TFTRH #52 - Luis Elizondo: UFOs, UAPs, AATIP, and TTSA

Transcript

my guest today is lou elizondo who is a former senior intelligence official a disclosure advocate a national security expert and perhaps most interestingly the former director of the pentagon's ufo slash uap program known as atip aatip so uh lou thank you very much for being here it's been a bit of a challenge getting some of the key figures in the uap world to talk so thank you very much for agreeing to be here mick it's my pleasure and uh you give me too much credit for calling me a key figure in the uap topic um you know that i think there's a lot of people that probably deserve that credit um you know i'm probably like you i'm i'm bespoke in a much greater greater wheel well i think uh people will disagree with you there but uh thank you for your humility uh and we've got a lot of material to cover and lots of questions and i'm going to try to take things kind of roughly chronologically but first of all i wonder if you could just give a one or two sentence description of what you think a uap is what's your personal definition of a uap wow uh well nick i think that definition is is constantly evolving and it evolves with our understanding um you know there was a time in in our history and i'll try to be brief with this but it's it's not a it's not a simple question uh there was a time in our in our in in our world where anything that wasn't a bird that we saw in our sky and it wasn't a star uh was was mysterious right um these these supposed traveling stars and they turned out to be planets and then of course comets uh later on that had this this almost supernatural uh um type of of of identity if you will uh where where if you saw a comet in the sky some people thought it was it was a sign of of of things to come it was foreboding and it would cause sickness and disease uh you know that was a by definition a uap and then of course we began to understand that and and uh then you have um well you have in the in the 1940s you have these these cargo religions that were established in the south pacific based upon world war ii aircraft flying over these remote portions of the of the south pacific sea flying over an island maybe dropping some provisions and uh you know that was a uap right they were they were gods from coming down from heaven dropping off food for for the people on the islands um and that was very much by definition of uap and so it's hard to say what what is a uap because i think as we gain additional understanding uh into into science and into technology um a lot of what was considered uap before is not a uap anymore anything by definition is is an unidentified aerial phenomenon until it isn't you know i think i think the definition of uap is a moving target um and what was once a uap is now um something you know that can be explained um for me anything can be a uap until it's not if that makes sense right yeah yeah so uh you know let's talk a bit about atip and kind of go back in time to around i guess 2007 when you first joined the program which at the time was called orsap aawsap i think the advanced aerospace weapons something something something program yes um what were you actually hired to do when you first what was your what you were tasked to do when you first joined uh either osap or you know the prototypical atip program back then i was asked simply to establish a a comprehensive security and counterintelligence portfolio within the greater construct my background is as a counterintelligence officer uh to a lot of people they look at them they say oh it's disinformation that's actually not really what counter intelligence does i think that's uh a bit of uh um a misunderstanding counterintelligence is really understanding what the enemy knows about us to put it very simply i've often told people it's like playing a game with chess and foreign intelligence is learning what the pieces on the opposite side of the chessboard can do counterintelligence is knowing what your opponent knows about your chess pieces and what they can do uh that's a very oversimplified way of looking at it but my my job was to set up a security program within that construct to a protect the information we have and b to figure out if the enemy is collecting information on us about that that portfolio so you're kind of an anti-spying person you're trying to protect uh and also do counter espionage essentially yeah that's exactly that's that's typically most of the job of of counter intelligence is you use the same techniques as you do in in foreign intelligence collection and human intelligence but you're doing it for a slightly different purpose it's it's the other side of the coin if you will of intelligence operations so when you when you first joined uh or separate uh what did you actually understand the program to be about what would you say was the purpose of of the program back then well initially i didn't have any understanding they didn't tell me what it was until until after i had a meeting with the director and then it became very clear to me uh that we were dealing with with with a topic involving some some very advanced technology that we we really didn't have a a good understanding now was it clear to you from the start that it was about uh the study of uaps well again let me let me say it again initially when i was first approached i had no idea what it was about um maybe i wasn't clear i apologize about no i mean but after after your conversation with the director uh did he tell you we are studying uaps yeah it was it was very very clear that we were we were studying uaps that's correct we weren't studying advanced aircraft we were studying right something that really fell outside of the normal or traditional understanding of aircraft technology so when you look at like the the history of atip and uh uh and norsap before that uh you you you see things like there's the solicitation document for the original osap program and uh they don't mention uaps uh they just talk about uh technology over the next uh 40 years i think you know advanced aerospace technology and speculative things like you know warp drives and quantum technology why why wasn't anything mentioned about that type of thing uh in the initial solicitations and the initial descriptions for example harry reid's letter of 2009 uh doesn't mention uaps at all even even like by by inference i think was that kind of a a secret part of the program no i mean it we do let's look at the dirts most of them were unclassified right we do scientific and academic solicitations for studies all the time we don't necessarily tell the sign when we say we'd like to know the friction coefficient of a reentry vehicle coming in at let's say an altitude of 250 000 feet at a velocity of 17 000 miles an hour at an angle of let's say 60 degrees you know what what type of material can withstand that and and the reason why you might ask that you don't necessarily in an unclassified realm tell the scientific communities because we're trying to look at uh enemy icbm missiles coming in on reentry right so right you don't when you're putting out an unsolicited when you're putting out an unclassified um solicitation for a study you have to understand that at the unclassified level anybody can read that and and so from an opsec or operational security perspective you have to be very mindful of of who's going to see it and so it's very