Joe Rogan Experience #1510 - George Knapp & Jeremy Corbell

1. 0:00 – 3:46

   Knapp’s path into UFO journalism: John Lear, early TV interviews, and a public appetite

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      First of all, George, pleasure to meet you.

   2. GKGeorge Knapp0:03

      Joe, great to talk to you-

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:04

      An honor.

   4. GKGeorge Knapp0:04

      ... great- great to see you in person-

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:05

      For real. Thank you.

   6. GKGeorge Knapp0:06

      ... finally.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Great to see you too. And Jeremy, good to see you again, my friend. Hey Joe, good to see you, man. This is, uh, we're get- we're doing this often. Yeah. This is becoming a thing. Uh, George, uh, I think that you're probably, like, one of the most important figures when it comes to journalism and UFOs. And when you, uh, broke the Bog- Lazar story, was that... is that '89? When was that?

   8. GKGeorge Knapp0:25

      1989.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:26

      '89. 1989, um, I, I remember reading about it, I remember hearing about it, I remember watching clips on television and watching countless Bob Lazar interviews. It all came out of you. I mean, did you think at that time... I mean, what was your thoughts about UFOs before you had met Bob Lazar, and how much did it change while you got to know him and hear his story?

   10. GKGeorge Knapp0:50

       Uh, changed quite a bit. I had not really given it much thought at all. Uh, you know, probably the same level of curiosity as most people. You go about your life, you pay your bills, you go to work, you, you love your family, uh, and it's always out there somewhere, "Hey, I wonder what the deal is on that?"

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:04

       Right.

   12. GKGeorge Knapp1:04

       But not- had not really dwelled on it until... There was a day in 1987. Into the studio comes a guy named, um, John Lear. And I had heard sort of a- a little bit about him. His family was famous. His dad developed the Learjet, the eight-track tape. John had run for the state senate and he had a certain amount of credibility with our news organization, KLAS-TV, because he had helped us break a really big story. And the story was the stealth fighter, the F-117. He had told my boss, Ned Day, managing editor, about this amazing plane that was invisible to radar flying up in Tonopah and Area 51. We had an interest in Area 51, not UFO-related, but Ned broke that story, it went national. So John Lear comes into the station one day with a stack of what turned out to be UFO documents, he plops 'em on Ned's desk, and says, "Ned, this is gonna be the next biggest story, the biggest story in history. It's a UFO cover-up. Aliens are here. Technology's been recovered." Ned takes a look at it and says, "I'm not doing this story. If it was true, I'd already know, know about it. Uh, this is crazy." Well, I'm eavesdropping, as I tend to do. I'm a curious person. So I's... As he's going out, I said, "Lear, let me take a look at this material." And I looked at it, and I thought, "Well, this is kind of interesting." I wa- at the time, I was, uh, producing and hosting this little public affairs show, 30-minute interview show. It would air Sunday morning at six o'clock. Nobody watches it. It would be, uh, interviewing a city councilman, a county commissioner. What the heck? I'll put Lear on there. And I let him go, and he told me this big sce- scenario about secret treaties with aliens and, uh, recovered technology and a giant cover-up. Some of the information sounded outrageous. Some of it seemed like it would be worth checking out. Suddenly, the phone starts ringing off the hook. I, I'm getting calls about people that, "W- who was that guy? What was the deal on that UFO stuff? Is it real?" I had him on again six months later, and the response was bigger. Had him on a third time with a guy named Bill Cooper, I regret that, um, and he told him an even more elaborate conspiracy-

   13. JRJoe Rogan3:04

       He's the Behold the Pale Horse guy?

   14. GKGeorge Knapp3:06

       Yes.

   15. JRJoe Rogan3:06

       Yeah, I read that book. And halfway through, I was like, "What in the fuck is this?" (laughs)

   16. GKGeorge Knapp3:10

       Yeah. He tied in the JFK assassination and-

   17. JRJoe Rogan3:13

       Everything. Bases on the moon, aliens are there right now.

   18. GKGeorge Knapp3:16

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan3:16

       Yeah.

