Zero Point & Beyond: UAP & Black Projects | Nick Cook

Transcript

i'm tim pantura and we're joined today by nick cook the former editor of james defense weekly 20 years ago nick stunned the world with the hunt for zero point which offered insights into the secret nazi weapons programs of world war ii and how those influenced classified aerospace research over the course of the 20th century in this presentation he joins us to discuss what's changed since hcp's publication and offers his thoughts and insights on the rapidly evolving uap story and how social and geopolitical trends are shaping the aerospace needs of tomorrow and thank you so much for presenting for us today it is truly an honor to have you here no no well it's a pleasure you and i go back a long way so um we we can talk about that i came into the conversation while we were talking about lifters tim and uh i you know i remember when we first met which was i think i was just in the middle of making a documentary and you provided the lifter segment which was uh fantastic so it's um it'll be fun i'm looking forward to it and for those of you who don't know me and there's no reason why you should uh i'll give you a little bit of a little bit of background uh so i was the aerospace editor of jane's defense weekly from 1987 to 2005 i'm a little vague sometimes on when i left jane's because they sort of employed me as a consultant towards the end and i sort of drifted on for a bit but basically it was until about 2005. uh while i was at jane's i started to write books and in fact i started to write novels to begin with but in 2001 which is what i guess we're sort of predominantly here to discuss uh i wrote a book called the hunt for zero point um which i will come on to in a minute so uh in addition to the novels which is fiction obviously uh i have a a non-fiction background as well um i'm also a ghost writer uh not many people know that because uh ghost writers don't tend to shout from the rooftops what they do but in effect we write books for other people so i do i do a bit of that i've done a bit of that i don't do too much of it now but uh it was a very useful skill because it sort of allowed me to get into the minds of other people and speak for them which is what i've done uh for about i think about a dozen books mainly in the military field but not all um i am also a consultant so i have worked uh for and with aerospace and defense companies um we can talk a little bit perhaps at the end about something that i was involved in um from about 2007 onwards which was an outfit which was looking to work with aerospace and defense companies to use their skills base and technology base to work on global challenges i've recently resurrected that uh under the ncw banner which is my sort of company and website and we could talk a little bit about that too uh finally um getting back to the novel thing i have recently rewritten or sort of re-embraced the whole novel writing thing i've written a book called the grid which sort of touches on some of the things that we'll be talking about today technologically but that i hope gives you a bit of a flavor about what my background is as i said we're here to talk primarily about the hunt for zero point i have to pinch myself that it was published in the uk 20 years ago uh in fact it was it was it came out uh the day before 9 11 which is not a great time to publish a book but it was an even worse time clearly for the world so um it was it was a time of great turmoil um i then had a u.s launch uh the following year uh so that actually sort of took off i think probably even more than the uh the uk one did but uh the hunt has been a great journey for me um i'm gonna get into it in some detail in a minute but it's sort of again for those who don't know it i haven't read it um it really allowed me to explore what i took to be or postulated to be the biggest secret that i could conceive of while i was working as aerospace editor of jane's defense weekly um that was out there in the world of aerospace and defense uh and it's really hard now to um sort of put our selves back in that mindset but 25 well actually i started the research 30 years ago so i started it in 1990. um at that time the whole area of anti-gravity uh of sort of advanced propulsion particularly ufos and uap which we'll come on to as well was so taboo that i mean i frequently wrote in the book and it wasn't a joke that i was in sort of some terror that i was going to lose my job when uh this book came out because it was breaking so many taboos in my industry and my business but in the end of course what it came to be about was anti-gravity could it exist did it exist uh again i'm going to talk about that in more depth in a minute um for me personally it was a great opportunity to uh write what i call here a kind of dark letter a dark love letter to an industry which i'd so enjoyed working well reporting on um for all the years that i did it but i sort of got to the point i think in the late 1990s when i really thought you know i'm sort of done here i mean it's i've had a fantastic time i've really enjoyed uh reporting on that whole world but um uh you know i i if i'm gonna go if i'm gonna go out i might as well go out with a bang and that really was sort of what the hunt was about in a way um so if we take that 1990 sort of start point um as the uh the journey beginning for me um whilst i had sort of always said to myself that i wanted to use this incredibly rarefied and privileged position that i had at jane's defense weekly which had and i i guess still has i'm not that familiar with it now but a great sort of um uh uh uh what had a very good reputation within the whole aerospace and defense business not just in the industry but also amongst ministries intelligence agencies there was pretty much no way you couldn't go when you had that jane's passport so this was the thing that really set me thinking which was okay i've got this access um i was quite young i mean i was how old was i um i was barely 30 i think and i thought uh if i'm going to make use of this