Joe Rogan Experience #1510 - George Knapp & Jeremy Corbell

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   First of all, George,…

   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 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 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.

   21. JRJoe Rogan7:11

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

   22. 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-"

   23. JRJoe Rogan7:18

       This is before his identity was revealed.

   24. GKGeorge Knapp7:20

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan7:20

       We should explain this.

   26. 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.

   27. 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?

   28. GKGeorge Knapp11:02

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

   29. JRJoe Rogan11:04

       He explained it.

   30. GKGeorge Knapp11:04

       Yeah. Right.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Well, Bob admitted from…

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      for a human being. They, they were... It was more like something that was built for a child. And he walked by a window and looked inside, and then some of the earlier discussions of it, he believed that he might've seen an alien. But he was really clear that he only saw it for literally a second as he was walking by, he saw something and, again, you know how the brain works, and memory, you could, you can really plant false memories. Everybody wants to pretend their memory is so good. Memories are terrible.

   2. GKGeorge Knapp15:27

      Well, Bob admitted from the beginning, it re- remember, with the first interview we did, I think it was June of '89, so it was a little after we did that live interview, but months before we went with his, uh, ID. And that was really, we recorded it in case something happened to him. He was afraid he was gonna be killed. There were a lot of really weird things going on. And, and I was worried about it too. I wanted to get it on the record in cla- case suddenly he disappeared. So we recorded this long interview and, and always, he downplays stuff like that. That's an example.

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:56

      Yeah.

   4. GKGeorge Knapp15:56

      I might as... I saw something that was that size, I don't believe it was an alien. It was just a glimpse. Maybe they're messing with my head. He also admits that they did mess with his head, that he had to, uh, they underwent some kind of, uh, hypnosis, that they made him drink this weird green liquid.

   5. JRJoe Rogan16:12

      Probably LSD. (laughs)

   6. GKGeorge Knapp16:14

      Well, maybe. Um-

   7. JCJeremy Corbell16:15

      They said it was an allergy test. But yeah-

   8. JRJoe Rogan16:17

      (laughs)

   9. JCJeremy Corbell16:17

      ... I mean, but, you know, to, to your point, just real quick is, uh, after 30 years, it's not that he changed his story, he's changed. So when I was interviewing him, you know, he cracked the book back open with me. It was like he was saying, "The science and technology is what I know. I had my hands on that. I can't attest to what I read in the documents. Yeah, I saw something for a brief millisecond through a fucking window, but I don't know what that was." So, so people have taken what he said and exaggerated it. Bob has always been skeptical of the things he didn't have his hands on.

   10. GKGeorge Knapp16:47

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JCJeremy Corbell16:47

       And, and I admire that. And he's changed as a human. As a human, he's matured. So now he's saying, "Okay, let me look at it rationally. I don't know what I saw through that window."

   12. JRJoe Rogan16:56

       Right.

   13. JCJeremy Corbell16:56

       And I appreciate that. He's, he's so straight.

   14. JRJoe Rogan16:58

       Yeah, he's very straight.

   15. GKGeorge Knapp16:59

       You know, they, uh, they... Various scenarios have popped up over the years about why he came forward. There are people who believe he just made it up, he was trying to make money or he wanted attention. There are people who believe it's government disinformation to distract attention from something else that was going on out there.

   16. JCJeremy Corbell17:15

       Yeah.

   17. GKGeorge Knapp17:15

       Or they believe both of them, which, you know, they would seem to be mut- mutually exclusive. Bob would admit that he had no business being there, that there may be, that there were much more qualified people to work on those kind of things. Maybe he was a guy who thinks outside the box, who might give a new slant on trying to figure this stuff out that they had had for decades and had not, had not, uh, been able to duplicate.

   18. JRJoe Rogan17:36

       We should explain that a little bit. The Los Alamos lab story was him. He put a jet engine on a Honda.

   19. GKGeorge Knapp17:42

       Right.

   20. JRJoe Rogan17:42

       And it's, it was a functional jet car that he built himself. So he was a legitimate propulsion expert and, again, like a super science nerd. Like where he got his education is what's weird, right? It's like-

   21. JCJeremy Corbell17:54

       I- I finally got an interview with the guy that wrote that article two weeks ago. So the guy-

   22. JRJoe Rogan17:59

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JCJeremy Corbell17:59

       ... uh, Terry English.

