The Sol Forum - with guests Hal Puthoff, Jacques Vallée, and Larry Lemke

Transcript

[Music] Hello and welcome everyone to the first meeting of the Soul Forum. I'm Peter Scavenish, the co-founder and director of research and policy at the Soul Foundation. It's great to have you here as we launch this new initiative, a space for credible, serious, and elevated discussion about UAP. The soul forum is something we've been working toward for a long time. It extends the conversations that happen at our annual symposium into a regular digital format.

One that allows us to engage with you more directly and more frequently. This gives us a unique opportunity to accelerate understanding of UAP and their implications and bring us closer to public consensus about the reality. Each month we'll bring in key thinkers from government, the sciences and academia, technology, the private sector, civil society, and even the arts. These are people who are shaping the discourse on UAP and leading the way in research, science, policy, and disclosure. Following the format of Soul Symposium, the forum's meetings will consist of interviews, fireside chats, talks, and presentations, as well as panels.

But the key thing is that this isn't just about presenting information and different lines of thought. It's about engaging with all of you. That's why in future meetings, we'll be taking questions submitted by our members, bringing your voice right into the discussion. Later in this meeting, we'll be joined by a driving force at Soul, my colleague and friend Mara Mendria, our director of strategy, and she'll talk about the foundation's mission and work, what being a part of Soul means, and how you can get involved in shaping where we go by becoming a member. After this meeting closes, we'll also be hosting a Zoom breakout room for members of the Soul Foundation.

This is an opportunity to continue the conversation in a smaller, more intimate, and more interactive setting. If you're a member, don't forget to register via Zoom. All that aside, we're here for something very special and exciting, which is a discussion of some of the very foundations of current research and thinking about UAP. Much of this thinking and research was originally done by members of the invisible college, the network of scientists and researchers who spent decades investigating UAP and related controversial phenomenon when social stigma required that they do that quietly outside universities in academia and without recourse to normal funding sources. So to discuss this, we're joined by three people each of whom have played a major role in that history.

Dr. Hell Putoff, Larry Lemi, and Dr. Jacqu Valet. We'll be talking about their work, their views of UAP and non-human intelligence, and most importantly, what they see as being the most promising directions in the science of UAP. So, introductions.

First, we have someone well known to most of you, Dr. Hellputoff. Hell is a physicist and engineer whose work pushes the boundaries of what we consider possible in advanced energy physics. His research often focuses on areas at the very edge of the field. From consciousness studies to exotic propulsion technologies to novel methods of communication, HAL was, as most of you know, central to former Senate majority leader Harry Reid's UAP research effort, now known as OAP, and is perhaps most famous for developing with fellow fellow physicist Russell Tar the practice we know as remote viewing.

Second, we're joined by Larry Lemi, who many of you will not know. Larry is a former NASA scientist and aerospace engineer with deep expertise in propulsion, space exploration, and high energy physics. Larry's career has spanned some of the most cutting edge advancements in aerospace, and he's explored the scientific basis of UAP, bringing a rigorous analytic perspective to a subject that often defies easy explanation. He also worked recently with Gary Nolan and and another guest of ours on the analysis of alleged UAP materials. And last but not least, we have that other person, our colleague and our friend, Dr.

Jacques Balet. Jacques is a computer and information scientist, an author of several works of science fiction, a venture capitalist, and of course, a theoretician and investigator of UAP, whose scientific work on the phenomena re remains unsurpassed and indispensable for anyone pursuing research in the field. His thinking about UAP encounters across time and space and his research on data drawn from sources is disperate as field investigations, folklore, medieval art, and historical records and government reports have shaped fundamentally the way we think about UAP today. So to our guests, welcome to the first meeting of the Soul Forum. It's an honor to have each of you here and I'm excited to jump in.

So to start off, I'd like to ask you all or each of you about your background on the subject and your history of research. How did all of you get into the subject and what kind of work have you done over time? Hal, I'd like to start with you because I think your uh history of this is is less well known to people than they than they think. Okay. Well, thank you, Peter. Um, I'm a quantum physicist and uh assumed I would just just be doing quantum engineering and and those kinds of things, working on lasers and so on.

But early in my career uh as it turns out, I was uh uh a naval intelligence officer. So I got stationed at uh NSA at Fort me and while there worked on optical computing trying to increase this velocity of uh calculations by a factor of a thousand or whatever. It turns out that that uh stent as an as a Navy intelligence officer was significant because of all the clearances I had. So that meant as time went on, I began to be pulled into various kinds of classified programs. One of the early ones was when I was at Stanford Research Institute.

I had done some interesting experiments that caused the Central Intelligence Agency to approach me. They looked into my background and saw that I had all these clearances and so on. And it turns out that they were interested in of all things uh the possibility of using ESP as a um investigatory tool in in uh you know in in research because they found that the uh Russians were spending enormous amounts of uh funding uh to see if ESP could be used as sort of an espionage tool. Well, I'd never particularly thought about that, but anyway, they gave me uh a small contract and said, "Would I look into it?" Uh, they were hoping basically that I would find out that it was all nonsense and they could dismiss it and not have to worry about it. But we began some experiments with some famous quote psychics like Engle Swan and so on.

And it turned out that we found that uh this was a consciousness ability that apparently some people had. In fact, there was a bell curve and to some degree as with athletic ability or musical ability, basically anybody could uh exhibit this uh kind of phenomenon. And so that took off and ended up being a 20 plus year activity for CIA, DIA, many uh army, navy, intelligence groups and so on. So that's how I got involved in what we labeled uh remote viewing uh as as a better term than say ESP and so on. Um so then uh after a period I uh left uh Stanford Research Institute to set up the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin and Earth International and uh because uh being a physicist and of course tuning into uh the fact that there was a lot of discussion in conspiracy groups and elsewhere about UFOs and all that kind of thing as It looks like we've got a problem with hell there.

So, um, until he comes back, I'm gonna It could hurt your career. So, anyways, uh, you know, sort of behind the scenes, I began to meet with various, uh, people like Shock Fillet and others to just generally discuss the UAP area, the sort of invisible college as as we came to call it. because of my involvement in that at one point uh as it turns out that Bigalow Aerospace uh got a contract from uh the Defense Intelligence Agency to set up the so-called OAP program advanced aerospace systems applications program to investigate UAP and that was the first time that uh I was sort of invited into you know become become an actual player in the UAP field. And my particular assignment was to find out whatever I could in any way I could about the technologies that might be involved in UAP. At the time it was highly classified, but now generally uh much of what we did in that program is now now open literature.

Uh if I can show you three I'll show you three slides to the kinds of uh investigations that we did. So if uh Ross will put up those slides. So we're basically asked to investigate every possible technology or approach that might have something to do with uh UAP technologies. And so this first slide shows a number of areas that we investigated. Next slide, please.

Again you can see we covered the waterfront as far as we were concerned. Uh third slide. So basically the idea was uh any area of science that might uh have some contribution to the UAP field. We really wanted to collect as much data as we could. So in fact I commissioned 38 papers to experts around the world to say where their field would be by the year 2050.

We figured that was probably the best way of getting the most advanced data on on on all these fields. And so uh that's what we did for the for the OAP program. And because of that we eventually went on to the ATIP program advanced aerospace threat identification program run by Lu Alzando. and then later on uh you know propose some programs elsewhere. That kind of summarizes uh how I got uh directly involved in in these kinds of issues and thank you Hal and Larry I think you know people know a lot less about you than they do uh Helen and Jacques.

So, you know, tell us a bit how did a NASA scientist and and uh engineer become interested in UAP and how how did your educational background influence your uh your interest and and your uh view of the phenomena? Okay. Well, thank you uh Peter. Um well I guess my uh intellectual journey uh with regard to the UIP UFO topic uh started in uh 10th grade English class. Uh the teacher decided that we needed to uh have a uh uh a course on debate classic you know debate practice and theory. So um we were told to you know pair up with another student and uh choose a topic and uh go research it and uh come back in two weeks and you know be prepared to do a classical you know pro and con debate on the thing.