   20. GKGeorge Knapp3:16

       He had, he had this scenario where he had seen these documents when he was in the Navy, and he's going to tell the world about it, then he's gonna go away. Well, every time he, he told the story, the documents got bigger and bigger. And anybody who criticized Bill Cooper became part of the secret government, including me. So, we do this third show with Lear, and he hints that he knows a guy who might be going to work out at Area 51 and knows something about alien technology. That guy turns out to be Bob Lazar, but L- Lear didn't give me the name at that time. Couple months later, I

2. 3:46 – 6:48

   Meeting Bob Lazar: the masked interview, S4 claims, and deciding whether to risk credibility

   1. GKGeorge Knapp3:46

      am anchoring the five o'clock news on KLAS, and, uh, we have a nightly or a- evening, uh, interview segment, five-minute segment, live interview. Our guest doesn't show up, and, uh, we're scrambling to find somebody to, to fill that hole. And I thought about Lear, so I called him up, not knowing what had been going on in Lazar's life or Lear's life. And I said, "Hey, is your, uh... that UFO guy you told me about, is he around? Would he do an interview?" Just turned out that Bob had been through the ringer. A lot of stuff going on in his life. He felt threatened. And he said yes. We had to black out his face. We do this interview, and he spills the basics of the story. "I worked out there at a place called S4. I saw nine flying saucers and an underground base. This is technology that came from somewhere else. I'm in fear for my life." Holy cow, the phones start ringing off the hook. My news director comes rushing in, the station manager, "Is that for real? What's the deal on that?" And we realized we had touched the pulse of the public in a way that I didn't really understand. We arranged to go meet Bob Lazar, my news director Bob Stolle and I, that following weekend, and put him through a paces, where we would ask him questions about his background and how he got the job. And we spent a couple hours with him, and we walked out of that meeting thinking, "Holy shit, what if this is true?" Um, you know, this is r- really risky for us as journalists, and risky for our personal reputations if it blows up in our faces when we do this story, and it would really damage, uh, the reputation of our news organization, which is... KLAS is a jewel. It's always been a- a leader in, in Las Vegas, one of the best TV news operations in the country. We're putting a lot on the line. Well, look, we decide, let's take our time. Let's look into this guy's story. And then in order to understand Lazar, we'd have to look at the bigger picture of UFOs. So I started a cram course on ufology, and I read everything, and I spent eight months, like, cramming for a final exam that never happened. I read everything. I interviewed people. That same year, MUFON had its, its inter- international symposium in Las Vegas, and I... there, all the world's UFO people came right to me. I got to interview 'em. Traveled around, went to Los Alamos. Uh, Lazar took us into the lab. We took cameras in there. He walked us around, waving to people. We didn't even, uh, have to stop for security. Took us into the l- uh, the lab like, uh, it was a rabbit going through its own burrow. He knew the pl- his way around.We were allowed to take a camera in there. We put those stories together, put them on the air in November, and man, it just went through the roof. Um, p- e- every night of these ni- this nine-part series, people got, uh, the, the audience got bigger, phones were ringing off the hook, people calling, giving us information. Suddenly, it's on something called ParaNet, which was, uh, sort of a precursor to the internet, and it was huge. And, and, um, it changed my life for sure. I, I had no idea that, uh, there were so many people out there interested in the topic, and I was hooked. And I really got hooked on Lazar, not only because his story, um, bec- personally, you know, I was interested in him. We became friends. I, I saw what happened to him

3. 6:48 – 10:54

   Digging into Lazar’s background: Los Alamos, missing records, and alleged intimidation of sources

   1. GKGeorge Knapp6:48

      after that live interview and in the seven and a half months before we went and I revealed his identity. He, he... People were really messing with him. I mean, there were... Y- y- you cannot convey what it was like, how weird it was then, breaking into his house, leaving the windows open, messing with things in his, in his home, breaking into his car, leaving the doors and windows down, just messing with his head.

   2. JRJoe Rogan7:11

      And you think that was the government that was doing that?

   3. GKGeorge Knapp7:12

      Yeah, I do. I think so. And then, so I had put out a call to people, "Hey, I, I want other people to come forward. I'm act-"

   4. JRJoe Rogan7:18

      This is before his identity was revealed.

   5. GKGeorge Knapp7:20

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan7:20

      We should explain this.