   24. GKGeorge Knapp18:01

       Right.

   25. JCJeremy Corbell18:01

       He... Finally, after all this time, he called me back three years late, you know what I mean? Would've loved to put him in the movie. And I said, "Look, here's the point. You said Bob Lazar was a physicist at Los Alamos, so how did you base that? You're writing a paper." And he goes, "Yeah, and it got picked up by AP News." He goes, "If I had misrepresented that he was a physicist at Los Alamos, I would've been blackballed by everybody at Los Alamos." They take that very seriously.

   26. JRJoe Rogan18:25

       Mm-hmm.

   27. JCJeremy Corbell18:25

       He was a physicist. I reported it. AP News picked it up. They repeated it. Not word one from anybody saying he wasn't a physicist at Los Alamos.

   28. JRJoe Rogan18:33

       Hmm.

   29. JCJeremy Corbell18:33

       It's little things like that, that, you know, when... Nothing Bob has ever said-

   30. JRJoe Rogan18:37

       Headlights right down.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   I've seen some of…

   1. GKGeorge Knapp30:00

      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.

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:27

      I've seen some of this.

   3. JCJeremy Corbell30:28

      Jeremy has a little piece of it.

   4. 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?

   5. GKGeorge Knapp30:33

      Uh, uh-

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:34

      That video?

   7. GKGeorge Knapp30:35

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

   8. JRJoe Rogan30:37

      All right, okay.

   9. 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."

   10. JCJeremy Corbell31:07

       ... and I find it sandwiched between two Golden Girls episodes on some tape he kind of recorded over. So I got out to the public, what, 17 or 30 seconds of this cooldown phase of the test.

   11. Is that online anywhere?

   12. Y- it's in, it's in my film. I can put it online.

   13. Right. But is it online? Has anybody-

   14. No, no, no.

   15. ... taken to it? No?

   16. I got it. I found it in these old tapes. They, they couldn't find-

   17. Crem- but you know how t- people take little things from movies and sometimes put it online?

   18. GKGeorge Knapp31:29

       Oh, yeah.

   19. JCJeremy Corbell31:29

       Oh, maybe, maybe somebody has.

   20. GKGeorge Knapp31:31

       Could be.

   21. JCJeremy Corbell31:31

       But I'll pu- I'll post it, man. I'll put ... It's cool.

   22. Okay.

   23. It's cool. It doesn't ... But Bob says he's so unimpressed with everything. He's like, "Jeremy, that doesn't show the cool part of the test, it's just the cooldown period." And I'm like, "Well, it shows that you filmed this with your friends back then, and that at least you believed you had 115." So what I have in the film, it's not definitive proof, but it shows that they weren't lying, that, that they filmed it. George was there.

   24. Mm-hmm.

   25. GKGeorge Knapp31:55

       Bob would just assume that that goes away, that people not talking about it-

   26. JCJeremy Corbell31:58

       Does this ... Is this it?

   27. That's it.

   28. GKGeorge Knapp31:59

       Yeah, that's it.

   29. JCJeremy Corbell32:01

       Jamie's the best.

   30. Jamie.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Can I stop you…

   1. GKGeorge Knapp45:00

      Whatever they were, it clearly is a threat to national security. But-

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:03

      Can I stop you for a second there?

   3. GKGeorge Knapp45:04

      Yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:04

      Is there an official record of these encounters?

