Putting 'the Woo' into UAP: The Peculiar Case of David Grusch

Transcript

love this podcast support it and sponsor today simply head to oast network.com for [Music] [Music] details [Music] hello audience wherever you may hail I'm your host John bruny welcome to the focus where we bring you the most thought-provoking and informative current affairs analysis from around the world each episode we invite top experts and analysts to share their insights on the most pressing issues of our time from international relations and Global economics to philosophy and and science no topic is off limits join us as we explore the complex and everchanging Landscape of the world where we provide valuable perspectives on the events that shape our Global community on the evening of Sunday June 4th Australian investigative journalist Ross colart sat down with US Government whistleblower David Charles grush who made some Sensational claims about a hidden UFO retrieval program within the US government these claims if true would be nothing short of Earth shattering and could potentially go down as one of the most profound discoveries in human history however as the late kle Saron famously said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so far no concrete evidence has been presented to support gush's claims no pictures no videos just hearsay but even if evidence were to emerge can we trust our own eyes in a world where Advanced hoaxes and AI generated images can easily deceive us grush a former high-ranking US intelligence official has filed his claim to Congress and the Inspector General of us intelligence making him one of the most senior individuals to expose such a deep and long-held conspiracy within the US deep State it's a story that seems straight out of Hollywood but one that needs a closer look joining us today is famous International debunker Mick West Mick is a British exper living in the US who closely monitors exposes dubious claims Mick thank you for joining us once again on the focus thank you for having me glad to be here Mick what were your initial thoughts upon hearing the cart interview with grush on news Nation well I I think again we've seen bits of it before in Snippets uh and there wasn't that much more that came out there was a number of interesting things but I think the thing that really kind of resonated most was the lack of evidence for a start and the extraordinary nature of the claims for which as you say uh require extraordinary evidence so all we've got so far is uh is Dave David grush making claims which are really increasingly outlandish I would say I think if he just started with the the fairly simple claim that we have some kind of um crash retrieval program that has recovered some materials and we don't know what they are and we're analyzing them yeah I mean that that seems fairly straightforward and May that was a secret program that was uh uh that was there and perhaps when he discovered it they didn't want him to know about it and then they retaliated again him for that but you know he takes that simple story which I think would almost be uh understandable and if it was true and he adds on things like um that aliens have killed people and he adds on things like uh the American government has killed people to cover this up then there's there's more I mean there's the the pope was involved back in 1944 to transport a help transport at the end of World War II during World War II at the time transport this UFO that crashed in Italy in 1933 and musolini had it for several years these things they kind of piling one thing upon the other makes the story seem increasingly uh unrealistic and kind of makes me think that someone has been taken for a ride here either either it's grush himself or the American public you know Mick uh while I was watching the longer version of the cart interview the other day I I noticed that colart and and grush were gathered around the table and they were looking at documents that seem to have been redacted now of course we didn't get a close-up view of those documents we sort of think that these documents may have indicated that yes there was a UFO retrieved in Italy during the close of World War II the Vatican was involved and all we saw was a piece of paper on the table that had been basically blocked out so you had no real evidence that was being presented and Ross cart standing there going oh my God you know yes you know there's the evidence you know um so do we take a journalist's view of being absolutely surprised by this as as as fact of something that happened I I I just don't understand how someone as senior as Ross cart I mean I great respect to the Man I mean he's done an enormous amount of good as an investigative journalist but what I don't get is why has he seemingly crucified himself on a story that as you rightly point out is just so incredible at so many different levels you could literally write a Hollywood script on this blasted thing well you obviously be more familiar with Ross uh coming from Down Under but uh in the states as far as I know he's only known as a UFO journalist he's been doing a number of Stories on UFOs and he's done some uh you documentaries or special reports and uh I believe he's written a book as well uh but it's all UFOs I think that's pretty much been his Focus for for a number of years now and I think that kind of you know makes him less of a disinterested Observer a journalist who is just discovering this type of thing for the first time and more something of an advocate for the cause it seems to me that he's part of a group of people who seem to be pushing A Narrative and they'll you do whatever they can to push that narrative forward because they believe it's for the greater good you know their their intentions are good they think that technology is being withheld from that could greatly help Humanity that this is basically the type of thing that uh that Dave grush also said he seems to have these these same kind of altruistic motives but time and time again when people make claims like this that there is something to it we never get the actual evidence we just get this belief and another thing that happens over and over again is that the evidence comes in the ter in the form of testimony it's something somebody said to somebody else like I was told that you know this particular encounter happened I was told that we have this material we never get