Ep 536 - The Program (feat. James Fox)

The Wild Wild West.

James Fox, welcome.

Thank you so much for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me on.

You have your new documentary, The Program, I believe.

Yes, it dropped today.

Dude, that's great.

Dropping right now.

How about the timing, dude?

You couldn't have planned that better with the goddamn fucking...

I literally had an Air Force colonel text me and he goes,

so what's up with the promotion?

You managed to get a full-on alien invasion on the release of your film how did you coordinate that hey man there's just larger forces at play so that's all that is yeah no i i'm i'm i'm i welcome it i mean you know within reason yeah for sure so i don't want people to panic yeah well dude here's i'll so to be honest i was watching the documentary last night and i was uh i was just like on the way to a holiday party and i i just i got really stoned from a vape pen i haven't been smoking like that and i was just like launched and i started watching your documentary and i got like i started bugging out i started thinking about just the vastness of the cosmos and just kind of the you know the inevitability of there's got to be some other sort of consciousness or life form out there. And it's like, I was bugging.
I was like with my wife and I was like, they turned off. I'm freaking out right now.
What point did you turn it off when we got to that, the NASA conference or before? It was before that, but we were, I just started thinking about it because there was all, it was all these like, you know, there's these like Congress meetings and all these people. And it was like the line that, I don't know if it was from that or someone said it, but it's like, why would these people put their credibility at risk for no reason? No.
Yeah. No.
Come on. There's a there, there.
Yeah. So it's like, and so, you know, just tell us a little bit about the documentary.
How did you get into all that? And like, what did you, what kind of like launched you into identifying uh the uaps now not ufos yeah well yeah so yeah ufos unidentified flying objects and it went to uap unidentified aerial phenomenon and then it because they're coming in and out of the oceans as well they changed it to unidentified anomalous that's where we're at right now to me it's like they're just making it harder and harder to say to obscure the truth. That's what I'm coming.
It's like you unidentified on a lot. I can't even say it.
So I'm like, now I'm out of the race. You know, and UFOs had a bit of baggage.
There was always sort of that knee-jerk reaction when you mentioned UFOs. So I think they wanted to kind of, you know, steer away from that.
Yeah, stoner stuff. Yeah, get into the UAP stuff.
And it was really funny. I think it was today or it was last night.
Senator Schumer, Senate Majority Leader Schumer, is being like hammered in the press. I don't know if you've seen it yet or not.
And the guy's like, you don't know what it is. Therefore, it's a UAP.
You wrote the legislation. Don't you remember? Like, he's like, well, we don't know what they are.
Therefore, it's a UAP. He was probably so bla wrote the legislation they want to say they want to say drones because uap has people freaking out charged yeah and it's so funny too because they're going well we have absolutely no idea what it is but everyone's fine everything's safe there's nothing to worry about here sure so there are just like tons of drones popping up and everyone's freaking out because nobody knows whose they are.

I initially, you know, on first look, I was like, oh, it sounds, you know, conventional because, you know, UAP demonstrated technology that sort of light years advance or anything we have. But then I started doing a little deeper dive, and I'm hearing reports that they're evading the military radar, FLIR.
They go dark. Oh, really? They have a loiter time of hours and hours and hours.
Then the Coast Guard reported being followed over the ocean. I mean, just something weird is going on.
I don't know exactly what it is or who's behind it, people are scratching their heads that would be crazy if it truly was like a an alien consciousness but this was their like mall kiosk of them like flying around holiday toys and being like check this out everyone's watch watch this freak out the humans look at them look at them run so so just take us through You don't have to obviously give the whole documentary away,

but it's like, how did you get into that?

And to what depth does this whole phenomenon go?

Because like you said, when I grew up, it was just like aliens.

And you'd get a poster with black lights of an alien being like, peace, man.

Right.

But yeah, the more you hear about it, it just came out of nowhere.

The government, I feel like a couple years ago, was like, oh, by the way,

aliens are probably real.