position what am i going to do and it was this idea that okay you know there's your day job that's fine do that but behind your day job can you uh explore amongst the people that you're seeing the notion that there may be this incredibly deep dark secret that has been suppressed and you know that led me to thinking what could that deep dark secret be and inevitably i thought that it would probably probably be in the area of an uh of a propulsion and and or an energy breakthrough so with that in mind sort of in the most extraordinary sort of happenstance way that occurs when i think you sort of wander along this signal line i one day i got an article plonked on my desk and back in james in those days we had a central mail opening service so you know if there was no such thing as privacy all your mail would be open centrally and it would be uh distributed uh to the people it was meant to be going to so i found this article on my desk and when i say this article the picture that you see here um was from a 1950s magazine i didn't even know what publication it was from because the photocopy that had been made of it had cut off the um cut off the name of the publication i i later found out that it was actually in a sort of uh aero modeling publication but it spoke to these aerospace companies that had very familiar names they were some of them listed here the glenn l martin aircraft company bell lear there were others lockheed convair really well-known companies that were all exploring um the anti-gravity scene and this to me was just insane i mean you know i i was steeped and had been steeped for many years in this very traditional aerospace reporting scene and here were uh all of these companies talking very seriously in the mid 1950s about how they were very close to an anti-gravity breakthrough and one of them one of the executives who were quoted which really lifted it out of sort of the usual domain of you know sources said this or um you know uh uh um non-named individuals talking about all of this stuff but here was this guy called george s trimble who worked for the glenn martin company he was a very senior individual in their research and development organization and he said we are already working on cancelling gravity it could be done in the time it took to build the first atomic bomb and and when i read this i thought well okay well here's you know there are named companies there are named individuals um and as much as i didn't want to be dragged into this whole scene i thought well look you know if there's something here a few phone calls are going to establish whether there's anything in it and i made a couple of phone calls to people i knew in the business and one of them eventually this is uh people i knew in the pr side of uh the companies i was talking to one of them tracked down george trimble it was actually through lockheed martin because martin aircraft company had obviously become uh uh part of uh what is now lockheed martin and this contact pr contact of mine said i've tracked down george trimble he um he doesn't want to be interviewed by you in fact he doesn't want to be contacted by you at all and um i'm suggesting to you nick this is what the pr executive said that you dropped this story because i don't know what it's about but it's obviously um it it's obviously you're obviously up to no good and it's going to get you into trouble so i just recommend you drop it well of course you know that is red rag to a ball from that moment on i hadn't really been into this story until then but i certainly was now and off i went so regrettably what i found was when i looked into this sort of mid-1950s scene was that uh for all of these um programs that were being discussed in america in in the mid-1950s which just petered away to nothing by the end of the 1950s so by the early 1960s it was like none of this had ever happened um i'd had some experience in jane's of covering black programs at that time bear in mind that this was in the sort of late late 80s early 1990s we'd had the big reagan-era ramp up um of defense spending particularly in the classified realm we had aircraft like the f-117 that had been developed in the black a colleague of mine bill sweetman who i'm sure many of you will know the name of if not no personally bill was working at james at the time and we paired up on a lot of stories and we covered uh the whole black world scene which was very exciting at the time because there was plenty going on there was the not only was the 117 sort of beginning to emerge out of the black from the skunk works but there was the b2 which was sort of semi-black it was more gray than anything else and then towards the end of the 80s we got rumors of very exotic sounding uh but very ethereal uh programs like aurora um hypersonic uh hyper a putative hypersonic platform that was meant to replace csr 71 blackbird you know all of these reports we looked at very carefully at james and bill sweetman and i particularly uh spent a long time looking into them but they ultimately they kind of led you know beyond the the ones that became public which were um predominantly the 117 and the b2 the others were very um they just all of those stories kind of went everywhere and nowhere but there was enough for me to know that this anti-gravity story had a kind of a tale you know it began somewhere and so i annoyingly for me because i really did not want to trace it back into world war ii but that was where many of these stories about anti-gravitational type technologies seem to originate there were reports as many of you will know at the end of the second world war in 1944 and 45 about foo fighters buzzing allied aircraft over germany i looked into that i found a very interesting paper in uh the us air force's files called project lusty which stood for as you can see here luftwaffe secret technology it was an interesting file to me because it hadn't been um scrutinized much if at all at this point and i'm going now probably to the mid-90s i guess when i took a look at it maybe the late 90s and it was full of raw intelligence