very common practice in the us government we put out these studies all the time and we don't necessarily tell people why when you look at the studies holistically and you realize we're talking about warp drive and advanced materials and whatnot then you begin to understand that okay we're talking about really advanced technology why would we would be why would we be interested in that well clearly from a national security and intelligence perspective and you know what what are we interested in well as it turns out as as now everybody knows it was part of the a-tip program and part of the part of the study so when uh um harry reid like he sent this letter to the deputy secretary of defense secretary lin in 2009 uh it was this essentially kind of a public relations thing then was there some kind of back channel thing where he also told secretary lin that the the reason we are studying these things is that we are studying uaps it's not it's not necessarily just speculative technology we've seen these things in existence and we want to figure out how to do them would he have to so i told him i can't speak on behalf of secretary i'm sorry of of senator harry reid um i can tell you he's an incredible human being but i can't answer that question for him but what i can say is once again you had mentioned why isn't the term uap in in that letter well again look at the classification of that letter that letter doesn't isn't classified there's no classification marking on it so once again you know that's going to go through a whole bunch of folks to coordinate that memo by the time it gets to the deputy secretary and so what you don't want to do again for operational security reasons opsec and infosec and other things you don't want to give away more than you absolutely have to with the understanding that there were classified briefings already so deputy secretary lin already knew what this program was doing you didn't have to specify it and be redundant in an unclassified document if you're trying to protect i mean the basis of the memo itself was to establish a sap so in an unclassified type document the last thing you want to do is provide something classified that's so sensitive that it should be a sap and and yet reveal it in an unclassified document so it it's it's not it's not a leap of faith to to understand why you're not going to see necessarily the term uap or ufo in there as we now know that that the senator has come out and said as many others have including myself that the program has always been about the the the uap issue yeah so but would that uh i mean essentially i don't know exactly the terminology of sap from the beginning would it have been uh when you came on you know they told you this is the public face of the program and then there's the secret face of the program which is about about uaps i i can't discuss anything that's classified so there were portions of that effort that were classified or or or considered sap i i would not be able to have that conversation unfortunately in in a manner like this right so so you that was 2007 2008 it kind of transitioned into the uh the the a-tip program which i guess was kind of a was that a a refinement of the goals or a broadening of the goals no i think it was a refinement of the goals it was it was really a closing of the aperture where ossoff was a bit of a shotgun approach um a tip a tip took more of a of a concentrated more laser-focused approach really focusing on the nuts and bolts of what is it and how does it work okay so uh so you're working at uh at atip and uh at some point you become the director of eight tip uh when about did that happen 2010 2010 so uh you'd been there like two or three years and so you're the director of atip what's your actual responsibilities and your kind of day-to-day responsibilities running atip sure well it was the same as as the director before me uh basically you're managing a portfolio and sometimes uh it's it can be pretty boring sometimes you don't have any really anything to do within that portfolio other times uh it could be pretty pretty hair-raising and and pretty crazy so it really it depended on the day in the situation uh what information was coming in uh sometimes there was nothing to do and other times it was it was all hands on deck and what it was it was triaging information trying to determine if if if what is being encountered is is a a blue force something our own technology maybe we have some sort of capability that we're using or testing in the area we didn't do a very good job coordinating coordinating with other other elements uh within the department or is it a red force is it is there is there a detected enemy or or foreign adversarial technology in the area that we are aware of right uh or is it something else with the hope that you know it was one of the first two things it was only after through through an extensive and exhaustive process of of of deduction were we able to in some cases look at some of these and say okay these fall really outside the parameter of anything that we have and and that we're pretty sure that that our adversaries have and those were the ones that really now left your head scratching you have to do a lot of analysis and research on and get a whole bunch of folks involved with and say okay what what are we dealing with and by the way assuming this is what what what the cameras are seeing the radar seeing in the eyewitness are seeing what are some of the physics and technologies that could explain this type of performance characteristic if that if that makes sense so you say like when stuff is coming in uh was there kind of like a pipeline that kind of directed stuff to you was the kind of like uh you get pilot reports obviously of like pilots seeing things in the sky uh but were there like kind of reporting guidelines that would kind of direct that they were reporting channels they weren't reporting guidelines at the time sadly that's one of the things we really lacked there were several pipelines that had been established there were we were getting information through various channels because those channels knew that we were around the problem was it was a bit of a catch-22 the more you want people to report then the more they know who you are and what you're doing right and then the more upset issues you have so um you know it's it's kind of like going out and saying look if you see anything unusual report it well what does that mean unusual what if i see a big wave in the ocean if i see a manatee swimming across the bow of the ship if i see a russian submarine or or an interesting looking cloud what what does that mean something interesting right so uh that was always a challenge say well you know something that might be in the sky you know in the sky what do you mean or something might be under the boat just report and then we'll determine if it's interesting or not sounds like you you'd have to filter out a lot of stuff if you have kind of very kind of vague criteria for uh yeah yeah and and unfortunately it was not as as organized or structured as as i would like that we're seeing now where there's formal you know reporting change and there's policies and there's there's teams dedicated to triage this information and get it to the right people so say a pilot report comes in and he says like i i saw a cigar-shaped object in front of my craft and it followed me for a minute and then