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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.
We got what arguably be one of the biggest
briefs of anybody's career at the time.
And it was, hey, you know, the invasion
is happening in February of 22.
As has been previously reported,
all of the red balloons were up.
We knew that it was going down.
The reason why
I remember that day of this brief was
because it's tied to the UAP experience.
The group that you guys are responsible
for is invading another country, right?
This is a Super Bowl that we never
imagined would ever be a Super Bowl.
As I'm sure you have experience.
No fighter pilot wants to sit on the boat.
No person in our shoes
wants to be back home.
And so it was a wild time.
Case.
And best everyone.
Welcome back to the Safe
Aerospace Podcast.
Thanks for joining.
Joined today by Case and Best,
a friend colleague in the UAP
space, a veteran like myself.
You know he has his own UAP experience
that we'll talk about here in a minute.
But he's also been
someone that has not just been
a witness
but has gone through the reporting process
starting what year
when we first report the arrow.
Oh my gosh,
I think I was just getting out.
So it must have been 2020.
320 23.0 report to the FBI
and eventually joined
Americans for Safe Aerospace
as our intake lead with our reports.
And I'm sure some of our listeners
will recognize your name
and potentially voice,
and hopefully
they have good things to report. No.
But Carson did a fantastic job
bringing in and managing
a lot of the workflow, and I had to start
focusing on some other activities.
Well thank you.
That's the first compliment
I've gotten from you.
So and, you know, before
I turn the ball over to you,
you know, a lot of the today
is the 13th of June.
It's a Saturday.
Yesterday the DoD released their third
tranche of UAP reports.
And as we've been perusing that here
today, Farrow Space,
a number of those reports are reports
that we received first
and ultimately with the witnesses
permission brought forward
to various groups, including the FBI.
And you were responsible
for doing that for some of the cases.
So you've been involved in this
for quite some time.
So it's great to finally actually sit down
and talk to you on camera.
So thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
You know,
I think I've been very lucky in life
to have a lot of heroes along the way,
and you are one of them.
And so it's cool
to call you a friend as well.
And thanks for rolling
the red carpet out for me today.
It was a blast.
Yeah, I'm excited for after this as well.
So yes, I am trying to motivate him
to move down to Austin
so we can continue to work together.
So we'll see.
We'll see if this this whole ploy works.
So let's let's start early on.
Let's let's talk
about your military service.
Kind of let people
understand what you did.
Yeah I'll share a little bit
I think in my some of my prior life
decisions will make a little more sense
just with some of my background.
I grew up in a very nice family,
playing high level tennis as a kid
in Middle Tennessee.
So I had a good gig going
and lived by myself
in South Florida for a couple of years
in the end of high school.
And I'll share that
because it gets into how I made kind of
like the first big split in my life,
and I was just looking for purpose.
The military was not on my radar
whatsoever.
I didn't know what West Point was.
I had heard the name
and I'd also seen the movie Major Pain.
And I figured.
Right up there with Top Gun.
Unfortunately, I don't agree.
But yeah, maybe.
And I thought West Point was like a school
for delinquent kids where like, troubled
kids get sent by their families.
And that might be might be true
to some degree.
Yeah. But I had no clue to was.
But I guess through a lot of serendipity,
looking for some purpose in my life,
like many young men are at that time,
the Army sounded like a sweet gig,
so jumped with both feet and kind of got
onto the track to where we are today.
Crazy enough. Awesome.
What did you study at West Point?
So I was a human geography. Major.
Human geography.
Yeah, yeah, it's a it's
an engineering school, believe it or not.
But there's a couple of the softer majors
there as well.
Well, yeah, there's, there's a spectrum
at the, at the academies that come out.
Well yeah.
Especially,
you know, special operations and pilots.
You know, I think everyone has an image
of what their educational background is.
But you get everything from,
you know, people with masters in physics
to people with degrees in shipbuilding
to the proverbial basket
weaving and everything in between.
You know, at the end of the day, to do
those types of job require, you know,
the type of education
you're getting at the school
isn't necessarily preparing you for a
stand your career. Right.
And the type of skill sets that you need,
or go far beyond what you do
in the classroom
in order to be able to execute those jobs.
That's my take on it.
No, I think that's a good one.
It I did it because I was on a sports
team and that takes a lot of work.
I wanted to have a high enough class
rank to where I could pick
whatever I wanted to do in the real army,
and I was interested in it.
And I figured, like, those are three
good enough reasons to justify
not actually learning a hard skill, such
as engineering or mathematics or physics.
And I think it's worked out.
It actually helped a lot in
in my career, to your point, in ways
that I would not have expected it to.
We still ultimately ended up at MIT,
but we'll get to that in a moment.
What happened with that Army career?
Let's kind of get into that.
Where'd you end up?
So I went all in.