to see any actual evidence and when we do it kind of Falls away because it's not generally very good quality like these videos that come out you know we get a video like the green triangle video best UFO video of all time according to Jeremy Corbell and then it turns out these green t triangles are just stars and planes and drones then just made triangular through the through the camera so we've got this repetition of uh claims hearsay and very poor evidence and here we don't even have the evidence all we've got is people saying that you know a number of people have said things and that there there are some documents so it's it's very difficult for the public I think to to have any basis for taking this seriously and I would encourage everybody to be extraordinarily skeptical on this matter I've always been fascinated by the notion of people keeping uh a straight face during a lie you know whether they're consciously knowledgeable of the lie or not you know there's this notion of coherence within the story and you know I'm I'm reminded by the fact of what you we were discussing a little earlier and that is that it's a complex layered story that they're trying to sort of push toward the public and had this story been a little less over the top had it been a simpler story they were telling it may have stuck at a more fundamental level even among skeptical people and I'll put my hand up and say I'm one of them but you know it's like if if the story sounds too weird you know people are just going to back up and say hey that can't be right yeah definitely and that that aspect of it comes through in a number of ways uh the first one is the Leslie Kain uh who wrote this this story in the debrief with Ralph Blumenthal and uh you not coincidentally she also wrote the original story for the New York Times which David grush says was what got him interested in UFOs in the first place this is the first he heard about it he saw it and thought it was nonsense and started looking into it um this this very story and then you five years six years later he's being interviewed by by Leslie Keane again but Leslie Keane has said said that she didn't talk to him about the bodies she didn't you know I don't know she didn't even knew anything at all about them but she say she didn't talk to him and if she had she wouldn't put it in the story because it it seems like you outside the scope of what she's interested in she just wants to go with the simple story we have a secret uh UFO crash retrieval program and it's being covered up and that's her story and she's she thinks that's enough which as you say it would be but people can't help but add on more things and she's like backing away from this she's saying no I would love to hear what she says about the even more extreme things like what does she have to say about the fact that aliens have killed people yeah uh and then there's the people who are telling the story I think they believe a more extreme version of it you know they've they've been told things that are pretty extreme and they they kind of anxious to get that out so Dave grush is is saying oh yeah we have an agreement between us and the aliens um or at least we should look into that because it seems that way and he says like you know there's been this big cover up we're selling things to uh you know military industrial companies like Lo he marting and and then that they're selling it back to the government and this is all illegal so he's adding on this whole other layer of conspiracy and then there's what he describes it in his his statement as um a publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material that has been waged under the noise FL War for decades which is kind of a a weird a weird thing that there's this cold war between nations like between us and Russia and China and all the countries are involved which adds on this huge extra layer of complication yeah and then there's people around him the there's he has a team of people who are helping him and they probably found him and you know kind of brought him forward one of those people is uh Danny shean famous lawyer he worked on the Pentagon papers case many years ago uh now he does a lot of UFO stuff goes to UFO conferences hangs out with UFO people all the time T tries to promote disclosure because he's a big fan of of you know helping Humanity he said that one of the craft was uh that was you know actually crashed was the size of a football stadium the size of a football stadium but only on the inside on the outside it was only 30t across so it's like Doctor Who's Tardis right which you know so it's getting even more ridiculous if you start talking to the other people involved you know and I'm sure like if you broaden the scope of who you're talking to the in the team we're going to get like weird things like telepathy and people coming from other dimensions and things like that but it's obviously these people all believe a fairly extreme version of reality that does not comport with the facts and they've tried to make it palatable but they're kind of failing and their strangeness is slipping through the cracks I just want to go on to the legal cases that seem to be Brewing uh behind the scenes now as I mentioned in the introduction you know this information had been passed apparently by the Pentagon through a particular agency where information has to be vetted before it can get released into the public the one strange thing on top of all the other strange things with regard to the story is if this is All Right audience forgive me I'm going to be using a bad word here if this is all right if this is all and the Pentagon knows it but they then give the tick to allow this guy who's a highly placed intelligence officer to go public with a story that is so incredible that it simply cannot be true at least not in this universe yeah what does that say about the Pentagon I mean I'm not a conspiracy theorist Mick but what does that say about those guys are they trying to play a joke on everybody no it's it's really quite simple uh isn't classified uh the pentagon's office doser it's the department of pre-publication and Security review they exist for two purposes one purpose is to check uh official government products for accuracy and um not having classified material in so if if a military units Commander wants to issue a press statement or something it goes through doser and they make sure