vanished and you got that report what would you do with that well first of all is you want to identify if there's any other cooperating information right is it is it one pilot or were there sever pilots was there any radar data collected and not just from that aircraft but were there other maybe sensitive platforms in the area that maybe even the pilot didn't even know about right that were operating in that same area that we could then pull that data and look at uh was there any pod camera footage for example or or gun camera footage available electro optical data that then we could you know compare and contrast that compared to the radar data compared to the eyewitness reports and kind of cross layer all that information to give us a better what we call a cop common operating picture um so was this uh like did you have like say a uh a task team you don't sit around a table and you go over it or was one person take it away and look at it or multiple no no we had a test team no we did absolutely right we had an internet a small interagency team of individuals who had very specialized training in certain things so some might be electro optical engineers right and they understand uh you know what a a a weather balloon looks like at 30 000 feet from all different angles right you might have several aerospace engineers that can talk about performance characteristics at that altitude right because not all things behave the same way at altitudes right um and then you have other individuals i'll give you an example if i may make um and i've done this a few times this is a training aid that i that i've i've had for a very long time and i don't know if you can see that uh on camera but it's a profile of an aircraft and on the back of it is uh details of the aircraft from various different perspectives and you can see here here's some other ones here of different aircraft uh in this particular case front side bottom top you name it here's one of another aircraft from the bottom and the bottom line is that uh individuals in the department of defense many of them are trained to understand what enemy and adversarial and allied aircraft look like there's profiles and you have to be able to very quickly identify what we call friend or foe and and frankly your survival oftentimes depends upon that and so we had experts that understood what what enemy aircraft looked like their silhouettes if you will from various different perspectives under various different weather conditions under all different types of scenarios in order to better um understand what we're dealing with and sometimes we were lucky because they would come up and say look actually what you're seeing here is an su-22 for example uh doing a 60 degree maneuver uh probably about a 3g turn at this altitude and this is why you're you're you're seeing what you're seeing right and that that case where oh kind of rub rub the sweat off your forehead and close the book and say okay great you know that's that's the plausible answer that we're dealing with here um but in other cases you know it it it really was it was as i've said before such a such a effort of mental gymnastics to try to come up with uh what it could have been that um it was it was extremely unlikely right right so you would you have like uh you know an official designation that this has been determined to be unidentified or determined to be a uap yes correct okay yeah that's it there was a threshold and once once you met that threshold uh and that's why the five observables were so important for us because we we knew what traditional aircraft could do and technology we knew what um you know very exotic technology but still technology that that we had could do we were aware of the technology we were developing and what its performance characteristics were and it's only when you you really got outside of that paradigm and you had something that was far exceeding those performance characteristics if you will well beyond that envelope of not of not of only what we're what we have now but what we're trying to build in the future um that's when you really were stuck with with with the difficult um you know idea that maybe maybe we're dealing with something else um again trying not to describe an origin very roughly like how how many kind of i guess uh certified uaps uh would you have come across in your your time at daytime unfortunately more than than we're comfortable with uh you know we wanted to find a solution for all of them unfortunately i can't give you an exact figure but enough where where uh the system became energized and and now you're seeing uh increased reporting coming out um if you're having classified briefings being provided to to elected officials in congress um because of that and again not we not ascribing an origin to this because i know people are always saying you know lou you said for the record you know before that it could be u.s it could be foreign adversarial but you think it's you know something different well yeah but that's why i don't like to offer my opinion because at the end of the day we have to let the data speak for itself we can't ascribe just because i think it might be something we have to really avoid that temptation and let the data speak for itself and at this point we simply just don't have enough data to make a some sort of of of conclusion as to what this is so uh okay i'm moving on from from a tip not to no we can really move away from it but like moving on to the the ttsa period of time uh the to the stars academy in 2017 uh you resigned from from adept and you joined tom de long's to the stars academy and at the same time there was a new york times article that came out glowing auras and black money and i believe at least one of the videos i think was the gimbal video came out in that article and around that time uh ttsa was releasing that video and the the floor one video from the nimitz at the same time was this was this kind of like uh all happening together kind of coordinated you know you're talking to leslie keane and you're talking to tom delong and it's all kind of one big thing that's happening in this this time in fact i i never i never went to speak to to anybody in the press in fact i i didn't even want to i would my hope was that when i went with tom delong it was going to be somewhat subdued uh he asked me said hey do you mind i'm doing a a kind of an internet type announcement for for this effort to bring awareness do you mind saying a few words like yeah i saw and i thought steve justice was there and and we had some other folks i said yeah hal okay yeah i'm i'm happy to say a few things hal i've had worked with me obviously on a tip um but i i did not reach out to the new york times it was not me who discussed with leslie kane initially anything about the program she had her own sources and somehow she had that video i did not provide it to her and honestly and i didn't ask where she got it because i i frankly didn't want to know um you know it really wasn't my business and and i don't want to you know overcomplicate things unnecessarily the bottom line is she asked me to meet with her i did i answered her questions um of course there were questions i couldn't because i'm not going to talk about anything that's classified it was my my impression she had spoken to other people quite a few other people before she had spoken to me because she was asking me some very pointed