When I went to West Point,
I actually wanted to be a fighter
pilot at the Air Force Academy.
The only reason I got into school
is because of tennis.
I did not have the background worthy
of going to the West Point, frankly.
Otherwise, academically. Elise.
At the same time, the Air Force Academy
coach was trying to recruit me
to play tennis there,
and he made a huge mistake
by telling me that I was too tall
to be a fighter pilot.
And, you know, being a 17 year old kid,
I was like, hey, this guy's
been at the academy for 15 years.
He must know what he's talking about.
But little did he know, once
I heard that you couldn't
be strapping yourself to a rocket ship,
I was out.
And so I pivoted to,
okay, well,
the hardest thing to be off the ground
as a fighter pilot, for my understanding,
I might as well just be the hardest thing
I can be on the ground.
And so that was kind of like
my driving arrow.
That kind of got me to what I was doing.
So I started off as a airborne
infantry officer in the 82nd airborne.
After a year of training at Fort
Benning, doing just the standard pipeline
for an infantry officer.
So airborne school, infantry
officer school, ranger school
repellant out of helicopters and
then getting shipped off to Fort Bragg.
All the fun stuff.
Yeah. It was. Fun, I bet.
What's that? Fort Bragg?
The best way to describe Bragg
that people say
is, you know,
kind of the epicenter for the Army.
It's a it's a black hole
for airborne special operations.
And the what I would argue
is kind of the most competent components
for those on the ground
to include JSOC, Joint
Special Operations Command to include
colloquially, colloquially,
Delta Force, to include
Special Operations Command for the Army.
So use of SOC
and then maybe 82nd airborne,
which you know,
we were a little bit more regular,
but we were right there
and it was a cool spot to.
Be very cool.
And that was like a three year,
four year duty there.
Yeah.
So it was my junior officer time
before captain.
So it ended up being about three years
plus the year of training.
Yeah, we'll take us through it.
So that's considered a special operations
assignment.
No, no.
So the 82nd would not be.
It's just 18th Airborne
Corps, regular Army loosely
affiliated with the special operations
world, pretty much
just because of proximity, I see.
You know, I would say
it's the best of the conventional forces.
Okay. Yeah.
And people will say that I'm biased,
which is completely fair,
but I think that's a fair statement.
Okay. Very good.
So you did that for a few years and then
did you deploy it all during that?
Yeah.
Again, through just extreme serendipity,
my brigade in the army was the only
infantry brigade that was slated
to go to Afghanistan in 2019.
So a little bit of context.
The war,
the writing on the wall was very apparent.
Administrations were trying to get out.
Obviously
a historically difficult event to do.
And so we were on the tail end.
And then in my brigade of three
battalions, my battalion.
So my unit that I'm intimately with day
to day, was selected to be
the only combat battalion in Afghanistan,
aside from the Special forces
battalion that we were attached with.
So the role was called AI Attached
Infantry.
Really, what we did was we were the ones
with the machine guns and kind of doing
the grunt work
attached to Army Special Forces, who
their mission was much more with,
like controlling partner forces,
dealing with Afghan special operations,
trying to get them to fight while we were
kind of pulling the security and,
you know, doing more basic infantry tasks.
Got it.
Many firefights out there,
or was it too on down?
Yeah.
So again, just completely through luck,
I found myself
the executive officer
for the Special Operations Task force.
I tied to the ISIS mission.
So it was called Sota 20.3.
I was the XO for the attached infantry
and then worked directly alongside an
excellent for the Special Forces company
that was in charge of Nangarhar province.
So the best way to think of
it was a completely separate battle
away from the Taliban
partnered with the Taliban,
which is pretty interesting,
but like classic special operations.
So so we were partnering with the Taliban,
providing the Air force
as they swept through Nangarhar Valley
doing the harder work.
And we stopped ISIS
from receding into Jalalabad,
which was the major population center.
It's amazing
how fast, you know, foes become allies.
It's crazy.
I mean,
the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And that was exactly the case.
So the entire country were fighting
Taliban and Taliban only,
and then in action.
And the Bala district and Nangarhar
Province, we are partnered with them.
Wild. Wow.
And a world that I honestly
didn't know anything about.
I'm just an infantry dude.
You know,
we don't have clearances, really.
We go on missions
and we don't really even know, like what?
We're there to like,
who we're there to capture.
Yeah, I come to find out later
that it's really nobody that important.
But you're really left in the dark.
Yeah, but yes,
to answer your question, firefights.
Living on a combat outpost
with 60 other guys.
And that's it.
Showers every two weeks.
The full experience?
Yeah, the full experience.
That's the right way to say it.
Did you get a nice vacation after that
or what came next?
Covid came next.
Yeah.
So that the ice mission
dried up in October of 19.
I did a stint at the Special operations
headquarters in Bagram
doing kind of more staff work,
not combat stuff.