   7. GKGeorge Knapp7:21

      Yes. "I am actively seeking information from the public. If you ever worked at Area 51 or S4, you know anything about this, you're at Nellis Air Force Base, reach out to me." So I started getting calls, and six people right in a row who had talked to me on the phone and offered to give me information were visited right after the call. Um, one of them was a guy who did tax returns for people at Nellis Air Force Base, and he had got to know these guys really well and got information about crashes. There was a guy who was a golf pro at Nellis who had gone on out o- road, road trips with officers and told them about r- this weird stuff out at Area 51 that seemed to be from somewhere else. Uh, he gets visited and told to shut up. There was a lady who worked in the court system. A cop, uh, told me about her, and I talked to her on the phone, and, uh, she had worked at the court system, but before, she had worked for a company called Holmes & Narber, which is a defense contractor. And she said she sat in as a stenographer in these meetings and heard these conversations between the government contractors and, um, Air Force officials about crashed saucers. And they would, after the meeting, they'd, uh, took, take the tape, uh, out of the typewriter and, and destroy it and take all the notes, and she agreed to tell me this story. It was just a tiny piece of the story. The next day, she's visited by these two guys in suits. They tell her, um, "Look, you are still subject to your security clearance. I hope you know that." And then they said, "We know you travel to LA to see your daughter, and we know she comes here. It's a big desert out there. It'd be terrible if something happened to either one of you." This lady is scared shitless. She didn't make that stuff up. So, six people who had offered to give me information on the phone, one right after another, get visited, and it, it made me mad. It also made me mad that dealing with, you know, trying to fill in pieces of Bob Lazar's life. Now, I know there's some gaping holes. I know it m- better than anybody. I've had to deal with it for 31 years. But I always thought if, if he worked at Los Alamos in classified projects in a scientific or technical comp- capacity, then it would make sense that he could get hired into a program like S4, um, as somebody who thinks outside the box. Despite personal shortcomings or whatever, they might bring somebody like him in to help them crack a problem that they hadn't been able to resolve themselves. So, I focused on Los Alamos. I knew he had been there. I talked to people who remembered him from being there, but the lab kept telling me, "Nope, no record of him. He's never here." And then I, I showed him, "Well, look, I've got the Los Alamos newspaper. It's a small town paper, there it is on the front page, uh, a front page story, Bob Lazar, physicist, Meson Facility, Los Alamos lab. It's a story about his jet car." Nope, still have no records of him. And, and then I found his name in the phone book from the era when he was there. He's in the lab phone book. He had been hired by a company called Kirchmair, which is a, a company that's a, a headhunter that fills positions at Los Alamos and places like that. "So great, I'll, I'll reach out to Kirchmair." They said, "Yeah, we hired him. Yeah, we've got records." "Can I get it? Can I get his employment records that would show where he went to school, whatever information you guys had?" "Yes." Couple weeks go by, nothing. Um, couple more weeks go by, I call them again, I start writing them. I've got a stack of letters that thick. It went on for two and a half years, and finally, by the end of it, they said, "He was never here. We don't have any records." That, that pissed me off. It made me mad, and I think that that is really what got me hooked in the story, um, is that I was being jacked around by government and, and national facilities like that.

4. 10:54 – 28:41

   Is Lazar credible? Education gaps, consistency, and “he’s obviously brilliant”

   1. JRJoe Rogan10:54

      We should explain the Los Alamos thing, 'cause the Los Alamos thing coincided with him doing work at MIT, right? Is that, is that correct?

   2. GKGeorge Knapp11:02

      That's how he's explained it to me.

   3. JRJoe Rogan11:04

      He explained it.

   4. GKGeorge Knapp11:04

      Yeah. Right.

   5. JRJoe Rogan11:04

      And the way he explained it to me, I don't think I'm at liberty to say what the project was, because the project, the way he was describing it, is, uh, essentially internationally illegal, like what they were working on. And that's one of the reasons why he was saying... He explained what the project was, it sounded very feasible, also very evil. (laughs) And then it was, it was basically a, a weapon, and then he said that this was the reason why there was no actual record of him studying at MIT. It wasn't important that he got a degree, it was important that he understand the, the technical specifications of what they were attempting to accomplish.

   6. GKGeorge Knapp11:45

      That's my understanding as well.

   7. JRJoe Rogan11:47

      Yeah.

   8. GKGeorge Knapp11:47

      And, you know, it's always been the most problematic part of his background, and it's where a lot of people in the Bob Lazar story, that's where they stop.

   9. JRJoe Rogan11:54

      But, uh, the thing is, when you listen to him talk and when he describes things, it's very clear he's educated.

   10. GKGeorge Knapp12:00

       Oh, he's a brilliant guy.

   11. JRJoe Rogan12:02

       Yeah.

   12. GKGeorge Knapp12:02

       There's no... But here's... I had always told him, and I've... "You know, Bob, you're my friend. I wanna have a conversation with you about these claimed degrees." 'Cause I didn't believe that he'd ever sat down... You know, in those days, you go to a college like MIT or Caltech and get a degree, you've gotta take classes in something other than science. You'd ha-

   13. JRJoe Rogan12:18

       Yeah.

