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The Joe Rogan ExperienceThe Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan Experience #1510 - George Knapp & Jeremy Corbell

George Knapp is an author, speaker, and the chief investigative reporter at KLAS TV in Las Vegas, NV. Jeremy Corbell is a contemporary artist and documentary filmmaker.

Joe RoganhostGeorge KnappguestJeremy Corbellguest
Jul 17, 20202h 55mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:06

    Rogan welcomes George Knapp & frames the UFO journalism legacy

    1. JR

      First of all, George, pleasure to meet you.

    2. GK

      Joe, great to talk to you-

    3. JR

      An honor.

    4. GK

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

    5. JR

      For real. Thank you.

  2. 0:06 – 3:46

    John Lear, early Vegas UFO interviews, and the lead-up to meeting Lazar

    1. GK

      ... finally.

    2. JR

      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?

    3. GK

      1989.

    4. JR

      '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?

    5. GK

      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?"

    6. JR

      Right.

    7. GK

      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-

    8. JR

      He's the Behold the Pale Horse guy?

    9. GK

      Yes.

    10. JR

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

    11. GK

      Yeah. He tied in the JFK assassination and-

    12. JR

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

    13. GK

      Yeah.

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. GK

      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

  3. 3:46 – 7:21

    The first anonymous Lazar interview and the KLAS series that changed everything

    1. GK

      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.

    2. JR

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

    3. GK

      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. JR

      This is before his identity was revealed.

    5. GK

      Yeah.

    6. JR

      We should explain this.

  4. 7:21 – 12:18

    Threats, witness intimidation, and the fight to verify Lazar’s Los Alamos history

    1. GK

      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.

    2. JR

      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?

    3. GK

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

    4. JR

      He explained it.

    5. GK

      Yeah. Right.

    6. JR

      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.

    7. GK

      That's my understanding as well.

    8. JR

      Yeah.

    9. GK

      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.

    10. JR

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

    11. GK

      Oh, he's a brilliant guy.

    12. JR

      Yeah.

    13. GK

      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-

    14. JR

      Yeah.

  5. 12:18 – 16:59

    Lazar’s technical credibility, story consistency, and the ‘what did he really see?’ problem

    1. GK

      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-

    2. JC

      I-

    3. GK

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

    4. JC

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

    5. GK

      Right.

    6. JR

      You got a laser gun?

    7. JC

      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)

    8. JR

      So it looks like a handheld toy-

    9. JC

      It's a t-

    10. JR

      ... but it's actually-

    11. JC

      It's a t-

    12. JR

      ... a real laser?

    13. JC

      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.

    14. JR

      (laughs)

    15. JC

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

    16. GK

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

    17. JC

      No comment on that.

    18. GK

      ... and started mar-

    19. JC

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    20. GK

      Yeah, well, you know.

    21. JC

      It's a massive flame-

    22. GK

      He made one. (laughs)

    23. JC

      I mean, it's massive.

    24. JR

      Made a flamethrower. Yeah, he's obviously a very intelligent man.

    25. JC

      Yeah.

    26. JR

      Um, when you listen to him talk, there's no bullshitting going on. When he talks about very... When he's ta- uh, talks about undeniable, concrete things when it comes to science, when it comes to elements, when it comes to propulsion systems, he clearly knows what he's talking about. And the, the really confusing thing for people that are detractors is he really hasn't changed his story in 31 years. It really is the same story. And that's really hard to do. Even if you tell a true story, 31 years later, you get it screwed up a little bit. It's hard. Like, when you're calling on 30... Like, if I'd a- had to remember things from 31 years ago, that's like, I'm one year into standup comedy 31 years ago. I don't-

    27. GK

      (laughs)

    28. JR

      ... remember it. I p- I barely, like-

    29. GK

      Yeah.

    30. JR

      ... I'm gonna tell you, like, "Oh yeah, it was a Sunday night." And then my friend Greg would go, "Actually, it was Wednesday." "Oh, fuck yeah, you're right. It was Wednesday." Who was the host? You know, we'll, we'll have a... I don't know. It's a blurry slideshow. But Bob has been remarkably consistent. The only thing that he's vacillated on or varied a little bit is the, whether or not he saw an alien or whether or not he saw someone who was looking at something that was the size of an alien, like a, a small figure, like whether or not they were trying to determine how large a creature would have to be to use one of those small crafts. Because it's, the crafts were very small in terms of like a, for, 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.

  6. 16:59 – 20:50

    Disinformation theories, Area 51 becoming global mythos, and why Lazar ‘stuck’

    1. GK

      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.

    2. JC

      Yeah.

    3. GK

      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.

    4. JR

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

    5. GK

      Right.

    6. JR

      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-

    7. JC

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

    8. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. JC

      ... uh, Terry English.

    10. GK

      Right.

    11. JC

      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.

    12. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    13. JC

      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.

    14. JR

      Hmm.