it's accurate and they make sure that it doesn't conin any classified information that would help for adversaries they also exist to check things that people publish after they leave the military so if you leave the military and you want to do put some publish something on your own time or if you you still in the military and you want to write a novel or something that involves things that were in the military they do a pre-publication review of that now that is only checked for lack of classified material so the only thing they want to check within that review is like is this revealing any secrets if you write this big science fiction novel about how the the the military is uh you know it's fighting transdimensional tarantulas that's that's fine they would approve that because it doesn't reveal any secrets right so if you have a statement that's composed mostly of they'll be perfectly fine with it because it doesn't reveal any secrets and you allowed to publish fiction out there you're allowed to make mistakes you're allowed to uh you're allowed to lie you're allowed to tell life so long as it's not going to be something that's lious which would probably be a different thing entirely uh that would be a different Court thing that's not doster's function they're just checking to see if there's any secrets and apparently there isn't any secrets in this apparently it's not secret that we have an agreement with aliens it's not secret that they perform this specific metallic analysis on parts and find odd isotopic ratios which if you know if we were analyzing an enemy U uh machine uh we wouldn't go around saying what type of uh analyses we we've done on that that would be something that would be classified so the fact that he saying that we we've done this it means it maybe didn't happen or it happened in a like outside of the military it was it was some buddies of his who did it or it's something that they did this analysis and it you know it doesn't really show anything in particular but the idea that that they did a specific analysis and they proved something was an alien spacecraft that would be classified as a detail yes yeah it's not even just a characterization that's a specific detail that they had odd isot ratios and then all the other stuff like aliens have been killing people not classified it's you know what if it's not classified why aren't people talking about it it's not secret even you know anyone could could say it now the the kind of the excuse that some of the people give for that is that it's an illegal program so doser wouldn't know about it so they wouldn't know that they weren't allowed to release any information about it but that doesn't make any sense because there's a vast amount of information that he can't give us so obviously there's actual classified information that is not giving us about this illegal program so they couldn't just say like oh well you know uh there's an illegal program that exists you can you can talk about you can you can you can reveal the existence of this illegal program but you can't reveal any detail you know that wouldn't that wouldn't work you know they would know about it if they know about all the details that they can't now release so it doesn't make any sense whatsoever uh and simplest explanation is that what he's been saying and what's being cleared isn't actually accurate will the detector must have worked at some fundamental level with regard to mainstream media because of course they just didn't pick up the story at all uh it fell on to the debrief which is some sort of minor paper uh dealing specifically with UFOs and and the weird and the wacky and uh and then of course you had news nation which is one of these new little startup Enterprises looking for their first big story to break it upon the you know well to make themselves to make their success known basically you you think that in this sense the claims that grush put forward were been too outlandish for even you know the like the likes of the New York Times to put out this time round I mean the first time in 2017 when Keenan blumthal came out with the the original story it was intriguing there wasn't that much information forthcoming but there was enough to keep people interested but now it's just like a multi-layered pile of steaming crap on the table that no one wants to touch except for the fringes of of the media yeah I think the media is being rightfully very cautious about this because you you you read the story and it sounds like something from like you know the globe or news of the world like one of those extreme tabloids uh it's like aliens are killing people Giant football field Siz Inside Out tardises you it doesn't it's it's not like a sensible story which of course you knows why they they wanted to make it sensible Leslie Keane wrote This original story that kind of started the whole ball rolling uh both for everybody outside and for grush uh and she says she left things out of that story because they were too extreme there was a bunch of things that happened apparently and like you know maybe like telepathic communication and things like that uh that she didn't talk about because uh she wanted the story she wanted to promote the idea of disclosure she's not really interested in you getting everything out there because it turns people off and you maybe that's a valid thing if it's actually true you if if the world is actually as Topsy Turvy as this suggest and there's there's multiple races of aliens which you something else that he claimed that there's more than one type of aliens one of which is malevolent the other one presumably less malevolent maybe that's the one that does the crop circles crop circles are getting very popular now uh but yeah it's it's um it's difficult to to understand like why even say news Nation took it seriously the debrief I can see they've done a lot of UFO stuff news Nation they do like silly UFO stories like there was a alien in someone's backyard in Las Vegas and they they cover that because it's like kind of a fun thing but this is much more serious so the fact that they're taking this seriously it's it's it's even a little bit surprising for them mean they're not they're not a small organization they're like you part of a a billion dollar Corporation so it's not it's not like this little tiny little channel uh so I think you know maybe they just thought they they would maybe