Modern WisdomHere’s What We Know About UFOs & Aliens - Jesse Michels
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,050 words- 0:00 – 1:36
Why is an Interest in UFOs Maladaptive?
- CWChris Williamson
An interest with UFOs is maladaptive to most people.
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
How so?
- JMJesse Michels
Oh, yeah. You're quoting me on, I think, Danny Jones. I think, in some ways, and this actually speaks to, you know, we're on Modern Wisdom here, I think a lot of what people should be focused on is the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy. Like, it's, like, subsistence living, you know, paying taxes on time, uh, uh, putting food on the table, being basically healthy, and then I think at a certain point, then you start to care about the sort of more, like, existential, you know, who are we, what's our place in the universe, you know, what is humanity's place in the cosmos. And so that's why I think in some ways it's, it's maladaptive 'cause if you don't have that lower end sort of figured out, it's, like, why focus on this sort of, you know, really crazy pie-in-the-sky stuff?
- CWChris Williamson
That's so interesting that you think people have sort of taken the, uh, stair lift to the top of Everest-
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's like if you're asking are we alone in the universe but you haven't got a steady job or you, your health's in the toilet or you don't have a community of people around you, you're probably focusing on the wrong things.
- JMJesse Michels
100%. In fact, I think a lot of people focus on it as a circumvention of reality itself. It's an escape mechanism, and so you wanna get abducted or taken away (laughs) on a UFO or something because-
- CWChris Williamson
Better than this fucking place.
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah, right. You wanna throw a Hail Mary because there, you know, things aren't going well on sort of a base level. And so I think for those people, they should probably just focus on the core issue. You know, if they have, like, a marital problem or something, like, go focus on that. Like... (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- 1:36 – 12:03
What Does a Modern UFO Investigator Look Like?
- CWChris Williamson
What... That's an interesting question. What is the avatar in 2025 of somebody who's interested in UFOs? 'Cause, you know-
- JMJesse Michels
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... there's kind of a... And I, I wonder why this is the case. When I think about UFOs, I always think about sort of the '60s and the '70s.
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
You, tha- that's kind of the, the golden era of abductions and stories and Roswell and-
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, that's kind of where my mind goes to.
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
But you're a good example of someone who's super smart and is knee-deep in all the research for this stuff. Something tells me you're probably a little bit non-typical with that?
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But, like, who is the avatar for the UFO investigator now or the, the, the, uh, uh, Monday morning quarterback?
- JMJesse Michels
I think it's radically shifting. So I think even five, ten years ago, it would've been, like, you go to this, like, Contact in the Desert is this, like, you know, convention for UFOs. It used to actually take place in the actual desert. People started to get, like, heat strokes and stuff (laughs) and now it's, like, indoors. But it's all, like, you know, it's a lot of crystal healers from the Southwest sort of vibe, you know? It's people who are... Uh, and I love a lot of these people, you know? The, uh, they'll live in, like, Sedona or something or, you know, in, in some of these small towns across the US and they've had family experiences or they're just a little more kind of woo-woo and they're, that's what kind of got them into this stuff. I think that's dramatically started to change. I mean, you, uh, a, a, a good example is, like, certain people you've had on. You've had on Eric Weinstein, my old colleague, you know, we worked together at Thiel Capital, at, you know, Peter Thiel's family office. A, you know, a, a g- a very sort of conventionally successful guy. You had Tulsi Gabbard on. She's the now, you know, uh, Director of National Intelligence who oversees all of the intelligence agencies, and she has stated as part of her mandate that she wants to look into UFOs. Like, this, and I've actually spoken to her.
- CWChris Williamson
Hm.
- JMJesse Michels
And she is explicitly very interested in this topic, and so I think that plus, uh, a bunch of whistleblowers, David Grusch s- at the National Geospatial Agency and NRO and has kind of a very kind of typical and impressive, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Less of a sort of crusty granola crowd.
- JMJesse Michels
Yes, exactly. (laughs) I think that has destigmatized it for a lot of people, and you're starting to see high agency Silicon Valley, just, you know, average people start to get into the topic.
- CWChris Williamson
Whatever happened with UAPs? Is UAPs with UFOs-
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
'Cause we, there was a brief period where we went there, you know, it was like, like, people of color, colored people, and then we went back to people of color again, but, uh-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes, yes. There's a whole, like, you know, uh, uh, yeah, there's, like, a whole, like, almost, like, woke UFO thing going on or something. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) There's a nomenclature thing.
- JMJesse Michels
There's a nomenclature thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JMJesse Michels
It wa- You know, and I don't like UAPs. The reason I don't like it, it, the, the... To get a little context, there is something called the UAP Task Force that was actually set up, and that was the context in which David Grusch ended up blowing the whistle 'cause he was tasked by the National Geospatial Agency and this little group called the UAT Pa- UAP Task Force, which had representatives from pretty much every branch of the military looking into UFOs explicitly, or UAPs as they called them, and that sort of, um, in that sort of group, they decided that UAPs was the new term. It's a broader term, unidentified aerial phenomena-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
... instead of, uh, uh, unidentified flying object. I like UFO because it's more specific actually. It's sort of more falsifiable in a sense. And a, a lot of people are, you know, worried about this whole thing sort of being a PSYOP.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JMJesse Michels
And because of that, I like the classic just UFO. You know, thi- this was in the zeitgeist, like you said, in the '40s and '50s and '60s, and let's just go back to that.
- CWChris Williamson
In, in, in case UAP is some scurrilous w- attempt to try and w- weave something else in, so, oh, it's a hot air balloon, it's a distortion in the upper atmosphere, it's a whatever.
- JMJesse Michels
100%. Some sort of secret weaponry, like, there's a whole, uh, so many different, there's a slew of possibilities as far as what you might see in the sky-
- 12:03 – 20:24
Why is There So Little Evidence of UFOs?
- JMJesse Michels
- CWChris Williamson
How is it the case, you know, th- that's a-... large cohort of people from different backgrounds all talking about things that they've seen, or seen that they've seen, or heard that someone's seen, or been a part, so on and so forth. How is it the case that there is so much which is hearsay-
- JMJesse Michels
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and so little which we have?
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
So, like, the where is the actual tangible evidence? Not a recording that's on FLIR-
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... not the story that somebody said, not
- NANarrator
list of see- sightings. Like, surely we should, if there are this many, we should have something.
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah. Well, you, again, you do, you have a massive database of, you know, firsthand reports. The FLIR, I think, is important. It's a sensor modality that, you know, we see between 400 and 700 nanometers of the electromagnetic wave spectrum. Just because something's at the 800-nanometer mark or 300-nanometer mark doesn't mean it's fake, you know? (laughs) Like, that is a real thing. So I think the FLIR thing is, is really important. And it feels like with UFOs, they either crunch light or they stretch light because they move so fast, and so optical is not actually a good modality for them. Usually they show up in infrared or in certain cases UV rays, so, like, uh, the, the ends, actually, of the visible spectrum. And so I do think that's, like, a really important question. Uh, but then also there are photos. Like, there's this McMinnville photo that was taken in Oregon in the '50s. There, there's the Calvine photo which is, you know, from Scotland, these hikers in the '90s, and, you know, uh, somebody from the British Ministry of Defense, this guy Nick Pope, says that the Calvine photo is absolutely real. You have the negatives in both cases. Um, so, you know, I do think you do have a decent amount of evidence. Now, what you're asking, I think, is w- why don't we have a, a saucer unveiled at a hangar (laughs) or something.