    15. JC

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

    16. JR

      Headlights right down.

    17. JC

      ... "Have I driven down..." Yeah.

    18. JR

      This is a real hot rod. (laughs)

    19. GK

      Yeah. (laughs)

    20. JC

      And he, and he did the story because the car was badass when he fired it up.

    21. JR

      Yeah. When he has a history of this. He also made a hydrogen-powered Corvette later on. Uh, yeah, he's a, he's a wizard. He's a very smart-

    22. GK

      Totally.

    23. JR

      ... guy.

    24. GK

      You know, he, he will admit to you that maybe he was picked for the job, uh-... they figured, all right, in case he blabs, we can discredit this guy like that. When we're done with him, uh, there's things in his background, he likes e- to blow things up. He likes explosives. He had a pirate flag on his, on his house at the time that I first met him.

    25. JR

      (laughs)

    26. GK

      Uh, he, he liked machine guns. He, you know, he had an illegal fireworks show that would go out in the desert every year that, uh, became a, a world-class event. He, uh, uh, got into some legal trouble after he'd worked out there. So there's a lot of things in his life they could use to discredit him. But the people who still maintain that Bob was a disinformation plot, it was meant to distract attention out from something else going on out there, whoever came up with that idea should be fired. Because as a result of Bob coming forward with that story, Area 51 is now known all over the world. And I'm sorry, but the Bob Lazar version of, of that sto- the tale is the one that prevailed. It's known everywhere. It's been in movies and books and TV shows. It, it's launched a thousand different, uh, you know, proj- uh, products, like the, the hat, that-

    27. JR

      Yeah.

    28. GK

      ... Las Vegas 51s. Our Triple-A baseball team became the 51s because of the Lazar story. The ET highway is created and christened by our governor. Um, you know, that, that story, that version that he told is now known all over the world, whether detractors like it or not. And if somebody was trying to distract attention away from something going on at Area 51, it failed miserably, because tens of thousands of people have made the trek out there. Even today, 31 years later, every single day, there's somebody with binoculars or a scope or something looking for whatever is flying around out there. Every major news organization in the world, after giving me nothing but grief, has made a, uh, beaten a path to Area 51's door. All of them, they have all done it. And Bob's story about reverse engineering craft from somewhere else is now f- part of a much larger and current, uh, series of events that we can get into.

  7. 20:50 – 53:36

    From Lazar to the Navy encounters: Tic Tac parallels and gravity-style propulsion talk

    1. JR

      Yeah, and that story that he told when he was on the podcast here, uh, w- got phenomenal response. There were so many people that I talked to that were my friends who were skeptical about that shit, they, they'd call me up and go, "Hey, man, I'm, I'm starting to believe this is real." And I'm like, "You should watch the documentary and then you should watch the Commander Fravor interview where he talks about the tick-tock U- the tic-tac UFO that they encountered off of San Diego." 'Cause you're talking about a rock solid military man with no shenanigans in his background who is telling a story about a craft that they cannot explain, doing things that defy physics and our understanding of propulsion systems. And quite a few people from that interview have completely changed their tune. Friends of mine who thought it was total horse shit have done a 180 and they're like, "Fuck, is this real?" And then the New York Times story came out, of course, and The New York Times is showing all these images of these UFOs and these, these things that they can't explain, that all exhibit very similar propulsion s- methods, or at least, uh, speeds that they can't explain. They, they move the same way. And there's legitimate people, legitimate scientists now, that are starting to take this into consideration and say, okay, if this is from Earth, then there's got to be some sort of a program that has technology that's far beyond anything we knew was possible. How did they do that? Is it because there's some super geniuses that the government gets ahold of right when they're in college and they immediately ship them off to the desert and have them create this stuff? Or are we, in fact, encountering something like us from the future or something from another place that has had a completely different path to technology? But it's not outside the realm of possibility. We are here. We're here sending videos through our phones to each other. You know, we're talking to people. The, the, you know, it's being relayed b- through the sky. We're watching films that are instantly downloaded wirelessly from these servers. I mean, w- their, just the technology that we have right now is completely alien to anybody who was around in Roswell in 1947. From r- 1947 to 2020, in terms of the universe, is not even a half of a blink of an eye, and then boom, things have changed so radically. Or are we, in fact, encountering something like us from the future or something from another place that has had a completely different path to technology? But it's not outside the realm of possibility. We're here. We're here sending videos through our phones to each other. You know, we're talking to people. The, the, you know, it's being relayed b- through the sky. We're watching films that are instantly downloaded wirelessly from these servers. I mean, w- the, just the technology that we have right now is completely alien to anybody who was around in Roswell in 1947. From r- 1947 to 2020, in terms of the universe, is not even a half of a blink of an eye. And then boom, things have changed so radically. It's not, it's not crazy to think that something from somewhere is far ahead of us. Yes, so that's one of the big things. Getting Commander Fravor in that room with Bob was so cool, 'cause people... Bob talks to whoever he's talking with. He helps you understand what he's saying. He can go into high specified detail on stuff, but typically he's just talking to whoever's there. When, when I got him in front of Commander Fravor, all of us and Matt, we were all in the room, it was amazing 'cause Commander Fravor saw it too. He saw something like Bob saw it. And the, the way that the craft, the tic-tac moved, it, it cannot be something that we have because it, it, it was clearly gravitationally propelled. This is something they talk about. Commander Fravor saw it bouncing like a ping pong ball on the inside of a glass. The, the inertia, being able to go bump, bump, bump. And the coolest thing Bob said was, "Well, Commander Fravor, Dave, it could have been a, a subject to a time distortion." So you're seeing it one way and they started talking about gravity amplification. It was just so cool to see them talk without an audience. What the fuck did Commander Fravor see? And, and Bob was... It's cool that when he c- can be calm and chill like that and just talk to another human. And what's crazy is what Commander Fravor is describing is what Bob was describing, the propulsion systems of 1989 that they were working on.