they got convinced somehow maybe Ross is a smooth talker and he told them that it was going to be going to be good uh but I think he's kind of grown and I think they're starting to be a bit more skeptical they're starting to ask questions uh I I was on news Nation a couple of times three times actually once with um uh C CUO uh who's going to the the the headliner of the show of the the channel and he was quite skeptical about the whole thing and and I think in coming days we'll see more of that because people are going to be asking tough questions we're probably not going to be getting anything coming out of Congress confirming this and we probably get some of the members of Congress will start to distance themselves from this story it's kind of already they're being a bit tentative and we'll just be left with the more eccentric members of Congress like Tim Tim burett who's a big fan of UFOs and the more sensible ones will just move on to other things Russia's story is also intriguing for another reason and that is because of his background in US intelligence M why why should people believe grush or anyone else coming from the intelligence Services I mean what makes them so credible in the eyes of the public well you have to be very vetted uh to to work in the intelligence service you have to get top secret clearance and there's another level called uh top secret uh secure compartmented information tssci where you're allowed to be read into specific programs which have their own individual security classification and he he had this security class classification um I think more broadly it's refer referred to as title 50 uh which means that he was trusted to be told secrets and he he was involved in creating the president's daily briefing and uh he even CED it couriered it to the White House although I'm not really sure exactly why being a secure Courier is uh is a great endorsement but you know he's he was he was trusted by the intelligence Community but then I think you've also got to look at the next thing which is then he wasn't because what happened was in 2021 well 2017 he read the New York Times article he got really interested in this he he joins the UAP Task Force at some point uh which was run at the time by Jay Stratton and and CH his chief scientist was Travis Taylor who is this kind of odd figure odd figure he's kind of a scientist but also TV scientist he's on Ancient Aliens constantly spouting off about aliens and secrets of Skinwalker ran talking about portals and wormholes in space very unscientific but anyway so uh uh Tim um sorry uh Dave Dave grush goes joins the UAP task force I think initially as a liaison for the the reconnaissance office which does like satellite imageries and he so he's hooking up with uh with Jay Straton and Travis Taylor who do not seem like very reputable people in terms of their their their qualific one their qualifications what they've actually said about OS I just don't I think they they're both strong Believers in in this you get it from Travis tor on his TV appearances and Jay Stratton has talked about strange paranormal experiences he's had and people have come forward saying that he talks a lot about ghosts and he didn't do enough actual investigating of uaps and perhaps that's why we missed these uh these Chinese balloons year ago years ago because we had him working there so I think he was influenced gush was influenced by these people and eventually got the idea that there was this secret program going on and then other people came in who made similar claims in the past and they're very well spoken very persuasive people like Hal POF and Eric Davis and Gary Nolan these these people who are well known within the UFO Community they show him stuff they explain stuff to him and he gets convinced and then in 2022 he files this whistleblower complaint with the dodig uh the Department of Defense Inspector General and the at that point I think they stop trusting him because he's as kind of as he describes it uh he he said that he was getting retaliated against and they were kind of imping his his decision-making abilities and his mental health and U uh his his good character and things like that so yeah I think at that point either he's discovered this top secret program or he's got convinced of this illusory top secret program and is starting kind of Behaving erratically because he's believing this thing that doesn't actually exist he's starting to believe that aliens are killing people and all these things are happening and he's going around uh like discussing it with people and saying he's going to blow the whistle and he files this this whistleblower complaint so by retaliating against him really what they're doing is that they are rightfully concerned that he is becoming a little bit irrational you if this story is in fact false if it's true of course then you that's fine but it doesn't look like it's true yeah rather said downfall for a for a man of his career and expertise you know I mean uh ultimately you have to just you know sit down and think my God you know um something tragic or terrible must have happened to have triggered someone into this sort of belief structure you know I don't know though I don't know if you need a Char to go terrible thing I think is you know I I looked into a lot of conspiracy theory beliefs and people can just slide into them they can just kind of get in like a little bit at a time and often it's like they see some some one piece of particularly compelling evidence like for example he might have gone to the UAP task force and said like what about this gimbal video yeah that's probably just you know it's probably he he he says he originally thought it was a near peer uh adversary technology like someone else his drone or something like that and so he goes to the UAP um you know task force and then he asks Travis Taylor the chief scien what do you think of this and Travis Taylor tells well I think it's a UFO and his way I think it's a UFO and then he says oh well yeah that makes sense and so he starts believing that's a UFO and once you believe one thing is an alien spaceship it takes very little to to believe something else so I you know I don't think he's necessarily had some kind of nervous breakdown or anything like that I think he's just been convinced uh over years that this is actually true to the extent that he he can't see how ridiculous his claims are so