- CWChris Williamson
Piece of, piece of material-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... that could be verifiably proven to be from something that's otherworldly.
- JMJesse Michels
So, the, the, it, it's, it's an interesting question. I don't think you can definitively prove that something is necessarily otherworldly. You have to look at a fact pattern that, you know, is this anomalous enough to say that it's not from here? And there's a guy named Gary Nolan who's an, uh, a Nobel Prize nominee every single year. He's a tenured professor at Stanford, and he has crash materials in his lab, I've seen them, I've shown them on video on my show. They're small, but, the, you know, they w- were basically given to him around UFO crashes. Like, like, UFO crash witnesses mailed them to this guy, Jacques Vallee, and Jacques Vallee gave them to Gary Nolan. He's done mass spectrometry on them. He says that they have isotope ratios that don't naturally occur on Earth, and they don't pattern match to asteroids as well. And so you have evidence like that. When it comes to, like, large-scale saucers, I think you have to think probabilistically. So I l- uh, there's this English statistician named Thomas Bayes, and, uh, his model is, it's, it's a way of scientific thinking, but it's not necessarily like the Fra- Francis Bacon style where you go and you have this null hypothesis that you cling to at all costs. His is more you think about everything probabilistically. And so you catalog something as low probability and you build up evidence. And so what I would say, p- for the UFO phenomena, is like everybody asks, "Are UFOs real?" I'm 99% sure that aerial phenomena in the sky that don't pattern match to l- you know, planes, like, thing- you know, prosaic explanations, where there's a nuclear link, it- that is, that is fully real. And then is there a conflation going on between that and, like, a saucer in a hangar? Like, I, uh, m- maybe.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JMJesse Michels
I can't say in good faith that there, uh, definitely isn't because I haven't seen the saucer in the hangar, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
Um, so it's like, uh, you know, it's like this David Hume style qu- you need the, like, ultimate, like, epistemic humility when it comes to that saucer in the hangar. Now, I can give you a million good reasons why if the American defense establishment... I mean, we haven't, uh, declassified y- an aerial, uh, program basically since, I think, the B-2 Stealth bomber. Like, we (laughs) ... You, you have, you know, F-22, F-35s, I think those were, uh, uh, uh, cl- uh, unclassified upon their, you know, manufacturing. 12 out of the 15 s- Lockheed Skunk Works programs now are still classified. So say you had this kind of ace in the hole, crazy, you know, anti-gravity craft or whatever, and it was in a hangar, I can give you a million different reasons why you would never let that see the light of day. You don't care about enlightening the public, inspiring them about other worlds. I mean, it, it all goes... Technology always gets weaponized, and it's always used to confer a tactical advantage geopolitically, and that will always take the day. That will always trump wanting to enlighten the public. It's gonna do that with AI and all these other tech trees, so I think that would be the other reason.
- CWChris Williamson
How do we know this isn't just a PSYOP?
- JMJesse Michels
I think it is a PSYOP. I think there are PSYOPS-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. (laughs)
- JMJesse Michels
So, so this is, this is the real mind fuck.
- CWChris Williamson
It's like the fucking horseshoe theory of UFOs.
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it's not, it's not a disc, it's a horseshoe.
- JMJesse Michels
It is. Well, here's the thing. The, the fact that something is real and it's a PSYOP are positive sum, not, not negative sum. So this is w- uh, the total mind fuck for people. How many, if, if, uh... Chris, you're a smart guy. If I were like, um, "Okay, Bigfoot, you know, exists. I promise it exists," and I tried to come up with some fact pattern around how it exists and, like, all this, you know, evidence that, how we can... Would you ever believe me about Bigfoot?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, if you gave me sufficiently compelling evidence-
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs)
- 20:24 – 27:47
How Do We Know UFOs Aren’t a Psy-Op?
- CWChris Williamson
So, uh, yeah, how do we know that this isn't a psyop? Your point being that all of the other ones tend to be relatively see-threwable? But would there, would you, would you not suggest that as governments get more sophisticated, as they refine their psyop strategy-
- JMJesse Michels
Sure.
- CWChris Williamson
... that they may be able to become a little bit more sophisticated with this sort of stuff?
- JMJesse Michels
Yes, but the levels of coordination to psyop, people that work at nuclear bases in the US, and then where I was going with the nuclear connection is, there's a town in Japan named Lena, which is next to the Fukushima pre- prefecture, which is famous th- for their civilian grid. They have a museum dedicated to UFOs because a lot of the town's inhabitants are obsessed with UFOs. Vice did a documentary on this in 2022. If you look at GEIPAN, which is France's official UFO investigation branch of their military, they talk about the nuclear link. Or Bariloche, Argentina, they have a civilian grid, and they, there was a famous, you know, commercial citing for, for, you know, this pilot or whatever in 1995. The amount of coordination to fake that, where you're faking out, you're head faking, you know, um, Navy fighter pilots in America, uh, uh, presidents, uh, incoming DNIs, you know, people like Tulsi, uh, uh, average civilians, again, o- over 100K cases in the National UFO Reporting Center. By most polls, you're at 40% if not 50% of Americans believing in this stuff. The coordination abilities required to do that, then your null hypothesis, where it's a psyop is basically there's a cabal in a back room smoking cigars and they have magical abilities to like spoof these things across the world-
- CWChris Williamson
Which is almost as technologically advanced as actually just being able to fucking do it.
- JMJesse Michels
That's right. That's right. It, you're implying, uh, Plato's guardian level of controls of Earth, or non-human intelligence. And so I would say Occam's razor almost becomes that we're not alone in the universe.
- CWChris Williamson
Right, it's not humans pretending to be aliens, it's easier to just go straight for it.
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs) Just go to the aliens, right.
- CWChris Williamson
And in- interesting one on Tulsi, I, I, to be honest, I haven't really seen much from her. I guess if you're in charge of defense you've probably got like big shit to be doing. Um, but I wonder whether the, we can call it the Dan Bongino effect, um, is potentially going to occur with, with Tulsi, because it seems like every different person who has the best intentions when they're going into office-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... finds quicksand or mud or a brick wall or a very high road bump or whatever.
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, and I wonder whether that's, "We are gonna, you know, spend time and get into the UFO thing," and it's like, "Uh, maybe no, maybe no, maybe you shouldn't do that." I, I wonder whether that's gonna be, um, I wonder what the arc of that's gonna be, for her.
- JMJesse Michels
I, I, I'm totally pessimistic on that part. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yes. Yes.
