Leslie Kean: UFO "Balloons," Afterlife, Cover-Ups

So basically we're not at the top of the food chain there's another species there's another life form or entity or Consciousness that is more advanced than we are you can be afraid of it because you know what if whatever this is decides that it doesn't want human beings around anymore it wants to use the planet for something else if you can see this type in Squirtle Squirtle into the Chat Leslie how's it going hi Kurt uh it's going well yeah got a lot going on as so do so does everyone else I think how are

you doing great so you're known for your work on UFOs and you've written a New York Times bestseller contributed to Huffington Post and you have a book called surviving death you will have a National Geographic series which just came out premiered I think February 13th called UFOs investigating the unknown of which there will be a link in the Description what else are you known for that I haven't mentioned what else am I known for well what else have I done maybe I would answer I would say um you know I did spend before the 2017

New York Times story I did spend a uh I started in reporting on UFOs in two the year 2000 that was my first story in the Boston Globe so I kind of had this whole phase of activity as a reporter before we had this you know this kind of cross over This line in 2017 where everything changed so I did spend a lot of years when the taboo was really dominant and I was just basically trying to get across the simple point that you UFOs are real and they need to be paid attention to I

mean even that was like a you know that's the basically was the theme of my book in 2010 and even that was like a major thing for people to consider you know so it's just really because I had all that experience before 2017 I I just Realized so much how things have changed and now you know official acknowledgement of the fact that UFOs are real just seems like almost it's p at this point you know so any anyway I've just been it's been so exciting to be part of this huge sea change that been happening

in the last five years especially after banging on all the doors I did for so many years before that as you know theories of everything this channel is about fundamental Reality mainly from a theoretical physics perspective as well as understanding Consciousness and subjectivity and so on so in that vein analyze this from a sociological perspective why do you think there's been such a plethora of Interest since 2017 toward this phenomenon yeah I think um you know the story in the New York Times revealed the fact that the Pentagon had been studying these objects for quite

a while and uh you know that Just set off this this kind of Snowball Effect I mean if indeed the Pentagon has been studying them and devoting resources and staff to that um and of course the program there was very small and they didn't have money but nonetheless they were still doing the work um you know that made that made the point that well there's something to this and there were videos that were released with the story so so it just if the Pentagon is paying attention to this There's something to it and then what

happened is the the the Congress wanted to be briefed on it or and and people were brought in to brief them and they received classified information and we have to remember that the lawmakers have access to information that none of us have so when they make their statements about the reality of this they're basing that on knowledge that we don't have and you know I think people forget that they say well why can't why don't we have More videos why don't we have more this and that we have to remember that the people in charge

have seen a lot more so you know it's just and then you know we had the June 2021 report in which acknowledgement was made in black and white of the reality the phenomena and that they're being the the various types of phenomena that are being seen and that you know they had no evidence that they were Russian or Chinese at that point um me you know statements by high Level officials both retired and active elected perenials and it so you know the it's just become this this public and a public thing you know uh the

media went crazy with this um the 60 Minutes show in June of 2021 I believe it was was huge and so yeah there's there's now that now that it's sort of okay to take it seriously the taboo has really sort of stepped more into the background you know he's still it's still there but we're in a new world with regards to This and we even have you we've had a congressional hearing we've had legisl passed that's allowing Witnesses and whistleblowers to come forward now and be you know release their security o or be protected and

be protected in that process so there's just so much that's happened I mean I think the why is people have always been interested in this and now that the lawmakers are involved and the Pentagon is involved and that's all public it's just Providing a whole different picture of what this is all about we have of course the National Security side of it and the aviation safety side of it which has been emphasized a lot um which is a good reason to pay attention and a good reason to investigate and find out what these things are

so what is this when we talk about the reality of this can you explain to people who are what is she referring to UFOs what are UFOs what are uaps I wish I knew what they were um I Don't think anyone really does but what we do know I mean that what's happened you know in the last 20 years or so that our conception of what a UFO is has changed we don't even use the the word UFO really anymore so when I first started there was all the Sci-Fi and the kind of popular culture

attitudes toward it and the general thinking among the people involved in investigations was what they call the Extraterrestrial hypothesis it Was sort of the simplistic idea that we're being visited from you know from the people who accept that this is not human it was a simplistic idea that we're being visited by beings in these dis shaped craft and they're coming from some other planet and you know fast forward to the way it's looked at now we now have use the word unidentified anomalous phenomena and recently the word aerial was changed to anomalous because the phenomena

as it's seen now Incorporates so much more than than the concept of some craft coming from another solar system or another part of the Galaxy um and it it's because you know the phenomena takes so many different forms it has so many abilities it affects people's Consciousness sometimes it has medical effects some people it comes in just about every shape and size that you can imagine uh and it's just this mystery nobody really ask what it is that's the big question Uh that we seem to you know I I know that the military has collected

a lot of data on how the the objects behave you know there's the there's characteristics that are consistent in terms of the extraordinary behavior that appear to be technological but so we have data about what they look like and how they act but the actual essence of the question of what they actually are I don't I don't think anybody knows uh even those even if we have collected Debris and we or we have crashed objects that are being studied uh by aerospace companies or by whoever in these very secret programs they might have learned something

but even if they understand a little bit about technology we still don't really know what they are why they're here or where they come from those are the questions that you know that everybody's so curious about and I hope we find the answer someday but we may never really understand what they're All about I don't know you have your suspicions as to where they come from and what they are I don't think my opinion is necessarily any more valid than anyone else's when it comes to you know where they come from I mean I really

don't know I think there there's so many possible explanations and maybe there's a lot of different phenomena coming from different sources here or maybe it's all one we don't even know that you know and people that have Discussed time travel as being involved interdimensional that they're coming from some other dimension and kind of bleeding through to ours and then they go back to their Dimension or visitors from extraterrestrial locations in the universe or who knows what you know I mean I think it's just every everything's on the table let's put it that way and um

everything's on the table you mentioned medical effects yeah medical effects isn't salutary or Deleterious the medical effects are not anything you'd want to have from what I understand um and I mean I'm there've been there have been some papers and some writings about them that basically people who come too close to these things can have problems have blood disorders or cancer related issues I mean I'm not I'm not up on all the specifics but there have been medical Effects by people who've had Close Encounters there have been government Related medical doctors who have been studying

these cases and I know Gary Nolan the the um geneticist or the biologist from Stanford is of course involved with some of these studies and so are others so uh and then you know yeah so I mean these these people are affected when they get too close um and I I I don't know you know I can't go a lot into the specific you have to go to The Experts who are doing the studies on them but um sometimes people have marks Or on their bodies afterwards or nose bleeds but there are a lot more

serious effects than that that can happen by the way have you seen the toe show before absolutely it's a wonderful show Kurt I watch your show a lot especially I mean I watch it mainly when you have Uso UFO people on so yeah definitely great show that means so much coming from you so I take this topic seriously and it's often difficult for me to disbro from the more distressing aspects well just take a Meandering relaxed approach getting people people introduced to this we'll start with the 2017 article called The pentagon's Mysterious UFO program walk

us through the writing process of that how long does it take how do you get such an article approved do you pitch it to someone and what is the article okay um well I people may or people probably know that I it started when I had a meeting with Lis alzando right at literally the day he resigned From his job as head of this program called atip in the in the uh you know the advanced Aerospace th thre identification program um which he was working on with some colleagues at the Pentagon and he resigned because

he didn't feel enough resources were being devoted to this and he wanted to make a point make his point the best way he felt to do that was to leave the job and so I was some colleagues of his invited me to a meeting with him in October Early October of 2017 and that's how the whole thing started and I was um that's where I first saw the videos I was given a lot of documents I was sh you know the letter from Harry Reid which showed his involvement in all of this a L's letter

to the Secretary of Defense which was really powerful spent a lot of time talking with Lou um and then I went to my colleague Ralph Blumenthal who is is a freelance contributor to the New York Times and was on staff there for decades and we pitched it to the New York Times you're absolutely right you have to make a pitch you have to get the editors interested so we were able to have a meeting with a um a man named Mark MTI who's the an investigative I think he's chief of the investigation Bureau in DC

we had an inperson meeting with him and they approved the story I mean they I I I wasn't all surprised how could they not because we had we had people on the Record we had documentation and this was related to the US government so that's the kind of thing they're interested in and then we were assigned Helen Cooper to work with us who's the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times who's absolutely incredible what a gift that was I mean we never would have been able to do the story without her she was just what's

her name one more time Helen Cooper and yeah she's the person who Recently at the press conference a few days ago or last week asked the question of whatever that gen the general Glenn van herk about you know whether these objects that are being shot down could possibly be alien I mean she had the guts to ask that question but anyway that's an aside but um and she's also featured in episode one of our of our series that you mentioned that just came out so it was pretty amazing foes investigating the unknown right which People

can see on Hulu now and it was just amazing to get her on camera I feel like she stole the whole first episode I she was so good but anyway just so she's just an outstanding you know reporter who writes front page stories all the time for the New York Times on a lot of you know topics related to Pentagon issues involving the Pentagon so anyway it took us so once we pitched it it took a couple of months to do the whole story we came out in December we probably Pitched it in mid October

or something like that it took a while we had to the big one of the big things we had to do was to get Harry Reid on the record which was a big moment um we had to get a lot of stuff past the eyes of the editors who were very very strict and very controlling when you're doing a story like this and um Helen Helen flew out actually to Las Vegas I met with Mar Reid in person and she talks about that in the series it's really funny how she Talks about it but when

when we knew when we had him we knew he had it I mean this was really he was crucial to the story because he was able to verify the existence of the program and the fact that he was the one who got the funding way back before atip was really atip he got funding for a Dia program that eventually kind of spawned atip but he was able to verify that program called Advanced weapons oh my God I might not get it right you know um sure systems It's a it's AAP people have to look it

up you got the syllables correct at least yeah I know I mean um yeah so um and you know AUP was sort of able to ride rode out from that program into the Pentagon and did a lot of work on specifically on UFOs whereas oap of course was much broader than that covering a lot of other things so so um yeah um so L comes to you with a slew of documents on day one yeah I mean it really wasn't Lou Who Came to me it was Chris melon and some other colleagues who felt um

you know that they should talk to me um and so he was just sort of willing to go along with it you know he doesn't he's not fully responsible for that he's not responsible for me getting those videos or being shown the videos but it was a group of his colleagues I mean I I I think it's public knowledge it was Chris melon and Hal put off and Jim semivan um who were there at the meeting Along with me and Lou um was there one other person I think that I think that was yeah for

that I'll tell you that changed my life that moment I was just blown away by what I was being told and what I was seeing after all the years you know of what I'd been through to be given the story like this was something I never would have imagined happening the way that it works for myself is much different than the way it works for yourself you have a much more Professional and seasoned approach for me when I'm choosing a guest I'll hear about them once or twice I look them up here and there over

the course of weeks and then at some point I start to do a deep dive this sounds like you just got thrown into the deep end right away is that the case or did you have some contact with Chris or Lou prior to get some semblance of what's going to happen at some point no I I mean I I knew I had known Chris for years so Chris melon I Knew I knew how put off for many years even longer than Chris melon um um and Lou I believe had already I just don't remember the

the timeline but I think he had already spoken on behalf of to the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences remember when they did that initial press conference so I it wasn't like I mean I knew who he was you know and um but I hadn't met him I hadn't talked to him I hadn't been shown all the things that I was shown at that meeting that's What was so significant about it and and knowing that there was a possibility bringing this forward uh was really exciting were there elements that you had to leave out of

the 2017 article there always are I mean we always every and I've done a whole series of times stories with the three of us and then some with just Ralph Blumenthal since then there's always more than than they give you space for but that was a long they gave us a lot Of space for that story and not only did we have the about a tip but we had a section about the nimit event and we had Helen and I had actually sat down in Washington with Dave frer and spoke to him for hours about