   14. GKGeorge Knapp12:18

       I could not imagine Bob Lazar taking an English lit class to save his life. But he is a brilliant guy. He, uh... I'll t- I'll give you an example. In April, COVID thing is, is raging, my wife and I are, uh, staying at home, we're getting packages delivered for food and things of that sort. I'm a little worried they didn't know about contact, whether you can get it, uh, off of cardboard boxes or whatever, and I mentioned to Bob in a phone conversation, "I'm thinking about buying one of these UV screener systems." He goes, "Wait a second."... don't buy one. I think I've got the parts f- that I can make you one in my garage. And a week later, it arrives. This thing, he's got it in his garage, handmade this big scanner with these UV things that (laughs) that don't work-

   15. JCJeremy Corbell12:58

       I-

   16. GKGeorge Knapp12:58

       ... so he just whipped it up in his garage.

   17. JCJeremy Corbell12:59

       I'll remind you, you got the, the scanner. I got a laser gun.

   18. GKGeorge Knapp13:03

       Right.

   19. JRJoe Rogan13:04

       You got a laser gun?

   20. JCJeremy Corbell13:05

       I did, man. It is super powerful. So it's like a handheld toy that he retrofitted with a super power, so I'm, like, lighting shit on fire in my house. And my wife's- (laughs)

   21. JRJoe Rogan13:12

       So it looks like a handheld toy-

   22. JCJeremy Corbell13:14

       It's a t-

   23. JRJoe Rogan13:14

       ... but it's actually-

   24. JCJeremy Corbell13:15

       It's a t-

   25. JRJoe Rogan13:15

       ... a real laser?

   26. JCJeremy Corbell13:16

       It's a toy. It's a toy with full noise, but he put a diode in there and it's super powerful. Like, it can light shit on fire.

   27. JRJoe Rogan13:22

       (laughs)

   28. JCJeremy Corbell13:22

       My wife hates that shit. So I got the laser gun.

   29. GKGeorge Knapp13:24

       You also got the flamethrower, though. Lazar made a flamethrower. This is before your buddy Elon made flamethrowers-

   30. JCJeremy Corbell13:29

       No comment on that.
5. 28:41 – 1:11:52

   Element 115 and the cloud-chamber tape: what exists, what’s missing, and why it frustrates everyone

   1. JRJoe Rogan28:41

      What was the experiment that he did with element 115 that you guys videotaped?

   2. GKGeorge Knapp28:47

      It was a-

   3. JRJoe Rogan28:48

      Was that available online? Could someone watch that?

   4. GKGeorge Knapp28:51

      No.

   5. JCJeremy Corbell28:51

      No, they said-

   6. GKGeorge Knapp28:52

      It's a... So, it was called a cloud chamber test. So he, he had this stuff. I know people don't believe that it exists and he never had any of it. They're welcome to believe it, but he had, he had a piece of it. He didn't steal it-

   7. JRJoe Rogan29:04

      How big was the piece?

   8. GKGeorge Knapp29:05

      Uh, y- uh, the only time I ever saw it, it was in his lead shield round disc. And he had it, uh, for a while, it was in an office.

   9. JRJoe Rogan29:11

      Was it because it's radio- radioactive?

   10. GKGeorge Knapp29:13

       I think it's stable. I don't think it's radioactive. That's how it was shipped to him.

   11. JRJoe Rogan29:16

       So it's in a lead disc.

   12. JCJeremy Corbell29:18

       It was to protect it from bombardment because it will become unstable very quickly. That's how he says they used it in the craft. So yeah, he had it in a puck and, and f- and dr-

   13. JRJoe Rogan29:26

       Like a hockey puck looking?

   14. JCJeremy Corbell29:27

       Um, yeah, like a metal sandwich.

   15. JRJoe Rogan29:29

       And it's lead.

   16. JCJeremy Corbell29:30

       Yeah, yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan29:31

       Okay.

   18. GKGeorge Knapp29:31

       Well, I-

   19. JRJoe Rogan29:31

       It was in this thing.

   20. GKGeorge Knapp29:32

       Yeah, and I showed it and I had it in the background in one of our stories, just sort of an inside joke, it's sitting in there. But Bob used to keep it in front of a particle accelerator that he had built at his home, you know.

   21. JCJeremy Corbell29:43

       (laughs)

   22. GKGeorge Knapp29:43

       Every, every non-scientist, every non-scientist builds a particle accelerator in their home. And he had it there when he thought he was gonna be killed, he- it was sort of a defense mechanism for him. He had it right in front. All he had to do is flip a switch, uh, and he, he thought it could explode. Um, I, I think he meant to scare people from coming in and trying to, trying to take him out. Um, but this cloud chamber test was the only time, I, I think he ever took it out of this thing, and I got there right as the, as the experiment ended where they had this little chamber, um, and it bent light. Now, they were... They showed me the video. I don't pretend to be a scientist. I, I don't try to be an expert on things I really don't know, but it looked to me like light was bending in this experiment, which it shouldn't be able to do. It's a, like a laser that bent.