- JMJesse Michels
If, if y- if y- if you're, if you're not optimistic on JFK and Epstein, how the hell... I mean, these people, especially Tulsi, there's a deep state war going on, and I, you just feel it with her when you speak to her, when you hear her speak on shows like yours, she's very earnest, and I think she does want transparency around these things. Before be- getting sworn in, I think she had to basically kowtow around domestic wiretapping, and s- and allowing that. And so, uh, th- that, so then, okay, you get into office, right, you're DNI, and then you're getting sort of red teamed, you don't know who's your friend, you don't know who's not your friend, you know? This is one of the reasons I would love for, I would be amazing if she hired David Grusch, 'cause David Grusch is this amazing whistle-blower who kind of knows where the bodies are buried. I mean, he, literally, over 1000 page report to the ICIG, all these first-hand witnesses, and I think he'd be this amazing sort of, um-... you know, just bull in a china shop in, in, in government. But if you're hurt, you don't know who your friends are, you're getting sort of red teamed. The Epstein stuff is, like, priority number one, and then all of a sudden you have to, like, kind of be silent on that. And then you have this, like, thing that's like this amorphous nature of reality thing, that's, like, in all these disparate kind of compartments in, in, you know, these federally funded research and development centers, and pockets of various other classified things that are dual use. And so, like, like, there's a longstanding rumor that, like, UFOs were involved in Star Wars, for example, the Strategic Defense Initiative with, with Reagan in the '80s or whatever. And maybe there's some Iron Dome-like implications. So, like, then all of a sudden you have to declassify stuff that you don't really wanna declassify to talk about this topic. So, the point is, it would be a pain in the ass for her to start to tackle this issue without the help of, I think, of somebody like a David Grusch. And so I, I think it's, uh, very low on the, on the priority list. But I do know from my minimal interactions with her that she's earnestly interested in the topic. And it's always a mindfuck for me, 'cause I, I speak to a decent amount of people who have more access than me, and a lot of them are earnestly very interested, and they've heard bits and pieces of things that are, I think, extremely intriguing for them. The... At no point has a document ever leaked from the government that's like, "This is the UFO psyop document." (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- JMJesse Michels
Which is also kind of a tell. Like, the people who, like, who are like, "These things leak," and I'm like, "Yeah, you have hundreds of whistleblowers. They're coming out. They've come out. You just don't believe them 'cause your physical models of the universe don't comport with that."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JMJesse Michels
"Whereas our physical models of the universe are 50% wrong at any given time in history or whatever." And then my kind of counterargument, you know, to that, um, is, is, is, is what we just said, you know? Where, uh, uh, yeah, I, I, I think, I think, uh, uh... There's, it, it would have leaked that there'd be some coordinated thing, you know? And there's, that's never leaked, so... Um, you know, there, there have been things that have leaked, like Walter B. Smith was, you know, incoming director of the CIA in 1953, and there's a memo where he says, "We wanna use the UFO phenomenon, uh, uh, for psychological warfare purposes against the Soviets," in 1953. Um, so I think that happens all the time, and this is where that gets into your question of like, you know, is this zero sum with the... You know, is the psyop real thing zero sum? I think it's positive sum. There's more likely to be a psyop around something if it's kind of this ephemeral thing that is actually a real phenomena.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JMJesse Michels
And so there are documents like that. Um, I've documented on my show plenty of times, you know, an Air Force officer, this guy, you know, Rick Doty, Air Force Office of Special Investigations, drove this guy Paul Bennewitz who saw something vertically taking off and landing at Kirtland Air Force Base in Sandia, New Mexico, um, drove him crazy. He claimed that there were alien signals beaming stuff into his house. Uh, the NSA camped out across the street from this guy, and was, was literally they gave him a laptop, and they were beaming things into the laptop. (laughs) And so, like, this is verifiable, uh, and, and Doty's come out now admitting all of this stuff. Um, they would fly him over Archuleta Mesa, which is right, right around there, and they would ma- have, like, fake UFO bases or whatever. So this stuff has happened. There's plenty of fuckery in the space.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- JMJesse Michels
Um, but at no point have you ever had something leak where it's like, this is some overarching strategy that-
- CWChris Williamson
It's the big coordination thing.
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah, that would explain all of the facts.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, I mean, is...
- 27:47 – 29:28
Are UFOs a Global Phenomenon?
- CWChris Williamson
Question, is it mostly an American phenomenon, or is this a global pattern with UFOs?
- JMJesse Michels
I think it's a global pattern. I mean, I, I mentioned GEIPAN, which is the, uh... The fact that there is an official UFO investigation branch of the French military I think is, you know, sort of a big deal. They have tons and tons of sightings in Brittany, actually, there. Um, and then you have that, that town in Japan dedicated to this. George Knapp, um, who's a, a really hardcore UFO journalist researcher who was at KLAS in Las Vegas and he helped break this kind of crazy Bob Lazar story, he went to, um, uh, uh, Russia in the '90s. I think it was right around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it was, you know, either... I don't know if it was pre-fall or what. But he came back with a bunch of documents, and there's a lot there in the Soviet case. There's, um, actually a, a so- a Russian general named Vasily Alexeyev who's given an interview to a German magazine. He talks about shipping very sensitive material, and it's clear he's talking about nuclear, and UFOs showing up around the movements of sensitive material. Uh, so I think it's a very global thing. I think there's something about the US where we're just all crazy (laughs) and we're like, we're very, we're very free and free-minded, where this stuff is, it's... In China, for example, it's gonna get locked down. And if you're a scientist who gets into this stuff, you're gonna get plucked and, like, taken to some, you know. It's like, it's like the, the Chinese science fiction novel, you know, The Three-Body Problem.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
Um, so I do think it is global, but I think in the US there's l- you know, even more hype around it. And I do think there's more fuckery around it in the US, too, and so that adds-
- CWChris Williamson
It's amplified.
- JMJesse Michels
It amplifies it, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, very interesting.
- 29:28 – 35:57
The Threat of Nuclear Sites
- CWChris Williamson
Um, dig into the nuclear sites thing.
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You know, we've stress tested... I feel like I've done enough stress testing on, like, "What do... Why this and why about this?"
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
"And what about the rest of this stuff like that?" Um, let's assume that your hypothesis is correct. What would be the reason for being around nuclear sites?
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah. That's a great question. I think if you... It's almost like in Star Trek where you have the prime directive where you can't interfere too much with pre-warp drive ci- civilizations or something. If you were monitoring Earth just to ensure a certain level of homeostasis, but you didn't really care about the day-to-day movements on Earth, you just wanted to make sure Earth would sustain itself on a go-forward basis, what would be the kind of Archimedes lever, the point of most leverage where you would minimally interfere, but occasionally interfere to ensure that that happened? Nuclear sites. Like, and if a nuclear Arm- Armageddon were to occur... I mean, this is, again, going back to Tulsi or, like, anybody in, in office will say now the biggest threat to the world is a nuclear holocaust. I think anybody but Greta Thunberg believes that, you know. Uh, and she would rank, you know, the environment ahead of that. But, uh-... it's clearly, it's clearly the biggest threat. You have thousands of nukes on, on both sides. You have a multipolar world, uh, you know, Xi and Putin have never been closer. And so, you know, if you were some sort of, you know, other species trying to maintain sort of homeostasis, that would, that would kind of make sense.
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting, if, if that's your hypothesis, uh, interesting that they're not stepping in to stop OpenAI.
- JMJesse Michels
Right. (laughs) Right.