And everyone was just like, what the fuck? What are you guys doing right now right now yeah well i mean so how that came about i'll back up a little bit and tell you how i got into it and um i had a father who was a journalist he was a quadriplegic with ms and so at a very early age i was traveling around the world with him because i was his legs i was his chauffeur i. I was his nurse, his secretary.
You know, we just traveled together. He was a mainstream journalist.
We interviewed people like Stephen Hawking and race car legend Dan Gurney and just did a lot of cool stuff together. And so I had a sneak preview into journalism pretty early on in my life through my dad.
And then I had a high school buddy of mine that when we graduated, we were 18 and we flew to Europe and we bought a used car, Renee Harris, and we bought a used car, drove from London down to Portugal. We were really close, man.
We were like brothers. And then we parted ways for like a year or two as things done.
He had different things going on, whatever. And then I, you know, reunited with him and he was suddenly into this whole ufo thing and i was like oh god renee man like i remember thinking i'm gonna have to cut my best friend loose like this is really unfortunate you know and um he was talking about roswell and ufo crash and alien bodies and i honestly thought he'd lost his mind i mean i really did yeah what year was this What year was this roughly? 90, probably 93.
Yeah. Maybe 94, 93.
You were looked at as crazy back then for it. And so anyway, I go, I was, I was apprenticing at a video production company and I went into work and I was telling my buddy, Richard Van Sickle about it.
And I had really looked up to, he was 10 years, my senior and really professional, great guy. And I was like, oh man, my really good friend has suddenly gone off on the deep end.
He's into UFOs and aliens and spaceships that crashed in Roswell. And my buddy Richard looks at me, he goes, you didn't know about Roswell? I was like, how would I know about Roswell? No, I don't know about Roswell.
How would I know about Roswell? He goes, well, the government actually admitted that they did recover a fly. Really? He goes, yeah, check it out.
Like they actually admitted it. And then the very people that were involved in the coverup came forward on camera before they died saying it was original, the original press release was correct.
So I was like, oh my gosh, I started looking into it, went to a few conferences, met a few military guys. And I was like, God, maybe there's something going on here and so i told my dad i was like you know i was doing video production at the time i was doing psa's and things of that sort and uh i was like i think i'm gonna do a documentary on ufos and my dad was like oh my god please son don't do that like there's he literally said it's a dead end street there's nothing to it you're wasting your life please not only did he was begging me he had all of my other members because i was born in england yeah of the family writing me letters saying your your dad is very concerned about you oh you're getting like english letters about it don't do it i don't that'd be a tough it's like a skull like a scolding just like i'm reading bertrand russell's autobiography and there's a lot of like english letters and they're they're pretty yeah they'll get you man anyways stinging letter yeah um my grandmother used to call me a rapscallion you hooligan you skiver breaking into the house at all hours of the boarding yeah she was your whole family so my family's like please reconsider you dad's very concerned and you know and And I just was like, well, of course, being a Taurus, I'm a bit stubborn.
And I just went all in. And I think it took me about four years.
And I was at the end of it. I was like, I'm never doing another UFO doc ever again.
But I sold it to Discovery Channel. It aired on Learning Channel.
And I kind of got the last laugh. And then I got invited to Russia.
And because I'd been, I got invited to Russia, which I ended up going in the late 90s and meeting with generals and cosmonaut Pavel Popovich. And then I got an invitation to meet with Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, because I've been trying to get interviews with him on my first doc.
And then all of a sudden, I was like, well, I guess I'm doing another doc, because I got got all these amazing interviews and I went to Russia and stuff. And so I did another one and that one was called out of the blue.
And that took me five years. Okay.
And I finished that and I said, never again. I remember, I remember my partner who was in a fetal position crying and his wife's like, you're killing my husband.
Like, stop. What was wrong with him? We're pushing each other so hard, so hard to do a good doc, right? It's like you just get to the end and you're, I mean, I'd been there myself.
I just, you're broken. Yeah.
And so I was like, well, I guess the documentary is done because I didn't really feel like it was where it needed to be. But we were all out of steam.
We were out of money. I pushed my partner to the brink of death.
And his wife was screaming at me. So I was like, was like, all right.
So then we sold that to NBC universal and it aired as a two hour special on the sci-fi channel. And then three years later, I own the rights again.
And I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to pick this back up and make it to the film. I always wanted it to be.
So I spent a couple more years on out of the blue and I released that as a director's cut. And in the process of that, I broke a big story with the governor of Arizona, Fife Simonton, who there's a very famous Phoenix Lights case that happened in February, sorry, March 13th, 1997.
And the governor poo-pooed it at the time. And then 10 years later, I met up with him.
It's like, why did you poo-poo it? You had one of your aides dressed up as an alien. He came and mocked the whole thing and all your constituents were constituents were upset and he admitted that he saw it too so then that happened and exploded in the head what did he see oh he saw the lights oh he saw a craft he saw a big all connected uh boomerang shape he said it must have been a mile from wingtip to wing across because it was so big why did he why did he poo-poo it though uh he he said just well he said that that there was

overwhelming uh uh fear like people were just freaking out he contacted the local air force

bank luke air force base he contacted the pentagon and they all shrugged their shoulders according to

him and said we don't know what the hell that thing was what so anyway i broke that story and

then i got i got i hope you don't mind i'm giving you a longer version of this yeah yeah so um