   5. GKGeorge Knapp45:07

      Yes, and those documents, you can find them. Uh, Washington Post broke the story in the '70s. They had obtained some of these documents after Freedom of Information Act came forward, and then the, the most recent study, Bass, AAWSAP, that we can talk about, they also really focused on the Northern Tier cases, and they looked up some of those guys. They found, uh, some of the nuclear missile officers and security personnel and interviewed them, and they told the story all over again. There's a guy named Robert Hastings, UFOs and nukes, uh, he's, has been his specialty for the last 30 years. He wrote a book, made a film. It's chilling. Um, part of what has happened is, it not only happened to us, the US, but in Russia. So once I got UFO fever and became a UFO reporter, uh, I traveled all over the world. And, uh, one of the places I went twice was Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it occurred to me that maybe, um, we might be able to learn more from the Russians about what our government knows about UFOs than our government will ever tell us. And I met a Russian physicist who was here in, uh, in the US to lecture on disarmament issues at national labs. He was getting ready to go back to Russia. He had been the National Security Advisor to Boris Yeltsin. He was the National Security Advisor to the Russian Parliament. He had taught Russian cosmonauts how to spot American nuclear submarines from space. He was connected. So I had a beer with him at the suggestion of a US congressman, and I said, uh, "Hey, Nikolai, you ever hear any of your guys in Russia, at high levels, talk about UFOs?" "No, can't, can't really think that I ... That doesn't ring a bell." We have another beer and he says, "You know, I do have a guy at the KGB who told me that they had looked into it for a while." And I thought, "Well," uh, they had just... the KGB had just released its Oswald files. I thought, "Maybe this is a golden opportunity to find out what they know," 'cause they are a superpower. They have nuclear weapons. They would have seen the same things we've been seeing. So I went to Russia. We sent Nikolai over to, back to Moscow, gave him a stipend, and, uh, his instructions were, "Find people who are in a position to know, high up in the military or the politi- or the government, who have never talked about this before." And it took about eight months for him to report back and get all these people lined up, and then I went to Russia and met him and interviewed him. And these were former military guys. There was a guy named Colonel Boris Sokolov who was a, a goldmine of information. He told us about a previously unknown study, probably the biggest UFO study in the history of the world. For ten years, from '78 to '88, the Russian military empire, every military unit in Russia, uh, in their whole military, global, if they saw any ball of light, anomalous aircraft, UFO, anything weird like that, they had to report it to the KGB, and then all that information went to one desk at the Ministry of Defense. Colonel Sokolov was that desk. And they had thousands of reports that had never been made public before. He told me about 45 different incidents where Russian war planes had chased UFOs, couldn't catch them. Three of the instances, these UFOs shot them down. Two of those pilots died. And after that, he said, uh, the order went out, "Look, if you see these things, don't mess with them." He said their study was for a very practical reason. These craft could do things that the Russians could not, and they wanted to get an advantage over the Americans in terms of stealth technology, so they wanted to do what people in reverse engineering programs are doing, figure out how the UFOs work so they could have an advantage over us. I s- had to smuggle some of these documents back. Um, if I had been caught with this stuff, 'cause it w- some of it was classified, if I'd been caught, I'd still be in a gulag somewhere. But I got it back. I shared it with some people. It eventually found its way into the US government's hands, and it, it tells us basically a lot of what we now know about our own government, that they have always taken this seriously. And one of the incidents, I'm sorry I made the long way around on that story, was an ICBM base in the Ukraine. Colonel Sokolov says that a giant UFO appeared over this base. These are missiles that are trained to go to New York and Los Angeles. They're very serious stuff there. It's a very secure facility. Giant UFO appears over this base. It splits into pieces, and then it melds back apart.... and, uh, and it performs this dazzling display for a couple of hours, the base is on high alert, and all of a sudden, the nuclear, um, control facilities lights up like a Christmas tree. And whatever this thing was, it entered the launch control codes. The missiles were enabled, they start firing up, they're ready to go. And then, poof, UFO goes away, the whole thing shuts down, it goes back to normal. Colonel Sokolov said his team, he and his team sent there to investigate it, they took the machines apart, could not figure out what it had done. And he told me on camera, "We think that they were sending us a message that 'These are your most powerful weapons, but we're not impressed.'" Same kind of thing happened here. Uh, we don't like to admit it, but, uh, there's a pretty strong paper trail that it really did happen. Now, what is a bigger national security issue than that? Or like the Tic Tac. You got a nuclear-powered, uh, carrier there, a- and other warships around it. And you got these, uh, strange, uh, radar sit- sightings for a couple of weeks, uh, right off the coast of the US. Um, this is an intruder. And even though these aliens, whatever they are, are not firing beams and wiping out our c- our cities, you have to consider it a threat. That's the job of our Defense Department. They don't know what it is, but they know it shouldn't be there and it's not ours. Um, and I think that's what the program is going on right now. It's a legitimate national security issue. It deserves to be investigated in spite of the larger social implications that we're not alone.