    2. GK

      Straight up.

    3. JR

      It's the exact same thing. Even the way it turns sideways-

    4. GK

      Yeah.

    5. JR

      ... to move a- to move off.

    6. GK

      Well, that's the g-

    7. JR

      That's exactly how he's describing it-

    8. GK

      Yeah.

    9. JR

      ... which is crazy.

    10. GK

      Yeah, that's the, the gimbal craft. You know, we have this video and everybody says, "Oh, it's this, it's that, it's another plane, an FA-18." Dude, I've talked with a dude at Boeing now who, who f- he serviced these pods that it was caught on, the gimbal. That thing is self-rotating. It is a saucer-shaped thing that is rotating mechanically against the wind...

    11. JC

      ... we, they all know that this is, has to be a gravity propelled pro... We, we understand the science that it takes to do it. We can't replicate it.

    12. JR

      Jeremy, pull that thing close to your face.

    13. JC

      Sorry, I always do that.

    14. JR

      It's okay. Just have it right up to your face.

    15. JC

      We can't replicate it, right, with our material sciences, our best information at this time. We can't replicate this technology, but we do understand how it works, fundamentally. As-

    16. JR

      Fundamentally, we just don't have the power to actually make it-

    17. JC

      The material science even-

    18. JR

      Yeah.

    19. JC

      ... just the actual physical material science, the materials it's made out of, and that's what's been in the news now. Meta-materials, that there are materials from craft that we have. George will talk about that, but-

    20. JR

      Y-

    21. JC

      ... Lazar is parallel with what we're seeing today.

    22. JR

      Yeah, and what's also really bonkers is in '89, he was talking about element 115, it wasn't even scientifically proven to exist until 2013. So in 1989, when he was talking about it, this is science fiction. He's making things up. In 2013, they actually were able to create, for a brief moment, an element 115, which is this insanely dense element that they believe is perhaps the propulsion system for this craft.

    23. JC

      It was always theorized, of course, element 115, but fabricating it-

    24. JR

      Yeah.

    25. JC

      ... was an achievement. But yeah, if you're talking about being a winner every time history writes itself-

    26. JR

      Right.

    27. JC

      ... Bob is, it's insane.

    28. JR

      He's batting 100%. It's crazy.

    29. GK

      100%. And he knew there was a place called S4.

    30. JR

      Right.

  8. 53:36 – 1:03:12

    Debunking battles: FLIR pods, GoFast ‘bird’ claims, and gimbal video disputes

    1. JR

      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. JC

      Right.

    3. JR

      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. JC

      No.

    5. JR

      ... or so...

    6. JC

      It's impossible.

    7. JR

      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. JC

      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. JR

      Let's talk about the debunking though.

    10. JC

      Okay.

    11. JR

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

    12. JC

      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. JR

      Let's pull up the Go Fast video.

    14. JC

      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. JR

      Explain what a FLIR pod is.

    16. JC

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

    17. JR

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

    18. JC

      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. JR

      But look how fast it's going too.

    20. JC

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

    21. JR

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

    22. JC

      Right.

    23. JR

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

    24. JC

      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. JR

      And how fast is it going?

    26. JC

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

    27. JR

      Interpretations?

    28. JC

      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. JR

      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. JC

      Right.

  9. 1:03:12 – 1:03:44

    How media pressure forced the issue: NYT 2017, briefings on Capitol Hill, and Rubio’s provision

    1. JC

      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. GK

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

    7. JC

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

  10. 1:03:44 – 1:05:59

    Skinwalker Ranch enters the picture: why the Uintah Basin became a government curiosity

    1. GK

      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-

    2. JC

      What kind of activity we're talking about?

  11. 1:05:59 – 1:29:37

    Inside Skinwalker claims: poltergeist activity, orbs, cattle mutilations, and the evidence problem

    1. GK

      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-

    2. JR

      Okay.

    3. GK

      ... 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

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