his you his judgment has been compromised but it's not like he's going crazy or anything like that okay so the US government and other governments worldwide are undoubtedly working on Advanced military Technologies could grush be the frontman for an operation designed to keep the myth of UFOs alive diverting attention from real classified programs well it's possible and that's something people have suggested as as a thing like that this is you perhaps he discovered some program and then they started feeding him all this extra information that just makes his claims look ridiculous and this is the type of thing that has been you know strongly suggested before people have made claims that this has actually happened and and I think at the very least uh the military does actually let UFO stories grow if not encourage them and they probably do encourage them to a certain degree as well because it provides good cover for things like test flights of uh of equipment like the when the U2 came out it got reported as a UFO all the time because it it flew at 65,000 ft where nothing else flew so Pilots were seeing you know things flying high above them and they reported it and it was just kind of you brushed under the carpet as a as a UFO uh and to a certain extent I think I think there was some encouragement of the ridiculing of of UFOs to kind of keep that not not being looked into quite so seriously historically so that there certainly you know that type of thing is possible but I think when you look at this particular case doesn't really make sense because you you're getting you still we're still getting this Congressional investigation we're still getting people actually looking into it it didn't really work if they they tried to ridicule it even though it's claims are ridiculous on their face uh they it's still it still kind of got through but you know that's a possibility I wouldn't want to rule out but it doesn't really seem super likely to me I mean for one thing that type of propaganda against the American public is is is illegal you're not supposed to spend money on on changing the minds of the American people uh in a deceptive manner like that uh so if someone was caught doing that then it seems like uh it would be it would the problems would outweigh the benefits and I think they're probably better ways of handling it they should just increase their security and not not actually have these these leaks actually happen uh because covering it up by inventing UFOs seems like a pretty outlandish and extreme way of doing it well if as you suspect there's no substance to gush's claims and he's exposed as a porn of a larger game or maybe just exposed as being diluted at some point what impact do you think it's going to have on legitimate scientific research into UFOs and the search for extraterrestrial life generally I don't think it'll change it that much I think right now we have a bit of momentum going in terms of uh searching for UFOs I don't think those those programs will be changed because they overlap with real issues like UFO uh or UAP could be a foreign drone it could be an airspace incursion by a foreign power or it could be representative of a systems failure or a procedural failure that we need to to address so things like Arrow the the pentagon's body investigating uaps I mean that should continue they need to figure out what's going on NASA's looking into it as well there's nothing wrong with that as they'll they'll do a report at some point uh Arvy lobe this Harvard scientist has a program where he is setting up telescopes and other equipment on on rooftops to try to capture a much better photo of UFO yeah there's nothing wrong with that he's spending his spending someone else's money but it's not my money so I'm I'm fine with that yeah uh yeah but so and then the search for life outside of the solar system isn't going to be impacted at all that's that's really kind of unrelated and the science there is still solid and we're still going to have the James web Space Telescope is going to be looking at distant planets and seeing if there are techno signatures in the atmosphere of planets you can kind of see when it go goes between when the planet goes between you and the sun you can kind of see how the light filters through and then detect kind of the chemical composition of it and you can see does it have any like you know not sure what the thing would be like nitrogen sulfides or something something obscure uh and and you can tell if there's life that's not going to change searching for radio signals is not going to change and this is just a very specific issue like yeah he's claiming that there are crashed flying sources uh that we've retrieved it turns out if it turns out we haven't retrieved crash flying sources it turn it throws a lot of disrepute upon Him upon Ross Kart and all the other people who went along with the story uh and but it's not going to impact these other things one of the things uh that is really intriguing about everything that we've said so far and you've already touched on it but I'd like you to uh give our listeners a little bit more of an insight into this and that is that many figures uh involved the current UFO UAP narrative seem to have some connection to the skin walker Ranch a place associated with many spooky paranormal activities could you please explain the importance of skin walker to the current UFO UAP discussion yeah Skinwalker Ranch when you look at it now it's it's a TV show and they they think that the ranch is kind of has a supernatural precedence of some sort maybe alien spaceship buried underneath it and they they do lots of fun experiments trying to figure it out but the history of Skinwalker Ranch goes a lot further back back to the 1990s uh when it was actually bought by a guy called Robert Bigalow who is a I believe at the time he was like a real estate billionaire or millionaire you had a chain of motels he later kind segwayed into some kind of spaceship research but he he brought the ranch because he was super interested in the Supernatural and in UFOs and reputedly the ranch was haunted beings could come into the ranch from other dimensions they were seeing UFOs all the time so he thought it was an ideal place to set up his new Endeavor which was basically he'd got a bunch of scientists together including Hal POF who is one of the people now involved with with this thing a bunch of