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What are pilots really seeing in our skies, and why aren't we talking about it?
The Safe Aerospace Podcast brings together military aviators, commercial pilots, air traffic controllers, aerospace professionals, and policymakers to tackle one of aviation's most pressing and least discussed challenges: UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) in controlled airspace.
Hosted by Former F/A-18 pilot, Ryan Graves from Americans for Safe Aerospace, the podcast goes beyond the headlines to explore what UAP encounters mean for flight safety, national security, and the future of airspace transparency. Each episode features firsthand accounts from credentialed professionals, analysis of emerging policy developments, and conversations with the researchers and lawmakers working to bring scientific rigor and institutional accountability to a long-stigmatized issue. The Safe Aerospace Podcast is produced by SafeAero Media.
He had a UAP encounter during his flight.
Can you describe that incident for us?
It wasn't actually during his flight.
It wasn't during. It, yeah.
Brian
Binnie was the second private astronaut.
Brian has just crashed.
He's watching his childhood
dream disappear.
He's 47 years old.
He's thinking
my test flight career is over.
It's six days after the flight.
So. December
23rd, 2003, 4:00 in the morning.
And there's flickering lights.
And he opens up
his eyes, goes to the bedroom window,
and he said it looked like daylight
had manifested itself
in his backyard in the daylight.
Were these translucent spheres?
He said there were a dozen of them.
As program manager of Spaceship one, again
with advanced degrees,
he looked into every prosaic explanation
at could.
Whether it's amaz.
I mean, just everything.
And ultimately, he determined that it was.
Welcome to the Safe Aerospace podcast.
My name is Ryan Graves.
I think we have a pretty interesting
episode for you today.
I'm joined by Kevin current
Matt Steinmetz.
We often wonder about what
astronauts might see in space
if they see you as well.
I think you're really going to enjoy
what these two folks have to share about
what might have happened to our second
commercial astronaut in space.
Is that correct?
Awesome. Kevin, thanks for joining us.
Let's start
with the introduction from Kevin.
What brought you into this conversation?
How do we run into each other
on the UAP topic?
Yeah, it's a strange one. So basically
I've been a career cinematographer
for about the last 30 years.
I do a little bit of everything,
but for a living.
I've made a living as a cinematographer,
so I worked for pretty much every studio,
hundreds of independent production
companies living in Los Angeles.
In 2020, the world slowed down
and I had to make some life decisions.
What I wanted to do with the one life
that I know I have.
And so, for better or worse,
that became aerospace had read aerospace
since I was a kid.
And so when it came time to work again,
I just leaned into it.
So I told everybody when I wanted to do,
and I got very fortunate.
I was the closest camera operator
to Blue Origin's New Shepard
landings and, you know,
so I shot the first four of those.
So I was five feet away from Bezos,
that whole crew on a 16, Shatner
and Bezos.
That was my camera,
that the world saw all of those.
It was an honor because, you know, that
company could go on to become anything.
I shot all the morning shows
for Blue Origin and it was incredible.
I worked for space a little bit Astrobotic
a little bit.
I worked on Artemis
one for meta to an all the launch,
you know, closest stage to the camera,
our closest stage to launch.
And then I was
pitching a series
and it was an aerospace series.
It was getting a lot of interest
but it just wasn't going.
And so one of the episodes was from Mojave
in the Spaceship One program.
And so I reached out to Brian Binnie
to even craft that episode.
And Brian Binnie
was the second private astronaut.
And I said, hey, Brian, here's who I am.
Here's what I want to do.
I want to celebrate engineers and people
that take us beyond our atmosphere
for us in my career. This is my skill set.
Can't go back and become an aerospace
engineer.
I'm a little too old for that.
But I want to celebrate
you guys and tell stories
with the power that I have in media.
I said, Brian,
your life could have been very different
if it wasn't for a series of events
that allowed you to fly the final flight
of Spaceship one because he had crashed
the first rocket powered flight.
So it seemed like to me
it was a simple redemption story.
I said, is there any truth to this?
And, you know, he said, yeah, there's a.
Lot of that specifically.
Truth to that.
It's like this cool redemption story.
Like,
have you thought a lot about how your life
would have been different
if it was marked by a failed
and a crashed test
flight at the age of 47,
pretty much effectively
ending your test flight career
instead of a series of circumstances
that occurred over the next ten months
to allow him to fly the final test flight
and become the second private astronaut
and fly the last flight of the program
and sell it all to all the IP
to Virgin Galactic.
And he said, not only is there a story
there, I've been writing a book about it
for the last 17 years,
and I said, can I read it?
And it was a PDF at the time.
It was called
The Magic Menace of Spaceship One.
But as a documentarian, it was a dream
because it was a day by day account
from somebody with advanced degrees
that was program manager for Spaceship
One inside this really amazing program
that essentially sparked
commercial spaceflight.
And we moved forward shortly
after that to produce a documentary.
And I can certainly talk about the UAP
part of it.
We'll get there in a moment.
Name of the documentary.
It's called Beyond Blue Sky The Untold
Story of the First Private Astronauts.
Amazing. And when did it come out?
Came up on May 5th in honor of Alan
Shepard's
Reaching Space, going past Carmen line.
That was the anniversary of him doing so.
It's on Apple TV and Prime Video. Awesome.
Very good.
All right, well, let's jump over now.
Matt, thanks for joining us as well.
Where do you fit into this picture?
So my name is Matt Steinmetz.
I'm an aerospace engineer.
I left college in 1998
and went to Mojave, California
for my dream job at Scale Composites.
I was a classic kid
like yourself, I'm sure,
sitting in a cardboard box with motorcycle
helmet on, playing,
playing, you know, Neil Armstrong
and and Buzz Aldrin
and Michael Collins,
and kind of set the space thing behind me.
And then just kind of
I won't, you know, by chance
I was in the right place, right time
and scaled started working on the world's
first commercial spaceship.
That was successful spaceship one.
I was the engineer that led that program,
and I was also copilot or Gib
back, Cedar Guy and back in the mothership
for all the space flights.
So I released all the guys on the space
flights.
Very cool. Yeah.
And so there I was in the early 2000,
in the middle of history
being made with commercial space.
So we had a small team,
you know, building the world's
first commercial space spaceship.
You know, it was very Buck Rogers. Cool.
Yeah.
See the pants? Flight tests.
Crazy flight test world. Yeah.
And so I did that early 2000.
We obviously made history
and then did a bunch of stuff since then.
So how did you get pulled into that
specifically?
I mean, I imagine,
you know, it's such a small project.
They have such big dreams.
And it's not like it's 20, 26 year.
Wait, what year was it again?
2003 I started. Yeah, I mean, spaceship.
I mean, commercial space
was just a vision at that point.
Yeah.