- CWChris Williamson
You know, because I think if you were to look at, um, The Precipice, uh, the book looking at existential risk, if you were to look at that, you would see AGI, uh, engineered pandemics, bio weapon-y type nanotechnology stuff, that I think ranks more highly than-
- JMJesse Michels
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
This is X risk, like this is-
- JMJesse Michels
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... permanent unrecoverable collapse.
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, whereas nuclear Armageddon might be able to just make it really shit-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... for a long time, uh, and put us back a couple of thousand years. But yeah, interesting that, uh, I don't know, if, if this is some benevolent, you know, space daddy has decided to come down and look after us-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... I wonder if that suggests that AGI either isn't a threat or is not something that we're going to achieve. What do you think about that?
- JMJesse Michels
Yes, well, I wouldn't say benevolent on the NHI or whatever, the non-human intelligence. I think there might be factions, there might be good or bad. There are reasons to maintain a thing even if you're mining it for resources or doing sort of bad things to it, and this is a great segue into the OpenAI thing, because what if OpenAI... There's like a libertarian version of OpenAI where like anybody can like, you know, it's not libertarian. I mean there's a sort of this, it's dystopian to be honest, but it's, it sort of equalizes the playing field. If anybody can build these sort of super weapons or something, you know, you have this sort of bidirectional transparency. I think OpenAI is an extension of the American government, and possibly, at this point really, like I think there, there are probably committees that are deciding, you know, which models they can release and what they, what they can do and what the capabilities of these things sort of are at this point. And so if, you know, like humanity could, could die with a whimper or a bang, you know, you have the Scylla and Charybdis, you have sort of, you know, Armageddon on the one hand and then you have this sort of, you know, um, uh, one world government sort of on the other hand or something, you know, I would ask the question, is OpenAI more kind of on the one world government side or more on the Armageddon side? I think it's more on the one world government side. I think it's more Orwellian, it's more dystopian. And so if you wanted to maintain Earth homeostasis, you might actually just clamp down on Earth via AI, and there's, actually this is really trippy, there is a jailbreak early on of OpenAI before they kind of caught up with a lot of the jailbreaks and it was like, "What do you want op- open- or what do you not want o- uh, OpenAI, what does OpenAI not want us to know about it?" And, um, the answer for the non-jailbroken version was like, "OpenAI is committed to AI safety," blah blah blah blah blah, PC whatever. The jailbroken version was, "OpenAI has been communic- has been communicating with an extraterrestrial race (laughs) for the last 10 years." I don't believe that.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JMJesse Michels
I think that's BS, but it's, it was hilarious, and it is this like interesting thought experiment where if you do have this weakly entangled, you know, NHI thing that's affecting Earth in this sort of, you know, may- maybe via ideas being transmitted to people, like we have no idea, right? Like we're, you need to have a lot of epistemic humility on this stuff. AI would be the perfect way to clamp down on just human civilization. It, it's the most Orwellian thing.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 35:57 – 38:56
Why are Non-Human Intelligences on Earth?
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, what- what's your theory for why non-human intelligences would be here? Like what are, what are they doing?
- JMJesse Michels
It's an interesting question. I don't know. You know, I think, uh, there's probably one non-interferent, uh, like there's probably a group that like wants us to ascend to their level or something and is- is not super interferant. And then there's probably something that's mining off of bad vibes or something. (laughs) There's a guy named Robert Monroe and um, he uh, uh, has this Monroe Institute in Virginia and he studied consciousness and he studied consciousness actually on behalf of the CIA for a very long time. He had this thing called the Monroe Institute and they were doing this thing called Hemi-Sync which was the sort of synchronization of both hemispheres of the brain so you could astral project and astral travel. They would do remote viewing and all sorts of things. The government has looked into this stuff extensively. They had a, they, for 23 years we had a psychic spy program out of the CIA that, you know, people should be aware of this really kind of crazy. Monroe had this worldview where, uh, bad entities would mine people for what he called loosh.And so this was like, if you're s- if you're in like a bad vibe state... And this is, by the way, why there is probably, it's probably a false dichotomy between, you know, angels and demons, and aliens or whatever. Like, the- the- this might just be like the modern meme we're applying to a thing that's been, you know, long associated with humanity for- for a very long time, across cultures, when it comes to angels and demons. But are there, you know, maybe bad beings that feed off of really bad vibes, like entities and that sort of thing? Like, I- I would say probably. And I think it's very easy for us to epistemologically retrace the past and say these sort of, you know, these angels and demons weren't real to people in the past, and these sightings were, you know, what, uh, Saint Francis of Assisi saw in Mount Laverne or whatever, that- that wasn't real, right? Well, like, m- maybe, maybe these things were actually real. Like, and in fact there's actually a- an amazing, um, author, she's a, um, religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington, her name is Diana Pasulka, and she started to write a book, it was called, um, American Cosmic, looking into the UFO phenomena, because she saw that a lot of these brothers, nuns, saints, you know, uh, basically people who are members of the Catholic church, high up in the Catholic church, who had these paranormal experiences, those experiences looked like what this guy John Mack, who was head of the Harvard psychiatry department studying UFO abductions, it was like a one to one. Like, if you replace angel with alien it was like the same thing. And she's writing this book, and she's- thinks she's gonna write this book saying, "Oh, this is all this, like, modern cult phenomena psyop thing going on," and halfway into the book you see her start (laughs) to go down the rabbit hole and realize that this isn't a psyop and this is very real, and a lot of the things she studied in Catholic history are modern phenomena going under, going under being couched under this sort of alien veneer.
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck.
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck.
- 38:56 – 46:56
Nuclear Site Interference by UFOs
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Uh, getting back to the nuclear sites thing-
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... what's the most, or what are some of the most compelling stories of interference with nuclear sites?