So I was approached by someone a friend a guy I who later became a close friend and said let's let's um let's do this and I I said okay fine and what's the topping? He says, "Well, let's talk about uh UFOs or, you know, flying saucers as it was known." Then I said, "Okay, fine." So, we flipped the coin and I got the pro side of the argument and he got the con side of the argument. So, we we went off and spent, you know, two weeks in the library researching all this and came back and and did our debate. And at the end of it, I um it was kind of the first time I'd ever really taken a you know kind of a close look at the phenomenon and and at that time of course uh there there wasn't really a whole lot of literature in the uh the library and and so on. But nevertheless it it kind of you know piqued my curiosity and just it kind of stayed with me. It was like I realized that there was an interesting story here somewhere.

So then I went off to college and my first undergraduate degree was in psychology and um so I uh you know kind of stayed in touch with the the field as much as you could by just reading sort of uh um the public literature and um uh kind of by the end of that time when I was about to get my undergraduate degree in psychology the um the Condan committee report came out and so I read it, you know, cover to cover and u and that was interesting because it was the first time that I'd really seen a concentrated uh technical treatment of the subject with just lots of, you know, classic cases and first rate in many cases scientific analysis and whatnot. But I was, you know, very skeptical of the thing. And so anyway, I went to uh some of my uh professors who were all, you know, very uh well accomplished clinicians in many cases and and I um and I wanted to explore what has become known as the psychosocial um hypothesis which is basically that you know flying saucers and are not real. UAPs are not real and therefore anybody who reports them is basically, you know, psychologically malfunctioning in some way, lying or they're hallucinating or misinterpreting or, you know, whatever. So, I went to some of my my professors and and I, you know, asked for their their position on this and and to my surprise, they uh none of them bought that explanation.

Um and and these were people who dealt with you know hallucinations and and you know personality disorders and all that that stuff every day. So that to me was kind of a surprise and then um but after that I I decided to change course uh entirely and go in in a technical direction. So I I went back and and got an undergraduate degree in physics. And so, um, again, as time went by, I I went and talked to some of my physics professors and colleagues and and, um, asked them what they thought of this. He says, "Well, you know, it's it's not physically possible.

The distances are too large and so forth and so on." So, so it's it's not a physics problem, basically. So, they they were pointing back at the psychologists, right? And so then finally for graduate work I went to to uh to Stanford in aerospace engineering. And so now I started looking at the whole thing from from the standpoint of an engineer. And uh and I realized that um you know you you you go to a first rate um program in aerospace engineering, they teach you how to make things that fly. and uh they clearly weren't teaching anything that had that could even remotely approach the performance of of UFOs if you you know assume that they're real.

And so finally out of that I realized that there here I I looked at this kind of from this background of three different disciplines and everybody was pointing to somebody else for the answer. Um nobody had the answer. none of those um disciplines really would would own the problem at all. And and that's when I realized that well okay um none of them had a paradigm that would encompass this and uh you know that was kind of around the time when uh the structure of scientific revolutions was was out there and Thomas you know and talking about paradigms and everything and so it kind of finally dawned on me that just from a uh strictly intellectual standpoint we we needed to have to expand our paradigms somewhere somehow to explain this. Um, and then uh probably what um pushed me over the the edge out of the armchair and into the field was uh the fact that I had a very good what I consider a very good UFO or UAP sighting in October of uh 1989.

And uh it was it was out in the desert in you know Southern California. It lasted for like 45 minutes. Um I had I a witness my brother was with me and um I had we had plenty of time to observe it from many different angles and different aspects and go through all the different hypotheses of you know balloons and helicopters and airplanes and swamp gas and whatever. And uh at the end of it um I had to admit that I had seen a very good UAP display. Larry, that's Larry, that's a remarkable trajectory and and thanks for that.

And and I I really like what you you had to say about um uh engineers, physicists, and psychologists all pointing the finger at each other and saying, "Okay, I you're the one who should have the explanation." I think that's a good segue into Jacques who who has um Jacques you've you've said that uh that that problem with uh everyone thinking someone else has an explanation uh extends even further uh across the sciences and institutions. Now, Jacques, people know your work. Um, uh, they know you as, uh, really a unsurpassed figure on this, but a lot of people don't know how you were first, uh, became interested in the subject. Um, and I believe that has to do with an incident that took place at a observatory where, um, you witnessed the destruction of some, uh, data concerning UAP. Well, I grew up um, in love with physics and math and so on.

and uh was uh interested in uh entering uh you know the field of astronomy in in France and then uh by the time I was uh about 15 I saw a UFO. So, you know, like very much like Larry, after that, um, you're, you know, you're committed to trying to find some answers that are not necessarily in in the books that they give you in, in school. So, um, the the object we saw, um, my mother saw it first. We lived in a small town about an hour outside of Paris. And um this was a beautiful afternoon in the summer, the blue sky, very clear.

This would have been in 1955, which takes us back quite a bit. And uh it was pretty much like what people are reporting now, a clear disc with a dome on top. It seemed to be um about half a mile away from where where we were. Um my mother called um called me. I was working with my father inside the house.

So I rushed out and saw that disc. Um and again it was uh motionless noise, no noise and it was very clear. The the next day I uh I told a friend of mine from school um who was uh very good in physics and he told me that he had looked at the same thing with binoculars. I got him to draw it and what he drew was corresponding exactly to what I had seen. His house was about another half mile up the hill from ours.

And so uh my father was a judge um and uh we never reported the case. Uh in those days there was a lot of you know expectation and controversy about the the phenomenon and it wasn't even regarded as a phenomenon yet and uh so we did not have any clear place to report it. Um my father had a lot of experience uh with uh well with war for one thing uh with the military and and also with testimony of human beings that he had seen come before his tribunal over the years. and he said, "You know, this is something that uh I don't doubt that you saw this. Uh you have two other witnesses, including my mother, but um this may be one of the new prototypes that are being developed now.

You know, those were the days of the first jets that you could you could see both for commercial and for um military. And you know, in time this will come out. this would be revealed. Well, a few years later, I was um an astronomer at Paris Observatory and we were tracking the very early satellites and uh there was nothing in the sky like what I had seen. So I started uh making some inquiries now that I was inside the French science um ecology if you want uh with people who might have ideas about the problem.

And um I found that a number of astronomers and physicists had and people who worked in the field had had experiences and never reported them or only to a small cad of of colleagues. So um we started um looking for people who had done more research, more actual research and by then I had access to uh my first computer which was used to compute satellite orbits uh that we were sharing with with the US. We're sharing it with the Smithsonian uh within the geological year around the world. And uh so we we had some communication with with the US already on what was going on in space. And that only reinforced my idea reinforced my idea that there was a new phenomenon.

And it it might be there might be a number of hypotheses about it, but it was definitely something that fascinated me. And we created at that point the first invisible college with people in France. Pierre Geran who was a leading planetary physicist at uh at the astrophysics institute in Paris. um uh people like Olivia Costa de Borugar who was the leading um relativist worldwide well recognized and um a professor of biology at the Soburn and so on and we started discussing so Jacques thank you that's that's a a you know remarkable story and that gives us a sense of how the invisible college began and you first brought together researchers. So I think something that a lot of people would like to know about is how did you and hell first encounter each other um and and on on what different issues in UAP research have you collaborated over the decades? Sure.