very relevant questions in fact a few i was a bit uncomfortable to answer um because it showed that she had a lot more insight into the topic than than i would have expected her to have so she she had a pretty decent understanding of of of of that effort already um and i suspect that there were people that had spoken to her so you were involved in getting the the videos declassified so that ttsa could use them and at the same time having them reviewed and so okay so this is let me that's a great question mick and i think there's a lot of confusion there people say well you got them declassified okay the portions of the videos that people see were never classified okay they were residing on a classified system but they were never classified the portions let me stay say it again the portions that that have been publicly released were never classified and are not classified okay so my part in that and it was after speaking with my office it was general consensus but i was a senior guy so as my signature was try to get these videos released the unclassified portions so they could be brought out to a wider audience for a more generalized distribution and analysis because we did not after banging our heads against the wall for for quite a few years on this type of stuff we realized that within the intelligence community we weren't we were we were we weren't getting the answers we needed nobody could unders nobody could tell us what was going on so we said look why don't we go ahead try to get these videos put out to a broader audience maybe industry partners and whatnot to come out and take a look at these things and see if they can help us with figuring out what the heck these things are if these are if they have ever seen anything like this before and and maybe there's a rational explanation that that you know for the life of us we just can't figure out yeah and so uh uh the you you filled out this i got this form here this 1910 1910 yeah is this you did you fill this form out uh get it declassified well i can't see too well what you're holding up i presume it is the same one so i'm getting on good faith see if my camera can focus there it is uh yeah again i i i presume that's that's the same one yeah it's it says uh go fast gimbal and flare at the top of it yeah title yeah mpeg file times three yep right uh and now it says here like on the form there's a stamp that says uh cleared i'll focus in a sec there we go uh cleared for open publication now does that mean that it's basically anyone in the public can can have it and you can that's correct that's exactly what that means there's if you look at the actual dod directive i'm dobser there are only there is no initially when i ask them hey i'd like to keep this in very controlled channels their response to me was you can't do that either it's releasable to everybody or it's not so i said well that's fine i'm happy if you're okay with it being released to everybody the general public that's your call that's not my call and yeah there was some dispute over that i think some uh some spokesperson uh said that you had to agree to what it says on the form and on the form uh it says not for publication research and analysis only uh so because you don't you don't publish videos okay this is not a book so adopts are primarily if you look at the mission of dobson even though everything has to go through the security review for pre-publication review you you release videos you don't publish videos you publish books right you don't publish videos so that's why you're sitting there not for publication this is not we're not talking about a book this is for research and analysis these are videos that we want people to look at so they can tell us what it is is going on here and the emails exchanges you see between dobser and myself they say in their hey look you know we don't have a problem with these going out at all and in fact if you look at the dobson regulations that category when it says releasable to everybody that means releasable to everybody that's that's that is in the definition of the actual adopts or little handbook that is publicly available for anybody to read and that by the way is not my stamp that's that stops your stamp yeah yeah so that means that they have cleared that's true all right so um this this you said these three segments of these videos were um you know not classified they were in a classified system and so you had to get them cleared to get off that classified system and you know you're saying segments and that kind of implies that there's uh longer versions of those videos available have you seen the longer version i i i can't go into that unfortunately um you know if if longer portions exist uh that's not for me to to discuss all right so i could say that go ahead i'm sorry the the title of the videos uh that they they list it here uh go fast gimbal and fleer where did those titles come from oh i couldn't tell you uh i mean here i mean if i could take a guess here flir is forward looking infrared right but who comes up with these titles well usually who whoever the owner of the film is right so so when the film was first taken it's put on let's say let's take the nimitz for example uh that would be that video came to us already with with the the name on it and the metadata and everything else that's contained in that video so right whoever is the the originator of that um you know would be the one who usually usually assigns the name in the first place but do you personally know the significance of the three names uh i don't only what i would presume to be you know again fleeing right forward looking at me i don't think it stands for you know that often yeah talking about the 1910 let's see if i can just get this up here uh right here it says uh uavs uavs balloons and other uas now uav is unmanned aerial vehicle uas would be in i think an unmanned aerial system and balloons why why did you mention those three things on the forum because when people are going to look at it they're going to say what is this and unfortunately that is an unclassified document understand we had been reeling from the wikileaks situation we knew that our systems had been compromised and we also had a very significant insider threat so the last thing i was going to do was try to compromise overtly an ongoing sensitive effort to the open public knowing that our systems could be compromised that is an unclassified document and i have to submit it in that unclassified manner i don't have any other option if you look at the 1910 the directions are you have to provide this in an unclassified manner which is the 1910. you can't classify it so so how do you again this goes back to the same same logic with harry reid you can't put an unclassified memo to the deputy secretary of defense with classified information in it so how do you do that well you you can't so what you do to make sure that you are okay is you make sure that the oca the original classification authority is the one who's ultimately going to approve the release of that who does know the significance of those videos right and that's why you see in there where they said look you know you need to check with the original classification authority which was well not going to say it was but it went to that office and they turn around and said yes these are truly unclassified and in fact we took it a step further um my office because of of the the