Government Secrecy and UAPs: How Much Do We Really Know?

There has been, for decades, secrecy about not just the existence of UAP vehicles, but government efforts to study them, track and detect them, recover them, and reverse engineer them. And maybe some other efforts, too, that would even go beyond that. But we're certain about those things. The secrecy has been so profound and so extensive because there have been activities and programs concerning UAP, but they weren't reported to Congress at all. Our Bay Area innovator today is Dr. Peter Skafish. With a PhD from UC Berkeley, he's a sociocultural anthropologist. He's the co-founder of the Sol Foundation, a think tank that does research on the philosophical, policy, and scientific implications of UFOs, also known as UAPs. One of the things that's interesting to me as an anthropologist, but it's also a problem, is that the entire subject was fictionalized for decades. It makes it complicated for us to understand facts about this, because often the fictionalizations are very, very accurate. In particular, he predicts how the sort of non-human beings that we imagine to design and operate this craft might think, and in what ways his thinking is likely to be different or similar with our own. You have to be able to imagine yourself out of the human box, and that's tough to do. People who are interested in UAP or have experienced them, they're very good at that. Their imagination can run away from them, but they can get lost in their imagination. The problem with researchers, with academics, they don't go far enough with their imagination. You need both things, and you really have to be able to plant your feet in the box and then also dare to take the lid off of it and stretch out of it and see where you can go out of there. This is Be'ere No Darez, and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Peter, welcome to our program. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. Great to have you here. You're a sociocultural anthropologist, and you're also involved with the Soul Foundation. You're the co-founder of the Soul Foundation with Dr. Gary Nolan from Stanford, and you've been working on analyzing potential behavior of non-human beings through this foundation, but there's a lot more to this foundation. I went to one of your events, and I was very impressed by the professionalism and the way that this whole thing worked out, so please tell us more about this endeavor that you're involved with. Yeah, of course. I'm the co-founder and the executive director of the Soul Foundation. We focus on, or our mission is to foster scientific research, both in the natural sciences and social sciences, as well as policy research on unidentified aerial phenomena. We're asking the question of whether we might be able to learn something about potential non-human intelligences who may be the designers and perhaps the operators of UAP. We could learn something about non-human beings that are capable of building and operating technologies, whether they're extraterrestrial or not. Now, you did a very comprehensive paper on UAP secrecy. Yes. Please tell us about some of the things you found or what's in this paper. Sure. Well, that began, that's a paper that we published in early November through the Soul Foundation. One thing the Soul Foundation does is it publishes policy papers that both address policy issues in government and civil society. That was intended to be a much briefer paper that would make recommendations to Congress about why it needs to take UAP secrecy seriously as a topic, but also what the likely history of it is and why it needs to be investigated and how. Let's assume that the Congress also doesn't know, whatever it is, it's kept secret from the Congress as well, right? Well, that's the problem. That's the fundamental problem, is that it's a longer thing to explain and justify, but a lot of us are now certain that there has been, for decades, secrecy about not just the existence of UAP vehicles, but government efforts to study them, track and detect them, recover them, and reverse engineer them, and maybe some other efforts, too, that would even go beyond that. But we're certain about those things. Whistleblowers like David Grush and Will Elizondo have sent out an oath to Congress that that's true, and the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee fostered and then passed legislation about UAP, which primarily concerns secrecy. And so the legislation states in very clear terms that it's in Congress's interest to know exactly what has gone on with efforts and programs or activities and programs concerning UAP that were never reported to Congress. Congress knows who to ask because it's going to be the agencies in the intelligence community. What are some of the findings that you came up in this paper? You know, the primary and most important finding, and this is less something that's about a fact but about the significance of a fact, is that this is a constitutional issue for Congress. The secrecy has been so profound and so extensive because there have been activities and programs concerning UAP, but they weren't reported to Congress at all. Congress is never known to govern the issue. And of course, it's completely abnormal. You know, the obvious analogy is nuclear weapons and also nuclear energy. You know, it was considered a matter of great importance in the late 1940s and early 1950s to figure out how the executive branch and the legislative branch were going to interact together and govern the development and