So um the the opportunities to do that kind of research in France were limited. Um, I wanted to I had a master's degree in astrophysics, but I wanted to go on to uh to an more advanced degree and I had the opportunity to move to Texas to Austin to work with Gerard Devoker who was a chairman of astrophysics at the University of Texas. So I worked with him and he was very interested in the in the problem and never made a secret of it. It was it was something that he spoke about openly and so I I worked um with him at Macdonald Observatory looking at galaxies and we published a number of papers in astrophysics and then I um I had heard of Dr. HK of course who was the um the astronomer who was the scientific consultant to the US Air Force and uh I moved to Northwestern to work with Dr.

H neck can merge my data because I had a a database of worldwide data that I had compiled in France with the blue essentially the blue book files which we started researching and and re uh reestablishing looking at the you know the the real data within the general data. Um, after I got my PhD at Northwestern in in artificial intelligence of all things in 1967, uh, I think people don't realize how far back AI goes. They only think of AI as what they see today in the public range. But, um, Dr. Heneck and I uh had the opportunity of uh uh testifying before the United Nations in 78 and also of being the first to testify before the Condan Committee when the Air Force decided to leave the field and essentially there was a a very negative report.

I uh jumping a few years, I continued to essentially um I came to Stanford working uh both between the computing center and astrophysics working with uh Dr. Peter Sturk who was himself very interested in in the subject of UFOs and has left a number of course created um a movement to uh interest scientists into uh somewhat like Saul but uh through publication of a review uh that that would inspire and educate people and so on. the um at Stanford I was responsible for essentially all the information systems for the campus and the medical school and develop new um so as opposed to uh to Hal who is more of a of a material physicist I'm I'm really looking at the information side of the equation and there is a fundamental equation in physics that relates information to the material world. So we we were a good combination when I came to SRRI. I left Stanford University to go to SRRI to work not on parasychology at least at first and not on UFOs but on a little project that was called the opponent.

We had engine number three on the openet which as you know became the internet. The uh at the time when I joined there were about 30 computers 30 machines on the experimental arponet and u this was you know heavyduty software development in in a completely new way. Um that's the time when uh Dr. Putoff and Dr. TARG uh joined SRRI with a project to begin to study parasychology and um since I was already there, you know, I uh I I I tried to contribute to uh I volunteered actually to to help with some of the information side of the study.

And so Jack, tell us was very generous in letting me uh interact with them and I became a little bit more involved as as time went on and tell us what Jo I'm going to interrupt a bit. I I want to get a sense. So you know how did the two of you start talking about UAP at the time at Stanford? Well the and and let's let's hear from Hell and you both. Okay. May maybe I can't maybe I can I should answer that.

This was the most secret part of their project was that many of the remote viewers were very interested in UFOs but they couldn't raise the the subject. Yeah. Basically uh am I on uh audio now? Okay. uh of course I was as a physicist I was interested in the sort of mechanics and the physics of UFOs and so on but as I started interacting with Jacques there at SRRI uh he began to expand my horizons and say well you know uh this stuff goes back millennia and he began to introduce me to the broader issue of the fact that even back in Egyptian times and in the Bible and elsewhere. Uh there were descriptions of phenomena that today we would interpret as UAP.

So he opened the whole field up to me and that got me beginning to read his number of books about the history of the phenomena and the fact that there's a lot more to it than just uh some physics and physics craft. So, so that that really uh expanded my horizons and I think contributed a lot to some of the things I got involved with later. And you know, one thing we want to do today is to share your perspectives with, you know, newer generations of scientists and academics uh and investigators who are tackling the subject now. And so, you know, I'd like to ask both of you, you know, just just briefly because we have a lot of ground to cover today. Um, by the time you caught up together in the 1990s and 2000s, what did you see as the key problems to solve? Uh, perhaps Hal, you could go first.

Well, originally, I mean, being a physicist, I thought the key problem to solve was how can you have craft dropping from space down to the ocean and stopping on a dime and then suddenly taking off and making a right angle turn at uh Mach 2 or whatever. I mean, as a physicist and so as part of the OSAP program, I interviewed a lot of the pilots about their experiences. And of course, the thing you'll hear on the news is these pilots will say, "Oh my god, you know, what I saw is just way beyond our physics." Well, of course, being a physics nerd, uh I didn't like the sound of that. So, as it turns out, one of my particular areas of expertise is general relativity theory. And so, uh I thought, okay, let let me make a list of what these people are saying they observe.

So on the left hand side of a piece of paper, I wrote down all the weird things that were being reported. And from my standpoint, the more weird the better because if somebody just making up a BS story, they want it to sound reasonable. So they're not going to say something like, "Well, I approached the craft and as I got closer, it turned out to be bigger or smaller or whatever." So any I had this list of things and then on the right hand side of the piece of paper I said okay uh suppose we could engineer Einstein's equations for general relativity the way we engineer Maxwell's equations for all of our electromagnetic technologies. And so I made a list of what you'd expect to see and sure enough I got a match hand and glove. So one of my big hobby horses these days is okay no this stuff is not beyond our physics.

It is however beyond re-engineering because it would take enormous energy densities to have those phenomena occur. So uh I think we can take a step forward take a reduce a little bit of the stigma that it's so magical and say oh no no no we we can understand this from a physics standpoint and Jacques I want to come back to you in a second on those issues because your thinking is very complex on this but I want to give Larry a chance to comment on what what as he got into the subject uh in a more formal way I believe in the 90s and 2000s uh what did you think the key issues were and what do you think the key issues are today? Um well, as I said, you know, from from my perspective of having looked at this from different backgrounds, um um it it seemed to me intuitively obvious that in order to to explain the full, you know, richness of the phenomenon, um you you needed kind of a breakthrough, a paradigm breakthrough in in more than one area. Um you know the science generally works by um there's just a body of knowledge that that is you know everybody share all the scientists share and uh you look for a new piece of knowledge by sort of triangulating from knowledge that you already have. you know, you you you you you think think that, well, if if A is true and B is true, then maybe there's another fact out here C that's also true. And so you kind of extend the the front of knowledge from what you already know.

And if if the new knowledge that you're looking for is like one step away from where you are, you know, that's that's kind of how we work. That's that's that's kind of normal science. It occurred to me that uh to to really fully explain the richness, the the new knowledge was going to be more than one step away. It's going to be two or three or you know more steps away and and and and you're going to need new explanations probably in you know physics in engineering and psychology at least to explain that. And that is u you know that that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do intellectually.

you you it's um in fact I I don't know how to do it, you know, but we're over time we've been kind of slowly in my opinion making, you know, progress on on all all of those fronts. Um is well that that might be a good good uh point of transition to going back to Jacques. Jacques, what do you think today based on your decades of work on this that the key uh key research priority should be on UAP and what do you think if you had to say it in a word UAPR? Maybe we could start with that question. It's a simple question. Yeah.

Yeah. Very simple question. Thank you very much. Um I I should say following on what Larry said that um once I was in uh in Silicon Valley a number of people who had had heard of what I had written um approached me with their own experiences and some of those people were in the aerospace field. uh at that point Larry was at at NASA and there were a few people within NASA like him who were interested.

So the the invisible college at that point expanded with um you know how and and other people at at SRRI and more widely you know in the remote viewing parasychology field uh in the US uh as well as continuing to expand in France and then you know people who were from from the venture capital community and from the entrepreneur community and a few people like like Larry who brought their knowledge of you know actual knowledge of working in space or with space space design and space space issues. Where we are now is um um you know if you had asked me five years ago after we had done all the work that Hal and I and others did with Mr. Bigalow in in Nevada and with the um you know the bath project also which was to me was a uh you know a high water mark in the science both with um as as Hal described the the uh summary of what is known in physics in advanced sciences that can be applied today to a problem. We don't have to solve all the general things that have to do with, you know, the cosmos and religion and all that. Those are discussions to go on.

In the meantime, we have tools that we can apply in a rational way. We can measure things and we can we've got computers. We can extrapolate the calculations and we can do all that today. I mean, there is no no sense to wait for the government to do something. we can we've got power powerful computers in front of us today that can do you know a thousand times what could be done you know at at SRRI in 1980.