uniqueness of these videos we actually went to two of the most senior foreign disclosure officers fdos in the entire department of defense to have them actually review the videos and say okay even though now dobster has said they are unclassified and the oca has agreed that they aren't classified we have the release we want to do one extra level of due diligence just to make sure is there any possibility that releasing these videos if they come out to the public domain can cause some sort of compromise of national security information if it gets into foreign adversarial hands and that's why we went that extra step and we went why why why balloons why did you use balloons as a generic descriptor well let's go back to the beginning of our conversation uh which i i i think you agreed with me maybe maybe not that that anything is a uas until it's not right anything is a uap until it's not unmanned aerial system well what does that mean well if it's not a human being inside it then it is technically a uas it is an unmanned it's aerial and it's just some sort of system same thing with uap so you know it's it's it's not disingenuous to say that because we quite frankly don't know what we're dealing with now clearly in the videos we're probably looking at something that is not that um after an extensive analysis that was done and i know some people argue about that and that's fine well i'm just about to argue about that actually sure because i'm one of the people has done a lot of analysis uh you know independently on on these three videos and i like to talk about them and kind of get your take i don't have you ever seen any of the videos that i put out analyzing these videos i i am aware of your work mr west okay okay all right so uh let's start with the fleur video the nimitz video and uh my hypothesis there is that it's some kind of distant flying uh plane or drone or something like that and that uh it doesn't make any sudden movements now a lot of people that look at this video it's kind of this blurry video taken by chad underwood it's very low resolution and you see the thing kind of jumping around but i think it always coincides with a change in the camera system and i did a detailed breakdown where i went through the video one step at a time saw when the camera had changed or there was some kind of camera rotation or a lens change or change from um you know ir to tv mode and it was always correlated with some kind of movement of the object and a loss of lock and then a regaining a block until the final thing where there was one big camera movement and there was a loss of lock and it just didn't regain the lock and then the camera changed from tracking mode to uh i believe the ground tracking mode and then the object itself went off to the side um are you aware of like uh well well first of all like what do you think of that analysis if you if you're familiar with this at all and do you think well i i think take it away i think well i let me answer great questions and you have a couple questions there so i want to make sure i'm thorough and answer them appropriately do i think your analysis is valuable absolutely it's always valuable did we conduct our own analysis absolutely very comprehensive analysis um did we come up with the same conclusion you did we did not and my question to you would be is you're looking at the video um are you certain that there's not other video or perhaps that there's also uh perhaps radar data that correlates with what the pilot testimony that would be great but unfortunately you know i've only got the video to go by but my point there isn't really that there may be other data is that people are taking the video itself and they're saying this video itself shows these things like chad underwood says this video shows the object flying off very rapidly at the side within the the unidentified tv program on the history channel it was claimed that this video itself was evidence of the object flying off and i would put it that the video itself could be interpreted as just a regular object not making any sudden moves i i think your interpretation is is i think you're certainly entitled to to your own opinions and your own interpretation i will tell you with my experience uh take it for what it's worth that was not the interpretation and we look at things in the government we tend to look at things holistically we try to avoid single source reporting uh from an intelligence perspective it's kind of a no-no for us right just like in reporter and the world of reporting you never look at a single source um and so that's why it's important to look at these videos in the greater context of um in the manner in which they were taken and the circumstances so you know anybody can look at a video and we see all the time videos that that show things that appear to be marvelous and then turn out to be not so much right and then in hindsight uh there's also other examples where you look at something and something seems to be fairly rudimentary and all of a sudden you realize after some careful analysis that it's actually extraordinary um and i would be my caution to everybody anybody out there is when you're looking at a video understand that a video itself is only going to tell you so much and that's why you need additional information to look at that can either cooperate or refute that information and based upon my experience in the a-tip program there is certainly additional information that made it um very very compelling and again people are going to say well what is it lou why don't you tell us i mean we want to know well i i i can't but but that information is starting to come out and when you look at that data that's compared to not only what you see on the game camera footage what you hear with the eyewitness testimony what you see on the uh the hawkeye radar information which is backed up by the spy 1 radar data from the princeton and possibly and i'm not going to say yes or no other sensors that were in the area at the time now you've got a much more complete picture of what's actually going on it would be great if i could get that picture of course but unfortunately i'm i'm just like you know a member of the public all i have access to is this one video but let's move on to the next one and i respect that tremendously and this is why mr west i wanted to have this conversation with you because i think i i think it's unfair for for i think it's unfair for me to criticize you and i think it's unfortunate i'd be happy for you to criticize me no it's not it's it's not a personal thing i i think everybody is entitled to i didn't mean that i mean just criticize specific things that i've said it's fine like if i've said something that i you think is wrong i'll be happy to be pretty sure well there's a difference between being critical analysis and criticizing and and i don't think i don't think we i think less critical okay uh the gimbal video is a bit more self-contained uh i think because there isn't that much kind of uh other stuff associated with it at least in public uh the gimbal video shows what looks like a flying saucer type thing and it's got this this this aura around it and that was kind of reflected in the the title of the new york times article glowing auras and black money uh but the aura was later discovered to be just kind of a standard artifact of the infrared um the infrared camera system is this thing called an