   23. JRJoe Rogan30:27

       I've seen some of this.

   24. JCJeremy Corbell30:28

       Jeremy has a little piece of it.

   25. JRJoe Rogan30:28

       I was able to find... Man, this was a search. So George, from day one, when I- Do you have it right now?

   26. GKGeorge Knapp30:33

       Uh, uh-

   27. JRJoe Rogan30:34

       That video?

   28. GKGeorge Knapp30:35

       Uh, on me. It's in my movie.

   29. JRJoe Rogan30:37

       All right, okay.

   30. GKGeorge Knapp30:37

       Yeah. Okay, so, so but basically what happened is... It's so annoying. I'm like, "You guys have footage of this," 'cause Bob never filmed this to put out to the public. It was to show his friends, like taking them to the test site, show them the saucers. It was so his friends didn't think he was fucking crazy. So they, they film it, and lo and behold, they give it to George. It's in a brown case. It's somewhere in his archives. I, I've sorted through his whole damn house, man. I can't find this tape. So then I asked Bob, "Is there anywhere this could be anywhere else? This is important footage, Bob."
6. 53:36 – 59:46

   Debunking the debunkers: GoFast, FLIR pods, and why ‘it’s a bird’ doesn’t work for them

   1. JRJoe Rogan53:36

      Now, let's talk about the people that have tried to debunk this and why they're off, because they've made some debunking claims about some of these videos and about the technology that was used to track these things that's incorrect, uh, where they don't, they don't really understand what they're debunking.

   2. JCJeremy Corbell53:55

      Right.

   3. JRJoe Rogan53:56

      So please, please explain that, because that's one of the things that people are immediately going to go to. They're gonna go, "Well, Mick West has already debunked it." And I've read the stuff that he says. It's mental gymnastics to try to explain it the way he's explaining it without recognition of the fact that these things were actively blocking radar. These things were actively blocking tracking systems. These were physical crafts. This is not like a bird-

   4. JCJeremy Corbell54:21

      No.

   5. JRJoe Rogan54:21

      ... or so...

   6. JCJeremy Corbell54:21

      It's impossible.

   7. JRJoe Rogan54:22

      There's a lot of the wacky theories that he has are like, I wonder... You know, it's real weird like that a smart man can make such really bizarre conclusions. Very weird. Almost like someone wants him to do those.

   8. JCJeremy Corbell54:37

      Sh- Sure. I mean, look, it's so exciting that, that we're seeing something and the government's saying, "Okay, these are UFOs. We have not identified them. They have propulsion techniques that we don't have." And we're not... We're just talking about the videos. Talk-

   9. JRJoe Rogan54:49

      Let's talk about the debunking though.

   10. JCJeremy Corbell54:51

       Okay.

   11. JRJoe Rogan54:51

       Talk about the debunking and what his claims are in the debunking.

   12. JCJeremy Corbell54:54

       Okay. So one that I recently, like, you know, attacked 'cause it was so ridiculous is he was saying that the Go Fast video, which is this, you know, object that goes along, uh, in a straight line, one of the three videos that was released. He said what was probably a bird. That was his first theory.

   13. JRJoe Rogan55:10

       Let's pull up the Go Fast video.

   14. JCJeremy Corbell55:12

       Yeah. I mean, I recently went deep into talking with, uh, Boeing experts who, who work on these FLIR pods. They're, they're telling me how they work, what they can capture, why-

   15. JRJoe Rogan55:25

       Explain what a FLIR pod is.

   16. JCJeremy Corbell55:27

       A for- a forward-looking infrared. So basically, on fighter planes, you have a camera.

   17. JRJoe Rogan55:33

       So here's the video. We're pulling it up right here.

   18. JCJeremy Corbell55:34

       Sure. Th- that's mounted-... and it's, uh, essentially recording in thermal imagery. These things are... Th- this is not Instagram. These things are weapons systems that are highly trained to be able to accurately represent, uh, spatial awareness and to be able to target, you know, enemy combatants. That's... This is not an, an iPhone, an Instagram. These are weapons for us. So out of the three videos, if we just look at this one, although I like the Tic Tac one with Commander Fravor, and I like the gimbal one, those are awesome, this one gives us very little information. But the, the idea that this would be a bird, if you talk to anybody that uses these pods, you don't... You, you can't pinpoint on a bird. You can't lock a weapons system on a fricking bird.

   19. JRJoe Rogan56:22

       But look how fast it's going too.

   20. JCJeremy Corbell56:24

       Well, h- here's what's so interesting is everybody can debate speed.