I mean, it was a huge, huge, huge gamble.
And I think everyone probably knew
that the first iteration wasn't
necessarily going to be
an economically viable system. Right?
It was probably going to be
a proof of concept to build off of it.
So yeah, I mean, I imagine they were
looking for incredible engineers.
Yeah.
I mean, we could go a long ways
into the history of scale.
But, you know, bird
originally started routine aircraft
factory building plans build airplanes.
He they build and him and his brother
and Mike Melville and Sally Melville
would make these plans for crazy airplanes
you could build in your garage with,
you know, beer
cooler, foam and epoxy. Beers cooler.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
So beer cooler and, you know, hot wire.
And next thing you know, you've got
a long, easy or whatever cool homebuilt.
But he started doing that at some point.
You know, the,
the big guy started paying attention
and started having Bert designed
bigger and bigger prototypes.
So it went from plans build in your garage
stuff that Burt was coming up with
to more serious,
bigger prototype airplanes
like the early Beach
Starship was an 80% prototype they built.
There were things for Republic
and all the.
So they started this spinoff
company called Scale Composites
to do bigger, more official
whatever you want to call it airplanes.
Burt always had this passion for space.
And so at some point
he kind of had solved that problem,
and he went to Paul Allen and said, hey,
we can do this space thing,
and I need an investor.
And so it kind of launched.
But, you know, just all the crazy stuff
they did attracted guys like me
and all the very talented people
that were there
that were part of spaceship and others,
just because they were doing cool stuff.
It wasn't just a, you know,
sign on the dotted line, start your job,
work on a bracket for an alternator
for your entire career.
Right?
It was,
which is kind of the aerospace standard.
It was. We're going to his left
for a while.
All that was left and so scalable
was very much like the show up.
If you're talented, show up. We're going
to give you way more than you can handle.
Throw you in deep, deep, deep fire hose.
You know, just,
you know, crazy world where you would
build an airplane in a year.
And so it was very appealing
to guys like me coming out of college.
Do you know enough about space
to compare those two cultures.
A little bit?
And I've got friends
there and have had friends over the years
there and have met
Gwen and Elon and stuff.
It's I think it's very similar
in a lot of ways
because we were a prototype
world, largely building
small airplanes
over a year or year or two.
Everything was that
we could was owned in house.
We didn't like sub out.
Hey, you big company and build a wing
and we'll build this other part.
We did everything.
And because of that,
because we were building prototypes,
we did a lot of times with like find
the T-38 or a wrecked airplane
or junkyard parts and we would steal
what we couldn't come up with quickly
and cobble it into a new, a new.,
Not too different than what the Navy does.
And so.
So for different reasons,
space was very similar.
They didn't get used airplanes
or whatever, but they very much
or vertically integrated
building a lot of the stuff in house.
And so I think what this is my opinion,
but what they would find over time is
they'd go to a vendor to try to get x,
y, z part and discover in space,
especially aerospace.
But for sure in space
it was extremely expensive.
The cost of entry
just on any component was infinite.
Yeah.
Because, you know, it's stuff for space
that largely had been built over
the industry had been built over decades.
So they would bring it inside
because they had to,
for cost reasons or schedule reasons,
because they were on a way different
timeline than NASA or whoever else.
And so they would do it all in, in house
and come up with a really.
Cool stuff
similar to what Elon does now. Honestly.
Yeah for sure. Exact same model.
And I don't know Blue Origin as well,
but I know I suspect they're very similar
were they bring it all in house
and have control over it, and they kind of
reset the bar on cost and schedule
for, for, you know, new equipment.
Vertical integration, leading the way for.
Yeah for sure.
Commercial aerospace. Very cool.
And so how did you guys come together.
Well so I met Brian and then asked him
who could help tell this story.
That was in his book.
And that's how I was introduced to Matt.
And that's one of those people that was
just I mean, you can see him right here.
He's, you know, jumps off the screen
and he's fun and we're around the same age
and just became friends through it.
Nice.
And who did
you have to get permission to be able
to create the video that you did?
Because he had a lot of access
and whatnot?
I mean,
I assume it was signed off on the top.
Yeah, basically,
I had to work with attorneys
pretty much every step of the way,
and it was a wake up call for me.
And it was one of the things as a creative
that I'm sure within aerospace
is the same thing.
We all get into our individual industries
because of creative and the will
to build something.
They just hit. The wall
and then the attorneys get involved.
So there was attorneys throughout clearing
every single second, every single frame.
You have to do something
called a stock log
and sign off on every single little thing.
So that was the thing.
Occasionally that would just take the wind
right out of your sales as a creative.
Yeah, because sometimes
you just have to wait on legal. Awesome.
Well, okay, so you know, we're here today
because I mean,
frankly, it's a pretty remarkable story
here.
What, Brian, I mean, one, he seems like
an incredible human being, an American.
And I want to get into his background
a bit more because I think
you guys could probably expand
on, you know, some of his earlier
accomplishments as well.
But, you know, as the second
commercial astronaut in space,
you shared in your documentary that he had
a UAP encounter during his flight.
Is that is that accurate?
It wasn't actually during his flight.
Oh, it wasn't during it. No one was it?
Do you want me to get in?
Well, let's not get into it now. Okay?
I'll stand corrected, but
we'll get into the details in a moment.
But first, he created this
this book, right?
That detailed his experiences.
Was this encounter in that book?
Did he include it in that first draft?
And is that kind of
how did he I'd say we
we we talked about his coming out on this.
Let's just talk about the man first,
who would be best to kind of
give us a little rundown on who.
Both give a snippet.
Yeah, you go for it.
I can tell you a little little bits
and pieces, but so on spaceship two,
actually.
So I was the program manager
on spaceship two,
and Brian was kind of my cohort in crime,
so to speak.
And so he was a business guy.
I was an engineer,
and we shared an office.
And so Brian was a gentleman,
a professional, like,
you know, a cool test pilot.
Just a cool dude.
Like a story I like to tell about Brian
is that we'd have these trying, crazy
high stress times.
And so I'd kind of sit back
and I go, Brian, tell me there I was.
Story.
Now, you being a fighter pilot,
you know, there I was and whatever.
But Brian would tell me these stories.
Anything from,
you know, from UAP stuff to there
I was over the Gulf, you know,
first night to go for and all this stuff.
And so we kind of had that relationship,
you know, we just we're both friends.
We're both pilots.
We both liked this aerospace stuff.
And he was also an engineer.
And so we could talk
on all these different levels.
And so yeah, we're pretty close
spend a lot of time together.
And he's just a cool dude.
I mean.
Well, can you share about his
his Navy background? Yeah.
I mean, I don't know all the details,
but for me, as an airplane lover,
I, you know,
I like to hear all the stories.