Thank you. was.
So anyway, I broke that story and then I got, I got, I hope you don't mind. I'm giving you a longer version of this.
So, um, so I broke that story and it catapulted me into the limelight. I mean, we were on all the talk shows, Larry King live with the governor.
And I thought, gosh, this would be a really good time to capitalize on this attention because media coverage is very fleeting. And I, you know, it only happens, you're lucky if it happens once in a lifetime.
So I was like, hey, let me capitalize on this and let me do an event at the National Press Club. And so I did with my friend Leslie Kane.
And it was 2007, and we flew in 14 military and government officials from seven countries and held an event at the National Press Club. And, uh, and I shot the whole thing on HD.
And then I ended up making a movie about that, which I sold to A&E called, I know what I saw. And it was a two hour history channel special.
So then I was just like, I'm done with UFOs. Like I've just, I'm done.
Yeah. And I, one of the things I've learned is never say never, because I've said that so many times in the past, But then I stepped away from it for a little while.
Excuse me. I did a film on the BP oil spill in 2010.
And then... Has that ever gotten cleaned up? Are the waters good now from that? I don't know if they're going to realize the long-term environmental impacts, because they were pumping Corexit 5,000 feet down into the oil, trying to keep it from servicingicing because they get fined for all the surface oil oh really they hide it with the corrects it which they'd never done subsea injection before so they did that and just blanket it down on the bottom they dumped more correction into the gulf ever before more than they'd ever done anywhere it was a huge lab test in the gulf yeah oh yeah i've been personally boycotting bp yeah ever since that so i guess so i i got i got it okay there's only two times where i've almost been killed i've been threatened to be killed in all my filmmaking years one of them was when i did the bp oil spill film there was a fisherman he was head of fisheries for a number of different states and he met with me secretly and he was giving me photographs of the fish uh impact that was having on these species from from the crexit and the oil they had like cysts and boils and oh just disgusting he gave me these photographs and he goes you reveal my identity boy i will hunt you down and slit your throat do we have an understanding i said yes sir we do he wasn't kidding he was like he goes because i run the fisheries i'm shooting myself in the foot along with a lot of other people but i can't in good conscience let the people oh right right eat this stuff not knowing what's going on like turn a big lab experiment the other time i almost got shot in the face is when i was making moment of contact i don't know if you ever saw that film it's about a ufo crash in brazil i was there with my buddy marco leal for like 12 years on and off and i made a film called moment of contact it was released in 2022 yeah late 2022 and uh we tracked down a guy who'd been hiding for 26 years who allegedly was driving the car during the second capture of a live alien i know it sounds nuts i'm with you well you.
Hold on, explain that. I don't know what you're talking about.
It was a UFO crash that took place in 1996 in Virginia, Brazil. I had been looking into it for 12 years.
I didn't believe it when I first heard about it. In fact, I was making my first UFO documentary, actually my second UFO documentary out of the blue when I heard about the crash.
It happened in 96. I was making it making it in like 99, 2000 is when I started.
I heard about it, but I was like, that's impossible. They don't have a UFO crash and live aliens walking through the town.
No way. So I took 10 years before I even, like almost 10 years before I would even, actually it was over 10 years before I would even look into it.
And then I ended up spending about 12 years. But in any case, a UFO was spotted in trouble.
It was a cylindrical shape object, like a cigar. It was like an aluminum kind of shape.
No wings, no visible means of propulsion. It had, according to the witnesses that I interviewed, and they're all on camera, it had a gash in the back of it and had sort of a white vapor coming out the backside.
And it was definitely in trouble because all the people who claimed to have seen it said it was just, it was struggling to stay in the air. And then it eventually crashed.
Two days later in the town of Virginia, just a few miles away, people reported these strange creatures. And then there were two, according to the authorities and military people that information that had leaked out and the researchers locally uh two or three of the of the creatures were captured and the second capture was involving a police officer by the name of marco cherez and the and the driver of that car um ed oh sorry lopes uh eric lopes and Eric Cherez died within a couple of weeks of touching the creature.
He manhandled it and took it to the local hospital. He got a weird infection and then died.
Dude, really? Yeah, it's true. Hey, no alien music.
Sorry about that. So the only other living witness to that second capture was was the driver eric lopes who's also a police officer and he was oh so he was just driving the other guy apprehended yeah he was actually on duty that night and they were told him be on the lookout for some something strange something real strange they didn't say live aliens or anything like that they'd just be on the lookout we're looking something.
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Like they're saying there's something weird on the loose, or I don't know, you want to come with me? So they team up, he jumps in the car, off they go, they see it. It ran across the road in front of him, slammed the brakes on.
Marco jumps out of the car, grabs the thing, puts it in the back of the car, takes it to Humanitas Hospital. What'd they say it looked like? It was brown.
You could look it up. Virginia creature.
It had a big head, big red eyes. It had brown, oily skin, frail, weak, struggling, suffering.
Yeah, yeah. All the witnesses said.
And then Marco Chirizzi had this like oily, greasy, he was like rubbing his body down with rubbing alcohol afterwards. And then he got this infection.
We interviewed the doctors that worked on him. He died and they couldn't explain it.
They were like, they'd never seen anything like that bacteria ever. Somehow his body just had no defense against it.
And he died. So the witness to that incident that particular capture is eric lopes so the driver yes so i got in touch with the with the with the mayor i they actually interviewed the mayor of the town this guy uh verge verge and um and he's like hey is there anything i can do to help you guys i believe this happened i want to get the story out i out.