what happened there and I think this was the first time he ever came forward so that was one aspect we would have loved to have included more about that event for instance but you know there's only so much space we would have liked to have included more About what they actually learned within the program about UFOs the story was not so much about the UFO phenomenon itself it was about the fact that this this uh atip program existed and how it got set up and uh you know all of that what the background was for

that program and that's what the times was really interested in our reporting on and then in 2019 when Ralph BL and the three of us did our Second Story then we got to focus more on the actual Objects themselves which is what people really missed in the first one I think and we tried our best I mean I mean we would have there's a lot more we would have liked to have included in that story but um the editors at the New York Times are really rigorous and they vet everything and they're they decide basically

what can go in and what can't you know and you can you can argue for certain things and you got to pick your Arguments and at some point you just it's what it is it is what it is you know um so it's not like we wouldn't have liked to have had included more we would have um but you know we're at the mercy of the editors and I think the second story in 2019 was so explosive because it did include descriptions from Pilots we had Ryan graves in that story and people just love reading

about what the pilots are actually seeing what the objects Look like what have they learned about them that's what was missing in the first one and what is left out is generally left out because of reasons of space it's always space so you that's the number one you always have a certain amount a word count that you're given you can you can have you can make it this long so you then we as the editor we as the writers have to determine what we think is most you know has the priority for that space But

there might Be things that they want to take out or that they want us to add for instance in that first story they um wanted us to have some comments from Skeptics that's not something we would have chosen because we didn't think it was relevant to what we were writing about I mean there was nothing in the story that was questionable or opinion or something that a skeptic needs to weigh in on but they wanted a you know an astrophysicist to say well we don't We don't we don't know if they're you know they're probably

not extraterrestrials or something which we weren't saying anyway you know so they they were like maybe three paragraphs that had to be taken up with comments from Skeptics that's not something we chose they're thinking in terms of perception management have to ask the editors I mean you just you know I can't speak for the editors they just feel like I think it's an idea that it has to Be balanced in some way because this is such a controversial topic they want to just make sure that you know they're covering their bases in a certain way

ladies and gentlemen gather around for a lesson in the mathematics of Slumber are you aware of the remarkable correlation between a comfortable temperature at night and the quality of one's sleep it's no secret that better sleep leads to Greater Fitness and increased productivity at work even improved Parenting such as patience Etc with Miracle mate sheets you can bask in the wonders of self cooling temperature regulation which has been proven to enhance Sleep Quality by a substantial 34% inspired by the silver infused Fabrics developed by NASA Miracle made has harnessed this Innovative technology to provide you

with a peaceful and uninterrupted night's sleep hey let us not forget the unhygienic conditions often present in traditional bedding Which According to some Studies have been known to Harbor more bacteria than a toilet seat Miracle made offers a range of self-cleaning and eco-friendly bedding preventing 99% of bacteria and requiring three times less laundry I've been using them for a week and they're noticeably cooler experience a healthy cleaner and more rejuvenating sleep with Miracle made sheets upgrade your sleep with Miracle made go to try miracl made.com Slever and use the code everything to claim your free

3piece towel set and save over 40% off again that's try miracle.com everything so you know it's a juggling act um yeah but the editors make the decisions like that what would you include you had car launch now you're allowed to take up the whole paper if you like what would you include that you weren't able to include in 2017 and 2019 well I mean we've come a long way now so A lot more has come out since then so you know if I was writing a new story now which I still hope to do um

it would cover more con more you know more recent developments it probably Focus I mean you know I don't want to Deva too much but it would focus on some of the legislation that's happened and maybe uh people who are coming forward and speaking to Congress uh speaking to Arrow the new DOD office so you know I always want to move the Ball forward so it just depends on where we're at and what what kind of a story Ralph and I can get I mean it's very very difficult to get a story that will satisfy

the New York Times editors I would like to be writing for them you know every other month if I could I think there's enough to cover but this is not a topic that they want to be covered in that way and if it's something that they can put their own staff on they will because I'm not a Staff I want you know I have to really be clear that people understand I'm not on the staff of the New York Times can you explain the difference yeah so somebody like Julian Barnes who has written more you

know skeptical articles uh is is a full-time employe of the New York Times and he writes about a lot of stuff and he's in the office working with the New York Times every day he's their National Security correspondent and so he'll he'll be Assigned a whole lot of Stories on a regular basis but the difference is that I'm a freelancer and so is Ralph which means that we're not working for the paper we every story we do we pitch independently we ask them can we are you interested in this can we do the story for

you whereas somebody like Julian barn or someone who's on staff is actually assigned stories so we're like we have to go to them with our pitch like we talked earlier about how we had To pitch the 2017 story to them we're not assigned it we have to interest them we have to say we even though we're not your employee right because they prefer to use their own staff for stories even though we're not on your staff we have something we think that's good enough that you you should be interested in it and maybe you are

and in fact we have an exclusive that your reporters are not going to get access to I imagine that's a major Selling point you're absolutely right it is and and I always tell people who are working with me to try to develop stories sources and so on that that's the reason why I have to ask people to be very quiet if they're working with me on a story because if it's not exclusive if it gets out all over the Internet or other media pick it up first the New York Times isn't going to run with

it it it's just you know it's not like I want to prevent other people from getting Access to this information but if I don't if we don't have an exclusive for the times the chances that we'll be able to publish it are greatly diminished so it's more about once the story comes out in the times that everybody run with it do whatever you want but we so you know people that I sources that I'm working with to develop stories usually understand that and they're very good about they understand that they want this to come out

in the times because The times make such a huge impact so it's worth it but it is an important selling point the exclusivity factor and that's why you know the fact that Ralph and I are out there and we know a lot of sources I'm monitoring this thing every day staff members of The New York Times aren't doing that so I am definitely going to come across stories and information that I only I would know about and their staff wouldn't know about here's Something I think about why isn't it that staff at the New York

Times and virtually any of the major media institutes why aren't they thinking about this topic more frequently you'd have to ask them Kurt I you know I I don't know I mean except that you know there's still a stigma and that stigma is definitely still at play uh and the New York Times covers so many topics they would consider to be way more important than this such as the war In Ukraine you know all kinds of things um they certainly have gone with the Chinese balloon story but that's not really the kind of story we're

talking about so I I really can't answer that and it's especially mystifying to me because the stories that we've done so far have gotten huge attention for the New York Times uh you know huge number of people viewing them the readers OB obviously loved the stories and want more but I Can't speak for them I just know that it they don't cover it on a regular basis they will cover things like a hearing that takes place in Washington or when the report comes out you know the odni report they have one of their people cover

that um so yeah you I don't know uh people would have to ask them people will have to write to the editorial Department write to them and say we want to see more coverage of this but I can't I can't Speak for them but I do know that that stigma is pretty powerful at the New York Times maybe more so there than a lot of other media because they are considered the paper of record and they're very cautious and the Chinese balloon story you're referring to what happened in Yukon yeah I'm referring to everything starting

with the shooting down of the Chinese balloon going forward from that I mean that's been such a huge thing in the media and the Times has been doing a lot of coverage on that and Helen Cooper's been part of that can you walk us through that story line and the North American issues that have popped up as of a couple weeks ago I wish I you know I've been so busy in the last few days with other stuff I wish I I I don't feel like I'm as informed about this as I would like to

be but you know as we all know there were there was first the Chinese balloon that was shot down which was clearly a Spy balloon and that was made very clear shot down over the Atlantic Ocean and then over this past weekend we had three more objects shot down right we had one in Alaska on February 2nd which they said was about the size of a small car another one in Yukon in Canada in February 3rd and then another one over Lake hon on I believe February 4th I think those were the and you know

they're they're just these small objects and uh we don't there has been no Definitive I mean not enough of a definitive statement let's put it that way about what they actually were or are and they're having trouble collecting the debris but um so there's there's a kind of chaos around all of this and and it's become this sort of you know it's been kind of heightened and and there's escalation that's been going on every day around this topic and I just think I mean it's clear to me that these are not alien objects and That's

been stated um even though that some people say the door is still open but clearly they're not they're they're most likely Chinese uh and you know it's it's a little confusing as to why that has not been stated more clearly I don't know if PE if there's just um people aren't talking to each other there's not an organized messaging that's going on around it they haven't found the debris from the object so they don't maybe Don't feel comfortable saying definitively what they are although I suspect they do know what they are so I don't know

it's um you know the objects are clearly not ET though why do you say they're clearly not the statement has been made by the press secretary for Biden who said that they have no indication that they're extra TR through they are Air Force officials that have said the same thing and they don't behave in any they don't demonstrate the Kind of behaviors that we're used to when something is extraterrestrial uh I don't so I just and I have sources that have told me uh also from the intelligence community that they're not that they're Chinese basically

um and I think the the bigger issue here has to do with the geopolitical Dynamics uh between China and the United States and there's there's a lot going on I think behind the scenes around all of this that we We're not privy to and hopefully over time more will come out they don't want to State publicly this is Chinese because it would cause more of a conflict than they would like I I you know I don't know if they're just not 100% certain or if there yeah there may be reasons why they don't want to

say it or they want to use this use UFOs as kind of a cover so they're sort of hedging it or they're just not clear and maybe some of the Congress people feel They've been left out and they want to know more and then one person says this and somebody else says that and it's just messy uh but I think there's you know there's more that we I'm sure will come out over time but I just um I feel clear that these are not we don't have to speculate that these are some kind of non-human

technology or something I don't I really don't think that's the case I'm going to read a comment from Ross cart and I'll put on the screen because it's fairly wordy I asked him for a question and he gave me a comment so you can just comment on his comment just so people know he has been really focused on this and he's brilliant and he's he you know he's really really uh been monitoring everything and thinking a lot about it more than I have so let his comment carry the day sure there is clearly dissent between

sections of the Pentagon notably the US Air Force and The White House when National Security adviser Jake Kirby saw that the dod had publicly briefed journalists these objects were likely balloons he clearly knew enough to directly overrule that assumption they are not balloons you do not fire Sidewinder missiles at balloons and balloons do not have the structure clearly described by the pilots someone tried to lie to the public and for the first time in decades the White House has overruled that lie fascinating right And the and and I I mean I agree with Ross and

also the White House has said that they want to set up their own agency to look into this which was kind of a shock too because we have the the arrow the Department of Defense entity doing its job and now suddenly the EXA you know that the president announces that he wants to set up another task force so um yeah it's all these contradictory issues that are going on at once as Ross points out and hopefully It's going to it'll smooth itself out over time did you receive a considerable amount of push back or reproach

from your article from the 2017 2019 one you mean by like Skeptics or from the editorial teams at the New York Times or from your colleagues or from the broader Community I'm curious to know where does the push back come from and where does the agulation from where does the praise come from yeah um I mean I think the story Was just so explosive that um you know I mean it changed everything you know so I don't know I'm sure there are people that have criticisms of it um and I know that you know um

we didn't reference the assap program which has upset some people um but I don't know it's hard hard for me to answer like where does criticism come from where does praise come from I mean it was just like this was set off like a Cannonball you know reverberated around the world and I think the focus was just oh my god look these are real and the Pentagon studying them uh and what's going to happen now I mean we didn't we were not focused I we I did not I don't remember getting people critical at the

time the time this thing came out and yeah I mean Harry Reed was on the record and he didn't object to anything in the story I mean it was all you know let's go moving It Forward here that was really the point of it and the fact that this was explosive to me indicates that the public is so desperate to hear about this topic I was speaking to Ryan Graves recently actually Ryan Graves has a podcast for people who don't know it's called merged and he interviewed me on the podcast which should come out in