unsharp mask which uh creates uh contrast in the boundaries between light and dark uh and yet this was something that was it was promoted on the ptsa site that there was an aura on the new york times thing it was unidentified why wasn't this discovered if it's such a fairly simple thing that it's uh it's just an artifact of the camera even jeremy corbell now admits that it's just an artifact of the camera why wasn't this discovered right from the start well because i i don't subscribe to that i think you can you can look at something and say oh it's it's a artifact of the of the infrared and heat signature but are you sure there was even a heat signature creating that i mean i don't know the physics what creates that and whether it is something naturally occurring or not um but there are other explanations what you see on a camera you can say well this explains that well but there's other things that do too and you're assuming that it had it had a heat signature right um because what do you mean by a heat signature though i think there's a lot of confusion as to what what a heat signature means so from your infrared so infrared in a technical perspective you're looking at at light wave energy below the visible spectrum of the red uh frequency right so infra red which means below red and you're usually typically dealing with that type of signature can be can be attributed to heat right infrared you use like we use infrared cameras um so if you're getting a picture of something aren't you getting a heat signature it's an infrared camera you can only see it if it has a heat signature well that's not true you you what you see is contrasting in temperatures it's not necessarily heat you can also see with infrared cameras cold spots which is the absence of heat so my point being is that you know we have to be very careful when we're looking at something if we see something that that fits a conventional model well okay great but i guess my my word of advice to anybody and this is including folks in the government as well always look at the second and third order layers of data it's important not to and this is what we found in atip in some cases it would help us find conventional explanations in other cases it didn't you know if you see something an accident on the street for example you see two cars collide and one naturally assumes one car hit the other well okay it may appear that way but but you have to start that's where the investigation really is important that investigative process to make sure you're you're not assuming or presuming something simply based upon looking at something in a video sure sure um yeah it's really looks like to me it looks like it is a glare of a heat signature which would be like something like a jet like my my broader hypothesis with this is that you know if you have a heat source which i'm simulating here with a light source and you shine into the camera then you get this glare around it which is much bigger than the heat source and we see this in videos of of jets the heat source covers the jet itself it actually something that does actually happen it does happen you're right that's called lens flare yeah uh that's not really lens flare lens flare is the reflection though this is lens flare over here uh the reflection within the lens this is glare uh yeah but but your lens flare is creating a a halo effect if you will from the object and so a lot of people have said well this is you know this is an artifact of the camera or this is lens flare or this is a you know an uneven distribution of of light energy as you say from from from a heat source creating this this you know fuzziness if you will of this this uh this aura um but you know again you have to understand temperature differences you have to understand differences you have to all those things to determine i have done a lot of research on on this uh but you know one thing that you have really i think sways the argument here is that in the gimbal video you've got this this sausage-shaped thing in the middle which you say might not be a a glib i think it's a glare and at some point you see it rotate which is very strange and it's the thing that gets everybody excited but if you look at the high high quality versions of the video that were finally released by the dod you see that um the horizon stays solid it stays at a certain angle um i think it'd be this angle and then you see this thing in the middle here and you see it the shape of this thing rotate but you also see light patterns in the sky rotate uh coincidentally with uh this thing here at the same time uh which seems to suggest to me that that it is in fact the rotation isn't a rotation of the object itself it's a rotation of the something in the camera system which is causing these these reflected internal patterns to rotate and this glare to rotate is that something that was even considered yes sure was but you know when you look at the horizon the horizon doesn't change right that's that's the whole point though i mean no they it wouldn't change because uh there's this thing in the cameras called a de-rotation mechanism uh that corrects for the the gross gimbal movements of the camera you know you know the the thing it's a 500 pound six foot long pod and it's got this very heavy like front thing at the end and wait it when that thing does a big rotation that thing itself weighs like 80 pounds or something it's got it's got these big gears grinding and it kind of jutters around so they try to minimize the use of that and they use the internal um steered mirrors to actually track things most of the time but when it transitions over zero degrees it has to rotate and we see that in the videos you actually see it in the floor one video than in this video and we see it in the gimbal video that there is a rotation uh and it seems like the entire light field rotates and this little object rotates which really suggests to me that it's the only way you're gonna get a horizon to stay strong let's go back to then some some study here let me grab here grab this for a second forgive me this nail represents an object flying and this is a horizon line the only way i'm going to be able to demonstrate this rotating and this staying straight is if i have two different cameras one focused on this and one focused on this and the one that's focusing on this doesn't change while the one focusing on this does change in this particular case you have one camera focusing on both the horizon and the object itself and the orientation of the horizon does not change consistent with the orientation of the object inside furthermore you have you have you have the eyewitness testimony of the individuals who got pretty up close and personal to this thing as it was rotating and again you're seeing it we have good do we do we actually have eyewitness testimony i think we have we have the audio on the tape itself but yeah we have a little bit of stuff you might not have it but it's there you have it you have so you you say that i'm a civilian right now i'm no longer a public servant so i don't have it now but i'm i'm very well aware of that case yeah i think uh respectfully uh i don't think you understand the the argument i'm making with the rotating glare and the horizon and the maybe nice and stable please please explain uh we don't really i think we really have time to get into it but basically uh the camera system is mounted on