I think the world needs to know. I was like, yeah, there's something you could do.
Could you help me locate this guy, Eric Lopes? He's been MIA for 26 years. He was apparently driving the car.
So we go to his house. Really spooky, right? The guy's off the beaten path.
Get to his house and... Oh, you got...
Yeah, that's the creature. That's it.
Jesus, man. Yep, that's it.
Oh, fuck. Yep, that was witnessed in broad daylight by three girls, Valkyria, Liliani, and Katya.
Two of them were sisters. Broad daylight.
They got within 10 feet of that creature in broad daylight. Damn.
Yeah, it was crazy. So anyway, we get to Eric Lopes' house, and he, I don't speak Portuguese, but he was like apparently telling everyone, you know, get the hell out of there, or he's going to start spraying bullets.
What? And he said it like three or four times, and then I looked over at the guy, the translator, and he looked at me, and was just like this. Eric Lopes was looking out the window right above me and I was looking at his eyes going, God, that guy's seen something.
I don't know, man. He had looked like he was so burdened with something.
You see it in his eyes. I remember I'd never looked into someone's eyes that had that profound, like he was just burdened with something really intense.
Did he look like afraid or he just looked kind of like just he looked like he'd been shouldering something so profound so deep so so deeply profoundly disturbing and that he couldn't share it with anybody that's that's what it looked like man but anyway it's confused but anyway that was a that was a second time only yeah two times where i actually was like threatened to be shot okay wow okay yeah Threat to be shot's great so you didn't even get to talk to the guy he wouldn't talk uh well he he funny and it's really funny actually because he said and you could see it in the movie when we rolled up he's like if you're here to talk about the et eric won't talk and he referred to himself in the third person which is weird and then he was like eric's not here and then it's like i'm gonna start shooting right now bullets out of here and i kept asking i didn't know what he was saying so i kept trying to get a question in like to my translator and the translator could look at me like just chill you know and then finally he looked at me like it's time to go like this that look you don't need to speak any language to get that look it was like we're leaving now period and i was like shit what's going on anyway so yeah that was that was what do you think happened to him you think he got like inhabited or something well just imagine for a moment if he really was the driver that was involved in the capture of a live alien okay just to me just i'm not saying believe it or unbelieve but if it did happen and then your best friend dies yeah and now the family and the world wants to know what happened you can't talk and if because your life has been threatened right so you have to shoulder that burden for 26 years right yeah so if it happened you can imagine how disturbing that was and you know he's military intelligent so you know he's armed to the teeth i'm sure and i would talk to some other fellow brazilian ufo researchers uber de jaro rodriguez this guy pacchini and he was like oh yeah back in 26 years ago we wouldn't go near globes i was like why not he goes everybody knew that guy was packing he was in an open fire i was like well now you guys tell me jesus christ i went to the guy's house i probably almost got shot in the face that would have sucked so bad that would have been a real bum Oh, that would have sucked. Yeah.
So anyway, so coming off the heels of that, I, you know, because I did a film called The Phenomenon, right, which covers the phenomenon from the 40s up to relatively modern day, 2017, 2020, whatever. Yeah.
And then I naturally, the natural progression would have been to go on from the phenomenon to the program, which is out now. But I had unfinished business with this alleged UFO crash case.
And so I went back to Brazil like a fifth time and I filmed a moment of contact, right? And at the very end of it all, and I totally believed it. In fact, I remember taking one of the audio guys.
He lived in Rio de Janeiro and this guy Guy and this guy and he goes oh yeah we heard about that story back 26 years ago nobody believes that it's like you know kind of like what roswell you know for sure yeah then i took him on all the shoots and he was like holy shit this happened you know and i said yeah i wouldn't waste 12 years of my time if i didn't yeah so at the week or so of filming in Brazil, a flight control officer with the Brazilian military, because flight control, fire department, police, they're all connected to the military. He came forward and said, yeah, I saw the United States Air Force plane come in Atlantic and Penas.
And then said to him. What did you say? What? So it was confirmed the United States Air Force was involved with this UFO crash case.
Okay. That the United States Air Force flew in to a place called Campinas.
And then from Campinas, I know, right? I know, Virginia and Campinas, right? It doesn't get any better than that. Can you believe it? Virginia and Campinas.
I know. Sorry.
I thought my mind was just making sure. I thought you might have known about this case.
I'm sorry. No, Camp Penis.
Joe Rogan talked about it for a year. Camp Penis.
Yeah. I wish I knew about that.
I know. I know.
So there was an alien invasion. They probably thought it was the best place ever.
They're like, we've got to go to Camp Penis, Virginia. Virginia.
I know. You can't make this stuff up.
I know. Okay.
So what happened? So the last time I was there after 12 years of filming on and off, a guy comes forward and he was with flight control with the Brazilian government, military. And he's like, yeah, I was on duty that night.
And I saw, this is January 20th, 1996. And I saw USAAF come in.
And I was like, USAAF? Oh, United States Air Force, USAF. Flight come in and didn't have authorization to land.
So he told some folks, like, I can't let this guy land. You need authorization.
And then a higher up stepped in the room and said, let him land. So he goes, yeah, this thing landed.
Then two helicopters, one or two helicopters were unload unloaded and they were flown to virginia they picked up some stuff came back to the campinas loaded it on the plane in the united states air force plane back to the united states yeah so that was when i became aware of the fact that wow there probably is a crash retrieval program going on so when i started started doing the program, the film that's out now,