a few weeks and I say that I don't think there's a stigma I think we have a collective illusion of stigma and I go Into this topic called Collective Illusions which means we behave one way in public because we believe other people behave that same way in the 1960s most Southerners were against segregation but they thought that their neighbor was for it so they would say no I'm for it and I believe that stigma is similar where we feel like other people stigmatize it so we don't talk about it much and that's why what you

did is extremely important what Ryan Graves is Extremely important legitimizing the issue by getting people to talk about it so I don't think we have a stigma problem I think we have a cowardice problem and the fact that your article was explosive indicates that people want this topic there are people that I interview math professors physics professors that you would think they're the skeptical type they come to me afterward and say Kurt why aren't more people talking about this tough subject I'm like why don't you bring that up on the podcast like show that you're

interested in it yeah I mean that's basically what I mean by a stigma I mean I think your Point's valid yeah people are afraid to say what they really feel because they think other people won't accept it but that's really because of a that's that's the that's really how a stigma operates I mean why are they afraid to say it because there's this taboo because they Afraid they'll be ridiculed or not respected and so it's all I mean I think it's just you're basically saying you know we're basically saying the same thing it just depends

on how people operate in the face of that stigma but I I mean I just you know there is still this hesitation however you want to describe it to be public about it and but it's changing rapidly it's changing rapidly I think um more and more people are are not afraid of it now yeah great Great great so what's some of the most compelling evidence that you've seen on this which we referred to earlier which is a synonym for the phenomen that it's not something terrestrial it's something that's extraordinary in a sense or if it

is terrestrial it could be a breakaway civilization but I mean it's not something ordinary yeah well I mean the huge question I mean the best I mean I think what what's really Compelling to me is to look back into the 50s and 60s back at a time when we you know it's really hard to imagine that the technology that we're observing could have existed then I mean now many cases could be American Technology or maybe even Russian or Chinese right but in those early days it's it's just inconceivable that any country had the technology that

was observed and the Optics being Ober observed then were the demonstrated the same behaviors that we See now uh and our government was very very concerned about it and it was the Cold War so they made sure to to try to make it go away and not let the public become involved D and know that's when all the the programs for ridicule and everything else became operative but how could that have been Russian Chinese or American Technology back in those early days I mean that is a a very basic question and then you can look

back at the government documents from the time And see what kinds of observations were made and um you know it has to do too with the credibility of the people observing these things as you know as general Samford said in that famous speech in 1952 after those flyovers in Washington DC you know credible re what did he say credible observers of you know these people credible observers of relatively incredible things I mean and this has been going on for decades there are Hundreds and hundreds of reports that are very hard to explain away um and

so you know you put it all together and you have this picture and I think for me personally it's also about people that I have talked to with clearances many of them off the record for years who from whom I have learned a lot um and who have helped you know validate for me a lot of things that you know are off the Record so I can't talk about them But uh you know when you put it all together it's like if you just spend years digging into this if it wasn't if it was something

explainable right if you dig into something for years and years then the more you discover the more you'll you'll you'll get towards an explanation you know you you'll start to get to the truth which would be well this could be explained this way or that way but it's the opposite it's like the more you Study it the more it becomes unexplainable and I'm talking about the only the very best information you know military documents military observers cases involving multiple levels of evidence such as you know radar and photographs and multiple witnesses that are milit or

Pilots or police officers um just a wealth of data and you see the behavior of these objects and I'm sure I mean you know of course most sightings that people have can be Explained so we're you know once you narrow it down to the to the ones that are really spectacular for which there's enough evidence that you can eliminate at least any known explanation according to it being man-made right or at least as far as anybody would know it that time if it's not super super super secret um you just you just see over and

over and over again these things happening and eventually you know there's plenty of Evidence as as is well documented and now that you know we have our our government acknowledging that now we have uh US Government involved in you know in investigating something here so they're not wasting their time investigating something that doesn't exist or something that they feel they can easily explain so I mean we don't have the answers yet but there are so many interesting cases and so much history to this um and it Takes a long time to wrap wrap that your

mind around all of that but um it's it's hard to imagine that all these cases that we know about that are on the record could all be explained through some conventional explanation when they've been studied as thoroughly as they have been by the best people with the ability to do that and then the whole realm of classical sorry the whole realm of classified information we have to constantly remind Ourselves that I mean I think Lou Alando said I forget the percentage he said maybe 10% of what the public knows is out you know we only

may we might know maybe 10% of what is known on the classified level about this phenomenon so we have to constantly remind ourselves of of that that there's so much more and if it was something easily explainable I think we'd know by now I I I think the Navy would have been happy To tell us the gimbal video was an airplane if if that's what they had figured out it was and you know they have enough expertise and enough experts to go to within their realm of within you know all the agencies that they have

access to to get that video analyzed properly and make a decision based on not only video itself but the the classified information they have that goes along with it that we don't even have you know so if if that video is Explainable they'd be happy to tell us that you mentioned that the way that it ordinarily works when you investigate a topic so let's say physics or particle physics there's a pruning of the possibility tree down and down and down to a singular solution generally but in this one it seems like more and more questions

open up can you walk us through your mental models what did you think what did you learn and why did that change and what did it Too I'll try it's a big question yeah I'll try um I mean when I first started you know I received this report from the some French officials I don't know I don't know how if people have probably heard me talk about this before this French report called the Keta report and basically these highlevel French officials had studied this thing for number of years and they were Admirals and Generals and

police officers and engineers and people like that and they Had that they had written in this report what they call the Extraterrestrial hypothesis right they said they thought these cases could best be explained through that hypothesis and it was only an hypothesis it couldn't be proven but it was a sort of notion that we're being visited as I said earlier being visited from somewhere else and so I think for the whole first 10 years of my or maybe more of my work on this I kind of held in my mind that it the ones that

aren't Explainable I agree with those those generals and Admirals they're most likly explainable through the Extraterrestrial hypothesis and that was sort of the way I viewed it you know it was um and my next story was about Aviation safety issues and about these objects flying around and impacting aircraft but it was always about their physical objects that have come from somewhere else it's fairly simple um and then you know over Time um I just learned more about the the more the more what they call High strain aspects of this uh related phenomenon or you know

things that affect people's minds it's all kind of what what I said before Kurt um you know and jacqu valet is has been writing about this for decades I mean jacqu Val the famous UFO writer and researcher and investigator and scientist has always had a theory about UFOs that was much broader and all-encompassing than the Extraterrestrial hypothesis and a lot of people didn't like him for that and now I think it you know we we can see that he was really ahead of his time because now we we just more aware of the multi-dimensional complicated

aspects of the the way the phenomenon manifests itself um and I mean books like Skin Walkers at the Pentagon for instance um which document some of the things that happened related to the Skinwalker Ranch in which you know one Of the things that's always stuck with me was the description of this blue orb that went into the body of a man who was driving a car and his daughter was with him and it actually penetrated his body and then he became severely ill after that now something like that that's not a physical craft that's come

from another planet right it's something else and these these orbs are described by a lot of people uh and so the phenomenon just takes on this broader Umbrella uh over time and I did I wasn't so aware of that in earlier in my career um and it's harder to write about because when I'm writing for the New York Times I'm not going to go into that kind of stuff because it all has to happen in steps you know the members of Congress are not really interested in that they just want to deal with the National

Security implications of these physical objects flying around our Navy ships you know But they did include in legislation which was passed you know they had the some legislation this year and some legislation last year uh that they wanted psychological and medical effects on people to be studied and reported to Congress so there is an acknowledgement on their part that they're aware of the broader some of the broader implications of this um and how it how it can affect people and if it was just yeah so I mean it's hard for me to describe it but

I Just I have much more of a sense that it's really is difficult to explain what this thing is and that it has so many more components to it than I ever realized before and it's connected to Consciousness and it's connected to inter other dimensions and it's uh manifest in all kinds of strange ways and some of the phenomena at skin marer Ranch you have to ask are those really UAP or are they something else where is the what is the borderline where where It's not UAP anymore uhhuh uhhuh that's something I was thinking when

we say that there's this phenomenon and then we keep talking about how it's so varied what is the relationship between them all aside from it being anomalous which by the way someone knocks on my door and I open and no one's there that's anomalous we wouldn't call that part of the phenomenon unless there was also a blue light associated with it or some Orbin and so right so what is it that Strings these together such that we can even put the label to categorize them as the phenomenon that's such a good question it really is

I mean I I think sometimes maybe it's not clear but I mean it's I think as far as the Pentagon is concerned I mean they have their their characteristics that relate to the way they behave they have their physical their data showing that the presence of some object they're more focused on the physicality of it and the National Security implications so there's a whole universe that they can sort of wrap around that you know and not the rest of it doesn't really come into play but for for other people who are more interested in this

in a bigger way um that's where those questions come into play what where do you draw that line I don't know you know when is it a UAP and when is it something else uh and I think probably people have their own ways of seeing that uh in terms of how They personally def interpret what that term actually means uh uh I think it's yeah I don't think we have any set agreed upon you know definition of what characterizes an unidentified area a anomalous phenomenon and what doesn't I mean just that term unidentified anomalous phenomenon

yeah that's you so broad we don't even have aeriel in there anymore you know yeah so that it's partly because they wanted to Be able to include the ones that go in the water but it it broadens it up to mean who knows what right yeah um so yeah it's just a fascinating fascinating question to ponder and there's so many such a variety of experiences that people have had engaging with these things that you don't know even almost how to define it anymore it's not like you're saying with physics with you can just get down

to one equation right it's like physic Opposite is happening with this it's like it just gets less that way over time although there's more data being collected at the same time you know but there's another dimension I think of the phenomenon that's not you can't pin it down it's just not something that it's almost like science isn't the right tool sometimes to even try and and capture this it's beyond our capability at some level what is the connection between uaps and Consciousness you mentioned This yeah I wish I you know again so what's meant by

that then I mean I yeah that's maybe a better question it's but you know does human consciousness in some way determine not just the presence of the UFO but does it play a role in what how a person perceives it or how a person H what kind of experience a person might have in connection to that phenomenon u i mean for instance there will be Witnesses to the same phenomenon but their experience of it is each person perceives it in a different way they'll describe it differently they'll have a different kind of experience what is

that about is that because of the consciousness of the of the human being that's in the presence of this thing even though the thing itself was just something out there you know it's it's like um and also sometimes people have an Encounter and then they develop these uh abilities you know not just Clairvoyance or telepathy they develop kind of more psychic powers or however you want to describe it after that as if they have their Consciousness has been impacted in some level we don't understand you know they're able to perceive more uh on the on

the on the of the Paranormal than they were before uh so and then there's questions about whether it's connected to the what people consider to be uh the Afterlife where we go and we die um people are studying that question a lot it's it's um it's mysterious and it had and then the whole question of Time how we Define time comes into play I mean um there's a a show on there's a series on Netflix called Dark I don't know if you ever SE if you've ever seen it it's a German series but it's it's

really profoundly deals with the question of time travel and it it has a lot of messaging in that Show that I think relates to how we perceive this phenomenon and What the deeper level of it is and so you know you can just keep going peeling back the layers and peeling back the layers and um you go to places with this that just expand your mind and you can't contain in a certain way take us through your journey into the studies of the afterlife then please yeah well that's um something I could spend three hours

talking about But I'll try I have the time I have the time Leslie the door is opened I would not put you through that um so after I you know my my UFO book came out and then um I did a series based on my book I did a a special TV special for History Channel in 2011 based on the book and after after that I kind of felt like I'm kind of ready to explore something else for a while and I've always been interested in this question of survival past death uh and So it

just naturally evolved that my publisher came back to me and said do you want to write about something else right at the moment where I was thinking about I wanted to write about that and so it was just this synchronicity really and I I jumped into that book with some awareness of what I was going to write about but it was really a journey for me in the way that the UFO book wasn't because it it it there I didn't know where that book was going to go I I knew The topics of research that