data brought back by british and american technology plunder operations operatives in the field that brought these raw reports back of what the germans had been up to in the advanced technology area um i was looking for a kind of smoking gun you know to see whether there had been either reports of exotic disc shaped aircraft or exotic propulsion technology um there was lots of very circumstantial evidence there was talk of directed energy weapons of which i was uh completely unaware um i was unaware the germans had been involved in directed energy at the time that i was uh looking into this stuff um there were plenty of reports of systems that would have gone into an integrated sort of disc shaped aircraft but there was nothing that remotely resembled a a flying saucer itself so um somewhat disappointed but not all together surprised i moved on to what i considered to be much more my bread and butter which was up-to-date stuff um so if we sort of fast forward to the mid-1990s again to uh the sort of 1996 field i was [Music] first sort of apprised of what was going on in this whole area of gravity shielding by an article that came out in britain's sunday telegraph which you can see on the left it was called breakthrough as scientists beat gravity and it was a sort of very pop story about eugene uh or evgeny podcletnov uh i went on to meet podcatnov later um and if i forget to mention that perhaps we can come back to that in questions but there was a an amazing guy at bae systems uh i know some of those in the audience out there tonight uh will will know of uh uh the um very redoubtable uh ron evans who worked at bae systems uh and who uh was in charge of a small department but he was in charge of a bae led enterprise called project green glow ron invited um evgeny pogleton kletnov to uh uh bae systems wharton um uh plant in i think it was about 1999 or 2000 but uh i'm getting ahead of myself that was in the future back in 96 uh this telegraph story told of podcletnov's apparent achievement which was to have uh caused um weight reduction in objects above rotating superconductors uh on the order of sort of two two to three percent and i know you know again this is a subject very close to tim's heart because uh tim and i had poured over uh podcletnov's achievements or not uh uh over endless conversations you know back at that time but um it was frustrating because although other uh scientist particularly at uh nasa and the university of alabama huntsville around that time were seeking to replicate what podcatenov had been doing as far as i'm aware and i'm sort of i have been out of touch for a while and i'm sure some of you at the end will be able to correct me but um no replication was successful uh in part or in maine because those rotating superconductive disks um could not be built to the integrity that was required and podcletnov always said that he had the kind of magic formula which uh only he knew and that was why no one else was successful in doing all of this stuff in amongst all of the people who were trying to replicate his uh activities i met the mythical almost uh ning li at a um uh quite a a sort of seminal event uh in all of this which was um the uh it was a conference on um on on gravity and anti-gravity uh at the miter corporation in just outside washington dc and i think it was in 2003 and ningli was there actually she was sort of presiding over it as the uh the sort of the the um mistress master of uh ceremonies and i had an opportunity to sit down and talk with her afterwards and of course it wasn't that long after that event that she disappeared off the face of the globe having received um some uh i mean a not insubstantial amount of money uh from uh us army missile command to develop her uh her ideas um as i'm sure again many of you if not most or all of you will know that uh ningli actually passed away um earlier this year in in the summer um that was the first mention that i had seen of her in uh the sort of 15 years that she had literally disappeared off the face of the earth so if any of you have any updates on what she'd been doing in the intervening 15 years i'd be very interested to hear them but um my overriding recollection of her she was very uh i i liked her i thought she was very she sounded a very principled individual um and so i was rather personally i was i was sorry that i heard when i heard that she had uh had passed away early this year so moving on um black world stuff okay um so in uh 1998 i made a documentary for the discovery channel and channel 5 in the uk uh which was called a billion dollar secret and billion dollar secret was sort of um again i was quaking in my boots i thought if jane's don't fire me for doing this uh you know i don't know i don't know what i have to do to uh to get fired but um it was really looking at the interface between deeply classified uh programs and particularly what people said they were seeing over the desert southwest of the states in that sort of uh late 80s early 90s time frame and ufo law lore um you know to what extent did these two uh overlap to what extent did they collide um it became a sort of um lesser kind of technological hunt more a sort of getting into the mindset of both the people who were developing these programs but also the people who were seeing what they saw in the in the sky and and it was really my sort of introduction to the world of ufology i spent some considerable time i mean documentary filmmaking time about a week in the san luis valley in colorado and there were farmers there who were you know i mean you don't get much more down-to-earth people than farmers but these people were being confronted almost daily by things they could not explain you know lights in the sky their cattle were being mutilated they really couldn't understand what was happening in their locale and when i interviewed them about this you know they said we just want answers so it just happened that i had an interview booked in the middle of that week with uh general george mulner who was the head of research and development for the u.s