scientists he got together and he kind of installed a team at the ranch to study this this supernatural phenomena and kind of a legend grew around this Ranch and at some point uh he he became F friends with Harry Reid who is a a senior senator since passed away but he was like the the House Majority lead for a long time uh the Senate majority lead and he got convinced Harry Reed got convinced of the whole UFO story and he kind of used his government connections and brought people onto the ranch uh kind of like people from the Pentagon came to the ranch there was a guy called James latsky came to the ranch and one of these people had some kind of experience on the ranch like a a manifestation of some Tubular Bells appeared in front of him in the kitchen and this guy was convinced Enough by this that he decided that they had to set up an investigation program into this and so with har Harry Reid's help they set up this kind of covert investigation of Skinwalker Ranch this haunted UFO flying uh Ranch they set it up with government money Pentagon money and the disguised it as being a program that was looking into advanced Aerospace technology but really it was looking into the ranch and that's what started this um this this UFO program that was eventually written about by Leslie Keane and Ralph Blumenthal in the 2017 article that Dave grush read that got him really interested in UFOs it started this program called orap uh that then became the atip program which was where kind of L is condo came in and then all these other people are connected to Skinwalker Ranch if you look at the uh the other people who have been talking about this um Jeremy Corbell and George knp they're big Skinwalker Ranch fans um all these other people have been to Skinwalker Ranch and it it was eventually was sold by Robert Bigalow to Gary Nolan probably because really wasn't very much going on and now it's this super popular place and the head of well the chief scientist of the UAP task force Force which is the organization that Dave grush uh kind of joined to and that got him really into the whole thing their Chief scientist is also the chief scientist well he one one of the chief scientists at skin walker Ranch I paid for by the new owner uh Brandon fugle who's another guy who's really interested in in this type of thing and has a lot of money to spare so this this huge web of connections going to Skinwalker Ranch and not just like a bunch of people but the Pentagon the Pentagon is deeply involved they actually spent money unbeknownst to most of them investigating this thing and I think this is an aspect of the story that has been sadly missed by the mainstream media partly because it's a ridiculous story yeah but unlike Dave gush's story this one is verifiably true there's documented evidence of all of this we know that Harry Reid uh got this program passed uh and got this this orap program started and you know supposedly a government program is meant to be sent out for tender but it ended up going to his friend Robert Bigalow so essentially he set up a program for Robert Bigalow to study interesting things on his own ranch and by fooling people in the Pentagon that they were studying something else and then all these people have been involved ever since and this is partly why we are where we are now and this is partly why Dave grush uh got convinced of of this type of thing it's um it's a bit troubling it kind of I think it indicates to me some kind of kind of systemic failure within the Pentagon if they this type of thing can go on you people develop these beliefs I mean maybe they caught it with Dave grush and that's why he's no longer with the Pentagon but uh you know it happened and it's it's happening with other people like Jay Stratton and Travis Taylor uh Fugal the current owner of Skinwalker wants to turn the place into a paranormal Disneyland doesn't he not really he's said that he he is only interested in um scientific experiments and he seems like an honest guy and I I I you pretty much believe that you right now that's what he wants to do you know he's making a little money from it uh they've got like a website where you can join and pay $5 a month to be an Insider but I'm sure that not very much money and he's a very rich guy because he's like the biggest real estate developer in uh in Salt Lake City or maybe just Pro but you know it's a very he's a very rich guy and he does lots of other stuff beside this so I don't think his motives are necessarily bad but I think the science the so-called science that they do at Skinwalker Ranch is just terrible they do the most ridiculous experiment and they do them very sloppily and then they completely misinterpret the results and this has been going on for for many many years and yet you know this place supposedly is the the Crux of the entire like us UFO thing that's going on right now I'm sure Dave Dave grush is probably familiar with it now some Believers and UFOs May hold on to their conspiracy theories despite any debunking efforts as we know but should we allow the surge of public interest to fizzle out on its own or is there value in challenging these claims while they're still popular I think uh there's def definitely value I I think people uh need to know the context of these things things like you know that Skinwalker Ranch was involved and if someone else is making a false claim you know you don't just let it slide you don't just say oh well it will be sorted out later and you know the people are making essentially false claims and already there's been retractions uh there was a story in the debrief where they they was it in the debrief I think it might have been in a in the hill which is uh part of uh of news nation's parent company so there's a story on the hill where they said that the the stories of ET flying crash had been uh verified by the lawyer uh that was working for uh for grush uh but it turns out that wasn't true the lawyer actually took the rather strange or well unusual step of issuing a statement kind of denying this and saying yeah we no longer work with h with Dave grush and we've been misrepresented in the media and all we did was file a very narrowly t whistleblower complaint and it didn't speak to the specifics of what he's been saying and they took no position on that and so the hill had to revise this piece uh to to say you know something much less impressive before it was like you