two axes uh externally the big you know external 600 pound thing uh and because because of that you can't actually track something from left to right ahead of the the forward position just with that gimbal system uh so when it transitions zero degrees and this is something that's mentioned in the pattern it has to do a rotation a physical rotation of the whole system now this would make the image rotate so to counter that it has an internal system called a derotation system which rotates the image back so that the horizon doesn't move so you've got this this camera going like this and then it does this little flip and then it carries on or it does a couple of them uh corrections kind of try to minimize image disruption and then uh then then it's de-rotated this image is de-rotated so from the pilot's perspective you don't see anything it just looks like you're tracking from left to right across zero degrees everything is fine but because there's been a rotation of the camera and because the glare is relative to the orientation of the camera this makes the glare rotate but the horizon not rotate i'm not sure i'm tracking i i apologize i i think what you're saying is that the the software is correcting is somehow keeping the horizon line straight um but because the physical attribute of the camera having to rotate the object is rotating but i i'm not familiar with the system not flipping the the if you're going to rotate the object while not rotating the horizon yeah it's not rotating the object though it's rotating a glare like a the shape of the glare uh like like oh my teacher saying oh okay okay yeah yeah you're saying the okay so you're presuming or assuming that the object inside is is not even perhaps a knob you're just you're just referring to the to if it was a glare and yeah well i mean i think it's i think it's an object like you know this flashlight is an object but when we turn it to the camera all we see is the glare and then if i was to rotate this camera uh you could see the glare rotate even though yeah so so what your what your hypothesis is correct me if i'm wrong but let me i just want to make sure i get this correct your hypothesis is that the object that that is that is creating that glare you're not actually seeing in the camera you're only seeing the glare is that one yeah so yeah so i'm thinking you're looking basically at the tailpipe of an f a18 that's like you know 10 miles away no i i understand what you're saying i i will have to respectfully dis disagree um and again uh please don't i'm not um i'm certainly not trying to be argumentative here but the data that that we had did not did not demonstrate that you were just looking at at a glare uh all right we've already got eight minutes left so i want to just really quickly get on to uh the go fast video uh okay uh now the gophers video it was said originally that it was a low and fast object but if you do the math on the the range and the angles that are shown on screen you can see that it's actually a high and slow object are you familiar with this discrepancy well i'm familiar with the alleged discrepancy but that is not the position of those that were inside the government um so you know i i i'm always i think an alternative hypothesis is always uh interesting and always worth having a discussion about it's pretty straightforward math though i mean would that imply that the the readings that are displayed on screen are actually wrong the angle and the range well that's a question we'd have to go back with isn't it that's a question that we'd have to go back and and figure out why there's a discrepancy uh i can tell you that that several individuals that were very qualified particularly in that particular collection platform uh were able to discern that this was an object that was indeed moving at a fairly fast speed i can't tell you what that speed is uh but i but i know what that's what was indicated to me after quite a bit of analysis and by the way let me make this clear it wasn't world according to luke or it wasn't even world according to atyp we we had truly some of the finest engineers and scientists and and other organizations within the intelligence community providing that data to us because we're not engineers right so we really needed those experts to tell us what it is we were seeing and then the discussion with the pilots were also very interesting because according to them and according to again radar data not just what you see in the camera that the performance characteristics of of this object in particular the way i presume you're talking about again go fast is that correct yeah yeah that that there was some uh very compelling um signatures associated with that with that video all right so you you have access so you've had access uh to addition i do not have access now and and let me again let me make this clear because i have a non-disclosure agreement with the government and i know it drives people nuts but i do not have access to that data now or anymore but fortunately there are people in the government that do and they have a lot more information than just that so again i guess my word of advice to anybody not not just you but anybody even even to myself and everybody we try our best to avoid single source reporting it's very important to when you are looking at something have all the available data that you can have in order to cross-reference um what you're seeing because seeing something is only part of the picture and again remember what you're seeing may only be a portion of of of an event it may not be the entire event all right uh wait i know i'm not going to get to all my questions that i have here but i want to just do one more thing that i want to discuss briefly with you the uh there was a chase there was a case uh published by leslie keane in the huffington post about the chilean navy the chilean navy they saw a object ahead of them and it looked like it was just some kind of black blob on the ir and they couldn't really make it out in the tv mode it started spewing out some stuff out of the back and it was investigated as a ufo by uh safer i think ce ffa oh yes if i looked like a contrail like a black contract coming out at the end yes i think i'm familiar with it yeah and that was something they investigated for two years and leslie keane if you look at her original article she said like he was highly trained navy pilots who were you know trained to observe these things and then they had this whole team of people they all sat around the table and they sent out uh to other places to get get sources and they looked at the radar data uh in the area i can tell you from my perspective and i also want to say this i'm unqualified to make this assessment you know to me it looks when you look at the video looks like a plane looks like an aircraft traveling at a relative you know cruising altitude cruising speed but i wasn't there for that and i i will tell you now i do not nor did i have access to any of the data that the that uh the chilean military had access to so i i guess my point here is that you know we've got this this group of highly trained people like the chilean i mean i'm probably not as good as the the us the u.s navy but yeah they're still there no they're good people hey listen you know what to to fly a multi-million dollar weapon system there's no such thing as not being good there may be people that are better but