air force at that time and this was again about 1998. so i flew from the san luis valley to washington and i interviewed george on his last day in office and we were specifically um cleared to talk about black programs so this was really interesting for me because you know every uh attempt i'd ever made before to talk about black world stuff had always been by talking to sources in darkened rooms or you know um sort of telephone calls from telephone boxes and it was all very cloak and dagger but here was george on his last day he was sort of apparently quite um d-mob happy and happy to talk about all of these pesky questions that i had about black programs you know including things like aurora when i walked into his office and you know he's incredibly uh friendly and uh welcoming um when i walked into his office i said hey george or general mulder i've just come from the san luis valley and there are all of these farmers who are reporting stuff in the sky which they really can't explain i said is that anything we should look to the air force as being responsible for and george said as it says at the bottom of this uh slide here he said get me the name of the contractor because whatever's out there has nothing to do with the us air force well you know i know enough and had known enough then to know that you can do an awful lot in the name of your country to obscure and hide black programs that's perfectly permissible so i didn't take george's denials at face value but we did have a very interesting conversation about you know what was and what wasn't out there and in the double speak that we sort of uh the double speak language that we we conversed in um it was very clear to me what the us air force at the time was looking for and again you'll see that quote here things that push the envelope a lot beyond where we're looking at next generation stealth certain breakthrough weapons technologies info-war spy satellites and in fact i i even talked to him about you know aurora this putative mark v um sr-71 replacement and he said something which was sort of i don't know teasing beguiling whatever but it stuck in my mind which was that there was a gap there was a gap in satellite coverage between the generation of satellites which uh were basically analog and the digital uh generation of satellites that were coming on stream um around about the time that the sr-71 was um retired and he sort of um teasingly said to me if there were such a gap and you needed to fill it with something don't you think that we would have filled it with a platform that might just match the characteristics of aurora so you know you pays your money and you takes your choice and that may have been an admission that something was built but hey you know it might just have been smoke and mirrors again and and in this game um as uh as many of you will know you have to uh you have to listen a lot and um not jump to conclusions and i think you also have to uh be very prepared to change your mind because if you stick to a rigid viewpoint in this game i think you're lost um i always say what particularly when looking at the whole ufo field that i reserve my right to change my mind about the whole ufo scene and what it means at all times because it is so uh teasing beguiling shifting and changing that i think only a a a full dare i say it would stick to a very rigid position on it uh so uh having sort of run out of steam uh talking to uh general mulner and his his uh his ilk um i then found myself dragged back very reluctantly back to nazi germany because um somebody pointed out to me that a a guy called ss general hans kamla whom i'd never heard of until that point but you know thinking i knew quite a lot about history of the second world war i was surprised by that because um kamla's position uh he was a very senior ranking ss general at the end of the second world war his position was to uh he had all of nazi germany's secret weapons programs particularly in the aerospace field um under his control right at the end of the war and so you know it was pointed out to me that if anyone would have known what the germans were up to at the end of the second world war it would have been ss general hans hans kamla well sort of like so what i said well they said well the interesting thing about camera is that he um disappeared off the face of the earth at the end of the second world war well that got my attention because um in the six conflicting accounts of his death uh you know any sort of you know anyone worth their salt investigating these sorts of uh individuals will know that that is a sort of pretty good indicator that there is dirty work afoot and sure enough um kamla uh had disappeared off the face of the globe these conflicting reports of his death were clearly designed to obfuscate um the tracks that he left behind um he uh was as i said um in charge of all of germany's secret weapons programs right at the end of the war and it was it really in following up this sort of kamla trail that i came across um a piece of technology if you can call it that um that was pointed out to me by a guy called eagle vitkovsky which many people will know now because it sort of has gone into mythology really in this whole area and that is the nazi bell i think i mean igor vitkowski who is a polish journalist um he'd spent a long time investigating top secret uh german secret weapons programs at the end of the second world war igor led me to this program he there was a physical location for it which was in uh southwest poland uh modern south west poland but which had of course been part of nazi germany at the end of the second world war um and i flew out to see him in i think it was in the year 2000 it was just before uh literally just before um i had to deliver the book but i managed to persuade my publishers to sort of um delay publication uh by a few months because i thought this lead sounded interesting i'd been quite wrapped up in the whole camera story and it seemed to be a sort of thread that came off the camera story because whatever this bell program was that