I wanted to cover but I learned a lot as I went along and I also lost my younger brother during the process of writing the book and so it became a more personal Journey for me because I was I I for for instance one of the things I covered in the book was mediumship which is um and you know most people think it's completely bogus you're just talking about people in you know have a sign in their window saying They can come in and they have a crystal ball or something like that it's not like

that there's some very skilled individuals out there who can access information that appears to be coming from a deceased person and so I had some profound experiences with some mediums in which my brother and my friend BD Hopkins who I had actually been with when he died in in 2011 both seem to be communicating to me through this medium So um how do you separate that from cold reading is like the natural question that would come up yeah I mean my point is it just became a personal Journey for me intermingled with a lot of

solid research um and a cold reading is very very different because that's usually when you're physically with the person so in these these readings I had I was not one of them was on the phone I couldn't even see the person couldn't even see me and The second one was on Skype she didn't know anything about me she saw me sitting in a room with a blank wall but a cold reading it's a way of manipulation so like they'll get information from somebody in the room and then they'll come they'll assume certain things they'll come

back with other questions to kind of um trick people into certain kinds of answers I mean I wrote about it in my book I don't remember you know all the details it's It's just a way of kind of creating a phony perception that there is this just that dead person there and the thing about a cold rating is it's not it doesn't have the kind of specific information that I was talking about in the readings that I had where just endless specific very very specific information is delivered that this medium couldn't possibly know that I'm

not revealing hints about in anyway and It's also the personality of the deceased person comes through you know none of these things happen with a cold reading they're they're just much more vague um and it's just another order you know of experience I mean there's no there's no comparison and that's just one media I mean you know you want to know what the best evidence is for survival after death and I I I don't think it's something we can prove but there are so many areas to Draw from um and you know I actually went

through it of you know one of them is young children who remember past lives very young children and investigators are able to verify their Memories by locating the actual person that they said they were because they provide enough details to be able to do that and this is you're talking two and three year olds who didn't you know have never been exposed to anything related to that previous person with all Kinds of emotional reactivity and sometimes knowledge of of skills that that previous person had that a three-year-old would never otherwise know you know a lot

of things like this very interesting in compelling cases that were studied by researchers at the University of Virginia for a long time and then you have these near-death experiences which I think people know about where you go into you know you apparently uh don't have any you're not You're basically clinically dead when these things happen and you leave your body and you go off into this afterlife realm and you come back and people's lives are forever changed because of that um and there are certain characteristics of those experiences that are consistent uh throughout the world

and those have been studied by many scientists medical doctors um you know uh and I I these are the people I drew from in my book to really get to The bottom of what those experiences are about and then there's things that happen to people at the very end of life when they're dying that seem to be Communications with the other side you know there's investigators in UK that has studied these cases and there's then there's mediumship and there's both mental and physical mediumship they're two different things after death Communications I'm sure a lot of

people have experienced that where you you've Lost someone you love and you're probably grieving when these things happen and you you you you sense you have some kind of experience where you feel that you are getting a communication from that person you don't need a medium for that you can get a direct communication it can come in many forms and it's absolutely unprovable it's totally subjective but um there's a sense of knowing when something like that happens And it's very meaningful to the person receiving it and I bet a lot of the listeners right now

have had those kinds of experiences and most people don't talk about them or they do just among their family members or their close friends but it's it's very I had a number of these events happened to me when I lost my brother and it's just very very in some ways more compelling evidence for an individual than any of the research could ever be because it's It's it's your own experience of something so that's another and those have also been studied there have been statistical studies on them and all kinds of studies by psychologists people like

that yeah and then there's apparitions that are actually interactive I'm not just talking about you see a ghost somewhere but I'm talking about something that appears to be conscious that doesn't have a body that's actually responsive to uh a human The action of a human being like if you wave to it it waves back something like that which you know you're seeing this ghostly form and it it responds to you and that suggests that there's actual Consciousness there all then you can pick up there's one case in my book where you were able actually this

this young boy was able to actually pick up messages from that entity which was in their house and everybody in the family was seeing it and the entity revealed Enough information about herself that they were relatable able to confirm that she was the person who had previously lived in the house and nobody knew anything about her when they moved in so you know that's a very strong case of an apparition that's evidential it's not just the same as somebody saying oh I was in a haunted house and I saw a ghost you know there's there's

a really a high level way you can study the best of the best when it comes to evidence for these Kinds of things and that's what I tried to bring together in my book called surviving death a journalist investigates evidence for an afterlife which came out in 2017 and there was a series on Netflix with the same title it's actually there now it came out in 2021 I think um it's a six-part series on Netflix called surviving death which also covers a lot of this stuff and I think people might enjoy seeing that so yeah

so in my book I tried to Bring together the the best evidence from all these different areas and kind of consolidate them into one volume where you really only have to look at this if you want to get a sense of what's being done in all these very areas of research and also read uh direct testimonies of people who have had near-death experiences uh people have studied me studied mediums I a lot of people wrote their own chapters in my book just like they did for my UFO book So anyway uh I just think there's

a lot of compelling evidence but it's not provable because you know when you're dead you're not unless you can die and come back some way that you can actually prove it which we can't do but it's just suggestive and it's fascinating to ponder and think about I mean it depends on what your personal definition is a proof right some people feel that if they've just had a certain kind of a Dream of someone or they've felt like they've had a communication from someone that's enough for them them you know but in terms of scientific level

proof I don't we don't have that when people encounter UFOs and they develop some of these extraordinary psychic abilities is that related to The Hitchhiker effect it could be I don't know it could be I don't think always though and I don't know I don't know if people who Have had the hiter effect have developed these these other abilities I I actually don't know um maybe they have but um it's not the hitchiker effect is not something I would ever want to have happened to me I'll tell you that I wouldn't go near that that

ranch that skin marer Ranch if I were anybody out there so I don't know you'd have to I mean I'm sure that that information is probably out there I don't know how they were affected by that can you briefly Outline Skinwalker as it's been mentioned a couple times and I know that several people may be new to this whole phenomenon so briefly if you can give an outlan to what Skin Walkers yeah I mean it's it's a a large track of land in Utah that was purchased by Robert Bigalow back in the 90s I believe

and was studied by his group which was called nids the National Institute for Discovery Science and then he eventually Sold it and you and now it's being studied by another team of people but it was a location where where a lot of paranormal stuff was going on and so uh the studies that mids did did you know extraordinarily you know accurate and detailed documentation of some of these events and uh the documents are with the DIA right now I don't think a lot or with Robert Bigalow they haven't come out but books have been written

about it by George knap and uh colum kellerer who Was involved and Jim laty the three of them wrote the most recent book and basically there were just a lot of very weird phenomena that went on there uh such as animal mutilations and beings that seem to come through portals and you know that you mentioned the hitchiker effect where people would um have encounters with strange things when they were there and then they'd go home and the thing would seem to follow them home and they'd have events happening in Their home that hadn't happened before

which would end up involving their whole family so it's it's just and there were UFOs there too but there was a whole range of other strange things uh that are more like Poltergeist kind of effects or you know weird portals and I mean those are things I think of animal mutilations you know a lot of dark very unpleasant things going on uh there were I think it come out that there was some Nuclear waste buried near there and there are you know things to do with the the land around there that could be impacting this

but I think there's still there there's ongoing studies to try to figure out what's going on in that location do you happen to know if some of these studies are open to people who aren't a part of nits or the big low Institute for instance I'm thinking as a someone who has a background in math and physics like say to the people in the Physics or the math or the skeptic Community hey James Randy or pen and Teller or Michael shmer or Neil degrass Tyson hey come here here's an open ticket in fact we'll pay

for your flight and your hotel the hotel of this the skinwalker come stay here bring whatever equipment you like it's Fairly reliable in that something occurs once a week or or three times per week or whatever the frequency is it's repeatable in that sense are you aware of any such Invitations or studies that are conducted by people who don't own the ranch or aren't associated with the ranch I I don't know because I am not connected to it at all but I I I can't imag I mean you know I don't know I don't know

how they work I would you know you'd have to get in touch with the people who are now there and that it's no longer in the hands of Robert Bigalow and his team so um and there were physicists that were there but it's a Great question I mean if if a skeptic wanted to go there with his equipment I I have no idea what they would say I'm not speak for them I believe the current owner Fugal is that correct Brandon Brandon Fugal correct Brandon fugle yeah all you Skeptics out there yeah see if you

can get on that property but I I don't recommend it because then you might get some weirdness following you home so you know some people say they would rather be the informed sufferer Than the ignorant Pig I don't know about that I think that's just a form of intellectual grandstanding I think that people would beg for the rewind button yeah I still wouldn't want those creepy things coming into my house but I understand that that approach too continuing on this thread of studies that have been done on the afterlife they're cataloged in your book correct

yeah I mean the the book covers them and their chapters written by some of the Investigators themselves there's great stories about people who have had amazing near-death experiences yeah it's all there and there's a huge um um you know list of of um as an index in the back so it references all kinds of papers and books and places where people can go to get more information and the most powerful kind of study is a peer-reviewed study sorry that's not the most powerful kind but that's something that is given plenty of Greeding are there peer-reviewed

studies in that book yes I mean some I think that the near some of the near-death experiences definitely there there's one paper that was published oh my God by Pimon lumel and team in one of the major I wish I could remember the name one of the major science journals I think it was science but one of the leading Lance LAN something one of the leading medical journals um which was definitely peer-reviewed and I I think there are a Bunch of peer-reviewed papers yeah um I do and then some of them are books but I

I know there have been studies on mediumship that have been peer- reviewed before they were published too and those are referenced in my book as well so I'm so happy speaking with you because when I ask you a question about evidence or studies you don't even bat an eye you don't take it as an offensive question and there's some people who I've interviewed more in the UFO scene That they see that as an attack on their legitimacy and I understand because it's such a contentious topic but it's refreshing when someone says oh yeah and here

it is or oh we can't prove and so on so I appreciate that well thanks I mean yeah I don't see why that would be I mean obviously I'm I want I'm not my my interest is for the general public for the you know to become more aware of all of this so yeah it's a natural question to ask well what's the evidence And then it's natural to want to share that and I'm sure there's things I didn't think of I mean part of it for me is I don't have everything in my brain because

I've been at this for so long and so I can't I'm sure like afterwards I'll think oh I wish I said that or that I'm sure there's things I'm not thinking of but um yeah I mean that's what it's all about if there's enough time if you can get your book surviving death and find two or three studies just to say Aloud because some people are driving listening to this so that they can look it up later and say oh I would like to look at the study by so and so okay I think there's

I think the realm of the near death experience is one of the ones that has the most published peer review papers um but there's in other fields there are too but the one I mentioned to you was December 2001 in the Lancet which I think is you know one of the leading medical journals I mean I know It is it's one of the leading medical journals and it's you know there's four authors to it I can give you their names and you it's called um okay Pim van lummel he's the probably the lead author and

he wrote a chapter in my book he's been studying near-death experiences forever he's a medical doctor and from the Netherlands um and then the second one is rude vanon whis Vincent Myers and ingred elfr elfer near-death experience In survivors of cardiac arrest a perp a prospective study in the Netherlands is the title it's in the Lancet 358 and you know the in 2001 and I've got the name of the uh you know the reference numbers that you need to access it and then there's some other studies here here's another one um a qualitative and quantitative

study of the incident features in ety of near-death experiences in card arrest Cardiac Arrest survivors that's in a Journal called resuscitation it has um one two three four authors one of them being Sam paria who's the lead author who very well known he's a resuscitation ex you know resuscitation expert or what there's a you know that's his field and he's done a lot of work on this um and then there's here's another one a prospectively studied near-death experience with corroborated out-of- body perception and unexplained healing In the Journal of near-death studies I don't know if

that's peer review but I think it is another one by Bruce Grayson incidents and correlates of near-death experience is in a card Cardiac Care Unit it's in the Journal called The General Hospital Psychiatry okay that's enough and I'll will put some of the links in the description thank you for that what does disclosure mean to you when people say we I want disclosure so and some people By the way say disclosure has occurred in which case I say my man you have such a disconnect from the people who are clamoring for more evidence and it's

just such a removal of yourself from the community that I feel like I don't know if we're speaking the same language which when we say disclosure has occurred but some people say that and I'm sure they have their reasons yeah and I think I think the fact that people do have different perceptions of it Means that we don't really know what it means I mean it means I've always thought that that term I never quite you know was on the disclosure wagon for all the years that that term has been tossed around I never I

think people have different perceptions of what it means but my perception is that it would mean an official statement basically saying that we're not alone in whatever form that statement might Take uh an acknowledgement of the fact that I mean and and some people think it means an acknowledgement of the fact that we've known about this since 1947 I mean I don't know I it's not a term that I use or that I identify with very much so I it's really up to those who use that term to tell you what it means you know