So the there is no question that this is something we can do. The what I'm most interested in today is to continue to to specialize in the witnesses. The witnesses are hurt by this. They need um advances in therapy. uh in what I mean is in in the very structures of uh of of science and support, psychological support so on and uh they need recognition and they re they need um sort of social support which sometimes is is quite extreme.

I mean you know any anyone who has been surprised by the phenomenon is um to some extent you know separated from the rest of society by the fact that he or she has had that experience and they we've done a very poor job of helping these people helping them communicate with their environment you know Um, a couple of days ago I was speaking on this medium with someone you would whose name you would recognize in the media who told me that um he had become aware that his mother had uh seen something at a young age and uh for a long time he didn't know what it was uh she had told no one except her husband uh later on. And uh she told him when he pushed for the for the the truth that she had seen when she was a young girl, she had seen through the window a a light that moved, you know, across the town and disappeared. That wasn't a meteor and so on. Later on, um, it came out that it wasn't just a light. It was an object that was in the yard in front of her, uh, a few feet from the window.

and that there were beings in there was a large window and there were beings looking at her including one she thought was a pilot uh who had pretty intense sort of communication with her. Well, this was at the time of the Betty and Barney Hills case and it's a description essentially of the same thing. an elongated object with a large window in the face and beings looking at you and lights in the background. Okay. Um what you've Jacques, what you've said about um the need to attend to the witnesses, offer uh therapeutic and social support is is beautiful and insightful and and is very much appreciated.

We have to go to a break soon and so I'm going to ask a provocative question to you Hal before we go just to kind of get the energy moving here. Um, Hal, if you had to say in a word, and I want to come back to this, what you think so-called non-human intelligence of the kind we associate with UAP, those of us who do research uh on them, uh, associate them with, what what do you think NHI, if you had to say it, you know, a pathy formulation? Well, I think there's enough data out there, enough uh, you know, reports from people that we talked to in the government programs to indicate that there in fact uh are non-human intelligence uh beings associated with some of these craft and uh you know there although you know have head, arm, legs and so on like like any any human would uh differ significantly enough that you have to assume that uh either they're uh some advanced form of human maybe time traveling back as an example or they could be a different species that broke off from us and maybe they have uh set up a civilization embedded in the seabed that we don't know about but they're you know went off on a different evolutionary track or whatever but I think the evidence is is strong enough from the people that we've interacted with that there are in fact beings associated with these craft that are significantly different from us and yet significantly similar enough to to try to wrap your head around that uh there are other beings uh in the universe that we're coming across. We don't know whether they come from the future, whether they're different species from here, whether they come from different dimensions as some quantum theorists are postulating. So, it's still it's still a big mystery, but the fact of it uh for those that are deeply involved in the field, the fact of it is is is taken for granted at this point. That's a remarkably uh provocative and and intriguing statement, H.

Thank you for that. So, we're going to go to a break um and hear from our director of strategy at Soul, Mara Mandria. And uh we'll be back in uh in a moment. [Music] Hello everyone. Everyone, welcome to the very first installment of Direct from Soul.

I'm Ma, dire of director of strategy at the Soul Foundation, and I'm thrilled to take you behind the scenes of our work. This series is all about giving you an inside look at who we are, what we do, and most importantly, how you can be part of our journey together. If you're into frontier science, a breakthrough ideas, and a mission that blends research, community, and impact, stick around because I'm going to start to explain something about our mission. You know, for centuries, we've looked to the stars with curiosity, searching for meaning beyond ourselves. And today something extraordinary is happening not just in the depths of space but right here on earth.

We are standing at the crossroads of two revolutions. The rise of disrupting technologies like artificial intelligence and the increasing acknowledgment of unidentified aerial phenomena or UAP. And for decades UAP have been dismissed, ridiculed and swept aside. Yet now, governments, defense agencies, and scientific institutions are admitting that many have what many have suspected all along. We are witnessing something that challenges our understanding of physics, of technology, and really of reality itself.

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So I want to leap right back in and follow up on Hal's comment. Um and I want to ask you uh Larry uh first to follow up on that. You have I think a extraordinarily interesting perspective on um how how we need to conceive of possible um non-human intelligences and and and perhaps you could say a word about that. Um, sure. Um, as as I mentioned before, I think, you know, we we probably need multiple paradigm breakthroughs.

Like Hal, I agree that, you know, from the physics standpoint, it's probably some form of electromagnetic gravity control. I think there's probably more than one technology there. But as far as the consciousness is concerned um um well Larry you you Larry you've said that that you know actually we need to be thinking beyond multiple paradigms in the sciences and and that that's kind of what I'm after. Yeah. So um I I guess my working hypothesis I'll just sort of maybe cut to the chase here is that um the the physics and engineering behind the the phenomenon is u post Newtonian um you know all of our conventional vehicles of of all descriptions are basically work on Newtonian mechanics.

I I think the physics and engineering is clearly post-New. The consciousness I think is is post-personal or transpersonal. What we would call transpersonal and and as far as the biology is concerned, I I think it's pretty clearly post Darwinian. Um Okay. And let let me follow up on that.

Why do you think it's clear that it's post Darwinian? Well, um the because um the the clues that I look at um are that in in a Dar in Darwinian evolution, you you have as as Hal point out, you know, a bell curve with with most of the population clustering around some normal some norm parameter, but then you have wide variation over that so that so that natural selection has something to select against if if you look at the the uh the creatures that get reported uh to me they look there's there's a huge amount of uniformity um you don't within any one particular type you know you don't seem to have fat ones and skinny ones and tall ones and and short ones and smart ones and stupid ones I mean it is you they to me they look like they're engineered and so I my my working hypothesis is that they are in genetically modified organisms that they've they've gotten to the point where, you know, frankly, we are about now where instead of relying on uh natural selection, you basically decide what characteristics you want in the organism, then you design one to do that. I mean, I think we're on the threshold of that right now. That's a what I find really interesting about that Larry is that you've uh you've basically said that we have to move beyond almost you know some of our fundamental 19th century early 20th century ideas uh and and uh even 18th century and you know it's it's postNewtonian post Darwinian and you could say post Freudian or transpersonal and it's it's really a a remarkable way to put in capsule form um the kind of shift in thinking we need to uh deal with all this provided of course that our hypotheses about this are are correct. Now Jacques I want to turn to you because um I think your own view of so-called non-human intelligence is that um there may be so much uh so much deception or um uh so much alteration of perception coming from them that we may not even be able to trust our hypothesis. Could you comment on that a bit? Uh, okay.

Maybe Jack didn't hear that question. Um Hal, I want to follow up with you um since I I guess Jacques's having an audio problem there and say in light of what you uh you know kind of put forward a moment ago um about uh NHI, what would you say, Hal, that um we need to do in research in order to not just study uh the technologies or objects of non-human beings but also the relationship we have with them? Um, I don't think we have the microphone on there. Yeah. Um, I try to, you know, my my approach to the data has been mostly through interviews with witnesses. Um, and I've I've only brought in the different hypotheses.

um as when they were relevant to the data structures and so and I've done that you know deliberately to avoid um really getting involved with one or another theory of what they were. For example, I, you know, I looked into one case that happened uh two years before the Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1945. Well, everybody says, you know, the phenomenon started in 47. That's not true. We have data from before, but in 1945, there was a crash near Trinity.

The crash at Trinity did not involve an advanced creature. It involved three entities that were about three and a half feet tall that looked somewhat like insects and that were obviously uh surprised by the by what what was happening with the crash. They were alive after the after the crash, but they they were observed for a long time by by the witnesses. It turns out that there are two other cases probably the the of the top quality cases that we have in the whole literature and certainly what we had in all the databases during the BAS project where you know my my design was for a series of databases of 260,000 cases. Those two cases are at um at Soro and in in in France uh in 1968 where they were very similar objects.