know verified by attorneys or like uh the Inspector General verifies claims of UFOs and then it was CH it was changed to uh verifies claims of a cover up so no details it's just a cover up but yeah it's uh you know we've got to keep keep the pressure on but you that said I want an investigation by Congress I want Congress to look into this and figure out what's going on I'm not trying to stop it I don't believe that there's aliens but I don't I'm not trying to stop them investigating these claims I think they should really get in there and look and see exactly what happened and hold hearings and hold investigation because it's kind of kind of messed up but it's it's got this far it's you for one thing it's kind destroys public trust in the government if people are all thinking that you know we we we keeping like this terrible thing secret that aliens are killing people and the government's not telling us about it and the government's killing people to cover it up you know we got to look into that if it's true which I doubt then yeah we'll do something about that if it's not true then we'll do something about that I'm John bruny and you're listening to Sage Internationals the focus podcast and from the United States we're speaking with science investigator Mick West Mick what's it been like being the key debunker in all of this I mean you obviously have to stay in touch with the UFO community at some level on social media how's it how's this journey been for you uh it's been very interesting I I think my I got my start in UFOs by investigating UFO videos which is what I still do and I still enjoy doing that uh recently there haven't been that many good videos it would seemed like for a while we were getting like new interesting videos from from leaked uh government things and even a few from the government themselves so that was kind of interesting and there's still a few but I also enjoy talking to people and discussing the topic and I I enjoy trying to figure out what's going on in their in their heads you know not you know they're not crazy but they've been convinced of things so I enjoy that part of the conversation and this has really kind of ramped everything up though like everybody in the UFO Community is really interested in this topic a significant chunk of them think this is it they think this is disclosure the government is going to tell us what they know and it's going to be a a utopian new world as we get all this amazing technology curing disease and getting rid of pollution and having free energy so they think this is all going to happen uh or at least we'll learn a bunch of interesting things about aliens and there's a few skeptical people as well but there's a vast number of people people who who feel very anxious that this be true and it's not all just people who are like you wouldn't it be great if we had got this new technology there are people a lot of people who have had some personal experience with the UFO like they they have seen a UFO or they've had an experience meeting an alien of some sort uh that they think actually happened and they strongly believe it and they want validation yeah they they want you know people to know that they were not crazy as you know some sometimes they can perceive other people perceiving them but that they were actually correct so they're very anxious that it be true so there's thousands and thousands of people out there who are very anxious that this be true and some of them get angry with me because I point out issues and they think I'm trying to suppress the story which I'm not you know I want it to investigate it uh but their their anger I think is is understandable I mean some people are not very nice and that's that's not good but you know I think a lot of people their anger is coming from a genuine concern uh either for you know their for for the world or for for their own position or a combination of things uh so you know there's strong emotions out there but I'm uh I'm used to it and I know that most people mean well you think that uh all of this sort of comes at a very peculiar time in human history I mean there have been many people saying well why now you know why is this mov move toward disclosure being pushed now but then when you look at the way that the world has been shaped you know we've got our climate change crisis we've got war in Europe we've got the fact that we are going to be deploying what in the very near term could be sentient AI in our homes and offices which ironically uh is a truly disruptive and alien technology which we built by our own hands I mean do you think that there's something to be said for the fact that we're all looking for some sort of Silver Bullet solution to many complicated problems and in the mindset that we're talking about in terms of David grush and the the whole belief in UFOs there's this notion that if only we could find that silver bullet you know if only we could find the mysterious alien technology that would be able to mitigate against all human foilables will be okay is there also this element playing into things you think I I think to a degree but I I also think that you know that type of Desire has always existed if you look back uh the history of the free energy movement there's a lot of people who think you know that the government is has hidden like carburetors that can allow cars to go 200 miles per gallon or you know run off a single like you know 9volt battery things like that and they they believe it quite strongly and they they're fighting for government disclosure of the 9 battery car uh and I think you know the same kind of feelings exist within the UFO community so I think that really hasn't changed uh and it's something that's really been similar since the dawn of the UFO age back in the 1940s and 50s uh I think what's different now really is that the UFO Community has done a good job of publicizing a number of stor stories starting with the 2017 article which is the kind of the root cause of a lot of this right now uh and this this particular piece of Interest has been building in the media you that article started the public interest but it also started Dave gush's interest and got him to a position where now he is releasing this information uh so I think we're we're seeing kind of a a combination of you know it's the spirit of the times which hasn't really changed but it's also this story is kind of coming to a