it was almost personal for me, right?

Because I had no idea.

Like I was on Joe Rogan talking about Moment of Contact in April of 2023.

Well, in July of 2023,

the highest level intel officer, David Grush,

testified under oath to a bipartisan group of lawmakers that there is a crash retrieval program and he found it damn yeah so that's so so so the program kind of covers this unprecedented push for transparency on what the intel agencies really know about the phenomenon right what kicked that off i was curious about that like if Like, this is my thing. If things are, like, top secret, you have these giant kind of, like, you know, mechanisms of power controlling and hiding things.
I do find it funny that they're like, you swear you're telling the truth? And they're like, you fucking got me, dude. Yes, I pinky promise.
It's a weird system we still do. Yeah, well.
It's like, you better tell the truth like you got me so so uh

people think that the government suddenly had an epiphany and decided to be more transparent on the ufo phenomenon that's not what happened yeah i doubt that yeah right what happened was there were a couple of uh intel insiders uh christopher mellon being one of them former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence along with lou elizondo and a handful of others small handful, that protested because of excessive secrecy. They found a loophole and walked some evidence from the Pentagon out on the front page of the New York Times.
And that happened in December of 2017. So they can't put the genie back in the bottle, right? Yeah.
So more people keep coming forward now, more people coming forward. And then Congress started getting wind were having behind the behind doors uh meetings with some of these witnesses and they were like oh there's there's a there there wow then they had the first congressional hearing by a guy named con uh andre carson congressman andre carson that was 2022 that had a hint of a crash retrieval program that was revealed through a memo, the Davis-Wilson memo.
Then they had congressional hearings in July of 2023, and that's when it was all out. David Grush said, yeah, we have a crash retrieval program.
And then recently, just a month ago, we had more congressional hearings, which I attended, and Lou Elizondo, who ran ATIP, or was one of the members on a tip he uh confessed under oath that there is a crash retrieval program so so they have been going around and scooping these things up so yes things so what do you say to people who are like it's just super advanced military technology they're hiding from everybody well if that's the case that would be uh even bigger story because somebody has kept it secret for over 80 years. So, wow, okay, that's cool.
Yeah, no, I hear you. These things exhibit a technology that's just so beyond anything that we have in our arsenal.
And what are the examples of the technology that we can't really wrap our heads around? So you have objects that can hover without displaying any kind of visible means propulsion. They can accelerate from a standstill to out of sight in the blink of an eye.
Right angle turns at high speeds. No sonic boom.
No air disturbance. Very little noise.
Sometimes you'll hear a slight buzzing or humming noise, but that's it. Within certain proximity, some of the witnesses.
And they fly rings around our fastest jets. I mean, like, they make a mockery of our fastest jets.
I mean, you could just talk to David Fravor about that, 2003 off the coast of San Diego. So, and I think the big secret is they don't know what it is.
I mean, they know it's engineered, right? They know it's technological, but there's a psychic component to it as well. So it would be very difficult for any governing body to come forward and say, hey, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans, it has been brought to our attention that they're a structured craft of unknown origin whizzing around with impunity.
They fly rings around our fastest jets, so we don't know who they are, where they come from, and if they turn out to be hostile, we have no visible means of defense against them. Thank you and good night.
Yeah, true. Everyone would be like, fuck this.
Everyone would be like, no! That's why right now, when they don't know what these drones are, they're calling them drones because drones are a little less scary than UAP, right? So they're calling them drones, but they're saying you have nothing to fear, and yet we don't know what the hell they are. So that's a little strange because how could you say what something isn't when you don't know what it is? Yeah, true.
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And guys, it is a holiday time. A lot of people get sad and freak out.
Maybe you're an advertiser and you're saying, this ad should have been a fucking minute long. So maybe I'm just wasting time and trying to get to a minute.
But guys, it is the holidays. People get sad.
I get cheerful. I get full of holiday cheer.
I love it. So I'm not sad during the holidays.
I like the holidays, but some of you get very sad. So do what you need to do in terms of finding your supports.
All right. You know what we all could use a little more of? Getting off asses.
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I'm keeping it cool on this one. My corporate partners were a little upset.
So, look, I just want to keep it all business right now. This is a Mountain Dew.
Check that out. Some of the verbiage is great tasting, refreshing, and has a citrus kick, which is very nice.
Talk about what game slash activity you'd play with friends. Honestly, I like to talk about that.
I thought I was being pretty open and candid with my branding partners talking about what I was doing with my friends, but I don't know if they like my candidness or my candid nature. So I'm just going to say me and my friends, we drink Mountain Dew.
We hype each other up. We watch the game.
We watch the game with each other. And then our wives come over.
And I'm not going to talk about wife swapping or anything like that with our corporate partners, but we just have a good time, dude. Whatever, man.
Just fucking do you, bro. The mountain is calling.
You should answer. Grab your friends.
Grab an ice-cold Mountain Dew wherever refreshing beverages are sold and do the Dew. Yeah, it is deeply unsettling to be like, because, you know, human beings just have this idea.
We're kind of like top dog in the universe. Yeah, I know, right? It does threaten.
I mean, I feel kind of weird. Like, what do you think the...
I have two questions. Yes.
What's the telepathic element you're talking about? I'll give you an example. And there's examples like this that go on for decades.
But so David Fravor, the encounter that took place, it's now commonly referred to as the Nimitz case. It was off the coast of San Diego in 2003.
And he chased this tic-tac-looking object. And it had no wings, no propulsion.
It could hover. It was hovering right over the ocean.
He could see it down below. There was two military jets that saw it, four people that got visual, and they picked it up on the radar, and they chased after it.
And as they were closing... So the plane, the object was down on by the like just above the ocean surface and it was darting around kind of like this and fravor said he was going to get a closer look at it at whatever altitude he was so he started spiraling down to get a look a closer look at it and the tic-tac object starts spiraling up so it was mimicking his mode his movement but backwards so he's spiraling down it's spiraling up and then he decides to kind of do a maneuver and intercept it, like cut it off.
He gets right at it. He goes, this is about a quarter of a mile, and he goes, that sounds kind of far away or half a mile, whatever it is, but in flight, it's very close.
Yeah. No rivets, no seams.
Like, what is this thing? And then he said it took off like you just, impossible. Like this, it performed, it did something that's just not even possible.
And then it ended up at their, um, it's a strategic Latin launch. That's, that's like, uh, predetermined before I'm trying to think of the technical name they use for that.
But in any case, it just showed up right at that exact tactical spot at their Latin launch. It's like, and he said he had like the hair on the back of his neck, stand up straight.
was like it basically like i'm a i'm a i'm five steps ahead of you guys like yeah i even know where your latin lounge is man yeah so um and again there's i could give you example after example for sure yeah no that makes sense that's pretty crazy yeah so what do you think are like the the implications on like day-to-day kind of like human? Say it's out. It's proven without any sort of doubt or whatever.
It's proven that there is life forms that just dwarf our technology and understanding of the universe. What do you think that does to human beings? Do you think that would spin people out or maybe make us be a little nicer knowing we have other life forms watching us? Yeah, I think I a little scary.
But that's okay. Reality is reality.
It's been going on for a long time. It doesn't seem to be here to hurt us because others might argue with me on that point.
But for the most part, it seems to be fairly benign. There are other aspects of the phenomenon that one might argue is a little scary, but whatever's a whole nother well i i would argue i would argue sorry i don't mean to cut you off i thought please i would argue if they're that advanced there's a huge chance they're not kind of like predacious and like you know what i mean because it'd be hard to be that advanced while you're still dealing with kind of like those more animal aggression like aggressive kind of instincts yeah you think it would like you would employ like human beings like there's if we don't kind of get our kind of aggressive instincts under control we might exactly we might like blow ourselves oh yeah yeah no it's really funny actually and to your point uh i interviewed this guy robert salas who was a launch control officer during the height of the uh cold war and uh i think he was in charge of minu-man missiles but they were nuclear arms.
And I'm not sure if it was Minot or...