use of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. In fact, Congress was given a lot of powers, greater powers than are normal for Congress when it came to atomic energy at that time. And so it becomes a constitutional issue because a lot of the, a lot of Congress's most important and also presumed responsibilities, it hasn't been able to execute on the issue. That's begun to change. We're now in, we've had a couple questions go to people who have been nominees to these positions. The Department of Defense Inspector General was asked what he would do about UAP or when he was up for, when he was up for the post. The Senator asked him, okay, well, what are you going to do about UAP in this position? And he was prepared with an answer. The more Congress becomes aware of this, the more, and the more people in Congress, both the Senate and the House become aware of it, the more they, they really realize what I've just said is true, which is that they should have known about this a long time ago. They're governing the United States from the legislative branch and yet the legislative branch was never asked to participate. In fact, the issue was, was hidden from it. When you say we see this through technology, does it mean that there is technology now that we use that it's somehow copied or obtained from non-human intelligence? There is a retrieval program for technology of non-human origin. There is a, there is a reverse engineering program. You know, for me, these are facts and I'm, I'm not somebody who is easily satisfied by data and evidence. So the big question is, were there technological advances in, in aerospace and defense that came out of the study of some of the technology? You know, the short answer is we really don't know. You know, you could talk to other people who would say, oh yes, one claim is that fiber optics were developed out of recovered technology and that's probably not true. And people assert that about a lot of other things. I would, I would say we have to be extremely cautious until there's some kind of reckoning about this in public about what's actually happened. I think what we can be confident about is, is if you look at some of the statements of people that were running the biggest aerospace and defense companies that have government contracts during the Cold War, they said in plain terms that UFOs exist and they were interested in, in emulating the performance characteristics. One of the founders of Northrop Grumman said that in the early 1970s. Kelly Johnson, founder of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, he acknowledged that he had a very clear UFO sighting witnessed by other people and he reported it to the Air Force. So I think we can be confident that there were always some, some lead engineering people involved in the development of some of the most advanced U.S. aerospace equities that were aware that UAP were real and they were very interested in figuring out, okay, could we emulate a little bit of what we see them doing? Given all the information that you hear and all the research, the interviews, tell us how do you separate fact from fiction? What's your, you know, your, your code? What's your way of, of separating that? Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a really, really good question. And I think that's a, a question that should be on everyone's mind who's interested in the subject. I mean, most people, you know, you're in media, I'm in academia. We have to think about what a fact is and, and all the hard work. We have to understand how to execute all the difficult work that goes into, to establishing that something is a fact. You know, and that's not something most people have to worry about and nor, nor should they. But then when they're interested in UAP and non-human intelligence, they, they will easily blend, let's say, fact and potential fact, okay, to be fair. And it gets mixed up so badly without any method for separating the two that you have people who have made perfectly accurate conclusions about what the government might be doing who then believe completely ludicrous things too. We have to be very, very careful as we attempt to establish fact in this domain. What I do, first of all, is I'm pretty harsh about rejecting claims made by people that I suspect are deceptive, are delusional. And it's a harsh thing to say, but I've encountered it where you have people who, they're not suffering from full-blown schizophrenia or a full-blown psychotic disorder, but they can be lightly psychotic and they can, they can have delusions about things that happen to them. Really be harsh sometimes because otherwise you can be wasting years of your time and burning your reputation on, on nonsense. That's the first thing I do. When you're dealing with the claims of whistleblowers or other people coming out of government who are telling you things that, you know, that you can't be certain of and that are difficult to research, you want multiple sources who aren't connected. And if they are connected, you want to be very careful to see after you've established trust if they start to tell you the same thing, very specific things, unaware that others have said anything to you. You know, you have to have trust and you have to, you have to consider them credible. You have to also trust them as people. You know, it's a tough thing to do when you get into it and you're dealing with people who have done intelligence work because you always have to worry about deception then. I think in this case I have, have really not run into