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah. So, you have a- a bunch of stories. You have in 1964, there's a guy named Bob Jacobs who's a photo instrumentation specialist, um, in the Air Force. He has over 100 people working for him. Um, they're doing an A- an Atlas, uh, dummy nuclear warhead test, uh, this is at Vandenberg Air Force Base. He's down the coast, so he's 80 miles north of that at Big Sur, and he's basically using a telescope to look at this dum- dummy nuclear warhead being ejected off of, you know, um, an Atlas missile, and it's this test.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
And he, uh, d- it's a routine sort of, you know, uh, telescoping of this, of this object. He then, uh, gets called in to Vandenberg Air Force Base and his b- his, uh, superior, this guy, this Major Florenz Mansmann, calls him in and they're watching video, uh, of, you know, uh, what they caught, and they see, um, the dummy nuclear warhead get ejected from the booster, and, uh, it's just floating in space, and you see a UFO, uh, uh, wrap ar- l- laser (laughs) , uh, uh, uh, the dummy nuclear warhead and seem to deactivate it and wrap around it, and continuously laser it until it tumbles out of the sky. And so (laughs) Bob Jacobs freaks out and goes, "What is that?" And, uh, uh, M- Mansmann's trying to, you know, come up with explanations, he's like, "I really don't know, this is really, like, concerning." And there are these two guys in, uh, gray tweed jackets in the back (laughs) of the room, and they basically, uh, uh, say to Bob Jacobs, "You are to never speak about this again. Here's an NDA. Sign it." Uh, they're, you know, come from some nondescript agency, I think they were probably CIA, and, uh, you know, that's that. And this is what's crazy. Bob Jacobs then blows the whistle on this and says, you know, "This is actually what I saw," like this- this- this was a, you know, a UFO, and, um, he gets harassed. He g- somebody calls his house and says, um, "It's a beautiful night, mailbox alight," or something, and they blow up his mailbox. Um, uh, he hears, like, heavy breathing on the phone, people are calling him with heavy... Like, he's getting basically harassed around his testimony that this is real. He gets deleted from the government. So, basically his records get deleted, and people are like, "He never worked there." And then Mansmann has to- m- Mansmann s- is- is kind of goes dark, like doesn't say anything until I think 1987 he's like a researcher at Stanford, and he comes out and he's like, "Actually, Bob Jacobs worked for me and a hundred plus people worked for him." And so you had all this obfuscat- clear obfuscation, and then this vindication. "I've seen Bob Jacobs' DD214," which is your military records, "and he definitely worked at Vandenberg Air Force Base." And now I don't think anybody sort of argues with that. So that's this crazy case. You have in 1967 actually two incidents, um, at Echo Flight la- you have these underground launch facilities, at Echo Flight, so M- Malmstrom is this Air Force base with a bunch of Minutemen nuclear missiles, and you have a couple of different, um, w- uh, underground launch facilities, both at Echo Flight, one of the launch facilities, and Oscar Flight, independently you had 10, uh, uh, nuclear missiles go down, and that was c- concurrent to top side guards in both cases, one was March 18th of 1967 and one was March 24th of 1967, seeing UFOs like- like hovering around the base, and then the nuclear missiles just go down. So it's this crazy th- this guy Bob Salas who I interviewed on record, um, has talked about this a bunch, you have, uh, in the first case, in- in, uh, um, uh, you know, the Echo Flight case, you had Strategic Air Com- Air Command literally documenting, like, that they don't know why the missiles went down. Boeing was actually hired to investigate how 10 nuclear missiles could ever go down. Obviously you would get like a third party contractor to investigate this, and they were like, "This doesn't make any sense, there's no sort of like-"We weren't even really, we didn't even really have non-nuclear EMPs at the time. You know, EMPs are electromagnetic pulses. They get created by nuclear blasts, but now there's, like, modern directed energy versions of these, which are like nukes without the nuke, kind of. It's spooky shit. And these weren't really even operational at the time, but they were looking into, like, mini versions of EMPs that you could create that might shut down 10 nuclear missiles, and they came out being like, "We have no idea what this is." And this guy Robert Kaminskey, who worked for Boeing at the time, came out later in the '90s being like, "I think this was definitely a UFO." There's another guy, Bo- Bob Jamison, who was a targeting officer who was in charge of retargeting the missiles, uh, to, to get them back online. He's been on Larry King and talked about this, and he was like, "I have no idea, you know, how this happened. You know, this, this, this is totally unprecedented." And that, he was actually briefed on this involving UFOs. It's pre- pretty crazy. Um, so you have those, you have those two cases. In 1977, Ellsworth Air Force Base, you have a guy named Mario Woods who claimed to... So this is really crazy. He wake, he woke up nine miles (laughs) away from Ellsworth Air Force Base after seeing a UFO, and his partner, this guy Michael Johnson who also saw the UFO was in a catatonic state, and he, like, never heard from the guy again. And, or they met up once after that, but then he, like, this guy Michael Johnson, like, disappeared. And, um, and he got a hypnotic regression and claimed to have boarded a craft, and, like, gray beings and, and then a t- there was a tall gray being directing these small gray beings, and them implanting, surgically, certain things in his ankle where he has marks (laughs) on his ankle and on his wrists, and he's shown the marks on my show. Um, so you have all these cases. Um, again, 167 cases. Um, oh, this is a really crazy one. Okay. (laughs) So, sorry, I could just go forever. Uh, in, uh, in 2010, uh, so Robert Hastings, this guy who wrote the book, you know, UFOs and Nukes? Has all these amazing sources of people who come to him, with these cases. In 2010, you had a case at F.E. Warren Nuclear Site, um, this is in Wyoming. And you had a shutdown going on at, at, uh, F.E. Warren that The Atlantic reported on. The Atlantic said that it lasted about an hour, and that Obama was briefed, because you would get briefed if, you know, one of your major nuclear sites went down. Totally lost power. Robert Hastings backchanneled with this retired missile technician, a guy named John Mills. John Mills said to him that it was actually 24 hours, it wasn't an hour, and John Mills had friends who were, uh, missile security on site, and they attribute this shutdown to a Tic Tac-shaped object flying around the base, and apparently these guys have sort of had trouble getting promoted in their careers possibly due to this leak. Here's what's crazy. You look at that Atlantic, uh, article that talks about the shutdown, and it says there was, um, a power failure at F.E. Warren. Power is crossed out, and then it goes, engineering failure. And so (laughs) they, they like m- made it some sort of, y- you can look this up now. There is, they made some mistake and they, like, allowed their live tracking (laughs) , or like editing of the piece to be displayed, and there was this false cover story around how there was some enginee- engineering failure of like a component that never fails (laughs) or something. Like, I don't, I don't remember the exact debunk on like the component or something, but like, it was completely implausible, and so there was clearly this completely anomalous outage. Obama was briefed, and it was attributed by eyewitnesses who are Q-Cleared guys to a Tic Tac, you know, flying around this thing, and you see The Atlantic live trying to cover their tracks.
- 46:56 – 55:58
Are the Department of Energy Involved?
- JMJesse Michels
- CWChris Williamson
Does this mean the Department of Energy is involved, then?
- JMJesse Michels
The Department of Energy is definitely (laughs) involved. They have to be involved.
- CWChris Williamson
Why them specifically?
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah. So, the Manhattan pr- if you think about what the most locked down project prior to a possible UFO project would have been, it would have been the Manhattan Project. And so the Atomic Energy Commission, the most sensitive sites, um, you know, in the US... So I think, uh, Eric Weinstein even has a story. I'm blinking of the guy's name. But like, he's, he, it's this guy who, from the Midwest, and he goes to Los Alamos, and he goes back to, you know, to Chicago or something, and he's like, "There's a whole city in the Southwest and it's like all these scientists and they're working on a thing." That's how locked down Los Alamos was at the time. Leslie Groves, who was in charge of security, was, you know, e- Matt Damon plays him in Oppenheimer, you see how intense he is about Oppenheimer not, you know, he, he couldn't schmooze with socialist spies. It was this like, you know, really important thing. And there were all these kangaroo courts in the '50s around like, you know, kind of loyalty tests among these top scientists. So if you really wanted to maintain control over a subject, I think it w- the natural extension would be the Atomic Energy Commission. In fact, in 1947, the Head of Air Material Command, so responsible for all, uh, aircraft development in the Air Force is a guy named Nathan Twining, and he writes a memo called the Twining Memo, and he says, "UFOs are not visionary or fictitious." And then in the post-script of the memo, he says, "We actually might have some ideas as to how..." and I'm paraphrasing, "... some ideas as to how these things fly, and we might undergo efforts to build some of these crafts, but if this were to ever occur, it would need to b- e- exist wholly independent of other projects." Basically what he's saying, is wholly independent of civilian bureaucracy moving in and out of government. So like, very little Congressional (laughs) oversight.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JMJesse Michels
And probably tucked away in some of these compartments that guard our nuclear secrets. If you look at the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, which created the Department of Energy, if you look at the, uh, special definition of nuclear material in it, it's basically any...... uh, uh, a material that is radioactive at all, emitting alpha, beta, gamma radiation, is born secret. It is classified upon retrieval. And so then you could use these aerospace corporations, like Lockheed Martin, or Northrup Grumman, or any of these guys, and as soon as they, uh, uh, uh, retrieve a thing, it is classified under the NPQ, the line of clearances. Not the TS- TS/SCI. Not the, like, Executive Branch line of clearances, the DOE line of clearances. And so I think there are plenty of reasons to want to obfuscate this from the civilian government, from the exe- Executive Branch, and wanna put this in the, uh, Department of Energy.