Anyway, it was one of these bases housing nuclear weapons

and objects were seen over the base, documented over the base,

and then all of their vast majority of nuclear weapons

went into a no-go situation.

They were to shut off and they're all independently controlled.

I report about it in my film, The Phenomenon.

And I talked to Salas about this and it was funny. I could see why he was a launch control officer because he's got this demeanor where he's just like super mellow and calm and just measured and just doesn't, you know, he's like, well, James, the message I got from that is almost like taking matches out of the hands of a baby maybe you shouldn't be playing with these things yeah

and i was like wow never thought of it that way i never heard of that so they all just deactivated yeah oh there's 50 cases in the my film the phenomenon i i literally did a deep dive in there with the help of this guy robert haitians who wrote the book on it and uh yeah you'll hear officer after officer after officer about incursions over military bases they seem to to be like some people would put it like a moth to a flame. Like anytime there's nukes around, the phenomenon kind of just comes around to check it out.
Yeah. Wow.
Damn, that's crazy. Yeah, Senator Harry Reid, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, gave me an interview, I think it was like 2019.
And he was the one that started this, one of the key people that started this UFO investigation, AATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Before that, it was OSAP.
But in any case, I asked him, it went on for 10 years. It was never meant to go public, but again, people had protested from the inside from excessive secrecy and walked some evidence out of the pentagon onto the front page of the new york times and it went on for 10 years it was found out in like 27 at the end of 2017 it started around 20 sorry 2008 2007 something like that and i said what was some of the more astonishing aspects of the phenomenon that you learned during that 10-year pentagon investigation And he goes right away, just like that.
He goes, they're interested in our nukes. And I was like, Oh, Whoa.
I'd heard about that a little bit. So we did a whole segment on it within the phenomenon of, of, yeah.
Wow. That's pretty crazy.
Yeah. And there are a lot of incursions going on military bases all, all over the place still.
So I don't know. I think it's a far more complex issue than one might, you know, gather.
Yeah, true. It doesn't have like one easy explanation.
I've been doing this 30 years and I don't know what the hell is going on. Yeah, it's one of those things that does it.
I wish I did. It kind of dwarts the perceived power of governments where you're like, you know, the United States where, you know, we have all these missiles or like missiles or like the you know cutting edge of technology then you see something that's so much more advanced if you know if it's really buzzing around kind of like the government it makes the government less authoritative almost so you're kind of like all right dude like i thought it would have a unifying effect on all of humanity quite honestly i mean if there's an outside force i mean reagan had talked about it but he used more of his threat but but you have something that's, I think it would unify us.
Yeah. Excuse me.
I remember interviewing Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell and he was Apollo 14, six man to walk on the moon. And he said on the way to the moon and he was so caught up in all the data and he might as well have been a simulator.
But coming back, he got to kind of really just look at the earth and look at what he and really feel what he was doing he was hurling through this little tin can through the vastness of space and darkness and he goes you don't know dark until you've been into space like it's just it's a vacuum out there and he goes i looked at earth and i watched it slowly getting bigger and bigger and all those invisible lines i didn't see any territories and i was imagining all the wars that were taking place and all this and he really felt not just saw but felt like humankind as one one race one you know i mean one people kind of thing and uh and i think that this reality will help uh accelerate that yeah in my opinion i i think it's a good thing we get a lot of people who start being like they're trying to use this to set up a new world government and blah blah blah and it's like i don't think they have control of it i really don't yeah i i don't yeah i would i would argue someone who's investigated all around the world for 30 years i just no way i don't think that we're no i think that they're they're doing what they're doing true and it's one of those things where it's like if they're say just say look for you know argument's sake say there were some just human beings who are so powerful they were engineering these kind of crafts it's like well guess what they're going to do whatever they want you know whatever but yeah i uh i think it's awesome man i think it's pretty cool and i think it is a uh i don't know i think it's good for people to have kind of shocks to their system and i think the uap kind of like reality life forms there's a good shock to the system way. I mean, if you look at the program, you'll see, refreshingly, you'll see a bipartisan effort.
You'll see Democrats and Republicans working together, being civil, and like really trying to get to the bottom of it. And I love that about that.
It's uniting Congress and our elected officials, no question about it. You're looking at AOC with Tim Burchett being really kind to each other and calling each other colleagues.
I love that. I think we need more of it.
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And don't forget to check out the official Hacks podcast on Spotify. Yeah, because you can get so into your hometown hometown versus the country you know you're like ants on a hill you're like this is this huge place then you get a cosmic perspective and you're like right fucking yeah that's right nothing they should send all politicians into space they should that'd be awesome or just give them a ton of lsd there you go either or sure is it possible that this is an it's us but an ancient civilization like if elon musk or bill gates if something happened now they were just going to their bunkers and they have huge bunkers and their civilization would grow for thousands of years and everybody else on top we decelerate and we become back to cavemen and now 12 000 years later they're finally the surface again, but it's us, just a more advanced civilization that was able to keep going.
I've heard that theory, and one of the things that I'm coming to terms with is that all options are on the table, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I've heard interdimensional.
I've heard future, coming back from the future. I've heard interplanetaryary I've heard they're right here all the time all along down in our oceans and in you know specific locations around the world and I can't say no to any of them I have to keep all options on the table and I won at one point jokingly says I'm a huge universe I said you know maybe it's above.
Maybe it's not just one race. Maybe it's a number of different things.
It's one of the reasons why I showed some incredible Hubble telescope photography from space and galaxies. And one photograph in particular from NASA is they look like almost stars.
There's so many of them, but then you realize they're not stars. You're looking at galaxies, and each one of those galaxies has like 400 billion stars, right? And you're looking at all these pinpoints of light, and those are all galaxies, and you're thinking, you've got to be kidding me.
That's just incomprehensibly big, right's like and we're just like there's more stars there's 10 000 times more great stars than there are grains of sand on the on all the beaches in the world it's like 10 000 times so you can't even wrap your head it's getting bigger by the day and now they're talking about multiverses and stuff it's like god only knows man like yeah sometimes it's like my mind hurts thinking about it like i just i don't know man sometimes when i think about the vastness and like how it keeps going on and if it doesn't last if it doesn't if it's not infinite then where does it stop this is the thing that fucks me up it has to be infinite because if it were to stop it could only stop by a sort of border there'd have to be something on the other edge of the border, so it has to be, by definition, infinite. It's so insane.