that. And, you know, I understand why people are concerned that the entire thing going on with disclosure could be a psychological operation. At this point, that shouldn't be people's concern because it's gone so far with Congress that you should worry more about Congress being credulous, right, than, and, and believing people that might be delusional than you should with the idea that, that intelligence people are going to Congress and deceiving them in public and under oath. That's very, very unlikely and it's very unlikely Congress is passing laws that, in which they're aligned to. Of course, they're not doing that, so, but so you can rule, you know, you can rule all of that out, but you still have to worry about deception, so you have to be very careful with that. But, you know, to really get your, I think the ultimate issue with at least government information about this that your question concerns is when you're hearing about events or activities or, let's say, operations that concern UAP that would really be of big historical and political significance, they have to reconcile with reality. If you can't, with known historical and social reality, if you can't reconcile it with reality, it's often not true. And so, I'll give you an example. Yeah, what does it mean reconcile? Well, you, okay, so for example, you know, some of the key legislation that's come out of the Senate on UAP and UAP secrecy asserts that UAP data, UAP materials have been classified, were classified under the Atomic Energy Act and so they were classified as nuclear secrets and the legislation asserts that they've even been classified under a rubric, something called trans-classified nuclear material, which is a rubric that was created to keep old secrets secret by kind of transferring them into a new, you know, updated secrecy. We'll put it that way. That's pretty specific information and if you take that, first, it's, that's unlikely, you read the law in which this is set and you think, well, that's unlikely to be something someone made up. At the very least, somebody believes that's true. Then you need to look at history and say, well, would there have been a reason to classify this as a nuclear secret? And of course, there's a very good reason and it's not talked about much publicly, but nuclear secrets were treated during the Cold War was that certain kinds of scientific data that could be used for the construction of nuclear weapons, it was considered born classified, this kind of data. And it was very controversial because if you or I were engaged in research on nuclear physics or energy and we independently made a discovery already known in the classified realm that had to do with nuclear isotopes, for example, technically that data was automatically classified. And so when you had lawyers and activists looking at this in the 60s and 70s, they started to question whether this was a just kind of law. But imagine that you have what you think is a secret or you have information that concerns ultimate defense weaponry potentially, that concerns national security and even human existence in a fundamental way. And you're looking at the Manhattan Project and you say, well, we had kind of what we thought was perfect secrecy and still the Soviet Union penetrated the project. Their own intelligence people made it in to the... It was in place. Yes. Well, yeah. And I mean, I think even cases we're not that publicly aware of where Soviet Union was well aware of some things going on. So you look at all that and you say, okay, well, if we classify it as a nuclear secret now, that gives us the best guarantee the whole thing is kept secret. So we reconcile with reality then. Change gears a little bit. Tell us, what is the goal of SOL? Okay. Well, SOL has... The SOL Foundation has some pretty big objectives. We're not just an academic and scientific research institute. We're also policy focused and we do advisory work with national governments, not just the U.S. government. And we make policy recommendations. We've advised not just the U.S. Senate, but the Canadian Parliament, the Japanese Parliament, the EU Parliament, the EU Commission, and indirectly some components in the U.K. government through some publication. It's academia and science and then it's policy and government issues. And then we also do advisory work with venture capitalists, with technology companies, and we're really trying to stimulate interest there and investment and research and development there. Now, I have to ask you about the drones because they've been around for a month, two months. I guess New Jersey drones are what people hear about. There's others in other areas. What is your take on it? What have you heard from your sources? What are they? You know, this has been a tough one for me because to provide really great answers on that, I realized I'd have to be spending 40 hours a week just on that because you had so much scattered reporting. You have so much fragmentary data. You have so many rumors and then you have no answers coming from the executive branch on this. So... Well, it's very unusual and we should focus on that first because, of course, what was said effectively by the White House is not... It's not coherent. It's that there's no national security threat here. Oh, we don't know what they are. But we don't know what they are. Okay, so one of these things is not true. Unless... Well, one of these things is not true. I still think it's possible that some of those might be United States drones that were operated for some purpose that