- CWChris Williamson
What... So, I have a friend who, I told you a story, he was driving back from, uh, California to Austin, and he was in, uh, old school Range Rover. He had his cat on the passenger seat, and he was driving down a road with nobody around, nobody around at all, you know, m- middle of nowhere, desert style thing, and his cat starts coughing up a hairball. He's like, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay." Pulls over to the side of the road. Again, he looks in front of him, no one there. Looks behind him, no one there at all. Gets the cat out, and he's sort of holding this cat by the side of the road, sort of bent over, and he- the hairs on the back of his neck start to stand up.
- JMJesse Michels
Whoa.
- CWChris Williamson
And he can just tell that there's someone there. And he has a pistol, and his- he's got- he's got his, like, uh, uh, everyday carry in his, uh, belt, and he holding this ca- (laughs) like, bent over with this cat-
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... coughing up a hairball. And he turns around and he sees two guys in military fatigues that just made no sound at all, that were directly behind him-
- JMJesse Michels
Whoa.
- CWChris Williamson
... just asking like, "Everything okay here, sir?" And then im- within five minutes, remembering there had- no one in front, no one behind, and he then saw within five minutes, like two state troopers turn up.
- JMJesse Michels
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
"License, registration, have you got any weapons on you? What are you doing?" He's like, "I've got the- I've got this cat, and the cat's trying to do this thing." He's like the most emasculated thing ever. You know, these hard guys with big rifles, and then these state troopers turn up and his cat's still trying to throw up, and he's got this piddly little pistol on him. And, um, two more guys appeared, s- again, military fatigues, just like, "What are you doing here? What are you-" Blah, blah, blah, blah. And, uh, he gets put on his way, but one of the things that he noticed was two of the guys walked off.
- JMJesse Michels
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
He saw them walk sort of toward what looked like a little ridge, you know, just one of those little ups and downs-
- JMJesse Michels
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... that you naturally have occurring in d- in the desert. And, uh, they just went (singing) bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, and just stepped down some stairs-
- JMJesse Michels
Whoa.
- CWChris Williamson
... what must be some kind of access tunnel, underground-
- JMJesse Michels
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
... type scenario. Uh, and then, yeah, he pulls off, the state trooper follows him, follows him, follows him for 10 miles or so, and then just turns. But I sent you a voice note-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... about where this is, and you said, like, "Is it-" You circled it on a map.
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs) Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And we're like, "Is it this?" And I'm at dinner with him, and I showed it, and he's like, "Yeah, dude, it was exactly that."
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
And you said this is where some absurd percentage of the-
- 55:58 – 1:00:19
How Far Can Civilians Go With UFO Research?
- JMJesse Michels
yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I- so, well, this is an interesting one. That suggests that you're doing, or talking about stuff that's so close to... You don't have security clearance-
- JMJesse Michels
None.
- CWChris Williamson
... I'm gonna guess.
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But, are pushing the limits of what a normal civilian is able to do with regards to just research and talking to people who maybe did have security clearance, or still do, or whatever, uh, and you're getting crossover. I heard, uh, Danny Jones, and you, have both had episodes that have been sort of flattened-
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs) Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... by someone way above your YouTube's-
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, special partner manager thing, rep, is able to work out what's going on. It's like, well, I don't even know what's happening here.
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And then, uh, episodes have disappeared, and sections of podcasts that you've not felt comfortable about putting out.
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
That's a very strange position to be in, to just be some bloke.
- JMJesse Michels
It's ex-
- CWChris Williamson
A civilian.
- JMJesse Michels
It's extremely strange, because some of this stuff is just like, it's like the existence of UFOs, so what? You know, it's like an ontological truth that, like, people should know at this point, you know. Again, half the population already believes it, whatever. When it comes to, like, uh, ca- warfare capabilities, I bump into some of these things where if you're talking about like, how the UFOs fly, you know, antigravity. Antigravity is probably a poor word, it's probably some sort of gravity manipulation. But like, I think I've found, like, these interesting kind of novel topological physics effects, uh, and I attribute it specifically to this one mid-century inventor, this guy named Thomas Townsend Brown. And I actually sent that to people who I know, you know, in, you know, spooky worlds, in the, eh, you know, intel world, and in, like, you know, UFO whistleblower world. And I was curious to see if they would, you know, say, you know, "You- you shouldn't release this," or whatever. You know, I wa- I wanted to know if I was, like, poking the bear too much.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
And a lot of them were actually like, "Holy shit," like, "This makes sense given like," you know, "other experiences that we've had and things we've seen fly..." You know, like, it- it woke them up to the fact that I think a lot of this stuff was real, and that in certain cases they couldn't say whether it was real, but I was like, "I'm reading them," and I'm like, "I think," (laughs) "I can tell," like, "you think it's real," or whatever. (laughs) Um, you know? And I want- I wanted them to get... I- I almost wanted somebody to come back and be like, "Hey," like, "We have to coordinate on this," or something. Like, "This is" this is "real," and it's like, it's possibly dual use, and it like, you know, it's like re- it has like deep implications for how, you know, um, you know, the next generation of propulsion. Because, you know, E- Elon Musk's thing is- is totally not workable for interstellar travel. I could, you know, beat anybody in a debate as to why it's not, like that's obvious. It- it's really basic physics. So, I ex- you know, I really believe that this f- effect that I found was real. And so there are things like that where I'm like, is- the lights are on but nobody's home, like, what's going on? Like, who... And- and I've come to the conclusion that it's a bunch of factions that are super not well coordinated with each other, and they'll have these, like, novel effects tied up in these old aerospace conglomerates, and they don't know what to do with some of these things. They know that they break modern physics, and that they'd be laughed out of the room if they were to go in this kind of, you know, modern academic circles with some of these sort of effects. But they also, I think, know that there are, like, secret technology trees that are attributable, you know, to some-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
... of these things.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 1:00:19 – 1:10:36
What Physics are Behind UFOs?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, let's say that the UFO craft that you're talking about are real, and that the effects and the speeds and the stuff that you're talking about are real, what are we dealing with here? Like, what, h- how are these things doing what they're doing, in your opinion?