   21. JRJoe Rogan56:27

       So this is where it's locked in on it.

   22. JCJeremy Corbell56:29

       Right.

   23. JRJoe Rogan56:29

       So the weapons system is locked in on this thing and it's tracking it now.

   24. JCJeremy Corbell56:33

       Right. And, and they got real excited when they locked it 'cause it's... It... They, they said boxed a moving target, right? They... So here's the deal though. Out of anything I could say about this video, 'cause there's not a lot of information in there, what I can say is that object you're seeing is colder than the surface of the ocean. Now, I looked up the surface of the ocean temperature at that location at that time 'cause we had the information. It was like 65 degrees. What propulsion system... So, okay, so a bird. A bird is about 100 in, let's say, five degrees, like a seagull. Seagulls can go maybe 15 miles an hour. I don't know how fast they can go. But they're... They wouldn't... They wouldn't be colder than the ocean. They'd be hypothermic and dead. It cannot be a bird because this o-... What we're seeing is a colder object than the surface of the water. That's why you're seeing it white.

   25. JRJoe Rogan57:21

       And how fast is it going?

   26. JCJeremy Corbell57:22

       That's under debate. There, there's different, um-

   27. JRJoe Rogan57:25

       Interpretations?

   28. JCJeremy Corbell57:26

       Yeah. So I'm... I'll give you one interpretation about, you know, 240 miles an hour, some people say. And then they can argue, well, the fastest bird in a nosedive could go that fast. Back up. We have an object that is colder than the surface of the ocean. That immediately gets rid of the bird theory, because a bird would be hypothermic and drop like a paperweight into the water. It cannot fly at that... So that's the piece of information I would attack that debunking with.

   29. JRJoe Rogan57:54

       But this video, when you're watching that, if it is going 200 miles an hour, that's not outside of what's possible with, with spacecraft or aircraft, or, or just planes.

   30. JCJeremy Corbell58:06

       Right.
7. 59:46 – 1:03:12

   Why the government started talking: AATIP/AAWSAP, Congress briefings, and Rubio’s reporting mandate

   1. GKGeorge Knapp59:46

      The, uh, the premise that, uh, the US government would tell you, "All right, look, we're gonna release these videos reluctantly." Lue Elizondo is the guy that got them released, and then the US government formally released them a, a couple of months ago. The idea that the US government would release it, the Pentagon says, "These are unidentified." The... And, uh, y- you know, if it was a bird or a, uh, a jet engine, uh, the pilots would not have the kind of reaction that they had that you can hear on the audio.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:12

      Yeah.

   3. GKGeorge Knapp1:00:12

      Our government does not tell c- members of Congress, the Pentagon doesn't go to the Senate Intelligence Committee, show them those videos and say, um, "Yeah, it's un- unidentified," if it isn't. And, you know, the reaction of the pilots, uh, the, the fact that they would... Were forced to release it to begin with suggests that it really is unidentified.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:31

      Why do you think they've addressed it? Why do you think that they have, uh, addressed the fact they're studying these things? Why not just continue denying it?

   5. GKGeorge Knapp1:00:38

      I think they were forced to. Uh, and some props to Tom DeLong. I know you guys had a pretty spirited conversation when he was here, but he created an organization-

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:00:48

      That's a funny way of putting it. (laughs)

   7. GKGeorge Knapp1:00:48

      (laughs) Um, Lue Elizondo, who ran that program, came forward and brought with him those videos. I saw them two days after, uh, Lue Elizondo stepped on a stage with Tom and said, "I was in charge of the program." He and Chris Mellon have been sort of the engineers of getting that story into the New York Times. That changed everything. As I said, the last two and a half years, um, everything has turned on its head. The New York Times covers the story, the result is other media covered as well.They've been ignoring it forever, and, and the, and that allowed people to keep these secrets. That pressure meant that people in Congress started asking questions. Uh, two days after the story came out, I interviewed Senator Harry Reid, who was the one who got the money to create that program that became AATIP. And he said his phone had been ringing off the hook from other members of Congress who are now suddenly interested. "I didn't know there was a program," they're telling him. "W- how do we learn more about this?" It started a series of closed door briefings on Capitol Hill that continue to this day, that the pilots like Dave Fravor were hauled before Congress, first in front of the staff of the Senate Intelligence and then Senate Armed Services, and then the elected members. These c- these senators who get briefed on it, and they were impressed, and they wanted more pilots to come in. So it's been going on for two and a half years, and two weeks ago... no, excuse me, uh, about a month ago now, the culmination of it. Senator Marco Rubio, who is now the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, drops this bill, and it's the budget for the intelligence budget for the next year, and he includes a UFO provision in there. We want... Congress wants to have a mechanism set up by where we get regular briefings from the Pentagon on UFOs. That's an astonishing change of events. It's because the media pressure and then congressional interest, it made it, um, more acceptable for everybody to pursue the subject matter. It's kinda out of the shadows. And the Pentagon has reacted in fits and starts. So sometimes as they said to The New York Times, "That program ended. Had nothing to do with UFOs." Uh, at first they said it did, then they said it didn't. They've admitted Lue Elizondo worked on the program, then they said he didn't. Um, they've said that the AAWSAP, which is the other program, the mother program, uh, that became AATIP, that that had nothing to do with UFOs. Well, it did. So they continue to sort of lie and obfuscate and muddy the waters, but the fact is that there's too much momentum from media and Congress and the public, uh, to hide this anymore.