I mean uh I'm not using it so I don't really I can't answer that I find it so tricky because even if the government did quote unquote disclose Some fact or set OFA it's not as if we would believe it even if they say hey we're not alone we would say well prove it or we have bodies show me or we don't have bodies prove that we don't believe you you've lied to us so much and further even if they disclose to me like Lou mentioned what we know is 10% a partial truth can be

a lie in some sense a partial disclosure is worse than no disclosure there are several cases you can convince yourself of that telling a Bit of a truth is much more misleading than saying nothing at all it's just a tricky word for Me Disclosure to Me Disclosure would be that the scientific Community has access to some of the data or all of the data it has to come through otherwise it's just we're believing them well maybe disclosure will be when the Galileo project led by Avi lob at Harvard actually get some data maybe it'll be

the scientists that'll make it happen people think of It as being up to the government to make it happen but you just rais an interesting point it's like where are the scientists in this and so the Galileo project is you know they're going to set up their own means of capturing data that may disclose may may be able to be proven to be technology from somewhere else or an object from somewhere else um you know so we don't really know what it means I think and what form it might take and maybe it's a Process

that happens in stages which is why some people think it's already happened because certain stages of it have happened I mean if step one was for the government to acknowledge that UFOs are real objects they've done that and they had not done that before you know June of 21 or maybe they did it a little earlier but certainly not before 2017 they would they hadn't acknowledged any of that you Know since the close of blue book it was like silence and it was ignoring cases that no ignore events to happen and if you can't ignore

them you make up something or you try to say something to make them go away I mean that was been the approach of the government in all those decades so you know even that is a level of disclosure and maybe that's what people are talking about when they say it's already happened some people feel that the the government documents Released in the 1970s are disclosure that basically they show that UFOs are real and a lot of the documents from the 50s uh describe the perception that they were not from Earth that they were interplanetary or

ever you know so how do you define it I think that's I I think I mean my perception has always been that the real disclosure people are talking about some massively dramatic official government Statement that takes us to another level than where we've been so far I don't know if that's going to happen um but you know I mean I think one thing people think about is if uh some of these Witnesses who are coming forward now to Congress and to Arrow do uh come up with information about crashed objects or even debris that has

been that have been studied enough to prove that they're not from here if that was ever to be released perhaps that's a form of Disclosure perhaps that's a form of proof the question is will that happen and if it if they do report these things to Congress first of all Congress or Arrow or everybody involved with this investigation will have to track that down and make sure it's accurate and very verified for themselves then the question becomes do we make this public or not what are the risks in doing that maybe it won't be made

public you know so but I think we get closer and closer To something like that happening the more time that passes and a lot of people have uh expectations that this process that's underway now and people are already involved with it that maybe it will lead to something like that let's jump off the speculative end and say what would be some of the reasons that the government would not tell the citizens of something extraordinary occurring other than wanting the technology so that they can outpace China or Russia for instance one reason would be panic but

what would be some other reasons yeah I mean Panic is a broad term but it could be this just sort of the destabilization of of society that might occur if people were really freaked out about it I mean I think that's protecting technology is the number one protecting data that we don't want our adversaries to to have but number two yeah could be the impact on societ soy number three could be Concerns about um you know uh going after people who have you know trying to convict people or or going after people who have been

involved with keeping the secret over so many years trying to take them to court or whatever you know kind of a vendetta going on um a lot of anger that we we haven't been told sooner uh you know it's a it's loaded um and I you know I think if something like this does come out it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some kind of amnesty for Those from the Past who were doing what they thought they needed to do and were told to do um but then you know there's questions of of crimes

that may have been committed of people who were harmed or even killed to keep them quiet I mean you know it it opens up such a can of worms and maybe there's a way for something to come out in which the past is not dragged along with it which I personally Think would make a lot more sense and be cleaner for us to just focus on the present what we know now and not get bogged down and digging through the past and all the misdeeds that occurred for all kinds of complicated reasons uh and I

don't know some people might not like me saying that but I don't think it's productive personally um so and then then there you know there Could be other reasons I mean maybe the explanations that uh our government is withholding for us are much scarier than we might think or there's an acknowledgement that has to be made of a lack of power that we might have or our military might have a lack of ability to control this phenomenon to keep people safe that of course was connected to what you're saying about panic but you know there

it's it's um the implications that it Might have for the public can be complicated and I mean the fact that it's it's a gradual unfoldment probably makes a lot of sense you don't want to shock people you don't want to disrupt the structures that we have in society that you know could be impacted by this um and some people believe Kurt that it really isn't going to be a big deal for if this announcement were made some people believe and I if you know people high levels that who have been Involved with this thing for

a long time that it really won't be a big deal and that most people just won't be that concerned about it I mean we have to remember that the people who are interested in this topic are a very small number we kind of get we're so involved that we think it's it's reality it's life right but there's so many people that are just concerned about paying their bills and doing their jobs and raising their kids and the question For them would be well yeah that's kind of interesting but it doesn't affect my life and if

it's not anything that I have to to worry about or be scared of for me and my family then I I don't really care that much and I'm just going to go about my life you know it's not necessarily going to affect everyone some people don't have a curiosity about stuff either they're just focused on their daily lives and they're struggling to survive every Day so it's so hard to predict how it might impact people I think Tom dong has intimated that that it could be that the government is benevolent and that they're withholding for

a positive reason not something that is a power struggle or because they're trying to increase their influence and and dominance and so on I don't recall his reasoning for that but do you remember do you know me positive what he's saying is that it's a good thing it's being Withheld yeah that when we find out we'll thank them something like that could be I mean it could be that's what I mean about if it's something frightening you know maybe every element of that shouldn't is not going to be helpful for people to know about I

mean I can understand the thinking along those lines right what's it going to do you want to terrify and depress everybody in the in the society when they learn you know about what's going On that they never even imagined was going on I mean it's a it's a valid question what what good would it do would you want to learn it some truth if it was terrifying and depressing I definitely do I want to know the truth and part of it is because I've been involved with this for a long time and and I I

I already think things look pretty dire in the world anyway so you know I always want to know the truth as much as possible but that's not true for Everyone you know maybe I'm like a masochist or something I think the majority of the people in the comment section agree with you have you read the Dark Forest or heard of the remembrance of Earth's past I haven't okay I'll give a two-minute explanation see here's something that I think about frequently I think that if you haven't found the bounds that could be revealed to you such

that you would want to rewind time and you would wish oh my gosh I wish I Didn't know I wish I didn't investigate I wish I didn't fly too close to the Sun for instance in AI if the people who are behind the development of machine learning like open AI people can't see how their technology can go terribly terribly wrong if they haven't thought about that then they shouldn't be developing it and same with the people who are developing the nuclear bomb Like Richard finan and so on he said we were just having fun as

physicists and Einstein even said later I wish I could burn my hands I would never have signed off on this had I thought about the implications so in the dark Forest it's a book series it's called the remembrance of Earth's past there's this Chinese scientist who found a way to communicate with other galaxies and she says respond to us if we're not alone something like that someone answers back from a different galaxy and says if you know what's good for you do not send out Any more messages the universe is a hostile hostile place anyway

I'm not going to go more into the book but she doesn't listen and there are dire consequences so what frightens you about this phenomenon um I mean I mean I I don't I can't really say that I'm frightened personally um but I'm more I don't know I I'm not totally comfortable responding that how Would I respond what frightens me I mean I think the reality is and you know if you talk to someone like Jim semivan or people that have actually encountered it which I haven't that it has complete power over us right it's it's

way more advanced than we are so can do whatever it wants and I'm not saying that it has done anything harmful but um it's something more advanced than we are and we're not so basically we're not at the top of the Food chain right even though we've always thought of ourselves as being at the top of the food chain you know we are the the most intelligent Advanced species on the planet Earth and really that's not true there's another species there's another life form or entity or Consciousness non-human Consciousness however you want to describe it

that is more advanced than we are and it's it's it's a shock in our thinking to come to terms with That I don't think most people think are aware of that but that's reality and so you can be afraid of it because you you know you're not in control and what if these uh what if this whatever this is decides that it doesn't want human beings around anymore it wants to use the planet for something else there's nothing we can do about it what keeps you up at night in LLY nothing except maybe the trucks

on the street of New York City I mean No um no I I I'm not I I'm not really kept up I'm not anxious I mean I'm just always trying to learn more um so I would say I'm kept up at night I'm a good sleeper can you tell us about the case in Brazil the Faria I believe it's called for people who are unaware yeah Virginia is how it's pronounced I mean you people may have seen James Fox's film called moment of contact which just Came out this past year it's really worth seeing but

it's it's it's basically a fascinating case because it involved the capture of creatures of enti you know uh how you want to describe them non-human creatures and um there's a lot of interviews that James has done we know that there are videos and pictures of these creatures that exist they were in the hospital they died they you know their bodies and debris from the incident were Taken to the United States apparently um it's a very very involved case which people have been looking into for years and the people who the Witnesses and people involved have

been terrified to talk about it because the threats that they've received so I've been doing a little work on the medical there was one uh police officer military police officer who actually was the one who grabbed this entity when they were Trying to capture it and later died as a result of that of the contact physical contact with this entity and so I've been doing some work and James Fox is the main investigator into this but I've been trying to help out by looking into some of the the medical aspects of what happened to this

young man who died and seeing if I can get records documenting he because he was in the hospital he was treated by a bunch of doctors there all kinds of Records about what happened to Him and so I have talked to some of the doctors that were involved and I've gotten some um documents translated which were autopsy reports done on him that are interesting but it's an ongoing investigation it's not I don't have a whole lot to share about it yet and I hope to keep going with that but it's it's really fascinating and um

you know what what's the potential in that case is so what's so explosive about it is that if we could actually document The reality of these entities if there you know and we know that the proof of that is there it's just not coming out but think how that if you're talking about disclosure you know think about that uh if there could be proof and this is in another country so so the America I'm sure America has a lot of control over what comes out but maybe not complete control and you just don't know uh

if some of the people in Brazil that are That are sitting on this information might feel they can release it so far they haven't and it's because they're terrified so the doctors they remember this person you just say hey do you recall a case from a few years ago about so and so no I mean this case was hugely famous it was covered you know by media and they all know about it so you don't you know you just mention the name of the person who died and they know exactly who you're talking about um

yeah Know this is this is known throughout the world and it's been investigated for so it was took place in the 1990s so it was a while ago but uh they definitely know what this is about the people you talk to yeah do you think that private corporations have more information on the phenomenon than the government I don't know about more but I think some of the aerospace companies who are contracted with the government probably have a lot have information They've been looking into some of these the physical materials and physical evidence for this I