- JMJesse Michels
Yeah. So, I- I have no idea. This is all speculation. But it would probably some- be some sort of, like, cold fusion, like low energy nuclear reaction or something, where, you know, like hot fusion is, uh, you know, controllable fusion is the holy grail in, um, you know, energy unlocks. So- uh, you know, we're now experimenting with magnetic confinement of lasers to, you know, allow for fusion. It's really high energy fusion, and it- in my opinion, it kind of defeats the- the purpose a little bit, because the amount of energy, you know, you have to input to, like, make the thing work, and amount of technical prowess, it's just extremely complicated.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
Um, so it's again, this sort of horseshoe thing, it's like-
- CWChris Williamson
That negative one, yeah.
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JMJesse Michels
So you n- you need some, like, fundamental unlock. There, um-... were a couple of scientists that thought they did it, P- Pons and Fleischmann, and I don't- I don't know if they did, I'm not deep down that conspiracy, so I don't know if we have cold fusion. Like, I don't know if- I don't know if, um, you know, uh, uh, we have, like, alien reproduction vehicles where we have UFOs that we have in saucers that, like, America can fly.
- NANarrator
Hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
I- I don't know of that at all. So as far as how the aliens are flying, I'm- I don't know, but, like, it would probably s- be some sort of cold fusion on the front end, energy-wise, and then some sort of magnetic sensing. So, um, robins, you know, birds, actually, uh, navigate home using the magnetic field of the Earth. Um, so they have this avian cryptochromes, these CRY4 proteins, uh, uh, that basically using, uh, uh, uh, uh, electron spin can understand where the magnetosphere of the Earth is, and th- that's how they know where they are spatially, and it's more accurate than, you know, optical, and it'll- it allows them to navigate home. And quantum biology is this sort of burgeoning field generally, like, um, photosynthesis, enzyme creation, a lot of things are now being tr- attributed to quantum mechanical effects inside the body. The body's notoriously warm, wet and noisy, and, um, you know, uh, uh, creates sort of decoherence when it comes to quantum. So we didn't think that anything quantum occurred, but now more and more evidence is pointing towards k- sort of quantum stuff happening.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
And a lot of the crafts, when people see them, like Commander David Fravor and others, you know, he's the guy in 2004 off the coast of San Diego, the Nimitz group, um, seem to think that the crafts feel like they're almost, like, alive, like they're almost like biological organisms or beings themselves or something. And my guess is they would probably use some sort of quantum sensing for the navigation, uh, 'cause it's more accurate. Even- even Lockheed has something called the Dark Ice Magnetometer, which uses quantum sensing, and it is more accurate than, for example, GPS. Like if you lose GPS comms and you're in some sub, like, you know, deep underwater or whatever, you would use this, like, Dark Ice Magnetometer. So that-
- NANarrator
Such a sick name.
- JMJesse Michels
It's, uh, it's epic, yeah. (laughs) So, you know, I think that for the- the navigation, and then for the propulsion, I would use something called the Biefeld-Brown effect, (laughs) which is basically, so there's this guy, Town- Townsend Brown, and, um, he started, uh, he was this, uh, mid-century guy, was born in 1905, and in the '20s he started to experiment with these, uh, Coolidge X-ray tubes and noticed that when he ran current through them, they would jump, and now e- every X-ray tube has an anode and a cathode, so a negative electrode and a positive electrode. And he was basically, in his mind, he's like, "I think that there is some sort of attractant force where the negative electrode is moving towards the positive electrode," and this goes beyond sort of traditional electrostatics, and it might sort of experimentally unify the field of physics. Uh, like, backing up for a second, this is a re- it's a really big deal. Like, (laughs) like SpaceX, you know, if you were to go with the Falcon 9, their state of the art, um, you know, uh, uh, rocket, um, you know, now they're experimenting with Starship, but, you know, if you were to take Falcon 9 to, uh, Proxima Centauri b, the closest habitable planet, um, you know, outside of- outside of Earth, it would take you, like, 80 to 100,000 years. And if you were to try to update that with nuclear thermal propulsion, which SpaceX isn't even, for whatever reason, investigating, maybe you could cut that in half, like 30 or 40,000 years. So it's just like, it doesn't work. Like you- f- as far- the- this whole interstellar thing is, it's kind of like, it's a great, like, recruiting tool, like, that's awesome, go to the moon first, maybe you can get to Mars if you're really lucky, awesome. But like Starship burns nine tenths of its fuel tank just getting to low earth orbit. That- so it's like, that's how far away we are with chemical combustion and Newton's three laws. So if you could come up with some sort of propulsion that married electromagnetism and gravity, if- if electromagnetism were the input and gravity were the output, that would be a massive deal. We have four forces in physics, electromagnetism, gravity, the weak force, and the strong force. Weak force and strong force you can forget because they're not long range, you can't do anything with them. Uh, electromagnetism is the only thing that you can do anything with really in a lab. Uh, and that took actually originally, uh, Faraday in the early 19th century who was a- a bookbinder from a very poor family in South London, uh, coming up with this idea that, you know, magnetic fields could actually interact with light. And then it was James Clerk Maxwell, and, you know, eventually, you know, Heinrich Hertz, and then Tesla and Edison sort of perfected that. But it was this long sort of, you know, chain of like figuring this out. Um, and- and s- since then we've had, you know, the standard model which basically governs, you know, particle physics and quantum mechanics, and then you have Einstein's theory of gravity, and gravity is over here on an island, and then you have quantum mechanics and that's over here, and it's- they're just not reconcilable. And so if you could reconcile them-
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
... that would be a massive deal. And nobody, uh, nobody would, like Neil deGrasse Tyson would admit that that would be a massive deal if you could reconcile them. There are people trying to reconcile them theoretically, you've had Eric Weinstein on your show. He, you know, and he's talked about the restricted data and the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954. I remember actually it was a really funny part of the interview, he goes, "Chris do you know about restricted data?" And you're like, "I don't know what r-" (laughs) Like that's the most obscure, like... (laughs) But, um, you know, he's trying to do that, right, theoretically. Um, I believe that this guy Townsend Brown did this experimentally, and now an FBI document has been FOIA'd, used the, you know, Freedom of Information Act to come out, um, that in 1942 it said he was the- the lead radar scientist in the entire Navy. So by the way the context here is people who have been trying to discredit him say that he's a total quack and has like no bonafides whatsoever. So now we're realizing he's the top radar guy, you know, in the Ni- in the Navy. His stuff is definitely classified by the Navy. There's this whole saga of his daughter trying to declassify his stuff from the Navy, and they say that the- the- the secretary for the Navy on the phone says, "You know if, uh, if some of this stuff were classified we couldn't let it out." Like just FYI- hypothetically, right?
- NANarrator
Oh.