8. 1:03:12 – 1:11:52

   Skinwalker Ranch origin story: Bigelow, NIDS, and the ‘high strangeness’ problem

   1. JCJeremy Corbell1:03:12

      Y- you should tell Joe about how the, the government program AAWSAP was created directly because George wrote this book about a little place called Skinwalker Ranch, where the government was studying this property. That happened because of his book, some DIA guys. Well, you should tell the story of-

   2. I visited that place.

   3. Yeah, but you... Yeah. Y- right.

   4. Yeah.

   5. Yes.

   6. GKGeorge Knapp1:03:34

      Yeah. I, I, I think you gotta... uh, I think you got a little misled on it, but-

   7. JCJeremy Corbell1:03:38

      T- tell them, tell them how the government study (laughs) ha- started, you know, from your work. It's fascinating, part of history.

   8. GKGeorge Knapp1:03:44

      So some of it, some of it stems back to Lazar. So we did that story in, in the series in '89. One of the first people to call me after that was a guy I'd never heard of before named Robert Bigelow, a billionaire. He calls me up and says, "I was really interested in that. I've been interested in UFOs for a long time. Can I help you?" Meaning can he help fund me? I said, "I work for a TV station, I don't need any help." But he was not to be deterred. He then reached out to Lazar. They had a little... uh, he wa- started meeting with him and, and pumping him for information, and that really amplified, uh, Bigelow's lifelong interest in it. He created something called NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science, which he, he made a, a science advisory board of the best and the brightest in the, both the UFO field and the field of consciousness. So they're looking at two questions. Is there, is there life elsewhere in the universe? Is it here? And is, uh, do humans survive after death? And he assembled this board, uh, of former CIA guys, two former astronauts, men who had walked on the moon, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Dr. Hal Puthoff, physicists, um, psychologists, uh, uh, really a brilliant little think tank to take on these two topics. I was allowed to be a fly on the wall for some of it, not all of it, but some. And I told Harry Reid about it, uh, in 1996, and he said, "Can I go?" And so he showed up and sat in on the meetings, and he was kinda hooked. Harry Reid was the first person I told about Bob Lazar outside of our newsroom, when I... before we aired the stories, he had... I'd, I'd known him since he first ran for, uh, Congress in 1982, and then he becomes Senate majority leader. So he always had an interest in it, but he didn't want it to be known publicly. That does not help your re-election chances. So in 2005, we write the book about Skinwalker Ranch. NIDS, that team, bought the ranch. They were on the property for seven or eight years at that point, and had hundreds of different incidents that they investigated. They approached it like scientists would. They looked for prosaic explanations. They looked for gravity anomalies. They looked for, looked for psychoactive plants. Could there be hallucinations caused by magic mushrooms or something? Are the witnesses lying? They investigated the background of the family that lived there. And they found out that they, it could not be, uh, explained, the, all the range of activity there. So it was not only UFO-

   9. JCJeremy Corbell1:05:58

      What kind of activity we're talking about?