I mean, he went back was, you know,
training the Tweety birds, the old.
I don't know what that is T2 or something.
I don't.
I'm not even sure. Yeah.
This whole way before my time he flew.
You know, he was flying a Corsair TOS
before Gulf War.
You know, old engine technology.
He had great stories about,
you know, there
I was lined up pitching deck and the spool
time on an engine back in those days.
What, like 10s or something.
And so you'd get low.
They'd say power, power, power.
And you'd throttle up and it just.
Wait to happen.
So he had all kinds of there.
I was, you know, sure, I was dead stories.
And then he transitioned
to the early model F-18, F-18, c probably.
Yeah. And flew those in Gulf War.
So he had tons of go for original Gulf
War stories.
Some of them are in the books,
some of them are not. But love golf.
Just another F-18
got out there.
40 missions, bunch of boat
landings, 33 combat missions.
That's incredible.
Especially during the Gulf War as well.
And probably, like a lot of us,
once he finished his combat tour,
he probably applied to test pilot school
and was accepted there through the Navy.
Is that correct?
Went through the Naval Test Pilot School,
if you're aware.
Yeah, yeah.
Pax River. Yeah. Tax river.
Very good.
Then landed in China Lake and I think
that was pretty much the course of it.
I think it's important to start with,
can I address Brian's background
a little bit, please?
So basically, Brian
grew up between Indiana and Scotland.
So that's where he was raised.
And his father was a professor in physics.
And so Brian's early
childhood was kind of marked by his father
knowing the power of like,
experiential learning.
And so he used to take those plain Jane
like wooden model
airplanes and just shoot them up
anytime he had free time.
And it just goes up like a rocket.
And then wings pop out and it comes back
down.
And Brian said from the time
he was like 3 or 4 years old,
he just became obsessed with flight.
At that point,
anything that could go up there.
And then his mom kind of, inspired him
to get interested in things even beyond,
he calls it
that dimension where planes could fly
and birds could fly, which was space.
So his mom would sit there and talk to him
about the planets and the stars
and the galaxy, what he could see
visually, and just got inspired
to think of Earth in its place
within this big, vast universe.
And that's really what sparked Brian,
his parents, to get interested in that.
So he knew high school wasn't the place
where he could pursue those dreams.
But once he got to college,
he just it was on.
So he went to Brown and Princeton,
got advanced degrees and aeronautical
engineering, fluid and thermal dynamics,
and then flew, you know,
at Princeton and a sail club quite a bit,
and then try to join the Air Force.
That didn't work out.
And I think it was a friend
that told him about the Navy.
And then he joined the Navy, and he just
didn't really think about it like that.
It could be a possibility
of allowing him to continue to fly.
But while he was at Princeton,
a naval trainer came out, I think, in
like a T 34
and allowed him to loose and rolls
and all kinds of stuff and experience
that third dimension freedom.
And he said from that point,
he was hooked.
By the time he stepped off that plane,
he signed up for the Navy.
Very cool.
20 years.
In the 234.
Yeah. Corpus Christi, Texas.
Follow a plane.
Certainly not a jet, man.
That's a very cool story.
And, you know, you often hear people
getting the bug like that.
I was a late bloomer.
I didn't really get the bug
until I was almost on college.
Please continue.
Yeah.
So I mean, basically he flew that
20 years.
He realized he had a shelf life in the
Navy, much I'm sure everybody knows it.
But then he just wanted to continue
flying.
So he, the Navy wanted to push him
kind of into dust jobs
mostly like getting,
you know, funds from the Pentagon.
He wasn't interested in that.
He just wanted to continue test flying.
So he kept hearing Mojave
all over the place.
He knew
he had to go to the commercial side
and ended up in Mojave, worked
for a company called Rotary Rockets,
which was a single stage
rocket designed to go to space.
I think they flew for test flights,
but the idea was single stage rocket
display space and then Chinook
helicopter blades that would come out and
like allow it to, to land.
I think they did.
In itself.
Flights of it.
Brian was one of the test pilots.
And he said that that essentially
allowed him to land in Mojave
and kind of get his bearings.
And during the course of that,
he ran into Burt Rutan.
Yeah.
We had this crazy rocket
with helicopter blades.
We survived that. Right?
Yeah, exactly.
And so, he was in that environment.
It's pretty small out there.
The community is small.
And Brian said he had put out like fliers.
He was an avid golfer
to see who wanted to go golfing.
And one of the people that answered
was the infamous Burt Rutan.
And so him and became golfing buddies.
And when Rotary Rocket
essentially couldn't get more financing to
for their next test flights,
Burt said, why don't you come to us
and we'll figure out a position for you?
Sounds like Brian had fate intercede
a few times in his his life there,
he says. Far? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
So then he worked at scale,
and he worked on a few project
before coming to spaceship one
and becoming the the program manager
essentially for a spaceship one.
How risky is it?
I have some sense and it's ill informed,
but maybe the general public doesn't.
How risky is it to be a test
pilot in a in a program like that?
Well.
You know, he's been up
and he's he's the one.
Well, so I'll give you my perspective.
Right.
So we use rotary rock as a jump off point.
So I was an engineer
young engineer at that time
when Rotary Rocket was being put together.
And I think I watched it
physically fail with my own eyes
on the ground during testing 3 or 4 times,
like for example.
So it had a rotor blade like a helicopter,
but it had peroxide rockets
on the tip to oh,
so if if it was a rocket,
it'd be in space, it'd be falling,
the rotor blades would come out and the,
you know, the wind
moving past it, spin them.
So for the test vehicle,
they had to spin up the rotor with power.
And so the way they did
that was the tip rockets.
So one day one of the rockets shot off
and took, you know, 50ft of hose with it.
And it was streaming purple peroxide,
toxic peroxide.
And and that's a ground test
that was a tethered down ground test
and stuff
like that would happen all the time.
I mean, in test flying, right?
Your job is to go suss out
all the crazy things that are
potentially looming
behind the curtains of this machine.
That's very complex machine.
And obviously, the bigger the more complex
machine, the more dangerous it is.
Is that.
Ultimately like a simulation problem?
I would say no, because like that example
I just gave was it's so many times it's
the we used to have a saying, it's
never the things that you think of that
you simulate the bite you.
It's the thousand things
you don't know how to simulate
or are too dynamic to actually simulate.
So could I
simulate everything on a vehicle?
Sure.
How many infinite dollars
and infinite time do you want to spend?
The reality is, at some point,
every customer has to draw a line and say,
we've done the best we can,
but we just can't fiscally or timewise
keep doing this simulation.
We have to go test it.
And so obviously the bigger governments
can do much
more simulation than private industry,
just because there's more money and more,
more time there.
So the concept of a digital twin is a,
you know, a hot topic.
Yeah. You know, engineering.