I'm not in a position to know how much of that is shared with the government and whether they they keep a lot of it to themselves I mean all of that is would be buried under special access programs and that would all be classified so I'm not in any position to know about that sure can you expand on how some private a space companies may have material how do they Come in possession of that what do they do with it boy I wish I knew more um again this is all super sensitive stuff so I

don't know that much about it but I mean I I've been told by sources that aerospace companies definitely are involved Harry Reid certainly strongly implied this in in my one interview I did with him um and uh others have told me this too um and you know but how it happens and what they know and all of those details I Don't know that's all I forget what your exact question was um I just I just believe and again another thing is the Wilson memo that famous uh memo written by Eric Davis references aerospace companies being

involved too you can find it throughout you know and I'm sure invest you know researchers who document all this stuff to the like people like Richard Dolan and others probably have a lot of information they probably have it all organized in terms every time it's Been referenced you know but um some of it I no just from people talking to sources off the Record who have have knowledge of this but I don't I don't know any specifics because it's all highly sensitive stuff what do you make of the Wilson mels and can you outline what

they are for people who are unfamiliar well um the the the Wilson yeah the Wilson document or the Eric Davis memo however you want to refer to it was um a series of notes recorded by Eric DAV avav who's a physicist with with an absolute unbelievable memory um and I've talked to that guy the details that are in his brain uh are phenomenal so it's conceivable that he could remember such a meeting so he had a meeting with a man named Admiral Tom Wilson uh back in the 1990s again I just don't remember the exact

year um but uh and it was in a car and then after the meeting was over he made these notes about what happened in that Meeting and it's in that meeting um Admiral Admiral Wilson described how he had tried to get access to some of these special he was I think he was Joy Chiefs of Staff at the time again if I had known we were going to talk about this I would have refreshed my memory before we I came on but um he was a very high level and he believed that he should if

there were such a program which was looking into crashed objects of you know non-human origin that he would know so He went banging on doors trying to find the location of these programs and he was telling Eric Davis at this meeting that he had found one and they acknowledged that they had an crashed object not made by human hands was the way they described it these people in this program but they were not going to allow him access he was not on the bigot list of people who had access and they basically told him to

go away and then he was told to keep His mouth shut by people about it and not to pursue this any further uh um and that's basically what I mean I encourage it's fascinating to read this memo you have to go on and read it um and so uh Wilson has denied that the meeting ever happened and Eric cannot comment on it so he doesn't say one way or the other exactly yeah he's not going to comment on it um I my my colleague R Blumenthal And I tried to dig into this and it's it's

very hard to get any definitive on the record sources that could verify anything around that memo even though there's a lot of names in there and stuff like that it's it's just impossible to I mean there's been some great research done on it I'm not the one who's done it by various people in the UFO research world have done fantastic documents and long reports on This um which I'm TR having trouble naming it right now but um there's a lot of information out there about it yeah and do you take Eric Davis's no comment as

an admission of its veracity because if it was false he would just say no it's false does he always say no comment no matter what well you'd have to look and again there are documents out there that have have everything Eric has ever said about this written down you know so you can Look and decide for yourself I personally know him I believe he's an honest individual he would not make I don't believe personally he would make this up so I don't believe he did make it up and I know he has an extraordinary memory

and you know I'll leave it at that um and if you want to analyze the way he's responded to questions about it again you can look I I I I bet there's somebody who could put in the chat right Now the exact document I'm talking about it came out within the last six months I think this long detailed analysis under a pseudonym by somebody who analyzed that document in incredible detail somebody could probably put that in the chat right now I just can't sure sure who is St Alexander and why is the important to the

development of your work uh steuart Alexander is a physical medium who lives in the UK who I I got involved studying His mediumship when I was writing my book surviving death um and then I ended up having a lot of experiences with him that were really interesting and both from a you know journalistic perspective and from a personal perspective and I'm still very involved with this group that work with him and physical mediumship is a very strange rare thing and you know we can go into it if you want uh but I think a Lot

of people are going to think it's pretty weird and you know it's hard to talk about without placing it in context a historical context and really giving a lot of background so that people can accept it that how long would that take five minutes to do that or much longer I don't know you want to try do you want to start and then feel like ah no I mean I can I'll give a little synopsis but I would yeah because that's way too much of a teaser everyone's like I know it's True I would hope

that people would I mean I'm not trying to sell my book but I I spent so much time in my book building up to talk his mediumship was the very end of the book right and I spent many chapters contextualizing it showing the history showing scientific studies that have been done on people similar to him in the past that were absolutely you know irrefutable in terms of documenting the abilities the same abilities he has that have been Documented in other people by scientists in published books and papers I mean I just had to set the

context for this because it's too weird if you just dump it on somebody yeah it's all there if you want to read about it and the other thing is that steuart Alexander if you go to my website which is leslie.com and go under surviving death I think it's called book materials or something like that there is a a video of Stuart uh two-part fairly Lengthy video of him describing his whole development and journey as a physical medium and I would encourage anybody who's curious to go listen to him and you get a real sense of

who he is as a person and how sincere and genuine he is I mean and you it'll you'll also learn directly from him how he developed these abilities what they're about why he does them you know all the things that people would want to know but in a nutshell What physical mediumship is and I'm going to base that around what I've experienced with steuart Alexander is that um it he's he's he goes into a room with a group of people who he works with regularly every week and I I've sort of become part of this

group only I do a lot of it through the computer here in in New York i' link into their meetings but um I've been to the inside that group many many times and experienced all these things myself so And and the initial thing is you of course eliminate any possibility of there being trickery and I'm not going to spend time describing how I did that but I scrutinized everything that was going on to make sure there were no no no ways that this could be done through cheating or trickery um and you know what happens

is he goes into a Trans State where he basically leaves he's unconscious and then these entities who are supposedly Beings from the afterlife come into his body and make use of his vocal cords basically to communicate with people in the room and they they um perform all these physical miraculous physical things that you can witness that everybody in the group can witness at the same time so it's objective and it's in the dark but things are lit up enough some things are not in the dark so you can you know you can see enough of

what's going on Depending on what the actual experiment is they call them experiments and the dark is important the dark is important because and again this is the thing that could make us go on for half an hour about this you know and I do go into a lot of this in my book and I know people find it suspicious that it has to be in the dark but it's been the it's just the way he developed and a lot of mediums developed because there's a a substance that is used that is exuded from his

Body to to make these physical phenomena happen that is extremely sensitive to light and that's just the way it is and people can say oh it's just so that they can fake things in the dark you know but it's just not the way it is uh and the physical substance is that something that you can capture and then you could measure that or it's more like an energy substance I mean people have tried to capture it and take it into a lab but it kind of disintegrates it's Basically all that's left is some of the

saliva from The Medium because it's exuded from his mouth or it can be exuded from other parts of his body but you know it's it's more energy but it's it can solidify I mean this all sounds like magic and it's like magic this this stuff that's emitted can solidify into something solid and what it does is it it can move so then what you witness as a person in the room is an object um moving around The room you witness all kinds of levitation and physical objects moving around the room because this substance is attaching

themselves to it but you don't see the substance so you're witnessing there's this thing called a trumpet which is a conone shaped object which is a tradition they use in physical mediumship and it's got this illuminated band around the end of it so that even though you're in the dark you can see it and you can watch this thing Go up into the sky and fly all over the room and bang on the walls and go to the ceiling and touch you right in a perfect spot in your forehead answer you know respond to requests

and move around and that's one thing is this levitation of this object the trumpet responds to requests it it will respond like if you s it'll it'll yeah and sometimes a voice will speak through the trumpet a disembodied voice I've heard that numerous times I mean you cannot wrap Your mind around this yeah I see why you're saying now that several chapters lead up to this exactly because it's like people think this is completely nuts and it's very hard for me to talk about because of that it's so sensitive and I know that it's real

because I've I've done my due diligence and I've been involved with it for seven years or something and I know everybody in that group very well and I know Stuart very well um and I you know there's Absolut It's real that's without question it's been witnessed by hundreds of people not just me um over the years you know so but it's very I find it hard to talk about and I I gave a a I was invited to give a talk about this AR Rice University last year at their archives of the impossible conference which

was held by Jeffrey kple a professor there and I talked about this because he asked me to he asked me to talk about this because steuart Alexander's archives are Now with the uh Rice University collection all his archives have been donated with my help to rice and it was very very difficult for me to talk about this and if people want they can go and look at the talk I gave and that's another way you can get a sense of seriousness of this and the history of it I I was so nervous doing it Kurt

it's so sensitive it's very personal and very strange and hard for people to accept as real for good reason so I just find it Hard to talk about that you know for that reason but I you'll see that when I if you watch this talk I gave that I was pretty nervous about it and I acknowledge that but you know there's also things like the materializations of things happen so you know I have experienced numerous times as have others in the light you can see this a hand materialized out of nothing on a uh on

a table and I was able to touch this materialized hand and Then so you know what do you want to make of that uh and what is the hand supposed to represent someone who is no longer with us yeah it's it's it's um one of the spirit people that's what we call them for lack of a better word the spirit people who works through Stuart uh is actually materializing his own hand by placing it in I mean the way he describes it is he's just slowing down his vibration enough within this substance that's exuded from

the from The uh medium which is called ectoplasm and people probably laugh when they hear that word the spirit has a high vibration well the way they describe it and kid I can't answer all these question of course of course I lost the thread of the sentence it was a complicated sentence so wait the the spirit has a high vibration they slow it down and they use a substance to slow themselves down or a substance is given off as a result put their aetheric hand Into it I mean this's how you know again again I'm

just telling you what I was sure sure I I so they have to lower they have to lower vibration to just be in our physical world and manifest physically to to Manifest this hand so they somehow there's an aetheric hand there's a a non-physical hand that exists and that non-physical AIC hand is placed inside this material stuff called ectoplasm and then by slowing it by by somehow he's able to materialize that Hand I mean I don't know how I I sure all I know is I've witnessed it numerous times and so many other people um

and it's one of it is probably the most mind-blowing experience I've ever had in my life you know uh and but it's documented it's been written about but you know it's it's not it would never satisfy a scientist unless they went in that room and experience it for themselves you know a scientist is hearing me say that Is going to think it's ridiculous but if they go in that room and experience it for themselves and have you know can can satisfy themselves that there's no trickery going on uh you're stuck with this how does it

happen you said something interesting that it's one of the most interesting or mind-blowing experiences of your life of like that's one of the most that would be top absolutely Bar None can you give me two others that you haven't named so far You're really putting me on the spot here Kurt this is not this kind of stuff I usually talk about and I hope you don't get asked these sorts of questions often uh yeah but I you know I'm hesitant to talk about them too much I'm a you know yeah well what whatever you're comfortable

with we'll come back to that I'm going to going to give you some time to get comfortable and I'll ask you one more time the hand were you able to see the color of the hand was it More like a dead hand was it a white person's hand was it a brown person's hand were the nails grown or they manicured I'll explain it so what happens is the light it's actually a silhouette that you see so there's a a table that has a light underneath it with a red cloth over it so there's a red

light that's coming up from the table and so the hand is on top of the table so what you you can see is the um out you know the it's like a silhouette I you see the physical hand you see it actually form and it makes a fist and bangs on the table right when it forms so you know it's physical because you can hear that bang and you and and but you can't and and you can't see all the details of it because it's a silhouette because any more light if there's too much light

it's not going to be a they won't be able to do it but when you touch the hand yeah it has to be a certain amount of Darkness but there's Enough light here that you can see it um and then when you touch it it you feel everything I mean you it's exactly you feel the fingernails the knuckles even the warmth of a hand or no yeah so the way I would describe it to in what what I experienced when I held that hand was that it was way softer than a normal man's hand the

skin felt like a baby skin it was very very soft and it was also very very warm warmer than you would normally experience a hand and Pretty large too but I have a small hand so comparison to my hand it was pretty large but the the warmth of it and the softness of the skin were really striking to me but everything else the way it moved the way it fell the fingernails the knuckles all the features of a normal it felt just like a human hand I mean it it was um you know materialized hand