eagle was talking about was very much under kamla's purview so i go out to this place the wenceslas mine in uh it was a very sort of atmospheric evening i think it was uh this time of year so it was sort of novemberish um and it was dark and it was cold and we'd spent the entire day driving down from warsaw to get to this place very tired at the end of the day and then i come out uh sort of in the in the cars headlights as we drive through into this complex which is known as the wenceslas mine there is this sort of henge um edifice which you'll see at the bottom of the screen here which has sort of become famous but actually you know rather more prosaically um yeah i said to eagle at the time are you sure this isn't the base of a cooling tower because it looks it could just as easily be the base of a cooling tower as it could be the tess rig as you're saying uh eagle um it it is for uh for for an anti-gravity type disc shaped vehicle um anyway um i covered the story i wrote it up in a chapter in the in the book and i leave floating the idea that uh you know this edifice this whole place actually seemed you know much more in tune with the idea that the germans were developing um some kind of nuclear weapons capability in this particular area and and in fact actually that is the great untold story of all of this and particularly kamla's uh rather unpleasant legacy is that he was in charge of the ss's nuclear weapons program which was quite separate from the if you can call it white world um german atomic bomb program under heisenberg um bottom left there you'll see the uh heigerlock um uh [Music] uh nuclear reactor which had was discovered by american forces you can see in that picture right at the end of the wall the ss had been developing an entirely separate strand of nuclear weapons technology which in that book you see in the middle the hidden nazi um actually talks about the what happened to kamla i started working with the authors of that book shortly after i um uh the the hunter zero point had been published so probably in about 2004 or five um i got in touch with or actually keith chester one of the authors got in touch with me and we started working the camera angle we were all very convinced that kamla had survived the war that he'd probably done a deal with the americans i'd sort of hinted as much at the end of the hunt for zero point um it was possible though that he might have done a deal with the russians but these guys did a tremendous job i left the project because i went on to do other things they went on to finish that book and they absolutely um smashed it if you allow the expression because they found documentary evidence that showed that kamla had survived the war that he had uh done a deal with the americans indeed which had um kept him alive at least for a year after the end of the second world war um and had obviously traded many many secrets was anti-gravity one of them no um i i think we can safely say it wasn't there is no smoking gun uh to any kind of german anti-gravity development effort now whether there was something in the science and technology field at a very low as we would call it nowadays trl level technology readiness level maybe but nothing in the area of sort of ready developed maturely developed technology um but the camera story is a fascinating one and uh if anyone is minded to read it i do urge you to look at uh the hidden nazi um it's a it's a good read uh so a quick sort of word on what really came to be my kind of epilogue almost in the hunt which was after the whole nazi germany thing you know where did i go next well someone had told me about a guy at lockheed martin fort worth called boyd bushman um boyd who attracted some sort of uh unwelcome publicity i mean boyd was a lovely guy i first met him when i was doing that documentary uh billion-dollar secret in the late 1990s when he was still working for lockheed martin fort worth uh whose entrance way you can see there in in in in top right um and uh the pr guys at uh lm fort worth had uh set me up with boyd because um i'd asked uh when we were making the film billion dollar secret whether there was anyone working on any kind of exotic propulsion technology and i think they were so scratching their heads that the only guy they could come up with was this senior scientist called boyd bushman um and to this day i i'm not entirely sure that they completely understood what boyd was talking about which is why i think they allowed him to talk to me but boyd was a complete maverick he he never towed the party line he never told the company line he said what he wanted to say and boyd started telling me about um john hutchison uh john hutchison is again i'm well known to many of you a canadian inventor who uh had been evaluated by a pentagon science team in the 1980s boyd said if you want to know about anti-gravity nick go and see this guy john hutchison so i did and uh john was interesting he is a wild and crazy guy um he's even while more wild and crazy now than he was then but um he had been evaluated by a team led by colonel john alexander who was working i think at the time for inscon the us army's intelligence command and john was he said through the equipment that he had put together in his lab was able to levitate objects make them fly around his laboratory he could make them lose weight he could disrupt them which was his terminology for uh uh sort of bending you know sort of metal rods um transmuting uh metals from you know one element into another um it was it was wild and crazy stuff and and you know on this trail who could resist this this notion particularly when you're led to it by a senior scientist at the world's largest defense company so off i trotted to see uh john and and he showed me his setup but you know i came away thinking this this is sort of strange here you know i i had been i'd had very little exposure at this point to anything beyond the sort of the nuts and bolts of anti-gravity but it always struck me that john who was such an intense individual um was somehow bound up in the experiments himself