they're not ready to disclose. But you'd really have to have a really excellent reason to do that and then be lying to the public about it. I mean, you'd have to feel that it was just necessary to do that. So that's a tough one to believe. It's tough to believe that these come from the PCR or from the Russian Federation. That doesn't make a great deal of sense because why are they allowing them to not just fly around populated areas but over military bases and sensitive installations? That doesn't make any sense. So it really is a mystery in that regard. I have been skeptical that a lot of this is UAP vehicles in the sense that's important to me. Most of the images you see sure look like drones. They don't look like classic UAP. So I'm as without answers as most people. I will say, however, that not from my own colleagues in government but through colleagues of colleagues, I have been told that no one in the executive branch has an answer for what these are. Now, I don't know that that's true. I'm just sharing that. I would prefer to wait until there's more information before opining on that. Now, next, I want to ask you about more of your specific work, which is to analyze, research how these potential non-human beings think. Tell us what did you find out? First of all, how do you analyze that? And then what did you find out about their mode of thinking? This Bay Area Innovators episode is sponsored by Peter Cassara Clothiers, an Italian menswear store that brings timeless European style with a modern edge to Sunnyvale and the Bay Area for over 50 years. From top Italian suits and shoes, the exclusive Tami Bahama line, they've got your look covered. Check out their website at petercassaraclothiers.com to find out more. And now, back to our interview. Tell us what did you find out? First of all, how do you analyze that? Then what did you find out about their mode of thinking? I wish I could answer those questions today. This is ongoing research. One thing I'm doing is looking at reported UAP events that were pretty sure happened. If you've got events like that, you can start to make some inferences about what's going on that might tell you something about so-called non-human intelligence. An example of that is a well-known case in 1976 where the Iranian Air Force attempted to intercept a large UAP vehicle that was just kind of sitting in the sky above Tehran. I think two jets were sent after it. In one of them, the pilot, who later became a general in the Air Force and was interviewed subsequently years after, he turned his weapon system on and locked it on the vehicle. That resulted in both his communications and his weapons being jammed by the UAP. It also emitted a second object that came speeding towards him. He actually thought he would die. He said he compared it to having a missile fired at him. But it kind of shot out and then stopped and went back. Now, I cite the case because we're pretty sure that event happened. The State Department sent cables back to the State Department headquarters about it. Air Force and possibly CIA people interviewed the pilots. There was public reporting in Iran at the time, subsequent interviews with the pilots. We have a lot of documentation and data on the event. People interested in the subject professionally, we're all but certain that event happened, so we can rely on that case. What's going on there? If this is an unmanned vehicle, is it simply executing a program that is designed to defend the technology itself, or do you have living beings on board the vehicle that actually are engaged in self-preservation? I'm looking at cases like that right now. I mean, it's ongoing research for me. Trying to see how many instances of this there are and whether we have consistent patterns when this kind of thing happens that suggest to us that... Because those were Army jets, so they could have been seen as a threat by the UFO. Well, not just could have been, but... They probably were. Well, the jet became an active threat because the pilot locked his weapons on it with the intention of firing. There's another case, a Korean War case, that was very well researched where a UAP came... It sort of slowly passed over a battlefield, and a U.S. Army unit saw it, and an infantry person requested from his commanding officer permission to fire at it. And he fired a bullet at it and was conscious from the sound it made that the bullet had struck the vehicle. And he said shortly after the entire unit opened fire on it, but he had the impression that it was emitting some kind of energy that created something like a force field and protected it from the bullets. I think after a round of fire, they stopped, and the vehicle then emitted some kind of energy, and it appeared to be something like a directed energy weapon. And he described it as kind of sweeping across them. They dove into trenches to protect themselves. And what we know from this case, and I know the researcher, he's now in his early 90s, but I'm confident, having talked to him about it, that he researched the case very well. The individual that shot the first bullet became very, very sick, as did many people in the unit. And they were taken off the battlefield. They were hospitalized for a period. The researcher followed up with many of the people. So I'm confident this event happened, too, as are other researchers. Again, the question is, was that a technology executing a program, or was this an attempt at self-preservation by some living beings? That's fascinating. I would like to follow up now. I want to move