   6. JRJoe Rogan50:48

      The, the Tic Tac craft or Tic Tac craft, Tic T- Oh, goddamn Tic Tac.

   7. JCJeremy Corbell50:53

      Yeah, 'cause the Tic Tac-

   8. GKGeorge Knapp50:53

      Tic Tac, yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan50:54

      Can't, can't get away from that word.

   10. GKGeorge Knapp50:55

       Yeah.

   11. JRJoe Rogan50:55

       The Tic Tac craft, um, that was spotted off San Diego, it performed something spectacular-

   12. GKGeorge Knapp51:02

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan51:02

       ... in terms of its ability to go from the surface of the, of the water to 60,000 feet in how long?

   14. JCJeremy Corbell51:10

       S- so, uh, less, uh, less, less than a second, but there's actually more to it. There, there was a craft. Remember, I was talking with Commander Fravor before this was public.

   15. JRJoe Rogan51:17

       Yeah.

   16. JCJeremy Corbell51:18

       There was a craft under the water too. The Tic Tac would drop from 60,000 feet is what they're saying, 60 to 80, but that's the scan volume of the SPY-1 radar. So everybody I've talked with said they were coming from above. They were coming from outer space, dropping down within a second and stopping on a dime and then making the movements Commander Fravor saw, bah, bah, bah, bah, like inside of a glass. Then he said to me, in our first talk ever, I'll never forget this 'cause I'm talking to a fighter pilot, and I got to talk fighter pilot and I'm- I don't, you know... And he says to me, "It noticed me." And I go, "What do you mean it noticed you?" And he says, "As I was descending rapidly to engage it, it turned its nose and began to intelligently mirror my movements, came right up by me." And he says, "Faster than you can see a, like, you can't even see a bullet leave a gun." No, it just, bam, shot off. He goes, "We don't have anything like that. I wish we did. We don't." Whatever propels that is not a reactionary propulsion system.

   17. GKGeorge Knapp52:23

       D-

   18. JRJoe Rogan52:24

       Meaning it's not pushing something off the back to get it to go forward.

   19. JCJeremy Corbell52:27

       Like, everything else-

   20. JRJoe Rogan52:28

       Like fire and explosion and some-

   21. JCJeremy Corbell52:29

       It's a field propul- Yeah. Like anything else we know-

   22. JRJoe Rogan52:32

       Yeah.

   23. JCJeremy Corbell52:32

       ... you gotta have something going back to go forward. Rockets, we're still using the same ones from back in the day.

   24. JRJoe Rogan52:36

       Right.

   25. JCJeremy Corbell52:37

       This thing instantaneously, without effects of inertia, can move. Now, and that distortion, that's exactly how Bob described these things would work or do work in his opinion. So Commander Fravor got to see it. Now, and these incursions, by the way, look, there's stuff George reports on, there's a lot he doesn't. As a filmmaker myself, people tell me stories all the time. These incursions, it's not a rarity. These are happening to this day. I just heard about one in Guam. Incursions over high security airspace over our weapons systems. And in Guam, there was just recently an incursion. The Pantex facility with the igloos where we hold our nuclear weapons and stuff like that, there are incursions over these. So to George's point, the, the reason why maybe all of this is secret is not 'cause we can't handle it, people flip out, maybe we just wanna make sure we fucking get this tech first because it's a game changer.

   26. 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.

   27. JCJeremy Corbell53:55

       Right.

   28. 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-

   29. JCJeremy Corbell54:21

       No.

   30. JRJoe Rogan54:21

       ... or so...
5. 1:00:00 – 1:11:52

   Yeah. …

   1. GKGeorge Knapp1:00:00

      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. 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-

   9. I visited that place.

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

   11. Yeah.

   12. Yes.

   13. GKGeorge Knapp1:03:34

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

   14. 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.

   15. 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-

   16. JCJeremy Corbell1:05:58

       What kind of activity we're talking about?

   17. 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-

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:10:00

       Okay.

   19. 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