in other words there was something to do with john himself that was making all of these things happen which he disputed because he wanted to be known i'm sure he won't mind my saying this you know as the great inventor um when i asked john alexander about it i said what was your conclusion you know you guys invested 50 000 which uh back in the 80s wasn't an inconsiderable amount to look at his work i said what did you make of john's work and he said well i always felt that john himself was part of this it was his psychokinesis which was making all of this happen which was kind of interesting because that that was the conclusion that i'd come to as well finally a sort of last word on uh victor schauberger who was really part of the german story but um was another maverick uh in the vein of um john hutchison and boyd bushman victor schauerberger was a a forester came to the ss's attention during the war they tried to make him work for them actually with some success because the devices that he was building which mimics the way nature works and again this was boyd bushman was very keen to talk to me in very elliptical sort of language sometimes about you know it's nature holds the clue to what you're looking for nick um and and schauerberger was very much of that ilk as well what what nature uh can teach us is what finally will reveal and unveil truths about things you know and they were talking about you know sort of concepts which were very alien to me at the time again this was late 1990s you know things like the void i didn't know what the void was i didn't really know what the vacuum was i didn't know really what vacuum energy was these were just sort of terms that were thrown around to me at the time but when i uh was uh finally sort of led to go and see or directed to go and see hal put off who whom again i went to see round about the end of sort of my research journey in into the hunt you know hal started talking about things like zero point energy and of course you know that in the end is is where i took the book's title from um i i knew that zero point energy was fundamental to everything that was being discussed in the book i just don't think i had a sort of very uh sort of firm handle at the time as to you know just how influential that science was on everything that i was writing about and covering to be absolutely honest um i knew though that hal was at this kind of nexus of all kinds of things you know not only was he the the the brave and heretical scientist who was um talking about zero point energy at a time when it was incredibly unfashionable not to say heretical in fact but he was also of course instrumental in pulling together the cias and the dias and the us army's remote viewing program which was a psychic spying program set up in the in the 1970s which ran for 15 years or thereabouts and was continuously funded um throughout that time which you know always to me was telling you know i in my job at jane's i always followed the money i did that you know woodward and bernstein thing um because the money really spoke if there was money there you could bet your bottom dollar literally that there was substance to what was being funded i mean it didn't always pan out but you know that that was a fairly safe bet um and here was how funding uh remote sorry hal uh and russell targ being funded uh for a long time into remote viewing um and through all of that actually uh i came to meet quite a few of the remote viewers in fact after the hunt was published in uh 2001 i got wrung up by this uh god knows how he got my number but um wrung up by this guy who announced himself as as ingo swann and i knew english what i knew the naming is one because how hal had mentioned him he was the chief if you can call it that chief psychic um within the remote viewing program ingo was at one time lauded as the world's greatest psychic and he had devised with hal and others the protocols that allowed um remote viewing to go ahead so literally it would be on the basis of coordinates a coordinate would be would be given um and the remote viewer would be directed uh his conscious his or her consciousness would be directed to that um to that coordinate and they would then seek to bring back impressions of the target area so ingo said to me i've read your book the hump to zero point um and i'd like to discuss it with you do you ever come to new york so i said that i did and uh the next time i was passing through i went to see him and we sort of uh struck up a friendship and there are my bottom right talking to to ingo there in front of one of his paintings because he was first and foremost an artist and um then when he died in 2013 uh his family asked whether i would like to write his uh sort of biography you know kind of definitive account of his his life and um we looked at that for a for a month or two and then decided that there was nothing usefully really that i could add that ingo who had written prolifically about his life and others too had already written about it so i said i'll pass on that but in the meantime we'd found two lost manuscripts of his which went into some uh considerable depth um on ingo's take on consciousness and they've not been published before and i offered to sort of edit them put them into this volume which we call resurrecting mysterious which you can see at the bottom of the screen and that was published actually finally only uh last year but what all of this stuff was beginning to do was sort of direct me towards consciousness as being a sort of interesting area for examination um a long way from the nuts and bolts of my um aerospace and defense reporting but everything seemed to be sort of shepherding me this in this direction so much so that all the research that i sort of managed to gather by 2019 um i felt uh not confident enough to put into a a non-fiction book but i did feel confident enough in fact i felt compelled enough to write it in fiction form in a book called the grid and the grid um takes sort of the remote viewing angle but it also seeks to ask what would happen if you could