So I didn't know if if that was
maybe a pathway to something.
But, you know, I think to your point is
just they're just too complex machines
for us to fully simulate in a way that,
you know, reaches any level of certainty.
Well,
my boss used to have a great analogy.
So he would always say that the
the simulation expert,
whether that was a structural analyst
or a CFD, you know, an aerodynamic,
would always come to them
with an answer after it failed.
So something would fail,
and then they would run
a bunch of simulations and go, oh,
there it is. Yeah.
So the reality is you can you can spend
a lot of time and money simulating stuff.
And if you don't know what questions
to ask,
you're going to answer questions
that maybe don't really address issues.
You will always have risk
and things that are not understood.
And so that ultimately becomes
the job of the test pilot.
You are the guy that has to go put it in
the real dynamic environment and see,
see what things work
and what things don't.
It's just the way it is. Very cool.
And that was really the Spaceship
One program.
I mean, there was just
I mean, there were 17 test flights.
They started with glide test flights first
and then the power test flights,
pretty much.
I mean, every single one of the powered
test flights had anomalies, except
for the last one, which was kind of a
quote unquote perfect flight.
But it's all just I mean, all the footage
that I would see, all these sync cameras,
them just figuring out stuff in real time,
how to bring people
back down to the ground safely.
One is a great example simulation.
We did know wind tunnels.
You know, wind tunnel is not a computer
simulation, but it's a simulation in a
in a tube with air flowing past.
Of what the air physical simulation.
We didn't do any of that.
So one of the failures we.
Had didn't do any. Of that.
We did not do any of that.
And that was a financial thing
a financial. Yeah.
Because, because again
you can spend infinite time and money
and doing whatever you want.
Wind tunnels, one of those things
we believe we had a big enough grasp on it
with some light level CFD.
So computer based fluid dynamics
as opposed to a wind tunnel.
But on flight seven
you probably remember the numbers are,
you know, 20 some years ago,
the numbers are getting lost on me.
But and it's shown in the documentary,
we had a tail stall.
So the tail keeps a thing in trim,
and if the tail goes away,
the thing will end over end.
So tail stalled, entered a spin,
and basically the pilot
had to figure out what was going on
and kind of recover.
One of the things that we did after that
flight is we made a full scale mockup
that we stuck on the front of a truck,
and we drove up and down the runway.
And so we still didn't do a wind tunnel,
but we did a, you know,
the next best thing, which was
sort of a wind tunnel constraint.
So yeah. Well, that's very cool.
All right. Well, so Brian.
Brian comes on to the scene.
He is the active test pilot
now for spaceship one, right.
What year is this?
I mean, it started in 2000.
One one.
They rolled it out and then they started
test flight in 2003.
Well, take me through,
you know, kind of a little bit of his arc
there, you know,
because we talked about the crash
and whatnot.
And I don't think everyone knows
too much about that.
So yeah, let's explore that a little bit.
And then that will, I think, lead us into,
you know, his UAP experience, which
I think came relatively, you know,
well after, you know, later in his career.
One thing I was going to make clear
was there
were we
initially started with four test pilots.
So Doug Shane,
who was called VP of the company,
number two at the company, Pete Siebold,
we can get into details if you care.
Mike Melvill and then Brian, Doug
did the first flight on the mothership.
I think that's shown in the movie.
And then pretty quickly decided, I'm
going to run the test program.
I don't want to be in the seat
for these programs.
So he was the mission control guy
you hear on the comms.
And then Pete, Brian and Mike
were the test pilots.
Okay. Got it.
I mean.
All of them are amazing individuals,
but Mike Melvill was the first employee
of Aircraft Factory
and then became the first employee
by default of skilled composites.
And he's fascinating.
So basically,
the way him and Burt had met was Mike
built one of the home builds, a
very Viggen like in his garage in Indiana.
Nobody would certify it.
So I'm like, flew out to Mojave.
And Burt Rutan said, who is this guy?
And hired him pretty much on the spot.
But he had never graduated high school.
Incredibly gregarious,
amazing human being.
He became the go to test pilot.
He was just such an intuitive flier.
So for all these test flights,
all these research aircraft, Mike
was kind of the go to guy.
So going into spaceship one,
he was still the go to guy.
So he appeared most of the load,
even though it was three
centrally functional test pilots
for the spaceship one program,
he flew the first five glide flights,
I believe.
Yeah.
And that continued
kind of through the program.
So he flew like 60% of the test flights.
Pete flew maybe three of them.
And then Brian flew,
I think three of them as well.
Okay.
Before it's.
Weird contrast.
You had hero fighter pilot, right?
Brian out of the Navy
used to crash in airplanes into decks.
Right.
Advanced degrees, Vance
degrees. And everything.
Pete Siebel
was kind of the engineering test pilot.
Tons of commercial aerospace, time test
pilot, scaled flying, weird airplanes.
Not military.
Not military.
Very much a real smart engineer.
Built a simulator. Sculpted poly,
Cal poly.
Another story.
But yeah,
this engineer with test pilot background.
And then you had Mike who was a self
not self-taught but,
you know, all commercial aerospace
but tons of history with Burton
scaled and RAF flying,
every weird thing that Burt dreamed up.
So you kind of had three very different
personalities, very different skill
sets that you could pick and choose
who didn't into what flight.
And so imagine Brian
being kind of late to the party.
Yeah.
You know, kind of military culture.
Everybody else is civilian. Yeah.
Kind of a weird fit.
And so I can imagine him just looking
at this going, wow, uphill battle.
Right.
Well, it was a small project
and you guys were kicking it off
with who you could get.
I mean, that makes it makes sense to me,
I guess
Brian's flights
were probably later in the program.
Then he flew.
Yeah.
So he was worried for the first several
test flights that he he's like, where
where am I
as a test pilot in this program?
Mike's
flying flight after flight after flight.
So, it was the later glide
test flights that he got.
He got the 10th
flight was the one that he first got?
Yeah. Oh, that was his first flight.
Think so?
I'm pretty sure
I think that's right. Yeah.
And then he got the first rocket
powered flight.
As someone who had flown supersonic,
the only pilot had flown supersonic
of the three test pilots.
So they gave it to him,
or he was the only one to step forward
with an experimental plane
and experimental rocket
to essentially fly the first.
Super.
Flight and have the first private,
because it was also
the first private aircraft to ever go
supersonic.
Was it? Yeah. Private.
Commercial.
This was like, imagine this. Is like,
yeah. Yeah.
This is like a homebuilt airplane.
Yeah. With a rocket engine for all.
That's a big deal.
Yeah, that would be a scary thing
to volunteer for. So.
And why Brian,
you can respect this as a pilot.
That was a hand flown.
No sass. There's no computers. There's.