to movies for a little bit. First, a movie that I've seen as a kid, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's very interesting. It happened. I think it was 1976 or 77. Tell us about that movie, and how much would you say it's real, how much it's production, or it's Hollywood, and some of the characters from that movie. Well, it's great you asked about that film, and that you're asking about film in general, because one of the things that's interesting to me as an anthropologist, but it's also a problem, I think, it's going to be a collective problem for us as we get public consensus about UAP, is that the entire subject was fictionalized for decades. It makes it complicated for us to understand facts about this, because often the fictionalizations are very, very accurate. This film in particular, Close Encounters, it's extremely accurate. And it's extremely accurate because I think both in the writing and then the production of the film, you had some of the best people who worked on UFOs at the time for the U.S. government as consultants. Jacques Vallée was a consultant to the film, is even portrayed in the film. You know, I don't know- He was the French commander or the French- Yeah, French scientist that is working independently and with the Air Force on UFOs. And interestingly, he's portrayed by the great French auteur, François Truffaut. That says a lot about Jacques, that he's such a figure that to portray him well, you had to have someone like Truffaut as the actor. And I don't say that lightly, knowing Jacques. Jacques is a remarkable human being and so charismatic as a personality. But going back to the movie, how much was real? A lot of that film is a very, let's say, it's real in the sense, a lot of it's real in the sense it's a very accurate depiction of what was known by scientific and, let's say, uncredentialed researchers of UFOs and human encounters with them. First, you will hear from people who have worked on UAP in the intelligence community that this is an extremely accurate depiction of what UAP looked like. What we know from publicly available data and scientific or quasi-scientific literature on this is these are extremely luminous objects at night. And they tend to display all the colors of the spectrum with great intensity. So you see that in the film. I think some of the structures that you see for the craft or the shapes are not accurate. You know, they're very interesting to look at. But the shapes of UAP tend to be very simple. They can be disks or kind of double saucers or triangles. What about at the end? There's like some kind of mothership coming, right? It's a much bigger ship. I think what you see there, probably no one's ever seen exactly that. I mean, it's absolutely beautiful. And it's an extraordinary image. But I've never heard of a UFO that looks exactly like that. But there are a lot of reports of carrier ships. And I interviewed someone I consider utterly credible who, in the 1950s, as an 11-year-old, saw not only a disk, but then three more disks. And they all flew into a large carrier. And then the carrier shot up. So in that sense, that's accurate. Today happened to be the day that film director David Lynch passed away. That's a sad story. But he happened to be the director of the Twin Peaks series. Again, one of my favorite series. It's very fascinating. Tell us about that. I think you're familiar with it. Yeah, yeah. Some interesting things happened there. Any thoughts on what happened? You're European. I lived in Europe for many years. And it's easy to forget that Hollywood has directors who are visually just extraordinary artists, even today. Spielberg is one. But Lynch almost transcends film as a genre. And I think his importance on the UAP subject is that you have such strong elements of something like surrealism in his work, and certainly in Twin Peaks. That's not exactly the right term. His capacity to depict, let's say, otherworldly things and interacting with the world, and also to depict human worlds being pulled into other worlds, it's almost unparalleled. They're intertwined. Yes, they're intertwined. I mean, in fact, he also depicted very well, or conceptualized very well, what it means to investigate non-human intelligence or other worlds. Twin Peaks has a lot to do with the history of UFOs, just by virtue of the fact that Kyle McLaughlin portrays an FBI agent. An FBI agent who is psychic, is interested in the paranormal, dealing with very strange things. But he uses all the tools of police and forensic investigation to solve a problem that originates in another world. And Lynch even then flipped that when he did the reboot. The problem is no longer how can human beings use a technique of investigation to understand something outside the world. Now the investigator, it comes from another world, and he has to use the methods of another world to solve a problem that originates in the human world. So he really went very far in thinking about how you would inquire into something that is really beyond your framework, really beyond the world as you know it. With UFOs specifically, we often look in the 90s at the X-Files as the work of fiction, the work of television or film that really dealt with the UFO issue. And retrospectively we can see it got certain things correct about UAP secrecy. All of that was fiction, myth, or considered that at the time. But now the idea that there really are people in government that deal with UFOs and non-human intelligence, even their weirdest dimensions, and the X-Files got that right. But