Again, in all three cases, the Trinity, Soro, and Valenol, the the object is is a an oval, not a disc. It's an oval the size of a medium-sized truck. The creatures breathe our air. Okay? They are adapted to earth gravity. They have two eyes.

They have a dimminitive nose and a small mouth. Um, and they uh interact psychically with the witnesses in all three cases. Now what's remarkable about Valencol and Soro is that those cases were studied by the official agencies of the state. France in one case and the US in the other. First the local cops then the the FBI happened to be there but they contributed to the to the data.

They had no jurisdiction but the state police had jurisdiction. And then people from the from the base at um at at White Sands came over with specialists looking at the data because it might have been an object escaped from and then Dr. Heinneck was there and I was working closely with Dr. Heinneck at that point. I was at Northwestern having finished my PhD, but I was going through the Air Force files under an Air Force contract to rationalize the Air Force files and punch them into into cards and create an actual database that we could work with.

Again, this was this was very early. And the uh the case in Valencol is the same thing. there were two entities that also were breathing the air. Then you have cases where the entities are human, humans like us in connection with creatures that are described everything from dwarves to you know creatures that are 10 10 feet tall and there is a range of behavior that we have to look at. We cannot just take a few cases and build a theory on the basis of those those few cases.

In most of those cases, there is psychic communication, which brings us back to what Hal and and his cadray of of scientists were doing at SRRI and have continued to do, which is, you know, to what how far does that range of communication extend? And in if you remember the first meeting of Saul at Stanford, Peter, uh I showed a slide that had two bumps, you know, a small bump which is all the reports that the government gets through the army, through the navy, through pilots and so on, and then a much bigger jump of uh all the cases, many of which are unresarched that come from the public worldwide. Uh I've gone to um uh I've gone to Brazil four times. I've gone to uh Argentina a number of times. I'm very familiar with the extent of the French cases of different types and I've gone to Russia six times. I twice to the Soviet Union and four times to uh to Russia itself.

So uh that's what I try to bring to that is to look at and that's what you do when you're an information scientist. You look not so much at the of course you look at the physics and you you learn from what specialists have told you about the physics but you look at what the invarians are in the information space okay and that's what needed to continue to do Jacques let me ask you just briefly in a word what are the invariance here the the invariance is that the u the objects can appear can essentially punch a hole in our fourdimensional continuum. They can appear suddenly. They can disappear without accelerating by fading in place. And those cases I haven't published because they were given to me under conditions that I would not publish them.

But I can certainly talk about them witnesses who've come to me saying they they are not reporting this because of their position uh either in Silicon Valley or in Europe in many cases running companies and uh they some of them have described to me a large object seeing a large object twice the size of a of uh 747 with lights on it that you might interpret as windows if you want if you like windows. And that object moving slowly in the sky, just going its happy way in the sky and then starting to fade in place without accelerating and without actually moving anywhere. uh just moving slowly in the air and then fading into uh uh essentially into uh a state where they've disappeared from the sky. Now those cases are not unique. There are a number of those cases.

So we have to look at the totality of that you know including including the close encounters of course in and including also the medical cases that Hal and I looked at you know under the bigo project that have not been have not seen the light of day. Another part of the the Bath project that has not seen the light of day is a database that I designed and that we built with 240,000 cases in English in a single you know so that we could apply AI to it and the subject was dropped when the project was cut after two years as we were going to to put artificial intelligence on top of the database so that we could now I could turn it over to have for example to begin to to look at the physics with reliable data that we've never had. The punchline is we've let all the people of our team that we had trained we have let them go after two years. There were 40 people involved in in in my computer related project. They're gone.

And there is a an enormous problem of you cannot take a PhD from Harvard or a doctor from Princeton or from some other place and dump them and give them the data. That's not going to work. They need one or two years of of hard work with people that we can train to to to help educate the the the next generation of scientists on how do you deal with the data, how do you qualify it, and what are the the combined skills that you need to bring. Fantastic. what you have with the fant I have to keep I have to keep us moving Jacques.

So I want to follow up on that by asking a question of all of you. Uh starting with Hal. How you know where conventional physics is concerned? Um what frameworks from it have proved uh most useful and most limiting in understanding the kind of data that that Jacques is talking about? And and after hell, Larry, I'm going to ask you the same question. Well, in one element, uh it's the physics as as I pointed out earlier that I think we've made some progress on uh understanding uh how at least in principle some of these phenomena could be could be described within physics we understand even though we don't have the technology to reproduce them. Uh and then on the other hand um dealing with the consciousness aspects what I think we have to do is we we have to be more open-minded about the things that people tell us if we give them time to tell us.

Now, ordinarily, uh, people will give you a certain amount of data for a while, but then they'll stop because they know the next thing they're going to say, uh, such as mental telepathic interaction with beings and so on is going to sound a little weird and they don't want to, you know, sound weird. So, they they kind of hold back. So, so we need to have a a more open pallet and and make that okay for people. So, one one of the points I'd like to make to potential young engineers and and physicists and and psychologists these days is to recognize that despite the fact that this history of this phenomena has been very stigmatized and very conspiratorial and so on, nonetheless, in December of 2017 when suddenly the New York Times story came out, uh that was really a giant step up because it became clear that a program had been initiated that involved uh you know Harry Reid who was Senate majority leader and two other uh senators. And so suddenly you have people of known and accepted value saying that there's really something to this.

And so coming out of all of that, we've had a few convention congressional uh open open investigations that you know presented on C-SPAN and so on uh talking to the pilots and so on and the intelligence officers. So suddenly this whole area has become much more sort of mainstream and finally resulting even in uh Senator Schumer and and Rounds uh coming up with their authorization act so-called disclosure authorization act in which uh in in an actual amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act you had something like mention of non nonhuman intelligence over 20 times in an official congressional document. So I think what that means is that this whole field has now taken a giant step in a direction where new young scientists and and psychologists and so on should not be so concerned about getting involved and uh and so I think there's a whole future there that uh will be developed and will be very mainstreamoriented. Fantastic help. Thank you for that.

Larry, I want to follow up about the physics question. Um because I think you have the view that we might be dealing with uh multiple kinds of technologies based on uh uh different levels of understandings of physics and I I you know how are you how are you thinking about that and what do you think should be done on research uh in that direction? Well, um, yeah, I, um, and I'm I guess sort of the reason I'm going off in this in this direction is, uh, is based on, you know, stories that are coming out from from various whistleblowers. And, and I, you know, will admit that that is um speculative. that's, you know, um that's not the same as having like, you know, hands-on, you know, knowledge or whatever. But um it it it looks to me like there's um I if if the problem is to get from Alpha Centuri to here and back um you know within something like a normal lifetime if if the problem is to to be able to actually uh do do time travel as well as just you know space travel that um uh probably requires uh being able to manipulate what I you know what I sometimes refer to as the as the strong field version of general relativity.

Um if if you could do that then yeah all that other stuff kind of comes for free. But you know with our sort of conventional understanding the only way you can you know bend spaceime that much is with you know an object that has five solar masses or or something like that. You know it's just sort of impossibly uh imposing to try and and deal with. And yet uh if you accept the reality of of of uh of that that kind of report then you know somebody has figured out how to do that with much less energy and uh and mass than than than we have access to. At the other end of it, however, you have um reports of objects that don't don't really seem quite that exotic.

you know, they they they are able to travel uh through the atmosphere and presumably through space as well without really um exchanging momentum with the atmosphere. That's why, you know, they don't leave sonic booms, they don't leave much in the way of turbulent wake, they don't make a lot of noise, you know, that sort of thing. Um and uh to me that is actually um achievable within um the the field of what might be called propellantless propulsion where it's it's a it's a kind of a small um variation I guess on on Newtonian mechanics. Um and and to me the the the explanation for that is most likely in the field that HAL has been you know basically you know pioneered which is um uh engineering of the of the of the quantum vacuum of the 0 point energy. Um, I I think that kind of explanation uh is could easily explain some of the the the craft that we see at what I call the the weak field end of things.