You are connected from the stick
to the tail surfaces with cables.
Yeah. Right.
So you are flying the thing supersonic.
So if there's transient supersonic
you're going to feel them.
Yeah. And you got to be.
Yeah.
You got to be careful
if aircraft is not designed correctly.
And that when it gets into the transonic
transonic regime
between about 0.95 to 0.11 .05 or so,
I think those are the right boundaries.
And then, of course, supersonic aircraft
can do some very weird things.
Like you try to pitch forward
and you actually pitch back
and all sorts of crazy stuff.
So we had. All of that.
And you know, the modern fighter
can do that with like these incredible
digital systems that like react in real
time to these changes,
but to like manually fly.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Yeah.
And from an engineering standpoint,
we kind of tend
to think I can predict things.
I can simulate things up to transonic,
and then I can predict things after it.
Supersonic.
But that dead band in the middle,
there's a lot of different disciplines
that just kind of go off the map.
Yeah.
So how it's really going to behave there,
you don't really know.
Back to the
why do you need a test pilot there?
That transonic thing is a big deal.
So the approach we took I think number one
was put a guy in there that at least
has been supersonic and respect that.
You know that regime that was Brian.
And then number two is we're going
to light the rocket motor and go
blasting through it,
not hang out in transonic.
So we're going to go past it through it.
And then we'll come back through it.
But not like dilly dally. Yeah.
Yeah that makes sense.
Was that the flight
that he had his incident.
Yeah. Yeah. So can you tell us
talk us through that. Yeah.
Do you mind if I go backwards a little bit
and just write the fourth wall
a little bit?
I just feel like from the edits
going on in my head, and
I just want you to have a clean entrance
to, like, the three pilots.
Yeah. Okay.
So there were three test pilots in the
In the Spaceship one program.
There were Pete
Siebold, Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill.
They couldn't have been more different.
Pete Siebold was picked out of Cal Poly
by Burt Rutan.
He was just a whiz kid.
He didn't graduate from there. Bert.
That was his alma mater,
so he just picked him out.
So I think he was 30 at the time
and he built a simulator from scratch.
Had flown a biplane since he was a kid.
Just incredibly intuitive.
Brilliant engineer. Mike Melvill.
He was from South Africa,
never graduated high school.
He was birds go to test pilot,
and he was just an incredibly intuitive
flier who had flown the vast
majority of Burt Rutan research aircraft.
Then he had Brian Binnie,
who had advanced degrees from Brown
and Princeton,
had flown 20 years in the Navy.
And he came to Scaled Composites,
which was kind of completely outside
of the commercial test flight world.
And that was kind of a big bridge for him
to overcome to, to be in that world.
But incredibly intelligent.
Had run programs, ran the spaceship
one program, and their age differences
couldn't have been more different.
So Pete Siebold was like 30,
Brian Binnie was 47
and Mike Melvill was in his 60s.
Full spread? Yeah. Full spread.
So those were the three test pilots
who were jockeying for position to get,
you know, test flights and also to attempt
to become the first private astronaut.
Very cool.
How did that get determined?
Who was going to be the first?
That's fascinating.
So that was one of my big questions
getting into the documentary.
So theoretically, Doug Shane,
who had flown the White Knight and ran
Mission Control,
who had also been an old timer with Burt
but steeped aerospace
engineer also from Kansas.
He theoretically was the person
that was choosing
flight assignments behind the scenes.
It was really Bert approving everything,
and I had to get into that
in the documentary to just figure out
who's really making the calls here.
But it was, at the end of the day,
Burt written, and who can blame him?
Because,
I mean, it's his reputation at stake.
Yeah.
And his company and and and and yeah.
Yeah. No that makes sense.
And I would probably act the same way
if I was putting that much investment in.
Well very cool.
It's, I mean it sounds like
an amazing group of test pilots.
And I imagine it must have been
an interesting competitive environment
to operate as someone that's operating,
you know, similar environments
for similar types of people.
I can imagine it must have been
a fun, fun group to hang out with,
but also a challenge at times as well.
Yeah. A roomful of.
The dynamic really changed over time too,
because,
I mean, it was test flight program
and it was dangerous.
And Mike Melville
got a lot of the assignments
that were life threatening, you know?
And so ultimately,
he wanted to train Brian
to essentially be able
to get back into the cockpit.
And that's really what allowed Brian
to fly the final flight of spaceship one.
Well, when you say get back
in, you mean after his incident?
Yeah.
So you can you describe
can you describe that incident for us?
Yeah.
So what happened was it
was the first rocket powered test flight.
Brian was the only one
that had flown supersonic
so that you signed it to him, or
he was the only one left stepping forward.
It was a test flight to 67,000ft to test
the feather as well,
which was this novel thing
we can get into later.
But Brian basically flew it.
It was a 15 second rocket burn.
It was pretty much a flawless flight
until he came back down to land.
And spaceship one
looks like a wiffle ball from the inside,
so it's difficult to land.
You have chase planes
calling out wheel heights.
Yeah.
And you need them and. You got a flare.
And for simplicity's sake, Brian came down
pretty hard and crunched the right wheel,
and then it slid off into the desert.
There was an engineering analysis done
after that
because a lot of people looked at it
initially, like Navy guy
landing on a carrier just came in too hard
and crunched this experimental,
fragile plane of flare and just off.
But there was some engineering analysis
done after that, and they realized
that something else had caused it,
which can certainly get into.
The thing with flight Test.
Right, is there's never one thing
you probably experienced this
in a fighter community.
So there's always multiple factors.
And so whether it's,
you know, defaulting to your DNA
and just landing like an F-18
and not flaring or so we had some issues.
We actually had dampers, like,
imagine your shocks in your car
that we had added to the rudders,
those dampers, any fluid in that damper
or on the damper would actually freeze.
And so you'd have a breakout for.
So again
I'm connected to the surfaces on the back.
There's no computers,
no mechanical systems.
It's just me cable tail surface.
And so the rudders on that vehicle
when you
when you stepped on them
had a big breakout for us on that flight.
And so he had gotten into some Pio stuff
early and that kind of freaked him out.
And I think
probably there's a little bit of truth
to all the bits and pieces,
but there's that and there's the fact
that he just went supersonic.
So the gains are high
and his stress was up and everything else
and by the way, are in a wiffle ball
and it's hard to see.
So just.
One thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Super super tough environment.
And yeah, he just kind of landed hard,
broke a gear and skate off the runway.
How long that slow things down?
Three months.
Three months, which let's just stop there.
We crashed an airplane.
Three months later we flew it again.
Yeah, that is unheard of.
I mean, that kind of just
that tells you in one little example,
the pace of that program.
It was just crazy. That's amazing.
I mean, we broke a skid,
barely on the ground,
skidded off the runway, dirt everywhere.