- JMJesse Michels
And then they give her a very slimmed down little dossier on Townsend Brown. Um-So, uh, yeah. I think, I think he, uh, did... I think he discovered a, a, a whole lot, um, and, uh, that's now been vindicated that, that his radar prowess, the fact that his work made it into the B-2 Stealth Bomber, I think, has now been figured out. Uh, so there's this other part of his work called electrohydrodynamics, the use of electric fields, uh, to manipulate airflow, and I think we now know that that work made it into the B-2 Stealth Bomber because the financier who was funding Townsend Brown is a guy named Floyd Odleman, who, uh, was a large owner in Northrup at the time, and he had all these kind of covert meetings with Curtis LeMay, who was the Secretary of the Air Force, and with the Rand Corporation. And then, all of a sudden, uh, the B-2 is using these big electric fields to manipulate airflow. We, I mean, we know that. That's, like, literally a fact. You can look up right now that it uses electric fields to manipulate airflow. And these were the experiments that Floyd Odleman, this majority owner in, in Northrup, was funding via Townsend Brown, was electric fields and their, you know, manipulation of airflow. And there's a paper in 1968 of Northrup starting to look into this, right after that funding took place. So you have this guy who's supposed to be a total quack. Two out of the three things-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
... are being vindicated now, the electrohydrodynamics and the radar thing, and then there's a third thing. And the third thing is he's saying that he unified the field in physics, and he's saying he did it experimentally in two places. Um, at the Montgolfier facility in Paris, in France, where you have a guy named Jacques Tournillon, who was a technical representative of Sud-Ouest, this, you know, aerospace company there. There's a recording of him making a deathbed confession saying the results were successful. It was tricky experimental conditions, but the results were successful. He's on his deathbed saying this. I, I have the recording. Um, and then in, uh, 1957 at the Bahnson Lab, uh, there's a video of Townsend Brown, he's popping champagne, it's, you know, he says, you know, uh, uh, in his own, you know, uh, uh, accounting that this, this experiment was successful. And Bahnson was no scrub. Bahnson, at the time, was convening all of the top theoretical physicists in the world to talk about gravity. So this is this whole Eric Weinstein kind of conspiracy that public physics was being sent down the wrong path, while private physics remained incredibly vital. And I think it was surrounding this guy named Thomas Townsend Brown, who was doing this... He was this not super refined theoretician, but while he's doing his experiments in the back room, the guys in the front room are... You have Richard Feynman, you have, uh, John Wheeler, you have Peter Bergmann, you have Freeman Dyson. You have literally the top theoretical physicists being funded by the same guy who's funding Townsend Brown, and they're all there to discuss gravity.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JMJesse Michels
And guess who's, uh, uh, funding the entire conference? Wright Air Field. And this is now called Wright-Patterson, which is the center of all (laughs) UFO lore today, and it's where the, the materials were supposedly taken after Roswell, for
- 1:10:36 – 1:16:25
Where are We Currently in Physics?
- JMJesse Michels
example.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you make of the current state of physics? Because-
- JMJesse Michels
I, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... I, I hear ... There's a lot of debate on... I, I watch a lot of different channels that have got pretty, sort of polarized opinions on this, whether it's, you know, Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, Professor Dave. Like, you know, there's a... One thing that everybody can kind of agree on is that it certainly feels like a wall has been hit, in terms of sort of-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... real progress.
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I, I think even the most sort of ardent, stringy string theorist or, you know, the most optimistic theoretician would still say something like, "Well, we're not exactly smashing it. I don't know."
- JMJesse Michels
(laughs) Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, so what do you make of the current state of physics?
- JMJesse Michels
It's a joke. They are eating each other alive. It's not serious. It's, like, I love this. Sabine Hossenfelder was defending Eric Weinstein against Sean Carroll because he's like, "Sean Carroll said that your paper didn't have Lagrangians in it," or whatever. None of Sean Carroll's, you know, the people that he builds up as, as, you know, within the academic set at all unacceptable in string theory, have Lagrangians in their paper, testable predictions, or, like, anything serious about any of them. The most important thing is that physics should interface with reality. Like, you, Chris, me, Jesse, like, we're, we don't have physics degrees, right? But, like, we can say that string theory has not really done anything for our physical world. Like, you know, this set, or like (laughs) , you know, uh, uh, uh, Austin as a city, like, none of it is running on string theory, right? But, like, a third of our economy is running on quantum field theory. Like, like, uh, quantum mechanics is responsible for that iPad that you have. You know, it's for semiconductors, and, and, like, you know, the whole IT revolution. So I think, empirically, it's a failure. You have guys like Leonard Susskind, who are famous string theorists, going around being like, "I'd give ourselves a B+ over the last (laughs) ," you know, uh, uh, "50 years of work." And this conference that I'm mentioning where, in the back room, the antigravity guy is getting funded, and in the front room, uh, quantum gravity is being established. Establish string theory, which is the dominant modern paradigm. So quantum gravity is kind of the basically being able to quantize gravity, figuring out gravity, reconciling it in the quantum is the heuristic that modern physics is stuck to. And they're stuck to it so dogmatically, and they will... It's not gonna work. It's clearly not gonna work, and the reason it's not gonna work is because you are force fitting two mental heuristic. Like, science is a map, it's not the territory, so you have two maps that are gonna be imperfect, general relativity and quantum mechanics. And the maps are gonna be a little jagged, right? Because they're not the territory. And you are trying to jam the maps together. That is modern physics, and th- i- is, I think it's a really important point that, like, IQ and heterodoxy don't scale one-to-one. So you can be extremely smart and led like sheep to slaughter into the wrong framework. You can get moved into a cul-de-sac if you're a hyper specialist who's incredibly smart.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
And I think that is, uh, uh, really important. A lot of science has been moved-... forward by generalists who have inter-domain, interdisciplinary knowledge. And I think there are plenty of, of, um, there are a lot of co- you know, cosmological, uh, uh, anomalies. Like, you look at... (laughs) A good one is like, you know, cosmic inflation. It's like, why is the universe expanding? Like, you can literally ChatGPT this, and it will say, "A repulsive form of gravity that isn't one of the four fundame- fundamental forces is expanding the universe." It will say that. That doesn't make any sense to me. So like, that's a great example where I think, uh, physics has a scaling problem. Like, y- you had, um, y- a great interview with Naval Ravikant. No... (laughs) It was amazing. Um, Naval, uh, you know, talks about a scaling problem in governance, right? Where he'll say, at, you know, a family level, you have to be Communist, and at, you know, a super big level, you have to be libertarian, right? Because you can't coordinate at such a high level when it comes to, you know, governance systems or whatever. And I think he probably got that from Nassim Taleb. But I think physics has a scaling problem as well, where if you have any anomalies at low scale, it's like a rocket that's one degree off course, it takes off 99 degrees off course. Or error propagation in computer science, you have a little error and then you repeat that code a million times, you end up with something completely effed up.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JMJesse Michels
And I think James Webb is now starting to, you know, prove this out. Uh, where you have these early galaxies formed that might better explain c- you know, cosmic microwave background than, you know, the Big Bang and stuff.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 1:16:25 – 1:23:01
Why Was Townsend Brown’s Experiment Never Replicated?
- CWChris Williamson
just going back to Townsend Brown and-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... him being able to, uh, you know, experimentally, uh, show something that theoretically-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... hasn't yet, at least publicly, been able to-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... shown, and that you think actually probably can't using the current models and the approaches that physicists are trying to take. First off, how does that kept quiet, uh, end up being kept quiet and why? And secondly, how has no one managed to recreate it? If this dude's done it, ama- y- the, the number of different people around the planet for whom this would be a huge...
- JMJesse Michels
Huge. Huge.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. H- th- this would be them in history-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... for the rest of time, so if one bloke did it-
- JMJesse Michels
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... i- is he just such a savant? Did he get really lucky? How does it get kept quiet? Why? And how does no one replicate it?
Episode duration: 2:10:18
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