they're all good yeah i think it's a helicopter pilot uh but my point is they couldn't figure out what it was after two years and then they released the video and uh within a week people on the internet tracked down exactly what plane it was it was as you said it was a plane uh and those things that looked like contrails were actually contrails there were a type of control called aerodynamics surprised yeah uh but you know if that big team of people can spend two years looking at something and get it wrong what's to say that you haven't done that yeah well i can't speak for the chile again back to what i said i can't speak for for the chilean armed forces i i don't know when they had who they had looking at it i can only speak from my perspective with the united states government um you know you're asking me to to hypothesize the the capabilities of of aerospace engineers if they were used at all in chile right but a bunch of nerds on the internet figured it out in in less than a week i think it was about three days before that itself was i think that's testimony to to the wonderful world of of social media the world wide web this is exactly why the uap issue on on social media and as we're seeing now on twitter is is so good because you you're getting a lot of different perspectives in a lot of different minds looking at the looking at the same object but i i can tell you what you what i saw in that chilean video um for me is is not what compelled me to continue to pursue this in the government uh what i was privy to was far more compelling than than what i saw in that chilean video and by the way no disrespect to to anybody who's been part of that chilean video analysis because again i i don't know them personally and it's not a personal thing for me my honest opinion it looks like a like a typical standard aircraft probably a commercial plane uh you know maybe with a slight increase in altitude and you're looking at its contrails probably from twin engine i suspect i don't know for sure uh but it looked like that to me the interesting thing about that case is if you look at it it is actually uh you can't see the plane in the infrared all you can see is the glare of the engines which is a lot bigger than the plane which is very similar to the gimbal gimbal video but i guess my point here is uh i think this is why i don't entirely believe and i don't believe you i believe that you know what you're saying is true but i think there is possibility so that you may be mistaken in your group being mistaken even though they're highly talented people and they've got all this this extra information i still feel that because chilean government messed up well i'll tell you one thing for sure governments mess up all the time mr west and and we're fooling ourselves if they don't i mean we're not going to go into anything political here but we started wars off mistakes okay so if anybody thinks that their government is perfect you know then i've got a bridge to sell you but the government is trying and i think that when you apply you know the talent resources that we had available it paints a very compelling picture do we have the interest no that's why they're called uaps because at the end of the day we don't know what we're dealing with and maybe it is uh in some cases um you know something that can be conventionally explained in these three cases i i beg to differ but that's okay because that's that's the beauty about about this conversation ultimately you know the truth the truth has nothing to fear the truth always comes out and if it turns out to be you know a kid with remote controlled airplane with some tinfoil wrapped around it to you know spoof a camera then so be it and we have an answer right um and i i i think that's okay yeah we're all searching for forensics here and this is yeah and look as far as belief i look there's there's four categories of people and i know we're going over my time but let me let me finally just digress here sure there are four categories people the first category of those no matter what happens they're always going to be believers the second category are those people that believe now but they can probably be convinced otherwise if there's compelling information the third category of people are those people who don't believe but can probably convince otherwise if there's compelling information and the fourth category is those people who are never going to believe no matter what happens okay sure my job is not to to convince anybody of anything i'm not trying to have any i don't i don't give a damn if people believe me or not my focus has been getting the government engaged to figure this out which is what it should be doing whether it's a balloon whether it's little green men from mars whether it's a russian uh new surveillance platform or anything else the government has a job to figure it out and not ignore it period full stop and so that is what compels me to continue doing what i'm doing and have this conversation openly with anybody who wants to have it i don't get paid a penny for this i don't have my youtube channel i'm not getting advertisements you know i'm i'm doing this because i i believe in what i'm doing and i'm not going to focus on the first category those people who who are true believers and those people who in the second the fourth category people who no matter what we'll never believe i'm not going to convince them either way it's a waste of time and so for you know i don't come out here for people to say oh you know i want you to believe in me or believe what i'm saying that's irrelevant what i'm trying to say is get the data get the government to do what it needs to do collect more data so we can figure this out that's all this is about for me because i've seen the compelling data back when i was in the pentagon and it was very compelling and i can tell you that the senators and some of the people in our government have received now similar briefings with even more relevant data and they are all unanimously coming out saying the same thing anybody who's received that classified briefing has come out and said we need to take this seriously and and that's that's my only that's really my only my only perspective in this is that i think you know i think we can both agree that we need more data yeah i'd love to have more data and and we need more transparency into this yeah i was suddenly put myself in the category of people who would be convinced uh by compelling data i would say i would love to see this this data that you unfortunately are unable to share with me uh but uh you know for now well i i think that data is is starting to come to come out yeah i do think that'll be right and it's coming out in a legal way right where nobody gets in trouble so yeah well uh i i have a huge list of questions yet to be answered unfortunately we didn't have time for it but nick i'm happy to do this again sometimes great absolutely great yeah you got it you have an open invitation stuff and a lot of people on twitter asked me to ask you questions and we don't really have time so i know you have a hard stop on the hour and you've got a few minutes over which is it's great so i just wanna thank you very much uh for this time it's been a very interesting conversation and uh thank you so much okay thank you you have an open invitation anytime great thanks i will take it up so we got it talk to you later [Music]