The universe really is ruled by dream logic. That's the only place a thing can be infinite and non-infinite, is in a dream.
Don't get me started. I was freaking out in the Uber last night.
It blows my mind. Seriously.
I'm just like... But you know what I'm talking about, though? It has to be infinite, because if it were finite, there'd be a bord bordering edge and there'd have to be some physical thing on you can't have something that borders that doesn't have another side of it so it can't be bored it has to be infinite otherwise i remember one time thinking to myself like i have no idea why i'm here what the hell's going on i do that i don't think we're here to hate each other yeah that does that's one thing i feel like you know come on yeah it doesn't feel good in your body that's what i've been doing it's like people say like you know oh you know this is this is crazy it's all airy fairy talk it's like well dude if you like just assume we're these kind of like struggling animals with nothing other than animal instincts and our whole sense of consciousness is like you know just wafting off these it's just like this nonsense that's wafting off our instincts it's like to take that world view hurt it literally hurts your body yeah so it's like yeah i i agree with you right i think if you kind of open yourself up to like the kind of cosmic scale becoming basically a cosmic patriot rather than your country or what you know people be bad at me for that like but you can like your country but also be like i'm also a citizen of the universe.
Absolutely. Open yourself up to that scale.
Feels good. I remember asking Edgar Mitchell.
It was really funny because we're in the middle of talking about UFOs. And he kind of grew up in Roswell, excuse me, the surrounding areas.
And so he knew all the ranchers from back in the late 40s, early 50s, actually even earlier than that. And I was like, God, I'm so sorry to ask this question of you, because I'm sure you get asked this all the time.
What was it like to go to the moon? And he's like, well, James, if you'd like, I'll tell you. And so I got such a detailed description of what it was like right down to when they landed on the lunar surface.
They were hearing these macro meteorites pelting the skin of their craft. And they've been up basically for three days.
And NASA's like, you guys need to go to sleep. And they were like, oh, no, man, I want to.
They tried to go to sleep, and then they were too excited. They were like, told NASA, we're overriding your recommendations.
We're putting our suits on. We're going.
Wait, so they were up for three days straight, and they were just like, yeah, man. Yeah, and they couldn't sleep.
They were on the on the on the lunar surface and he said they put their suits on and they went out there and he's walking around the lunar surface and he says he sees off in the distance this blue marble i love sharing this story because it's so crazy this blue marble suddenly rise it was an earth rise up from the moon and he said there it was this oasis of life in the suspended in the darkness of space the vacuum of space such a hostile environment around it right and there it rose and he had these big gloves on and he put up one hand and he blocked out the entire earth right from the lunar surface uh-huh he's like all that i know all that i've learned all the borders all the people and i'm blocking it out with one hand damn yeah isn't that cool wait so the earth rises when you're on the moon yeah it was earth rise yeah earth rise yeah isn't that crazy that's so cool yeah and he's like it was like a blue marble like you said suspended in a vastness he goes you don't understand the vacuum of space until you've been there like it's dark it's hostile and there's this oasis this life oasis and yeah it's really It does suck and it sucks to waste it just being oh my gosh fucking miserable it's all we got i know i'm i'm guilty of that i can be a miserable dickhead but it's like it really is especially when you look at it it's like if you look at the scale and then you get into like the the math behind like what are the if they go guard it all happened by chance well what is like the mathematical probability of that and it's it's it's like literally if you were a math person you'd be like well yeah my own math proves that this happening for no reason is so statistically improbable it's crazy yeah and they go well it's because the universe is infinite and that anything can happen it's like okay all right yeah that's cool you know i wonder sometimes if we like, I used to think back when I first started this, because I was like, I would go into the field. I wouldn't just read books or go to conferences.
I would actually go to locations and meet with witnesses on UFO sightings all over the place. And so I knew the phenomenon was real.
I mean, unless everybody I was talking to, including pilots and FAA officials and civilians and governors all lying, I was like, well, maybe, you know, it's such a big universe, you know, the galaxy, whatever, Milky Way, we probably just get periodic visitation for whatever reason. The governments decide to cover it up.
That's what I thought. But now all these years later, I'm like, oh my gosh, now I feel like I know less today than I did when I started.
Because like you said, like, could it be time travelers? Yes, it could. Could it be interdimensional? Yes, it could.
Could it be interplanetary? Sure could. Why not? Yeah.
Tucker Carlson now is like, he's freaked out. He's like, and he's like, big on the interdimensional thing.
I'm done. Yeah.
He's, he's like out of nowhere. He tapped out.
He got off of Fox, and next thing you know, there's interdimensional entities, blah, blah, blah. And everyone's like, what the fuck, dude? Yeah, no, he tapped out.
What do you mean he tapped out? He's not doing the UAP anymore. He just doesn't even want to talk about it.
He learned certain things, and he's like, we're done. I'm not doing this.
And it's funny, actually, because one of the things that Senator Harry Reid said to me was that they were just trying to get some of these senators to look at the data, look at the evidence. And they were so dismissive of they said it's demonic and I'm not going to engage with that.
So because they couldn't explain it or for whatever reason, it was just written off. So there's that wing of the of officials that have looked at it that way.
I don't know if they're still looking at it that way, but they were like, it's demonic and we don't want anything to do with it. I'm not even going to look at it.
Damn. That's what he told me.
Yeah. And even people within the Pentagon saying that.
Yeah. I mean, it makes sense, especially if you're like an older man and typically politicians, and I would say even more so like military people.
A lot of them are sort of kind of like a rigid kind of like, you know, insulated and like not like they're not saying like they're egoic, but it is like they have a very kind of top down way of thinking. And like stuff like this is like there's no time for it.
You know, one of the people in the part of the UAP task force, I'm not sure what year he was involved, but his name is Len Val Logan. Great guy.
And he goes, you know, it's crazy. He goes, we pick up a Russian Meg or something on the radar and it's all hands on deck.
And yet when it doesn't have any markings on it, we can't identify it. It's like nothing to see here, folks.
It's like, he's like, well, how could that be? What? Like, if it had a Russian flag or a Chinese flag, it would be all hands on deck. But because it doesn't have that, it's flying rings around, we can't stop it, control it, whatever.
It's like nothing to see here, folks. Yeah.
Oh, that's kind of nuts. That's what he said.
Yeah, there's got to be some sort of directive. Like I said, if you're military, there's rules for everything.
So it'll be like, eh, we'll get that he's like how can that be i was like it's a great quote it's one of the quotes at the end in the credit i always like to um like i when i'm editing a film i'll get a lot of what are called gms or golden moments and i and i always like i always paint those i color those like a gold color and then i i put them if i can't find a place for them in the movie, I tuck them aside in my GM, you know, basket.

