeah I have to just do this. Sorry. I actually had a promising career that I'd rather be at. No, Lydia fortunately loves it. Good point.

0:40:16 Lydia: Yep.

0:40:24 Thomas: And so what's happening. And it's it's a bit scary though. So I if you would would like us to not be just really terrified, uh, please go to patreon.com/seriouspod, support the show for as little as a dollar. It really makes a difference to us. It absolutely does. And, um, allows us to continue making good stuff and it's just going to get better because Lydia is just starting full time. Uh, so we have a lot on our list.

0:40:47 Lydia: Oh.

0:40:48 Thomas: We have a lot of things to do. We Have a lot of ways to improve the show. We're going to do, um. Wait. If you sign on to that Patreon, is you may not know that there was a September bonus for Serious Inquiries Only. It was a little behind the scenes of QED, and it was fun. It sparked a debate that Lydia is still sour about.

0:41:03 Lydia: Man. It's Very Important. If you are not signed on to Patreon yet, you, because I need your feedback for this debate desperately. Yes.

0:41:18 Thomas: That's actually all Lydia cares about in this. She's just like, I just need help with this argument.

0:41:20 Lydia: Are You Team Thomas or Team Lydia with regard To the specific question. Your

0:41:24 Thomas: I'm not even Team Thomas. Thomas. I'm too, I think it's, it's no, I, I think it kind of depends. I think it's contextual, but we'll see. It's it, but that's, you know, again, the least important part of that. The, the, the bonus is just a romp. It is an absolute good time with Heath Enright joining to hear, because Heath actually didn't get to attend QED. He had other things he had to do, but he met up with us for a little bit of a trip, and I had to catch him up on the silly and insane goings -on that happened. Weren't on patreon.com/seriouspod, then you missed that. Please get on there. It was so much fun. Has the benefit of helping Lydia and I continue to do this full -time.

0:41:29 Lydia: Team. Move on. Okay. Okay. To You Maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:09 Lydia: Yep.

0:42:09 Thomas: Also, you get to enjoy that. Now, October. Looking ahead to October, we're back on the Seriously Awful Movies plan. We have scheduled, it's in the books, ready to go, Good Will Hunting, I sort of made Stormy agree to do, but no, no, uh, Dr. Alan Smirbeck, Stormy Decisus is good to go. And we also have back after rave reviews and a ton of fun, Omar back from, such uh, serious, awful movies as, as Armageddon. Uh, can't wait to have Omar back on. That Good Will Hunting. Oh, I cannot wait to do this movie. So that will be for the second tier and up patrons for October for patreon.com/seriouspod. And one more thing for patrons, for top patrons, that is, that is the third tier and above. Doing monthly hangouts now. The first one will be October 26th, 3 p.m. Pacific. We're trying to do it at a time that works for as many people as possible. You know, it's hard. It's different time zones. You know? It's a struggle.

0:42:21 Lydia: Najam.

0:42:41 Lydia: Oh, I know. Yeah.

0:43:06 Thomas: But that should be after work for the East Coast folks and for the Pacific Time people. Well, the problem is our kids can't be here. Otherwise, we can't do it. So one drawback of us both doing this is now anything we do, someone has to watch the kids, which is fine. We'll just do it during daycare hours. So 3 p.m. Eastern on 26th. For the $5 and up patrons. So if you want to, you know, upward edit your pledge or pledge at that level to join, that would be super fun. We can't wait to have you. We'll answer any questions. We'll probably do a thread. And I know how things work. Maybe that's going to be a time that people can't make.

It's if there aren't enough questions, if there isn't enough of, know, you people there to make that be the main focus. And I will talk about behind the scenes stuff. So some research for where there's woke. Oh, sorry, I didn't say that. This is combined for Sirius Inquiries only and where there is woke. So patrons at that level and above for either show will get to join. And we'll talk about the be talking about behind -the -scenes stuff for both shows. That's going to be a lot of fun. There's a lot we can talk about. We can talk about interviews we booked. We can talked about studies we want to follow up on. We can talking about where there's woke stuff that wasn't able to make it to the prime time. You know, plenty of research stuff that we don't, aren't able

0:43:20 Lydia: Yeah, mm Mm-hmm.

0:44:20 Thomas: Fit.

0:44:20 Lydia: So many browser tabs.

0:44:22 Thomas: Absolutely. So it's going to be a lot of fun. And then there's an even more bonus elite bonus bonus thing, which is for the top level of patrons, that is the $10 and above patrons. If there is interest, and I'm going to do a sign up that only you will see for your your eyes only. It'll be on the $10 patron level. Going to play games with you. So if any of those top, top patrons would like to play some Codenames with Lydia and I after, after that hangout, we are going to switch to Zoom. That'll be just a Zoom hang, you me, you, Codename. Horse paste.

0:44:24 Lydia: Mm-hmm.

0:44:41 Lydia: Mm-hmm, horse paste.

0:44:54 Thomas: And we'll play some codenames or, you know, if there's other games people want to play, we'll do that too. We'll start with codename though, because it's the one we know and love. And I can't wait to do that. Are... you know, it's hard. Like we have listeners from all around the world. So often it's hard to get everybody to one place at one time. But all we need is, you know, two minimum who want to play and we can do a game of Codenames and it will be very fun. And any more than that is just icing on the cake. So So that's our top patron perk that we have now.

So this will be spelled out in patron posts since I'm sure that since I can't even remember it, I'm Sure you folks can't either just listening to this, but that's what we're doing here to help sure that, patrons you are getting their dollars worth over there because now that Lydia is full time, we need it more than ever.

If you can find it in your heart to go to patreon.com/seriouspod or where there's woke and, as little as a dollar, you can keep us from having to go back to state work and

0:44:59 Lydia: Yeah yeah.

0:45:51 Lydia: We appreciate you so much. Yeah yep.

0:45:53 Thomas: Absolutely. So that said uh, I said, that's the end of part one. I could arbitrarily include like 15 minutes of part two so that the time is equal, but that seems stupid. So we'll just end part one on aliens here. And part two is an extra length episode with Dr. Brian Gillis about space travel, aliens, you possible systems might have aliens in them. There's all kinds of great questions. How fast can we propel something? What are the limitations, physical limitations on on rockets and all that kind of stuff. Really fun and I learned a lot. So I'll bring you that in part two and that'll be right away. I won't make you wait. Don't worry. See you then. A yes and not no over here and all no look over there sorry okay no

0:46:58 Lydia: It's OK.