You know, a lot of programs.
They would have said
to risky to ever fly again.
Let's just park
that one and build another one.
And we we went and flew again
three months later.
So very cool. Pretty nuts. Amazing.
And what year was that?
2000, 2003 December 17th, 2003.
Yeah.
So it was the 100th anniversary of others.
Yeah, yeah.
So that.
Same day, some astronaut actually they
didn't ball up the right flier replica,
but they landed in mud,
I think on national TV.
Something. Like that.
So historic day for multiple reasons.
All right.
Well, it must have been
I mean, you know, as a pilot, I've never,
you know, I've had some very minor issues
and never crashed.
Yet I certainly know folks
that have none of which was their fault,
but it can be jolting across
that threshold in your career, right?
Go from invincible to very vulnerable
pretty quickly.
Right? But yeah.
Yeah. Thankfully, we have ejection seats.
They have ejection seats.
No, no. Yeah. So that's
I mean, that's a tough spot. Be it. Yeah.
It's nice having an escape latch
as much as it will hurt.
But he recovered.
He was fine physically.
He was fine physically.
All right.
And then so what was
what was his kind of road there?
And was his next flight
the big flight. Wow.
So how'd that all transcribe.
It gets you know, cleared
I guess for flight.
And then how far in the future is that,
that final flight.
Ten months away. Ten months.
The UAP story occurred right after that.
First that crash.
All right. Well, then perhaps it's time.
I think it. Might be.
All right, let's. Do it.
So Brian has just crashed.
He's watching his childhood
dream disappear.
He's 47 years old.
He's thinking
my test flight career is over.
Nobody's
going to ever give me a chance to fly,
let alone get a chance to fly
another flight, a spaceship, one.
His dream of becoming an astronaut
is disappearing.
Brian is an incredibly intelligent, very
thoughtful person, and he's processing.
How can I possibly get back
into the cockpit of spaceship one?
He's losing some sleep.
It's six days after the flight,
so December 23rd, 2003.
He lived in Rosemont,
which is about ten minutes
south of Mojave, in a two story house.
4:00 in the morning,
he's got his eyes closed,
and he said it looked like
somebody had turned the television on.
And there's flickering lights
and he opens up his eyes.
Television is not on.
His wife still asleep next to him.
The flickering is coming from his bedroom
window.
Goes to the bedroom
window, opens up the window blinds,
and he said it looked like daylight
had manifested itself
in his backyard
and it was dark everywhere else.
He could see in the daylight
were these translucent spheres, he said.
There were a dozen of them.
Six of them were beach ball sized,
bounding around the perimeter
of his backyard.
He had a six foot like retaining wall,
and he said they were emitting light,
but they couldn't
possibly be the source of the daylight.
That was just kind of this.
Door catching shadows or.
Yeah.
But it was a light.
It was a fixed shape, translucent.
He described it like a soap bubble
that kids will blow like a giant soap
bubble, but fixed shape
emitting light from the center.
He said there were six of them, again,
beach ball size,
and there were six volleyball sized ones
20 to 30ft off the ground.
There were more free
floating and moving around
and he watched it for over a minute.
He said.
Within the course of that, from 40 to 50ft
away, two of the volleyball
sized ones came to the window,
passed through the window into him.
He turned around, thinking
they were going to be in the room
and they weren't there.
And he said he joked in the documentary,
whatever they were,
maybe they were probing me and checking me
out and finding nothing of interest.
But I turned my attention back to the yard
and the whole thing
gradually dissolved away.
Back in the darkness and Brian again
advanced degrees.
Princeton and Brown
looked into every prosaic explanation
he possibly could,
and ultimately determined that
whatever it was, was something
that was potentially watching him.
This is long before any of the House
oversight committees
and yourself showed the courage
to come forward and testify.
So it was. Brian wrote the book.
It was like 2020 when I saw it,
and I remember him
describing it and telling it to me,
and I didn't know what to do with it
at the time, because I just wanted to do
a simple redemption story on aerospace.
But I.
Was your first kind of introduction,
perhaps, to this topic? Yes.
And so I remember driving home after Brian
really told me
all the details of that story,
because we had dinner and talked about it,
and I didn't know
what I was going to do with it.
But we recorded on camera
shortly thereafter, and I was glad
I did because it was really important
to his experience.
But ultimately he thought that it was
something that allowed him to perceive it,
however briefly, and that it gave him hope
that there was something
much bigger than him.
And it got him out of that funk of like,
okay, I'm going to trust the universe
instead of cycling and wondering how
I'm going to get back into the cockpit.
I'm just going to continue
running this program and trust
whatever's going to happen is going
to happen. Trust that is. The right.
But I gave him hope,
and that's how he looked at it.
He looked at it as a beneficial
or a hopeful experience.
That's incredible.
So we're talking 12 orbs
of two different sizes, ten, 20, 25ft.
Did he say how long the event lasted?
Over a minute.
And so it was volleyball size once
and then beach ball sized one.
So the beach ball sized ones
were kind of patrolling the perimeter
almost like sentries, he said.
Just kind of bouncing back and forth
until they ran into each other
and then separating.
And the volleyball
sized ones were free floating above.
And those were the two.
That and everything
was illuminated in his backyard outside.
Of daylight.
Yeah, it just in his backyard.
Did he look up?
He said, I don't know if he looked up.
I didn't ask him that specific question,
unfortunately passed away since then.
I didn't ask him that specific question,
but he did say
it looked like dark everywhere else
he could see.
So that's consistent with me.
Basically,
like directional lighting is consistent
with other reports that we have.
I will say
it's not the first report of an astronaut
that has had experience with orbs.
I'll just say that
in their close proximity.
So how did he.
How did he share this?
So this happened in 2003.
You said he
wrote it in his book,
which he didn't share until 2020.
And that's
when you learned about story in 2020.
And what about you?
When did you learn about his book as well?
In 20.
20, I was telling you earlier, I shared
an office with him so we'd tell stories.
So I don't remember when,
but at some point I heard the story
and I can kind of like Kevin.
I was like, I don't know what to do
with that, I didn't.
He's a guy of integrity, of faith,
of all these things.
And so when he told me, it wasn't like,
this guy's a kook or something.
It's hard to rise someone like that off,
especially when.
Was like, well, I know this happened.
I can't explain it.
I don't know that he can explain it.
It's like to me
it was no different than any of the like.
There was the first night of Gulf
War stories.
It was it was a story.
It was an experience that Brian had.
And I believed him.
And I don't know what to do with that
kind of just set it aside, to be honest.
But it would have been between
2000 and 3 and, you know, 2020
some time probably in the middle there.
Can either of you provide a perspective,
perhaps, of his mindset
or how he kind of came out about this,
how he started sharing?