And so so I can see that there's this kind of a spectrum of technologies that we're seeing, some of which are extremely advanced and um uh which is, you know, what you would need in order to be able to move back and forth over long long distances and through time. And others are basically um a a much weaker uh version that is useful for you know easily for getting around on the planet or inside the solar system or whatever that are probably much easier much closer to being able to being attained um with technology that's with within our reach. Uh my my view is that the so-called ARVs or alien reproduction vehicles are would be examples of that and we and we're now seeing that that kind of reference is being made in the you know in the various whistleblower literature. So um as I say that's speculative but that's if I if I take all of those those clues and put them together that's kind of the the hypothesis that I get. Well, as someone who's worked on uh uh space flight on other planets, including Venus, uh that's your your opinion is uh pretty qualified on that.

Um uh and pretty expert. Um, Hal, maybe you could um uh comment on some of the things Larry was saying with respect to your work and and your view of uh uh energy and uh in in the so-called uh quantum vacuum and what this what this data what the case is if it's based on data for that. Well, one of the things that Larry brought up is sort of the quantum vacuum 0 point fluctuations and so on. And so um it's a built-in part of our understanding of quantum physics that empty space even far out away from planets or wherever is isn't really empty. It's full of quantum vacuum fluctuations.

uh now those vacuum fluctuations uh we don't particularly notice although there are some theories that I and colleagues from Lockhe worked on that well actually you do notice them because when you get in your car and you suddenly take off and you're pressed back in your seat you know what is it that's pressing you back in your seat well you're running into quantum fluctuations and so they're real but generally speaking they they cancel out uh because it's a very random kind of process. So, one of the thoughts among some of us uh who are looking for new energy sources is well, if you ever figure out a way to uh unrandomize the random fluctuations and get them all coherently uh moving in some particular direction, then then you might be able to basically get the energy you need out of empty space. And so there are various university projects going on that that are pursuing that. Now another thing I would say I think for new scientists and this is something that uh Jacques knows as as well as anyone that any materials that we've come across that may possibly be associated with uh these UAP craft are often a very exotic construction. I mean microscopic layers layered on each other or extremely pure materials and so on.

So I think to actually make a lot of progress material science is going to be one of the major factors and features. So now we're coming up with all kinds of new ideas topological insulators and so on. So, so, uh, anyone who's, uh, an engineer or scientist who's interested in in materials, I I think that's, uh, that that's going to be a great, uh, area to concentrate on. Really interesting. Now, Jacques, I want to ask you I want I want to follow up a thread on material science here in a a second.

And for those of us watching uh those of you watching who are joining our Zoom room, I want to uh ask you to be patient with us. I think we'll go 10 or maybe 12 minutes over because we we have so much ground to cover. Um but we will convene around uh quarter after the hour in in that zoom room. Um but before we uh come to the material science uh question Jacques I want to ask you uh you know what do you think the real focus uh of research should be based on the kind of data that you you crunch and gather uh or you've crunched and gathered over the years of these databases. Is it is is the essence in physics or is it really in something stranger and more esoteric? Uh the crux of what we should be looking at.

Um I've worked uh as as you know on on many databases. Databases in in in medicine are the the probably the most relevant because in medicine you don't necessarily have a theory. you you have people who are sick with a new disease and you don't understand the new disease. So you're open-ended and I think that's the kind of design that we need to bring in here. We need to capture as much as we can imagine but we don't know what are the most significant characteristics.

So we have to use in our imagination to to to to try to capture everything we can and not imply relationships between them. Okay, that which is very hard to do from people who are trained to build databases in in industry don't have to think like that. We do. Okay. So we have to uh make it available to diff many different theories that are going to test the the overall structure.

Now when when you do that uh you have to uh hold off on all the the different theories that we've been talking about because it could be something it could be something completely different. Now it could be a number of different things and we will have to find the different the different clouds of characteristics that are relevant. So we're very much at the at the beginning of that and uh so we we cannot be uh we cannot preclude certain uh certain interventions from you know we're talking about an intelligence that potentially is is much wider and deeper than than ours. So I think that's the attitude that we have to be in in in really looking at the data even if superficially the data seems to fit a a a particular theory. So we have to do what science always does.

You you can't just pick a theory and and push the data in that direction. If you do that, you should also look at counterarguments for that theory and look for data that contradicts what what would be there. And that's the the sort of the the the role that I've tried to to play in the field and that I continue to to to try to play. Um yeah we have done use of the sorry I have to interrupt the medical side of it that we need to bring into that as well. Yeah, you've done that remarkably, Jacques, in in playing, as you say, the heretic among the heretical.

Um, and in always challenging us to think differently, but on the basis of uh the basis of data. And I think you haven't been given enough credit by people who read you for um your analytic power with respect to um uh patterns in data. Um that's that's really one of the most uh um the the strongest points in your work. So I want to follow up now about uh material science because I think this is going to be of interest to scientists getting into the subject. Uh Larry and Jacques, how did the two of you get together and start working on that with Gary Nolan? And uh and what did you find? Maybe Larry, you could you could start off.

Okay. Well, um, some years ago, uh, I guess maybe probably five or six years ago now, I, uh, attended or or viewed, uh, a presentation that Jock made, um, in which he pointed out that, uh, he had accumulated, u,, you know, a very large array of, uh, various samples of materials that were alleged to have come from from UAPs or or um UFOs and uh because you know when you're as famous as he is, everybody calls you up or emails you or whatever and uh basically says you know I have this stuff and uh um I I'd like to know what it is. Can you help me? And so, uh, he Jacques at that one of those, um, uh, presentations, uh, sort of put out the bat signal and said, you know, if anyone's out there that wants to, uh, to help with this, uh, you know, call me up. So, I did. Um, I had known Jacques, uh, you know, for many years in other for other venues and other, um, context.

So I I said yes I you know after I retired from NASA I said sure I'd like to do that and so I got in touch with him and then I realized that uh he had also by that time started forming a uh collaboration with Gary and uh who has access to more or less you know unparalleled quality of analytical instruments and has a a rich research history of of being able to to use them. So I basically said, "Count me in." You know, it sounds like a uh a very interesting and and uh fun project. And so um um we we started up. Um my particular expertise, I guess, if I had to say, is is in what I call reverse engineering. um in which you you have some object or material or whatever it is you're you're looking at and you and you try to deduce from its characteristics what its function might have been and and equally importantly whether or not it might uh have an exotic or a mundane origin.

And in many cases, we've dis we discovered that many of the some of the samples that that we we come across are actually mundane and and misidentified um pieces of aerospace technology that um aren't well known to the public, but nevertheless are, you know, are identifiable as such. So, so a big part of it is is being able to to identify and discard the stuff that's really not uh going to lead anywhere into into new knowledge. um and then concentrating on the on the other parts and and Jacques as you guys have done these analyses uh with Gary Nolan this this actually goes back um decades uh in in France there's been for over 40 years now an established not not a big project but an established team uh monitoring reports from the public and reports from scientists within the space agency. The the French space agencies were the third wealthiest in the world after NASA and Roscosmos. Uh for one thing, they they own the Kuru spaceport and from which you know some of the the great experiments have been launched.

So, uh, this was pretty sophisticated from the beginning and the materials that that, uh, that I looked at and which I could borrow, they were completely open to letting me borrow it. And at that point, I was working at Stanford with Professor Sturok who pioneered all this with a study of samples from u from Brazil. and uh all that has been published uh again in the 70s and 1980s. So this is not like this is something we discovered yesterday contrary to what Congress seems to seems to believe. So we'll have to explain that at some point if they want to confiscate our samples uh which has was brought up actually.