head uh because of the E long running efforts of a a small group of people but also on top of that kind of taking advantage of the change in the media cycle we see it coming out in these small Outlets uh like the debrief and uh and news nation and it's still getting a lot of traction it was it was good great for them that the first story came out in the New York Times but this kind of shows that you can release on in other settings and still get uh a reasonable amount of traction for a story like this obviously it would have been a lot more had it been in the New York Times and I'm sure they they deeply regret not being able to do that but you media is is highly fragmented now and it's it's quite easy but things like a YouTube channel to uh have more views than than a CNN episode uh so if Joe Rogan talks about this like I think he did like a 20 minute segment on it a few days ago millions of people are going to see you that's that thing and they're going to get really interested in it and then they'll go and watch the news Nation thing they'll probably watch it on on YouTube or or wherever but you know that it's media doesn't rely so much on it the story being accepted by the mainstream you can still get a very big story out there and for something like UFOs which is a bit of a fringe that's a great thing for their position so this might be the first big UFO story of its type that has kind to come out in this way but I'm hoping that that will kind of educate people a little about you know how seriously should we take stories like this when something like this happens again in the future which it probably will Mick finally um I'd like to Ste you to another figure in the pathon of modern UFO U law uh an interesting figure which we have whom we have men mentioned earlier Dr Gary Nolan um he was recently recorded on a New York based seminar called salt in which he claimed he was 100% certain that we have and are being visited by aliens Nolan is from Stanford un University at the um School of Medicine his day job being a cancer immunologist Nolan is interesting in as a UFO UAP Advocate since he is a scientist though far removed from astrophysics and related fields M what do you make of his claims about aliens well I think he does believe it uh he's not making this stuff up he's also deeply involved in this this current thing with David grush like he's been one of the people who's been accompanying grush accompanied him to a meeting with Canadian MPS uh but you Gary Nan himself has been quite open about his beliefs which are somewhat of the more unusual uh UFOs he's not entirely nuts and bolts type thing he's very open to kind of slightly more Supernatural type things although you know he he was very much obviously the Supernatural is explainable by science because it's just a science we don't understand yet so we' probably frame it like that but he when he was young he had um encounters with beings uh in his bedroom like as a young young child and then some other uh encounters like another encounter with the UFO and uh and he's he's basically been in UFO culture for a long time kind of secretly though you he knows that you know within Academia people don't respect you UFO researchers so I think he kind of did this on the download for quite a while uh he appeared in a book by Diana Pula uh called I think American Gothic was it it called something like that but it was uh it wasn't called American Gothic it was uh something something along those lines though but anyway the he appeared anonymously in the book so he was like a researcher from you know a West Coast University but he talked about you know his beliefs and things like that so he's definitely a guy who's who's been in the community for a long time he's a very clever scientist uh but I think he goes into areas where he's not necessarily qualified to look like uh met metal analysis he does a lot of metal analysis and he's he might be responsible for some of the things that were talked about by Dave grush so you know he's he's one of the Prime movers of this current situation and he's someone who has an an honest belief that these aliens are real possibly From Another Dimension and he also believes in things like like mediums like he's a a friend of Tyler Henry the the Hollywood medium to the stars who you know summons us the dead so there's this weird overlap you see with other people as well um Leslie Kane also has written a book about life after death and she's been to sances and she gives Credence to the claims of of mediums who can you know materialize disembodied hands and things like that there a very interesting connection there and Gary Nolan summed it all up where he says you there's a word there's a word called Woo which means the the Paranormal the Supernatural and Gary Nan said uh we stay away from the woo because it scares the be jetas out of people uh but we know that the Woo is always just around the corner which is true within the UFO Community the woo the Supernatural is just around the corner a lot of people believe in it and a lot of people think that it explains the UFOs or UFOs explain the Supernatural and you know that that again is a little little concerning that so many people believe that indeed well Mick thank you for joining us today and sharing your insights into this intriguing topic it's great to have your expertise on our show thank you for an interesting conversation and to our audience thanks for tuning in to the focus podcast we hope that you found today's discussion enlightening and thought-provoking if you have any comments or questions please feel free to reach out to us on social media you can find the focus on Facebook referenced on the John bruny and Sage International LinkedIn pages and on YouTube or on the sage International website www Sage international.com by clicking the media drop-down menu and hitting podcasts and please leave leave us your comments on inquiries at Sage international.com don't forget to subscribe hit the like button and or leave us a review on your favorite platform my thanks to our stallwood production team of Malcolm Hughes and Neil smart join us again next time as we continue to delve into the most pressing current affairs issues of our time until then stay informed and stay engaged I'm John bruny and you've been listening to the focus love this podcast support it and sponsor today simply head to oast network.com for details