So like say,
but in the book, but, you know, was he
you know, he mentioned it to you
or there are other people he's mentioned
he broadened that circle.
What did that look like?
Yeah,
he mentioned it to other people at scale.
Like he didn't want to give Burton
any more reason to ground up,
you know what I mean?
So he, he had some trusted people
within that community that he told,
and then he told his immediate family.
But it was a really small selection
of people
until he flew the final flight.
He was very secure in his legacy.
And then he told a lot of people
within the test flight community.
But I was the first member of essentially
the press that he told about it.
Did you have any sense
of how other people reacted to it?
I think it was probably
just like anybody else, based on,
you know, who it was in their perception.
Again.
Yeah.
Brian is an incredibly incredible
human being.
Harvard book scholar,
advanced degrees all over the place.
So you have to trust.
For me, it's like I trust somebody saying
something like that.
I don't dismiss experiences.
Did he provide any
any interpretation of the event?
Yeah.
So he, as program manager of spaceship
one, again with advanced degrees,
he looked into every prosaic explanation
it could, whether it's amiss.
Ferric I mean, just everything.
And ultimately,
he determined that it was something
that allowed him to perceive it.
So some form of entity or something else
that allowed him
to perceive it
in a time of incredible need. So.
So it was a very personal experience.
Yeah.
So it changed his perspective
on the whole spaceship.
It was an on shift for Brian.
In a religious sense or in a I think both.
Yeah. Physical realist.
Is this a
a non-human intelligence encounter for him
or is this a religious experience for him,
do you think?
I think for him.
I've asked his wife that question
since he passed away as well,
because she's religious.
She said that it was more of a
not necessarily a spiritual sense,
but more of a non-human intelligence
sense like that
something was allowing him to perceive it.
Did you either
of you have conversations with him
as this topic UAP has picked up
since perhaps 2017 or so?
I mean, Brian passed away on September
15th of 2022.
So that was before your.
Before the hearing.
There was a little bit that, you know,
it started picked up a little bit
in 2016 Chatter I didn't know.
Yeah, it didn't really reach it
I'd say until about 2023 or so.
Yeah.
Although I would suggest that that is continuing right now is a lot going on. But
how old was he?
Was he when he passed away?
69. Yeah.
Sharing what he passed away from.
I've been I've been told cardiac arrest.
But yeah.
I don't want to be the person
to be overly conspiratorial.
But, you know, there's many folks
that have studied the effects
of close encounters
with some of these objects, and typically
they do come with a degree of radiation
or negative physical effects
that could occur naturally, suggesting
it happened
in this case, but it's just
the first place my mind goes, right.
I mean, a relatively healthy pilot.
I will say, though, pilots, you know,
do have propensities to pass away
relatively young,
especially ones that have been
flying fighters.
Yeah, a number of cancers and stress
and anxiety issues and PTSD, etc., etc.
but also it was very interesting that
this was a hopeful experience for him.
Right?
He didn't immediately report
any type of weird biological effects
or perhaps an ability to sleep.
And he.
No, he said it actually was it was just
the opposite and allowed him to sleep.
So it was the.
Stress of yeah, he said it allowed him
to kind of get outside of his little world
that he created.
How do I get back in this little spaceship
to become an astronaut?
To what is this thing?
Let's just let's just, you know,
I know there's a lot of folks who,
regardless of just how fantastically
credentialed Brian is, people say,
well, that's an interesting story,
an interesting ghost story,
but let's all let's
let's put all that aside and just assume,
you know, what he experienced happened
and we don't have an answer for it.
What does that apply to you?
Why did they want him to be able
to accomplish
what he accomplished shortly afterward?
Well, what's interesting is after that,
which none of us were aware of,
was people like your yourself
came forward, and a lot of other people
that had the courage
to come forward and testify on UAP.
One of those people was Jeffrey
Neuchatel, who was out at Vandenberg
and had three incursions
with multiple witnesses
on October 14th and just before
the end of October, of a massive red cube
that came over some of the missile silos,
and then of giant bright light.
That was within two months of Brian's
experience, 190 miles away.
He had no way of knowing that at the time,
unless it was rumors
within the test flight community.
But perhaps something was out there
already and just.
Yeah, I know Jeffrey well.
I mean, he came to us with this story for
the first time, and we shared with folks.
That's fascinating that I didn't I didn't
put those those two numbers together.
But yeah, that's, that's right
in the same period.
Very interesting.
So I mean, you had Columbia
that happened during the space program
and just those experiences, right
within 2003, in the same
general proximity is,
I don't know, some strange data points.
Yeah. How did Brian's wife
view this?
Did you ever talk to her. About you?
Slept through the whole thing,
but she viewed it.
She's very religious.
She thought that ultimately she believed
that there was some form of entities.
And she said within the documentary, too,
there's a lot of things in the universe
that we just don't understand.
So I think she.
Was almost by definition,
like if you have like
the slightest amount of humility,
you should be able to accept that
we probably know
very little about our universe.
Absolutely. Yeah.
I mean things like,
I mean just entanglement and all kinds
of strange physical phenomena
that are real that we just can't perceive.
You got to be humble
about all those things, right.
And if we're not special,
you know, there's trillions of moons
and trillions of planets out there.
And we're not special
as in terms of a species
that can escape their atmosphere.
You know what else is out there?
What knows about us, you know.
Why would they want Brian to help?
You know, maybe.
I don't know. You know,
it's really fascinating.
It's encouraging too, because if it was
his interpretation of events,
which was a beneficial entity that wanted
to give them hope, that's a great thing.
But that's his interpretation.
I will say my experience with people
who reporting encounters
that are more personal, I'll say
that seems to be the overwhelming trend.
They're not scary experiences, and
they usually come with a sense of calm.
And I don't mean just, you know, someone
seeing a light in their bedroom, but,
you know, pilots actively working
to avoid some of these objects airborne
are kind of getting this entire sense as
well as they turn away from these objects.
Right?
So it's interesting, me and I, you know,
I continue to understand how little,
you know, have increased humility for
how little we understand of the universe
and have become more and more aware
of the limitations that we have
for interfacing
with the with the universe.
Right. Yeah.
At least as we perceive it.
And there's some incredible work
going on by cognitive scientists
and mathematicians and physicists around
just trying to get that
first foothold into understanding
what consciousness really is.
Because at the end of the day,
UAP and conscious,
I can't get away from the link
that there seems to be between the two,
not only the the law of.
Perhaps that's
how some of these are operated,
but the actual interactions
that humans seem to have with these,
whether they're lights
in the sky or something more personal,
there's always this aspect
that it seems to be almost individualized
for that, that observer.
Right.
And sometimes even two observers
in the same place report drastically
different experiences when they think
they're viewing the same object.
It's fascinating.