and and it was physical and you know so but I couldn't actually see the color of it because of The silhouette effect yeah so about the let's just say one other incident in your life that's more on the extraordinary end that you're comfortable speaking about I'd rather have people read it just because it's so hard to talk about out of context um I you know I did witness an apparition that and I write about in my book that I believe might have been my deceased brother I don't know but it was very Very close to

my bed and it was absolutely mind-blowing and I was not hadn't been drinking I was wide awake you know that was an amazing experience um were you scared H terrified terrified yeah it was a it was basically a black shape of a person that was very close to my bed I could have touched it you know it was during the night it was a full moon there was enough light coming in the room that I could see it I Was and I was so afraid that I really couldn't move at first I thought it was

an intruder in the room um uh and then I or I thought maybe it was one of my family members but then I I knew it wasn't I just went through these things in my mind and then I watched it kind of uh disintegrate it just turned into these little silver particles and disappeared and I yeah I mean it was so clearly something Otherworldly that it was just mind I was absolutely convincing convinc that this was something otherworldly it was like there's no other way to explain it because I watched it turn into silver particles

and then dissolve for my eyes and I know it was solid because the pictures on the wall behind it were blocked out by the shape of this thing but it was very frightening to me very frightening after afterward I Imagined you just turned on the lights and you weren't able to sleep for a while or yeah I mean yeah that's exactly what I right about that too I mean I I think I lay in that bed for like 40 minutes before I could even move okay I was just so shocked yeah I don't know you

know looking back at and I'm thinking why was I so frightened I wish I had like number one tried to communicate with it or number two grabbed my phone you know and taken a Picture I don't know I I regret that I was so afraid um but it's just a shocking thing to see somebody some form standing right by your bed very close you know uh so I I kind of wish I'd handle it differently but I I just was kind of Frozen with the shock of it and then I did put on the light

and as I recall I went into another room to sleep and I don't think I I really slept much the whole Night um yeah I mean that was different because in the steuart Alexander Seance room it's a controlled environment where you're with other people and you're choosing for these these manifestations you know they're going to happen and you want them to happen and everything's safe and predictable uh and so you know you go in and over and over again you can witness the same things uh and at a designated time and place but this was

something That just came out of the blue uh and so that's why it was so much more it was shocking you know I wasn't asking for it um although I was always looking for proof of some kind of afterlife at that time but um anyway that was a shocking experience and you know again it's hard to talk about out of context but I'm doing it anyway Kurt because you're asking interesting questions what can I do yeah I appreciate your cander I Appreciate that even when I ask a question that I know or hope that you

can sense that I'm asking it from a place of curiosity and not a place of disregard or discounting or repudiation so if I say like oh what color was the hand I'm not trying to trip you up at all I didn't feel that way if I felt that way I wouldn't I wouldn't respond so no I feel your curiosity and I'm hoping that the listeners will come from that same place and you know if they Feel skeptical which is completely understandable I again encourage them to look at my book or look at the video of

steuart Alexander on my website it's a very well produced video it's really fascinating and so met might you know for those that are interested um and I I just can't deny my own experience I mean I you know I I'm talking about it because it's in my book so it's there already so you know were there experiences you had to leave out Of the book I would say at the time I mean I I thought carefully about whether I should even include my own personal experiences in this book should it just be a more sort

of sciencey journalistic researchy book you know and I I knew that it was really risky for me to do that um but I thought it's not honest if I don't because these experiences impacted my perception of what I was writing about and they were part of the journey and I thought they'd Be interesting to people and so I just felt like and I I talk about this in the beginning of my book that it wouldn't have been honest for me to pretend none of these things happen to me and so I just decided I'm going

to jump off that cliff and and do it um this point you know there I think of all the people who have come out talking about their UFO Abduction experiences or paranormal encounters they've had with things you they've all Taken a risk um people who you know have written research books like someone like Robert Hastings who wrote the book UFOs and nukes and nobody would have ever imagined that he was an experiencer himself so you know I I people do that people have done that and I'm not going to be any different um so I

decided to do it and sorry why would it have been risky for you to include some of your own personal Testimony into just because you know people think they don't I don't know it's good because it's strange stuff you know and they might not believe it or they might think I'm I've lost my mind or I'm uh okay so they would think that you're biased well not so much bias as that I'm just sort of wacky you know they're not they just going to be able to believe this um and they're going to think well

she's I mean She's really lost it you know I thought she was like this journalist um but I'm also a a human being who's out experiences because when you really dive into something you're you might end up having experiences you know I wanted to originally I wanted to test mediumship right I wanted to see is there anything to me is there any thing as a medium that can really do what they say they can do I wanted to study that for my book as a Journalist so I found out who some of the absolute best

mediums were and I'm not talking about Stewart I'm talking about mental medium we talked about earlier yeah and I tap the session not knowing for a second if any of it would mean anything I thought it might be complete baloney you know and I was so shocked by what happened um you know so it turned out to be a personal experience for me right so and but it was kind of built into my Exploration and desire to study it and sometimes you can't separate the them out you know you can't separate it and so I

tried to be as analytical as I could about those readings that I had but they were I'm not going to pretend that they didn't have a profoundly personal impact on me and so same you know same thing when I'm I'm writing about afterdeath Communications studies that have done on them I I have some other very very Credible people in the in the book who had amazing afterdeath Communications way more evidential than mine who I write about they're willing to put themselves on the line so um but you know I think it was more a fear

that you know it just wouldn't be taken seriously by people and so but you know there are a lot of people that feel the opposite way and a lot people who watch the series on Netflix are very grateful Because they feel that that that material opens a door for them to feel safe to talk about things they never felt safe to talk about before and if I can do that for somebody it's all worth it and I've done that for a lot of people in this situation great is there something about the skeptic mindset like

let's say the Randy Randy James or James Randy is there something about their mindset that would make it such that the phenomenon and maybe I shouldn't call it That apparitions or mediumship physical medium is less likely to occur in their presence I mean that's a good question question I don't I don't know if that would be true with mental mediumship I mean if they lost someone they loved and they were grieving and they felt a genuine desire to contact that person I you know but if I just don't know I mean it'd be an interesting

experiment if they went into a reading with you know hostility and doubt and Disbelief and a desire to prove that it was all fake maybe nothing would happen for them I don't know I I think in the situation with Stuart it would have an impact and he's talked about that when somebody's in there with a very negative attitude it can impact it's a very sensitive environment all about energies of people and the energies that are that come in play in that room uh and there's a Harmony among everybody sitting in that room that's really profound

and the You know that there's a a peace and a love and a Harmony you feel like you're entering into another world when you go in there if there were people in there that were the opposite who were hostile and you know out to prove that this was funny I don't know if that would affect the energy of the room and affect the ability of Stuart to perform what he does it's not really him it's the beings that come through him but I it's a really interesting question I've thought About that before if the if

the skeptic could pretend you know that they were totally into this m but weren't really uh I don't know what would happen I would hope that maybe they get to go in there and and see that hand materialize and have their lives changed and they would have to pretend that they're into it in order to be allowed into the room to begin with I would think I mean if and it's very it's hard I mean Stuart does do Guest sittings where people can come in you know it's but normally he works with the same group

every week but they there are there have been plenty of guests that have come in and yeah I mean I think if I don't know it would depend on the sense I mean Stuart is not interested in being studied scientifically it's just not something he's interested and he's not interested in trying to prove anything he he feels that that would be very disruptive to The the weekly process that he's involved when which for him is really about uh the experiments that go on it's about continuing to develop it's about showing people that life doesn't end

with death which is basically how he and the beings that work through him if you're willing to ackn you know accept that they exist um all that's their purpose for doing what they do and he's not interested in subjecting himself to the kind of studies that many mediums in The past did subject themselves to and that's why we have documentation for the validity of this because of some of the past studies but those mediums were also really tortured and tormented and you know was very very difficult for them to go through what they went through

and basically he just wants to keep sitting every week you know uh and he he doesn't want the kind of public attention that would come from scientific scrutiny uh and the Disruption to the process that he's involved with he's just doesn't doesn't care about trying to prove it they were tortured you said they were just put through such the ringer so much that they you know one they'd be asked to do one thing they'd be asked to do something more you know they'd be put under these very incredible uh physical restraints or you know be

forced to they theyd eat certain things that might affect this ectoplasmic energy you know Dyes and things like that that I mean a lot of them were photographed and they don't like certain types of food like food with dyes and processed food no I'm just saying that it was one of the exper one of the ways they would do studies was that the they try to I mean again this is really kind of off topic but you know they they'd give them something to eat that um might color the the stuff coming out of their

mouths if that was fake so if they were regurgitating Something that they might have eaten before they went in the room to produce a fake substance for the dye from whatever they ate would show up in that you know things like that um but I mean they weren't they weren't horrible but you know they would go on and on and on and there was never enough and there was always doubt no matter what these uh individuals were able to show to the scientists and sometimes people disrespect uh the rules of the Room there were cases

where where investigators or just Skeptics would flip the light switch on in the middle of an event where there was this sensitivity this sensitive energy in the room and the the medium was severely injured because of that or died even or wasn't able or died yeah there was one very famous medium who was um injured and then just was never able to practice again and eventually died I mean it's so sensitive the state that they get into And the substance that is exuded from them if the light suddenly comes on it rushes back into their

bodies I mean again out of context this is all going to sound insane to people sure sure probably shouldn't talk about it too much we finish this and then we probably shouldn't talk about it anymore you know but it it rushes back into their bodies and it can cause a lot of injury physical injury to their bodies and that's why they have to be extremely Careful about who who's allowed into the room because this is happened in a number of cases where somebody has put the light on and it's been has severe consequences and it

can it's the protection of the medium that's really the number one priority so anyway I mean I know people probably think it's it's very hard to comprehend all this but I I've studied a lot of it I've studied it well I think most of people listening and watching are much more open than you Would think and I think as soon as you said oh we should move on they're like what no this is right what it started to get good okay I mean there are books and documents and papers about all of this and these

re these mediums of the past were research and I have the best the best researches in my book so and all the references are there for people who want to find out more about how this could possibly be true uhuh um it's you know I would recommend looking at some Of the historical doc dou umentation and if anybody gets a chance to sit with steuart Alexander fantastic I I wish everyone could and maybe the problem is that that during covid it there was such an interruption um because they couldn't sit together for I don't know

how long a long time because they can't you know during Co they couldn't go in this small dark room for an hour every week um everybody's quarantining right and so Now the Energy's I mean it's it's happening again but steuart hasn't done any guest circles yet since Co ended but I I hope he will and then people can come and sit and then experiences for themselves um so we're going to end with just a couple more questions firstly I want to know what you make of the Pentagon reports so getting back to the UF all

topic what do you make of them even if it's null that's still something and secondly in the same way that you Read aloud three references for some of the peer-reviewed studies from before you mentioned that there's some documentation maybe not p studies but there's some documentation if you could also read a couple of them for people who are driving who want to listen be like okay I want to look up that resource be great okay you mean on the you mean on the physical mediumship yes um this is one of my favorites it's a book

called Clair voan and Materialization a record of experiments and it was published in 19 oh in 1927 and I actually have an original edition of this this book which is really precious to me written by Gustaf Jal who's a French investigator and within that book he studied this medium named Fric kusy who also materialized hands and these hand he was able to make these plaster molds of the hands and I talk about this in the talk I gave at um Rice University and I also write I've got pictures of them in my book but basically

these hands materialized they dipped themselves into into hot wax the hand came out of the wax the hand dematerializes and then you're left with this wax glove right and the only way the hand can extract from that glove is to dematerialize because there's no breakes or and and some of them are like this some of them are two hands that are Linked so there's no way you could like slide your hand out of the glove if you were like a human being so the only way that can happen is they de and people in the

room were actually able to see this because there were there was enough light in the room and again how do you believe this well it was documented by the scientists in these papers um and they have pictures and records of all the experiments they did to to get these molds that still exist and I've actually Seen them I went to Paris where they're housed I was able to see these uh these amazing molds for these hands and it meant a huge amount to me to see them um I mean maybe I can show you a

here's a picture of some them please um I don't know how well you can see that yeah these are from what year 1927 you said yeah the 1920s yep um you know they're not all perfect but this this one on top is to and again in this um yeah in my lecture at Rice I've got a lot more pictures that are better than these because I took them myself when I was there they're better um but um you know it's just and when you read the documentation of these two and it wasn't just Chalet he

was partnered with with um another my God I'm blanking out on his name a name I know very very well but I'm blanking out on it right now because we can talk so much Kurt my brain's like um but I appreciate you taking all this time yeah It's all documented in the book very detailed meticulous documentation of everything that they did and these were two scientists who were not going to risk their careers by making this stuff up and yeah there were witnesses to it and studies done on the all kinds of stuff but it's

phenomenal right that that how do you explain the the materialization of of living hands and this is something that's been documented and there other studies that Have documented it too with other mediums so what was amazing to me that I had studied these documents and I was fascinated by it and then suddenly I found this medium who can do the same thing now and it allowed me to be much more accepting of it to realize if it could be done then as was well documented by numerous mediums and sort of what we call the Golden