   10. GKGeorge Knapp1:05:59

       Well, it starts with UFOs, because that's what got their attention. The UintA Basin in Northeastern Utah has always been a UFO hot spot. Everybody who lives there basically has seen them, balls of light, orbs, structured craft, daylight, nighttime. In 1976, a guy named Dr. Frank Salisbury, uh, wrote a book about it, The Utah UFO Display, and he took hundreds of these cases that have been collected by the locals, there was a local science teacher named Junior Hicks, who because he had taught generations of kids, uh, science in that area, when they... people would see UFOs, they'd call up Junior Hicks. And he went and go and investigate them, and he had had hundreds and hundreds of files. He gave them over to this guy, Salisbury, who wrote a book about it, and he said, "These are real. You know, they're going on." But Junior Hicks would disregard any high strangeness cases that came along with the UFOs, anything weird, Bigfoot, ghosts, anything like that. He thought it was too incredible, and he, and he discarded that. Bigelow buys the ranch. He hears about these stories going on on this one property, flies in, meets with the rancher, and by this time, that rancher and his family had lived on the ranch for 20 months, and they were so scared that he, his wife, and his two kids were all sleeping at night on the floor in the same room, because it had messed with them so badly. Um, uh, their property had had...... ghost-type activity, poltergeist kind of things, trickster activity. Um, for example, the wife goes shopping to the grocery store. She buys i- all this food, comes back, uh, puts it on the table, takes it out and puts it in the shelves, leaves the room, comes back in, all the food's back in the bag. She would take a shower in the morning, locks the door, puts a towel and a hairbrush on the cabinet, gets out of the shower, door's still locked, hairbrush and towel are gone. Dad's out in the field. He is, uh, digging a post hole using a post hole digger, heavy piece of equipment. He stops for a second, wipes his brow, looks back, and it's gone. And they find it two weeks later up in a tree. They start hearing voices at night in, in the air, speaking a strange language. They start seeing shapes, um, outside the window at night, big lurking humanoid shapes. Hearing heavy footsteps outside, then hearing heavy footsteps inside. Then their animals started being mutilated. Cows, uh, would... The, the, the tracks would lead out into the snow and then just be gone. Calves, mutilated, cut up with surgical precision. Cats, uh, wiped out, s- cut up, carved up. Dogs that were vaporized. Hundreds of these incidents. Um, they, they would see holes in the sky, like, a, a great big hole in the sky and things flying in and out of it. Now, this rancher, college-educated guy, grounded, uh, strictly religious guy, thinks the government is trying to run him off his property. So he's out there at night lurking with a gun, trying to catch whatever government agents are doing this stuff, and it's not government agents. It was something else. They start seeing UFOs of all shapes and sizes. The first one they saw was like a... They thought it was a Winnebago. This ranch is a beautiful place, um, and it only has one way in and one way out. They see these two lights that look like headlights down in the third homestead. "How did this guy get past the house here and get down there? He must be stuck. Let's go down and help him out." The lights start coming toward he and his son, then they go up into the sky, up over the trees, and then poof, gone. Um, these different kinds of orbs. Uh, the white ones that were intelligently controlled, not fireflies, not bugs. Uh, blue ones that would go... They seemed to touch the, the fear center in your brain. They'd get near them. They looked like a... A little bigger than a softball, made out of glass, with a swirling blue liquid. Scared the hell out of the animals and then it scared the hell out of the, the, the people too. This literally drove them to their knees with fear. These red orbs that would stampede the cattle. They lost so many cattle that they began to, to think that they were gonna go under. They had these four prized bulls. I know I'm jumping around, but there's a lot-

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:10:00

       Okay.

   12. GKGeorge Knapp1:10:00

       ... of stories. They had these four prized bulls, 2,000 pounds each, behemoths. Very expensive animals 'cause they were raising Simmental cattle. Had them in the, in the, uh, corral, and the w- the husband and wife, they always felt like they're being watched. He says to the wife, as they're driving to town, "Man, if something happens to one of those bulls, we'll go under. We'll be done." They come back a half an hour later, all four of the bulls are gone. They jump out, they're freaking out. "Where did they go? Did somebody steal them? Are there rustlers?" Looking around all over the place. In this corral is a metal trailer where they used to store, uh, tools. And there's only one door into it, and it's r- it's locked with this heavy piece of wire. The, the door is still locked, the wire is still on there. The guy, just as a, a last resort, he looks into the grating on top of, uh, this trailer, and there's the four bulls inside. Door's still locked, they're all crammed in there. Now, you could take a forklift, you could have a team of 50 people and they couldn't get those bulls in that trailer, but there they were. He yells to his wife, "Hey, honey, they're in here." And when he says that, the bulls wake up as if out of a, a trance, kicked the, the door down and all got out. The NIDS team, which had been on the property for a couple of years at that point, um, fly in. They'd been in Las Vegas, they fly back in. They look around, they check out the animals. The whole corral, which is made out of metal, had been magnetized. So whatever technology was used to get those bulls from the corral into that trailer left a magnetic signature. They were there on the property, the NIDS guys, for several years. Bigelow owned it for 20 years, but eventually they gave up. Whatever this thing was, this intelligence, it did not like being stalked, and it played tricks on them. And they never made the stuff public because what are you gonna do? Write a paper about this? Who, who's gonna print it? You can't make a, a, a documentary about it 'cause they weren't there with cameras.

Episode duration: 2:55:59