That was Brian's first place that he went
was that, you know, he he wasn't visited.
He was allowed to see something
that was was already there.
I think that's a pretty keen observation.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, he's one of the
most credible observers out there, right?
Not just only
because of his intellectual background,
but because it was ability in real time,
he would always talk about being a Navy
pilot and testing into that program
just because he could see
in advance, like,
what might happen better
so than most people.
That's the name of the game, the jet.
Absolutely.
Well, how did this affect both you?
I know you already talked about
a little bit.
Hey, it's a data point
from someone that I respect, but
did you start perhaps either of you start
following along, perhaps a little bit
more to what was happening publicly,
or do you just kind of tune it out,
perhaps until Kevin got,
you know, in touch with you to reach out?
How is this,
you know, kind of perhaps shifted
your interest
or lack of in this, in this topic?
It's an interesting topic for sure.
Me personally, I've lived on the at least
in that phase of my life
and the cutting edge, a crazy dangerous
flight test programs and stuff.
So I was saturated.
It was.
I won't say it was just an interesting
blip, but that I never paid attention to.
But I didn't have any more data
or anything to to add a more color
to the story Brian told me.
So for me, it was kind of like
another one of the interesting stories
that I heard
and didn't really know what to do with.
I tried to believe,
at least some level, that I keep my eyes
and ears open, that I'm not like,
this is the way everything works.
This is.
This is the rules we've been told.
So shut up and just do what you're told.
And this is how whatever science is
and you know,
so to me,
it's it's another blip on the radar.
I'm not sure what to do with,
but I try to,
Yeah,
try to just keep my ears and eyes open.
What motivated you to come and talk today?
It's just kind of a
I don't know, it's a cool topic.
I mean, to me, honestly, spaceship
one was a very high point in my career.
And so anything to to kind of kind of talk
about that phase of my life is kind of
reinvigorating the adrenaline
to fund the whatever happened back then.
And so this story
specifically is a part of that.
But to me, it's it's spaceship on.
Yeah. Talking about this
really cool thing that we did.
That was pretty cool and kicked everything
off that we're seeing today.
What about you?
Kevin.
Yeah, it's, it's interesting
because I've always had an open mind.
I've always been a first, kind of person.
But, I was really interested in astronomy
as a kid, like, from a very early age
in aerospace and astronomy.
So I knew as much as you can know
how vast the universe was.
And I started thinking
when I was a teenager, like,
I mean, it's one of the biggest questions,
right? Are we alone?
So if you just kind of start to understand
the scope and magnitude of the universe,
and if we're not incredibly special,
even though it's a special time
for your species to be getting outside
the gravitational pull of your own home
body, whether it's planter or moon, it's
a unique time for our species.
Right?
And if other species have done that
on different moons and planets,
it's fascinating. Right?
So I, I mean, just as an example, James
Webb Space Telescope detected bio possible
biosignatures
124 light years on a planet away from us.
And so we flew in 1903 for the first time.
Kenny Clarke. Right.
I don't know, 123 years later,
we're able to do that.
What is some advanced civilization
that is able to escape
their gravitational pull, able to detect
and from how far away?
So if they're if we aren't an anomaly,
they've known about us for a long time,
potentially. Right.
That's just kind of like the mental mind
game or the thought experiment.
Even. Using tools
that we can all imagine. Right.
Detecting RF or optical other things.
Totally.
But we also forget that we had Nobel
Prize awarded a few years ago for
the discovery of non-locality of space,
right, with quantum entanglement.
You know, what other
sensor and detection and communication
capabilities might exist?
You know, when we further understand
how we can harness,
you know, those realities of the universe
that we exist in
and yet aren't easily observable
or interactable in our in our normal day,
perhaps a lot like UAP, right? Yeah.
Matt, I'm going to ask you straight up,
no UAP stories.
No, not to date.
Well, I'll tell you what you know.
Yeah, exactly.
Not yet.
You know, I've talked to probably
a couple dozen people who, you know,
have expressed support or reached out or
I've talked to and they said not not yet.
Or, you know, I have not.
And I'd
tell them exactly that. I'd say not yet.
And I'd say,
you know, of those a couple dozen
people are ones that came back to me
later and had an experience.
So not yet is the best way
to think about it.
I think it happens quite
more than people would realize. For sure.
I think we said earlier, like,
if you have your mind open
and you're not just rigid in your belief
about whatever,
if you have the humility to say,
I don't understand everything which I do,
then, you know,
then something might happen or not.
But, you know,
you got to have your mind open.
Yeah.
It's, you know, it's it's it's interesting
when you think about scientific paradigms,
right.
Because they're defined by these known
incomplete axioms or rules or
equations.
Right.
F equals m a later replaced by equals
m c squared.
But then of day they're just models.
They're just maps.
They're not the actual reality.
I think what's so fascinating
in this conversation is that,
you know, these are these are
anomalies are outside the paradigm.
When you're inside the paradigm,
your existing models,
all they do is reconfirm
the existing paradigm. Right?
That's all there.
That's all they can do. Right.
And to find those anomalies
on the outside,
that's where the true science happens,
whether it's in a a particle collider
or a telescope or perhaps a radar system
on a fighter jet.
Those data points are contrary
to everything we know sometimes,
which is what makes them outliers
by definition.
But those are the the signals that we look
to towards a new paradigm.
I think.
I think the disservice,
honestly, to our country
is to paint every story
like this is a little green men.
It's it's
to, you know, it's to kind of villains
that to where people people
keep their mouth shut.
If you had told anybody in the US
ten years ago there'd be a Chinese spy
satellite floating across northern U.S.,
they'd say, you're crazy, right?
We need to keep our eyes open and
and not just paint everything
that we don't understand
as, you know, as whatever.
Otherwise, we we miss learning.
We miss changing the paradigm.
We miss a lot of things.
And national security
is just one of those, right? Yeah.
So I'm not saying UFOs or whatever,
but when we don't understand it,
we should ask more questions
and try to try to dig
a little deeper as opposed to just,
you know.
I don't know what they are either.
But ultimately,
if if there is a gap there
that we're willing to ignore,
the adversary
is going to take advantage of that.
Yeah.
Well, this is amazing.
I really appreciate you guys coming out.
I really wish we had the opportunity
to have Brian here in person.
It's always sad when,
you know, a legend like
that moves on to to the to the next
phase there.
But he's done some incredible service
to not just our country
and not just to the space program,
but to also inspiring
the next generation of people
to go work at companies like space
and all these other companies
that are doing amazing things now.
So I hope he has the opportunity
in some form or fashion to to
realize that his story, you know,
I think we'll have an impact of people
outside of just who you shared.
So thanks for coming forward
and sharing it.
Absolutely. Yeah. It's been an honor.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks for joining us.
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