um if you could build technology out of uh the skill set that remote viewers essentially used so is there some technological application of what you know how and others ingo and others were doing in the remote viewing area that could give you the ultimate surveillance system that basically knew everything uh right down to what you were thinking and that that's what the grid was about and i sort of thought i would actually leave it there and move on to other things and um which i was fully intending to do uh until well this happened um 20 let's see 2017 december the 16th the new york times publishes this story uh glowing auras and black money the pentagon's mysterious ufo program um i'm sure many of you if not all of you will be aware of it who isn't it is um it was uh extraordinary really and i'm just going to take a pause and grab a glass of water before i go on because up until then um like i say uh all of this is and was incredibly taboo in my field uh it was really taboo uh i felt i could take the whole subject of anti-gravity as far as i could without being fired in fact um i probably should just you know postscript that of course i came back to jane's after i wrote the hunt for zero point and um i wasn't fired amazingly but uh it for me personally i'd sort of kind of moved on you know it was after you've done a story as exciting as that some of the things that i had been really excited about until then didn't seem quite so exciting the um sort of nuts and bolts of you know aerospace and defense reporting didn't quite have the appeal that it had um but i i really left this whole subject alone but when uh this story came out in the new york times it had this remarkable effect really which was it suddenly liberated me and i think it probably liberated an awful lot of people to know that what was previously taboo was now acceptable in the kinds of circles that i was reporting on to to discuss because here was the u.s navy being buzzed by something or things it had no rational explanation for uh it was talking about it openly it was saying that it was baffled there was a a a a real sincerity about it that i'd not detected before there was no apparent deception or manipulation this looked like genuine stuff and then you had the new york times reporting it um so suddenly it's kind of like open season you know all of this stuff that i'd not previously been able to discuss in polite company was now uh freely available to talk about and i i think it's had the most remarkable effect on the community it's um and you know god bless uh leslie keane and ralph blumenthal and you know the people who wrote this story uh revealing the existence of atip the advanced aerospace threat identification program within the pentagon that looked had looked at um unidentified aerial phenomena um aka ufos since i think 2008 when it was first funded because uh suddenly we could all talk about this stuff you know if the pentagon's doing it if the us navy is talking about it well you know we can too and as you all know there was then sort of a a trajectory from uh december the 6 16 2017 right up until june the 25th i think it was of this year when the uh odni the office of the um uh oda the odni report anyway to congress was um was uh released um i read it like everyone else did uh and you know sort of partly in frustration um infuriated that uh you know it hadn't got into the weeds and the depths of it certainly at least in the unclassified version that that i saw um that uh you know it just left so many questions really um left open but uh its significance to me was that it existed or had existed at all um and that it uh was not dismissing ufos as a thing as uh you know um previous reports had done and you know project blue book was closed in 1969 because there was supposedly nothing to see there was no uh threats to national security um etc cetera um all of this to my mind was turned on its head with this odni uh report um back in june um lots of questions perhaps if there's time at the end we can you know talk about some of them things that came to my mind was you know where was the us air force in all of this i mean it had such a peripheral mention um and and not surprising really because as anyone who's ever done any due diligence into the subject knows the us air force has been all over the ufo story since the very beginning but in the odni report it was sort of made out that you know the only data that was really worth looking at had been since 2004 um and you know so that anything pre-2004 was sort of just um you know a sort of dark hinterland that sort of wasn't uh worth exploring well that again to my mind is where a lot if not uh all of the or a great deal of the interesting stuff has taken place so we can talk about that i hope um a little bit if there is time tim in q a but uh it is you know uh the cat's out of the bag the genies out of the bottle there is no putting the cork back on the bottle this thing is now out there and it isn't all about without actually if you listen to the dod it is nothing to do with what has been developed in secret um by you guys uh i think we can discuss that but you know the key takeaway is is that there is a phenomenon here which uh defies you know what most people would say is you know explainable by things we know and understand it it is not this is um this is baffling stuff and uh it is the great question of our age i think um reality uh why have i put this slide up and why i put don hoffman up here well um when that report came out uh as it did uh in june you know i i'd obviously i'd been intrigued by ufos for a while i'd sort of kept it pretty um uh you know i'd not too many people i told but um like you know many people i was interested in it all and it struck me that you know that the whole reason that we hadn't made as much progress on the subject as perhaps we should have is because a lot of people had looked at it as a nuts and bolts phenomenon you know this was technology and should be examined as a technological issue and a technological problem um i i really questioned that i thought