we often forget that the other television show at the time that really dealt with this in a way that showed insight was the X-Files, where one of the main characters was the Colonel. The story was that he had worked for the Air Force on aliens or non-human intelligence and was involved in using a deep space monitoring system to pick up signals and so on. What's strange to me in looking at it now is that the Colonel is like people I know from the DOD and the intelligence community, where 10 years ago if I was to say publicly, no, people like that actually exist and they really work on things. It would be a completely ridiculous claim. Today you have people like that have come out publicly who are utterly credible, whether they're scientists or they do something else in government, who say, no, I worked on those things and you should have complete confidence that we were working on something real. So I look back on Twin Peaks and that aspect of it and it's a bit astonishing to me to see how well and with a certain accuracy, without sacrificing the uncanny and the strange and the bizarre and the weird Lynch depicted that. It's fascinating and I like your idea, or at least it's so much food for thought that if you're inside a box and you're trying to solve the problem inside the box, or trying to solve the problem outside the box, you may not be able to do it. From inside the box you may need someone else who's out there to help you to solve it, because you're limited by your knowledge or by your dimensions or whatever. Yeah, the way I could follow up on what you said is that as I'm looking at the different attempts to do research on UAP and possible non-human intelligence that have been done by scientists and academics and also, and I say this with respect to amateur researchers, people that weren't trained in any discipline or field, but they still develop methods of research. The thing that strikes me is that it's never been framed well as what I'll call a relational problem. You have to study the relationship, not just the thing you're trying to study, because it's in relationship with you. You're in, by virtue of its interaction with humanity, you're in relationship with it because you're human and you're trying to study it. Unless you study the relationship itself, you're not going to understand anything about human perceptions and interpretations that you might automatically and by default apply to it that aren't useful. Likewise, you're going to leave out what we discussed earlier, which is that a lot of the agency, a lot of the power in the situation actually lies with these other selves that we don't understand. Once you establish that there's a relationship and a relationship in which you're dealing with two selves, not just a self and an object, I think you understand the situation much, much better. Going back to what you said, you have to be able to imagine yourself out of the human box. That's tough to do. People who are interested in UAP or have experienced them, they're very good at that, but their imagination can run away from them. Then they become ungrounded. They often have great insight, but they can get lost in their imagination. The problem with researchers, with academics, or even journalists on this is they don't go far enough with their imagination. They have the sobriety you need to deal with the subject, but they don't have enough imagination. You need both things. You really have to be able to plant your feet in the box and then also dare to take the lid off of it and stretch out of it and see where you can go out of there. Give us some ideas of what's next for the UAP community. What do you see as happening in the next few years? First, I'm not trying to predict anything. It's not a responsible thing to do. Because people believe this is going on, I don't have some kind of secret information about a secret plan or something. I don't actually think anything like that is going on. I think the process in the United States government by which UAP have gone from being something completely ridiculous and absurd to becoming a normal part of government, I think that will continue. I say this with a lot of caution, and I'll qualify it a lot, because I don't think these are responsible people in many respects. But the Trump administration is giving us maybe the once-in-a-lifetime chance to have acknowledgement of this from the executive branch. Knowing a lot about secrecy and the fact that it's real with UAP, I am pretty sure that the executive branch has never wanted, even when you've had presidents who have probably been aware of this, to publicly acknowledge that it's real. But you have the person in the Senate who, maybe until now, but certainly until very recently, was the most informed about UAP secrecy and what really has gone on in the intelligence community, Marco Rubio, becoming Secretary of State in one of the best cabinet-level positions. A lot of people don't understand that about Rubio. I did not know that. The main people have been Marco Rubio who have dealt with UAP in the Senate. They were Rubio, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, now Michael Rounds, who's also on the intelligence committee, and Chuck Schumer. But Rubio was the first, and I know for a fact he was the most informed. And so you've got him in a cabinet position. A major cabinet position. And then you also have John Ratcliffe, who was the former Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration. And he'll be CIA director. He'll be CIA director. And he was the person