Age of physical mediumship which was mainly 1920s 30s or even the end of the 1800s and why couldn't it happen now if it happened then right and so even though Stuart does not want these scientists coming in and filming it and documenting it and all that nonetheless it's happening now on the planet the same thing and so that's why for me to discover that and to be able to experience it myself after being so interested in this was amazing I don't know what how to describe it but it was really really Profound that that ever

happened to me so Leslie what's next for you um I'm I've got some um write another writing project in the in the wings but it's not a book it's another type form of writing which I don't really want to talk about because I don't like to until I know something's really going to happen let's see I'm you know I'm I'm helping get the the current series um I'm dealing with a lot of communications and responses to that and Hoping interviews to try to get the word out to the American public the series being the Netflix

Hulu one the Hulu yeah it's not Netflix it's it's Nat Geo and Hulu for people who are listening once more it's UFOs investigating the unknown is that correct yes and if you go to Hulu it's right there and it was just released a couple days ago the first two episodes the next two episodes are next Monday on Nat Gio and then Tuesday on Hulu and Then the fifth episode is the following Monday on N Geo and then on Hulu so in two weeks all episodes will be on Hulu but you can watch them gradually as

they as they're released yeah to be clear this is February 2023 so if you're listening to this much later all episodes may be released yeah depends um so I think the last date I don't have my calendar in front of me is two weeks from the previous Monday all be out there anyway um I'm always hoping to be able to do more reporting for the New York Times as well with my colleague Ralph Blumenthal and we're always digging and talking to people and you know seeing what we can come up with on that score um

and it takes way more time than you might imagine because not everything pans out or you have to spend a lot of time talking to sources to get maybe a nugget that would lead to a story So um yeah and I never know where my path will go you know there might be other uh projects I'll do with breakthrough films which is the company that made this current series and also made surviving death the series we just talked about on Netflix this amazing independent film company in New York who I've worked with for years and

years so we may end up doing another uh series or documentary or something Together I don't know yet but do you have a dream project um oh kind of but I don't know I can't talk I don't want to talk about you don't talk about it like one that is not in the works right now that you're thinking I'm working up to that I would say yes I'm similar in that I don't like to talk about with embryonic how many years is that away in your best case scenario [Music] Um I don't know it depends

how much focus is put on it the resources to do it and I mean it could be just a few years away okay I'm gonna hold you to that within a decade okay oh definitely I don't yeah it better happen before that I don't think we're going be in any shape in a decade to be doing very much of anything so I don't have I'm not hopeful for the future direction that we're moving in and the future Direction Climate wise AI wise and geopolitical wise GE you know the whole thing I think is going to

kind of come think things are going to be pretty difficult starting in a few years and from what I've been told by sources what does that mean it's going to be difficult I mean I can't say specifically I know that much yet and I can't really say but just that um a lot of what we take for granted now in life I don't think it's going to be you know we're not going to have it a Lot of things we have now that makes our lives as wonderful as they are like electricity I don't know

I don't know just the access access to all the things we have access to now that are that are dependent on the global globalization basically which just aren't sustainable a lot of the things we have aren't sustainable the populations are growing and I think the climate issues are major as well I that's just my opinion but I have studied quite a bit About the climate change problem and I take it really seriously is there something about the geopolitical situation because you just referenced population and climate change it's not that simple I I just don't feel

qualified to talk about it but I just I just don't think things things as they are now are sustainable and I'm not qualified to really talk about that I just I'm just concerned that's All yeah so I I don't think it I don't think 10 years in the future I only think three or four years into the future it's too uncertain past that point I would say so I would say so yeah okay I'm going to check with the audience just a moment do we have some questions from the audience someone said you're working on

disclosure kind of I think so yeah yeah Of A Sort huh right if I can report new information it kind of moves the ball towards greater disclosure while we're talking about that I get probably as frustrated as you do and as anyone who's listening to this watching interviews with the supposed UFO Big Wigs we're hoping we're watching them thinking please slip up say something that crosses your NDA there's such a lack of information it's constantly disappointing or there's equivocation And we just want more answers more answers and you mentioned there are some necessary preconditions for

further disclosure I think one of them is destigmatization and I think part of that is also people watching in a sense if you're watching when you're hearing this you're listening to this you're a part of a necessary precondition for disclosure so it's not all lost I know I can get dismayed when I watch interviews or read transcripts and so on and I'm Thinking like come on I just want to hear the answers hear the answers you're going to mess up laps of slingly somewhere right they're so careful not to because they don't want to get

in trouble but there is this process now that people can go through with this with information like that to reveal it to the authorities and to Congress that maybe will eventually become available for us so people with that information now have something they Can do with it and they don't just sit on it anymore so we'll see what happens so I'll read some of the comments many many plotts toward you saying appreciate all of your time Leslie thank you Leslie your 2017 article was a paradigm shift this is my favorite toe interview yet great so

wow people like the weird stuff I think they like honesty more than anything else I do feel very I almost feel vulnerable talking about all that Stuff and I hope people will understand that it's very personal and it's also out of context when you're hearing it so grant me that yeah what's been your experience with the phenomenon as in the more UFO UAP related phenomena I would say nothing I mean I I I may have seen some things in the sky that I thought wonder what that is but you know nothing dramatic at all that

that's really all the people I've talked to who are witnesses rather than me being a witness How do you think the world would change if they knew what you knew that is to say there are some pieces of information that were given to you that you can't disclose because it was told to you off the Record or for whatever other reason given that you can't say what it is but how do you think the world would change if people had access to the same knowledge um I don't think I have access to that much more

than most people but [Music] um I mean I don't know if I can say without revealing what that knowledge is you know it just think about if if I mean we talked about it earlier if people become convinced that there is something here that's not human and it's it's an intelligence and it has power how would they react I mean that's kind of when we talked about it Earlier [Music] um you know I don't know what else I can say with regard to the uaps what what convinces you that there's something intelligent behind it I'll

preface this with the way it moves in the sky doesn't to me indicate intelligence per se because it could be some Advanced drone if it's even extraterrestrial extraterrestrial sent something unmanned or sent a biological robot it doesn't Necessarily mean creativity or intelligence or intention what convinces you that there's intelligence behind the uaps well I mean there are some cases where they're responsive so there are cases I remember in the study by Richard Haynes that I wrote about in 2001 I mean it goes way back you know documenting all these cases of Aviation safety issues with

with commercial airplanes there were many cases where The UFOs appeared to respond to the actions of the pilot or the movements of the airplane even in the even in the Tic Tac event right you know the way that Tic Tac was responding to the to Dave fraver and kind of interacting with him other another case is the Peruvian case of 198 where um Oscar Santa Maria was sent out to shoot down something that they thought with this it's funny about bringing this up now they thought it was A spy balloon uh and um this thing

kind of got involved and it he realized it wasn't a balloon it was a he tried to shoot it down and it he couldn't shoot it down but then it started to maneuver along with this plane and it would interact with him I mean I I won't go on all the details but there was sort of this cat and mouse game going on so lots of times there seems to be interactions that are occurring so that's where I think the Intelligence comes in and a lot of the military people I mean the famous phrase of

of Charles Holt from the renon in incident is he says said so many times that they appear to be under intelligent control it's just a phrase I've heard a lot of them use and I think when the pilots are in the air and observing them there's any sense of responsiveness to the their presence that would indicate there's some Consciousness there there's some Awareness of of which applies intelligence so you have to look at the cases when there's more of an interaction um but because you're right if they're just flying around up there doing their own

thing it it doesn't show particularly intelligence it's when they're responding to something that's happening around them in the moment that they couldn't predict that you you know unless there's Some kind of Technology where they can do that without intelligence it depends how you define intelligence I guess I mean maybe there they're just sophisticated technology that can adapt and respond to what's going on around them um so I don't know but um I've heard so many military Witnesses and Military experts use that phrase that they appear to be under intelligent control that I just kind of

in many cases it appears to me that Way too have you heard anything credible or anything interesting with regard to the time traveling humans hypothesis yeah I find it really interesting Kurt it's funny you you rais that question because I have this little thing in front of me I was thinking about reading it's a little it's sent to me by um a colleague who is very interested in that question and it kind of relates to the show called Dark that I mentioned earlier which I would encourage everyone To watch because it deals with that question

and it's it's metaphorical it deals with humans involved with time travel but you have to look at the deeper layers of it and it really speaks to the question of that that you bring up and I just want to I want to just read I I was really affected by these few lines that this friend sent to me and it says what what he wrote was we trust that time is linear that it proceeds eternally Uniformally into Infinity but the distinction between past present and future is nothing but an illusion yesterday today and tomorrow are

not consecutive they are connected in a NeverEnding Circle everything is connected We Exist within a spiral galaxy after all ultimately what we know is a drop what we don't know is an ocean maybe that doesn't really relate to time travel but it sort of does because it already time travel is Connected with time and the nature of time and what is time and some of the lines from this text uh actually came from the show dark um and so I would yeah that's about you know I'm I'm still trying to figure all this out I

don't know but uh I would encourage people to watch that and see what see what they think of it because I learned a lot from that show about time and time travel And it all relates to the ultimate nature of the phenomenon we're dealing with which is something vast and big and defies time and so it yeah so can it be connected to time travel yes I I'd say so Leslie thank you so much for coming on I appreciate you spending three hours at least with me Kur it went really fast and because I'm blabbing

away and talking a lot so but I think you asked fantastic Questions I appreciate the respect and curiosity you have for these strange things that happen to and I'm not the only one they happen to happen to lots of people so I want people to realize that they're not weird um and yeah I appreciate you're putting this information out because it's important that people understand that life isn't what they think it is and they don't have to feel weird if they have anomalous Experiences thank you lesy thank you so much Kurt appreciate it very much

don't go anywhere one of the best videos on toe was just released and I can say that confidently because it's technically not ours but instead yours it's the list of winners and runner-ups for the physics and explation contest recently launched on toe visit the link in the description thank you to all of the winners and congratulations to everyone that video covers various explanations to reality To Advanced physics techniques and Concepts put forward by several of the people in the theories of everything Community the podcast is now concluded thank you for watching if if you haven't

subscribed or clicked on that like button now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people also I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm which means that when you share on Twitter on Facebook on Reddit Etc it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube which in turn greatly AIDS the Distribution on YouTube as well if you'd like to support more conversations like this then do consider visiting theories of everything. org again it's support from the

sponsors and you that allow me to work on tow full-time you get early access to adree audio episodes there as well every dollar helps far more than You may think either way your viewership is generosity enough thank you for