Um so I I brought in some of those samples from France. uh when uh professor Sturak resigned uh or uh at uh at at Stanford and retired uh he uh gave me some of his samples and I've started working uh of course working with our new team to to sort of form a um no a good catalog of of many of those cases including the American American cases that I remembered from project blue book uh were were actually analyzed at the time. I mean either the air force did it or the air force asked a lab to do it. Battel did a number of those studies. Battel memorial institute in in Ohio.

And uh so we have the chemistry. The problem is that somebody can create a hoax or a accidentally there could be some weird sample that comes out from a factory somewhere and is regarded as being weird. So we we have you know as Larry said we we need to recognize um even sophisticated uh uh samples or combinations of things from aerospace technology that are not necessarily uh broadly known in in the literature but are not not secret. So uh the to do that uh you need to go to the isotopes and that's where that becomes a little bit more complicated because the science is is difficult and you need specialized uh specialized people who know the instruments know how to calibrate them and so on and a lot of there's a lot of things in the literature that's just not true with good intentions on the part of people because they did not understand the instrument they were working with. Well, the beauty of working at Stanford now with the third generation of of eupfologist with Dr.

Nolan is that Dr. Nolan and his team have have built a new generation of of instruments that that can do that kind of analysis on top of the the existing machines that are available at Stanford that are mostly used by geologists. Geologists are very interested in isotope ratios for the for their own science. So we've been collaborating with with both teams and that's where we are now. I mean collecting more samples and as you may know we've published one study in in the leading aerospace journal about an analysis we've done on a case that wasn't really well widely known in the American literature but where there were a dozen witnesses who testified to what they had seen within an hour of the object dropping the the liquid metal in an area in the Midwest.

So that um I think that that publication is sort of the gold standard uh right now for what we can do with the instruments we have. So, Jacques, that that leads me what your comment about um previous materials analyses going on uh as early as the 1950s um leads me to want to ask all of you about UAP secrecy, um US government UAP secrecy and what you think uh should be done about it in order to open up uh research in the science and social sciences. uh to a broader uh uh spectrum and and and cohort of researchers. And I'm going to ask each of you a specific question about this, but I I want to start with you, Hal. Um I think you've occupied a fairly unique position on this because you have both been on the inside, but you also have tried to um open up work on the outside.

And how do you think this can be done? And how do you think it can be done additionally in a way that um is more international in scope? Well, one of the things that that I take is kind of a a critical factor is uh I look back and and I I I I like a quote from uh Edward Tuller who's father father of the hbomb. He pointed out the fact that uh of course when we developed the uh atomic bomb and nuclear technologies and so on uh in the Manhattan project it was all very highly classified but as we moved forward and and carried out the developments under this very highly classified program the Russians basically were kind of moving along lock step and so there wasn't that much difference between say Soviet developments and our development ments in nuclear technologies. On the other hand, he pointed out that in the area of electronics, you know, circuits and and uh integrated circuits and so on, we didn't classify that area. And our progress forward with all the open collaboration between scientists and engineers moved way ahead of where the Russians could go. And so that stands to me as an example that increased collaboration, increased knowledge available in the public doesn't necessarily hurt your national security.

So for that reason, even though I recognize there are certain things that probably do need to be kept secret to not uh give too much away to a potential adversary, in general, I think the compartmentalization is too strong and we should take our example from Edward Tuller that the more collaboration, the more openness that we can have, it doesn't necessarily affect our national security in a negative way and then we can make progress a lot faster. Okay. Thank you, Hal. Now, Larry, I want to ask you about um a particular question about UAP secrecy. Um because you have a fairly unique and personal story about that and I think that's going to be of of a lot of interest to our audience and even to the broader UAP community.

Um what's what's the thing that's led you to understand uh the most that there really has been long-standing secrecy about UAP from the US government? Well, um probably the most convincing thing is uh uh my father worked for the Lawrence Berkeley Rad Lab from about um uh roughly 1955 to 1965. And just quick, you mean the Lawrence Berkeley uh rad uh radioactive materials or radiation lab? What's radiation lab? Yeah. Which was uh part of the Manhattan project. In fact, it was the uh that's where Oenheimer and uh Teller and uh uh Lawrence and all those guys, you know, that's that's where they started in in the physics department there at Berkeley and and the Rad Lab. And um so uh he he uh he worked there as I said approximately 10 years from about 1955 um to roughly 1965.

And um la later in life uh after I had become a professional aerospace engineer and wor work worked for NASA and so forth um I I got him talking about um so you know what what it what what he did there, what what was happening and uh and this was around the time that the uh the whole Roswell um story was starting to become big around I guess the mid to late 1980s where people like Jesse Marcel were coming out and so forth and so on. And uh and my father confided in me that um when he was at the at the Rad Lab there, he he had actually been tasked at one point to work on pieces of recovered UFOs. Um, in fact, the exact words he used, he says, you know, I I worked on a piece of that thing that crashed in in New Mexico. And interestingly enough, he never actually said Roswell. So given that there might have been more than one thing that crashed in in New Mexico, I you know, I'm not really sure what it what it would have been, but reported uh working with some of these materials and and and the the so-called Roswell memory foil in particular.

And um so um at the time um I actually within NASA I had a a security clearance and I and I had to pause and sort of wonder you know was I just the recipient of unauthorized disclosure of classified information and uh uh I ultimately decided no I wasn't because you know I I some level just a conversation. You know, it's not like I'd been read into a program or something. But, uh, in any case, uh, you know, I I I sort of prodded at that and tried to to cross-check it and verify and so forth and and to some extent did. And so, um, I I it was actually then, of course, mo more recently when David Grush came out and and pointed out that the, uh, the Atomic Energy Act was modified in 1955, uh, in in a kind of a clever way to include um, UFO materials under the uh, topic or under the the the category of special nuclear material. Um I that to me kind of provided some some more some more validation.

Um I so I I had long thought and had long figured out that uh if given that there was um a highly classified component of of the so-called legacy program um that a a large and probably more sensitive component of it was was inside the the uh Atomic Energy Commission and what is now of course the DOE. So um which to me is is would be a very logical place to put it. I I've thought for quite some time that the the the the UFO secrecy uh program was was modeled very closely on the Manhattan project. um having come out of around the same time and out of the same uh sort of national security, you know, mentality. Um so to to me it made perfect sense that that would be it given, you know, 1945 or 6 or 7.

Um, if if you were looking for uh a model of how you would keep something like this highly classified, that would probably be what you would use as as the model. Of course. Of course, Larry. And so, could I add something just please? Um, and and so that actually kind of ties in, I think, with what uh what Hal was was talking about. to to me the model for for declassification would would also probably follow uh the pattern of of what happened then because um of course the the bomb was developed under high high levels of secrecy but once it was used the secret was out I mean this the the the secret that we could do that was out you couldn't hide that anymore and so you had you had to admit it and so what we did was Um, among other things, in order to develop nuclear technology in the civilian world or or even inside the military, you had to you had to bring on you had to educate a new generation of scientists and engineers with the knowledge that they would need to be able to to build nuclear reactors and and things like that.

And so they had to declassify a certain amount of the information in order for um there to be, you know, a workforce that was adequate to to develop. And I think the same same thing would would probably apply here at some point. um you you'll have to declassify uh enough of the enough of the knowledge so that if you really do want to develop this technology in a large scale, there's there's going to be enough people in in the prof professional workforce to to be able to deal with it. Again, you know, you're probably going to want to retain some of the more sensitive stuff that's going to probably have, you know, weapons implications and so forth to keep that classified as as we do with with uh Hbombs today. You know, that that's still still classified.