well if it was you know a strict nuts and bolts problem to do with extraterrestrials visiting us from other star systems or where wherever which it might well be by the way but only as a subset of a of a bigger hole uh i you know why hadn't that delivered answers um i thought a much more interesting route given that i had now become interested in the whole consciousness thing was to look at uh the ufo phenomenon through the lens of the way we perceive reality and so i went on a sort of um a bit of a troll and a bit of a hunt to see if i could find people who could help me i'm not a physicist i'm not a scientist i'm just a writer i'm a journalist but i'm a curious individual and i wanted some i wanted a model that could help explain reality in a way that might explain what ufos were or are and i came to don hoffman because he um presented reality in a very interesting allegorical way which is basically that it's we should think of uh reality as we think of or the relationship we have to reality with the relationship we have with a computer screen um i am gazing at my computer screen now i'm looking at the interface the uh the screen itself i'm looking at some icons on it i don't need to understand the software i don't need to understand the hardware but i can click on icons and i can basically do whatever i want to do through the interface which is sort of what don hoffman is saying about reality which is that we have developed a relationship with reality wherein it gives us no more than we need for our survival so the icons on our screen our user interface are all associated with uh survival um and we have uh filtered out things that are not necessary or germane to our survival because uh we don't need them we don't need psychic ability um in our daily lives because uh if we were tuned into the deeper realms as don hoffman calls them it would blow our minds there would be so much information coming into our uh our minds that we wouldn't be able to handle it um and i i think this is a or for me this was a very useful model to understand uh reality and to look on it as a way of probing the uap sphere in a way that i think it should be so um don is even trying to unpick that screen mathematically to understand its workings to allow uh us to explore some of the deeper realms technologically but in the meantime he's saying that there are methods that allow us to do that i mean one of them is remote viewing another one is through psychedelic drugs or meditation or near-death experiences i mean there are a number of ways into the interface which don hoffman says are sort of kind of you know interim steps pending the development of technology that will uh allow us to get there and you know in some ways all of this was a bit scary to me because i'd been writing it in fiction form in the grid some time before i came across don hoffman but um hey you know it it is what it is and this is sort of where i am at the moment um last slide uh so you know for some time now um i've been looking at you know models of sort of trying to understand through models of my own how we might understand this interface um and i've got a sort of schematic here it's don't take it literally um but you know if we could take a slice through consciousness um and it if it gave us the sort of the uh the depth planes of existence that you can sort of see in the right there we would sit somewhere on that uh uh a spectrum um at the very sort of high frequency end you've got uh some stuff going on um which obviously is uh uh you know perhaps there's an analogy to sort of light and and you know the the brightness of that light um there are then lower dimensions and you know where we sit on that spectrum is anyone's guess but somewhere and somehow in this picture we have extruded i think you know organized matter in a universe that is very fine-tuned to us uh the things that we see on the interface which uh as i said uh per don hoffman are normally geared to our survival so they would those icons would be you know warmth water uh reproductive sex um you know call it what you will that whatever it is that we need for our for our continued survival every now and again we get a rogue icon on that interface we get a ufo we get a a a cryptid we get a a ghost we get a um [Music] we get something we can't explain on that interface and science or at least mainstream science has not wanted to look at that because it is uh again it's taboo we're back in that with that t word again but um i think we need to look at it i think if science doesn't look at those rogue icons it is missing a trick because the i think the only way and i'm not the first person to say this i mean there are some very eminent ufologists and investigators of the phenom phenomenon i'm thinking particularly of jacques valley you know who i think would probably go some way to uh towards agreeing with the fact that there is a uh a a a a strong consciousness element to the whole uap ufo um story which uh has sort of it's been neglected and i think that now is the time to look at this and i think that now the genie is out of the bottle um since that 2017 new york times story about uap you know we need to get science as a whole i mean not just the military this isn't just a military issue i mean it's partly one because these things that appear they may be benign they may not be um we it's an intelligence problem we need to know um but uh it it's time that the whole of science was brought in to look at this and you know if if that's what i can sort of leave us all with and and uh as as i wind down here it is that thought that that uh this is a whole of science problem um and i think we're getting much closer to mainstream science uh sort of embracing the idea that there is a phenomenon here that needs to be looked at but we're not quite there yet so some more work needs to be done i realize i'm probably way over time tim and i'm sorry but uh that for the moment is the end of my little ditty thank you very much nick thank you sir thank you again this is a tremendous honor to have you here and speak for us