And then at the end of the film, I'll go,

oh God, I really, can I squeeze these in somewhere?

And if I can't squeeze them in,

one time I was like,

why don't I just sprinkle them throughout the credits?

So now I always love doing that.

What I'll do is I'll get my little GMs

and that moment with Len Val Logan, who's part of the UAP task force, sprinkled in the credits at the end so that's awesome if you do watch the program watch it all the way through the end because there's lots of cool stuff sprinkled throughout the credits that's awesome man yeah that is a good idea yeah damn man so what we'll wrap this up i think this has been awesome by the way thank you oh cool um my question is so say if somebody you know the biggest doubting thomas or one of the you know if someone pretty close mind is like i don't even want to think about this stuff you have like one kind of like silver bullet you'd be like check this out or would you just um i would have to say that if you watch the program and you still think there's nothing to it i think that's going to be impossible. I really do.
Just because of the bipartisan effort, the congressional hearings, people testifying under oath, some of the video photographic cases and radar. And look, the DOD is begrudgingly admitting that the phenomenon's real.
They're not lying anymore about that. Yeah, yeah.
Right? I mean, they're trying to control how this stuff comes out,

but it's happening.

It's coming out, okay?

So one can speculate all day long as to where it's coming from

and what its objective or agenda.

That's up for speculation.

But the phenomenon is real,

and it defies a conventional explanation.

Awesome.

Dude, thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

Thanks for doing this, man.

Of course.

Watch the program.

Thank you, James.

Of course.

Later on.

Later on.