But I think that to me that's probably the model that we should be looking at. Larry, that's thanks for that that comment. We we we know that uh during the 1950s and60s and even in the 40s that it was necessary to uh declassify a lot of information just to advance science and it's it's a good reminder um that we need that in this context especially because we're not just talking about defense technology and we're not just talking about US national interests. There's a international interest here. But I I have to go back to what you said because we we kind of uh we lost that for a second.

you you basically just told us that your father, who worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, had confessed to you in old age that um he he did work on what we now call the legacy program and and he did it in in the context of working on uh uh materials that were uh allegedly from UAP and that were were uh classified under the Atomic Energy uh act. That's a it's a really remarkable statement. Um so thanks for sharing that with us. Now, you know, we really ought to have a whole conversation about that. Um, but I think to wind up, um, you know, because we don't have forever today, it'd be it'd be great to hear from each of you, um, uh, you know, in in as you know, in a few minutes each on on what you think, uh, the questions are that a, uh, scientist in their 20s, early 30s, uh, should pursue uh, in the area of UAP.

Um maybe Jacques you could start. So I get um and you guys probably experience the same thing. Um um private messages that say you know I'm finishing my PhD in such and such and I'm fascinated with this problem and I want to work on it. Where should I go? And um there are there are two things about that. Um first um the academy isn't quite ready at this point to uh to open a new branch dedicated to this.

So you would have to continue to do it. Unfortunately things haven't changed that much. So you would have to find a position in physics or in in space science or in uh you know in in medicine in biology where you could u begin to introduce your own ideas and if if you're very lucky you might find a a professor who would uh take you under his or her wing to begin to bring in some of the UFO data. data or UAP data into uh the the the subject that you do. It's it's a lot easier, of course, in um in policy research, in psychology, in in other fields like that to to be accepted with that kind of subject.

It's it's still very tricky in uh in science. Now there are three major universities in the US now where the subject is getting much more open. Uh the the first is Harvard I mean with Dr. Ailob and his students uh Colombia and Stanford where there are now three generations of researchers who on their own brought up the subject. That's one one way things will develop and I I see our role more shifting more away from frontier research itself and more into uh tending as as you were saying earlier Peter tending to prepare the field for uh younger people who want to number one find the information and find the encouragement to uh to begin to theorize about it and dedicate themselves to it.

But we're not we are not there yet. I think uh Harvard is is doing a great job certainly with the the observations and bringing an an international uh view of it that mixes uh both technology we have today u computer science behind it that makes possible some of the things that you couldn't do with with physical devices before and then uh then of course the the analytical the analytical work that's always been part of astrophysics. So I think that's that's a good a good model. Uh I think we need as as Hal was saying we we need similar models in material science and uh um and then we need money. I mean they they will have to start uh convincing funding agencies and and that's of course where so the soul foundation has been a pioneer is educating a number of of foundations to the reality the opportunity for for science to move in with this um but we're not quite there yet.

Now what what I want to do personally is I want to help this along especially in opening up the the medical records and and looking at what what we can bring in physically and in terms of information structures to look at exceptional medical records. uh I'm not a doctor and I'm not but I understand their data problem and I can help solve them if they give me some indication of the variables they they want to look at and then um I want to go back with some some personal uh some personal data that uh I've you know somewhat exceptional where I I have done an incomplete job of doing the investigation and I want to go back and I can do that by myself with practically very little help. going back and reinvestigating some of the real key cases that can can help turn things around or throw light on on part of the problem as as I did uh you know in the case of Trinity with Pa Harris and people have misunderstood that book but those those three cases with the same type of craft and the same kind of living entity uh is a um you know it's it's a test it's a series of of of test cases on which we can continue to build. Wow amazing uh response shock. Um Larry maybe in a couple minutes you could tell us what you think the uh research priorities are.

Well, um I I've you know I I I mentioned that I I as I said I think there's you know three paradigms that need to change you know psychology, biology and and the physics and and I won't belabor that anymore. So I'm going to actually answer kind of a slightly different question that you didn't ask. Um if if I had advice for you know the the sort of the up and cominging generation um I'm sure that actually they're you know they're bright enough to figure out what the interesting questions are and you know how you would go about that from their various different perspectives. Um the the one piece of advice I would give is is the the the the one characteristic that you need as as someone who's contemplating that kind of a of a future for yourself is you you basically have to give yourself permission to think heretical thoughts uh somewhere along the way. And in fact uh to to me what I discovered in in my trajectory was that was actually the most difficult thing to do.

Um that uh you know you can go along being a skeptic and um sort of weighing you know this that and the other thing and indefinitely. Uh but at some point in order to uh to make progress in the field, you you have to give yourself permission to take it seriously. Uh in my case, what really precipitated that was having a UFO sighting. Um I know everybody can't necessarily go out and do that, but uh it definitely, you know, will propel you out of the armchair and into the field. Um, so I I just if I I will just leave with with that you you you really have to uh take care to to allow yourself to take it seriously and to be willing to at least provisionally believe you know seemingly incredible things.

you've got to authorize yourself to take a hetradox approach to research and science. Yeah. Thanks for that. And and h I think uh you have the last word on this and and uh I I think it's would be very useful for people to hear what what you really think uh across physics, material science, many different domains. Uh uh the the key problems are today.

I get a lot of uh inquiries uh since I'm known in the field by by young scientists who want to know you know what can they do to you know make a contribution in these areas and the first thing I I really press with all of them and you know I'm thinking of five different fields for example advanced physics uh so I tell those who are interested in physics you know really learn your advanced physics learn your physics, learn your advanced physics because you need to have that kind of grounding before you then begin to go to the edge edge of your field. Uh secondly, uh for those interested in material science, learn everything you can about uh new materials and the directions that the edge of material science is is progressing because you're going to need that. uh also uh for biology, people interested in biology and the new uh kind of stuff that Gary Nolan is doing with uh you know genetics and so on. You got to get a grounding in that that kind of stuff uh that comes out of very classical training before you then begin to push it toward the edge. Similarly uh in consciousness studies uh in in the psychological fields and so on learn everything there is about what in fact is known before we begin to like press forward in into new areas.

And finally uh those interested in in information processing learn all you can about computation and AI and so on. So the main thing is to get extremely grounded in what is known. Uh so you can be in the edge of those technologies at the same time always thinking in your mind about how if I push this the next step can I make a contribution in the UAP area. So I think you have to have both the grounding and as Larry says the sort of willingness to think out of the box. Okay.

Wow. Hal uh uh thanks for the response and and thanks uh to all three of you for um making statements like that because we have you know not just a very young generation of researchers interested in moving into this field we've got many generations uh below yours um many people with established careers that are trying to jump into this leap into it and as as Jacques was pointing out before um they they can't simply transition into this they need a couple years to get oriented uh to uh what's known uh what's hypothesized and what the edge of the topic is. Um you know the three of you are uh you know remarkable people uh uh legends on the topic and and we really appreciate that you were here uh uh on behalf of Soul but also our network and audience and everyone out there that um wants to take a serious approach to this. Um, Soul really believes that uh scientific research uh academic research and evidence-based and databased inquiry is uh extremely important in the UAP field right now. We have uh a lot of media.

We have a lot of conjecture um and we have a lot of wild speculation. Um but we have very few people that are trying to take an approach um that in which they challenge themselves uh to work with data to uh work with rich data to uh to exclude stuff that is bad data um and then on the basis of that um ask these very difficult uh leading edge questions um which uh I think a lot of people don't have the uh the courage or the insight to ask. So, so thank you everyone and thanks to our network uh uh of uh people in soul for being here and for everyone out there that's new to our work. Um but once again uh Hal uh Jacques and Larry uh thank you for being with us. Thank you.

Thank you Peter. [Music]