that confirmed on national television in an interview with Fox News that effectively there were in fact, as has been asserted by Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon and others, there were many other videos of UAP, some of which were much better than those that have been publicly released. He talked about this, John Ratcliffe. And he said, I wanted to declassify that information before the end of the first Trump administration. We didn't manage to do it. And he acknowledged something which is kind of the dirty secret in all this, which is that some of the best imagery they have comes from US spy satellites and other sensor platforms whose existence they don't want to disclose. And so declassifying the videos might have exposed the sensor platforms. And so the whole conundrum was, how do you strip metadata out? Or how do you not give away the nature of the sensor while still declassifying the video? It's shocking. He said on Fox News, we have satellite imagery of this stuff. And my work, I realized that was a big no-no for anyone to admit to that. Even people who would admit to all sorts of other things going on with UAP data, it became very clear to me that they were unable to say, yes, satellite sensor platforms are capturing these things, capturing images of these things. So you've got Ratcliffe going into the CIA. And I'll put it this way, because I'm up with the following. And I want to say something without being too direct about it. When you hear people talking about the intelligence community and UAP, that's a polite way of saying the Central Intelligence Agency, which still rules the roost in the intelligence community, I'm pretty sure has primary jurisdiction over the issue. Now, I don't say that a lot publicly in media context, because I'm actually very sympathetic to, I think, the problem they have there. Because they're going to be blamed for secrecy about this when I don't think they instituted it. And a lot of the activity is probably taking place there. I mean, they're perfectly legal. They're not rogue efforts or something, as far as that's what I'm learning from conversations I've had with people who at least claim to know about it. The only problem has been that someone wasn't reporting them to Congress. So having Ratcliffe go into that agency could be a major thing. The downside of it is that that's not exactly an easy agency to control, especially if you're an outsider. And he's not an insider from it. Historically, it's an agency that's had a great deal of autonomy and necessarily, to do its work, it employs, of course, not only a lot of compartmentalization. I was just going to say that. Yeah, but it's an institution keeping secrets from itself. And yeah, I mean, as someone I know who had a remarkable career in the intelligence community said to me recently about Ratcliffe coming in, he said, well, you know, he's not an insider. That's a very difficult place if you come from the outside to really get leverage if you're trying to make change. But he also said, Peter, it's basically the Truman Show in there, where there's a kind of pretense that things are one way, but plenty of people know they're another. And you're dealing with ruse after ruse and trick after trick, even internally, to keep certain things secret. So that's the difficulty there in getting any kind of movement. Well, Gina Haspel, I think that's her name, right? She was director. She was coming from the inside of the agency, but it didn't seem like anything came out or anything changed at that time. That was 2018 or so, 2017. You mean in terms of with UAP? Yeah. Maybe it wasn't the time. The CIA would never, just like any other government agency that deals with state secrets, they would not initiate a policy change about secrecy with that. It's not their place to do it. The Director of National Intelligence could do that because that position was created to... Monitor. Well, at least nominally create coordination between all the different... I mean, you have 18 intelligence agencies or components in the U.S. government. But this also goes back to what we talked about earlier, whether there's some control that's being exerted on us by this non-human intelligence, they would somehow not allow it to happen. Well, I mean, again, this is only a hypothetical. If anyone knows about how that's really happening, they're not in a position to talk about it. But let's just assume no one knows what's going on there. You'd have to work with multiple scenarios and possibilities. I mean, first, we can't presume there's one non-human intelligence interacting with us. So there are probably several. That seems to be what the data indicates. Because you have different kinds of UAP vehicles, and the kinds are... It's stable enough types that you have to ask yourself why they're different kinds that look... They don't look so similar. So one hypothesis is that they do belong to different groups and so on. That may explain also the crashes that there's so often that maybe there's infighting. There's groups that fight each other. Yeah, there could be that. So you might be dealing with multiple so-called NHI that want different things. Regardless of whether it's one or many, we don't know what it or they wants. Do they want disclosure? Do they not want disclosure? Do they want it at their own pace? And so we really can't make any assumptions about that. Peter, thank you so much for your time. It's been a fascinating conversation. It's been a great conversation. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.