Got shipped home.
And then the day that we showed up
to Fort Bragg on Pope Army Airfield,
we got told there's a thing
called Covid in your quarantine in.
So we did not pass go.
We did not get to see our families
that were waiting for us after a ten month
combat deployment.
Brutal.
And we went straight into tents
in the woods.
Brutal. Yeah. Can't even imagine.
There were I can't even.
Upset was not a word to describe
it. That's.
I mean, that's bad.
I mean, and I
you probably could call your wife
and I was a call their spouses and explain
that.
Cancel the party.
You know I'm being quarantined
for an unknown.
They were lined up at the fence
at the airfield when we got off the plane,
and they could not see us.
Oh, wow.
So it was. It was.
It was a rough moment. I bet.
But to answer
your question, on the vacation part.
No, the vacation was quarantined,
unfortunately.
And. All right, well, keep us going.
Where where where were you next?
Some of the work that I did
in Afghanistan, in that staff role,
I was the future operations officer
for the Special Operations Task Force.
So I was a senior lieutenant
in my battalion, the soda.
That task force needed a officer.
Normally, it'd be a Green Beret
Special Forces guy.
They were short at the time
because of staffing.
And so they kind of pulled up.
The most senior person who was unemployed
and I was unemployed
because the battle was over against ISIS,
at least on paper.
And so I found myself into a world there
that was much more compartmentalized.
You literally go into a building
or compound within a compound,
within a compound that was Camp Alpha,
the Special Operations
Interagency camp on Bagram.
And you walk past a fence many times
going into the shower, just back and forth
for a week as paperwork goes through
and you're waiting to get your read ons.
And then one day they say, hey,
you're good to go.
And then you go into a door
that you walk past that you never noticed
because it was just an industry door.
And there was Christmas
lights on the other side.
And it's a little bit
different of an atmosphere.
And you get read on to the information
that you need to know
to understand
what's actually going on in the country.
And that was a very different departure
from being in combat, not knowing
why you're in combat to not in combat
and knowing what's actually going on.
Funny how that works, Crazy.
Like, it's it's truly like going down
the rabbit hole and Alice in Wonderland.
The reason why I shared that is
that made
me recognize that there was a lot
more going on where previously
I was kind of worshiping the combat roles.
Yeah. No.
How much was behind the curtain?
Yeah, no.
And I think I'm a person who is fascinated
by trying to tether myself
to reality as much as I can,
and it definitely sparked an interest.
And that led me to,
I would say, serendipity,
but I don't think that's the right word.
I think there were other forces
involved to getting me into a role
as an intelligence officer, intense
special forces group,
which was a job that a hundred
other people applied for.
And for some reason, I got it.
And so I made a completely different
shift, completely different career change.
So out of combat into the darker world.
Yeah.
And the intelligence world is a beast.
And it's a it's
not a monolith, and it's extraordinarily
bloated, like all of the government
is to some degree, right?
Any bureaucracy.
But there's components of it
that do some extremely interesting things
at extremely high levels.
And I was lucky enough
to find myself in that world.
And I think Lucky's honestly
kind of in the phrase, yeah, yeah.
Can you share any of the circumstances or.
Circumstances with getting getting that,
that one slot?
I think it's just more along the lines
of like, they're looking for a certain
a certain people, and certain people
have identified who they're looking for.
And, you know, that's kind of how.
The the holes of the Swiss cheese lined up
enough. Yeah.
It's like kind of how the world works
anyway.
It's like,
you know, somebody knows
somebody who needs something
and they might know a guy, I guess. Yeah.
And where were you locating during this?
This was at. Bagram,
that's all. At Fort Bragg. Fort Bragg?
Okay. Like when I was out
processing from infantry
to intelligence, that process started.
And did you stay stay there or did
you go off to, like, a new duty station?
Yeah. So I had to do a year.
So I did a year for infantry training.
Now I have to do a year
for intelligence training.
I went to Fort, which at Arizona,
Sierra Vista, right on the Mexican border.
Cool place.
I enjoyed it much nerdy, so much nerdy
nerdy than the world that I, you know.
Yeah. Yeah, sure. I'm sure. Yeah.
So it was a complete culture shock.
Here's a guy with a master infantry badge.
Arranger, screw arranger. Tab. Sorry.
Good lord, don't make that mistake.
And a chip on my shoulder.
And now I'm in the Army Center
of Excellence for intelligence.
So it was.
People straight out of school
in some cases.
Yeah.
And I'm glad it took like we were there
for a year, because that probably took me
that gave me room
to like, reorient myself.
Yeah, yeah.
Decompress a little bit.
And then. Then where to?
Straight to 10th Special Forces Group.
Yeah. Yeah. For Carson, Colorado.
Colorado. Yeah.
And it was a weird time
because we're getting out of Afghanistan.
This is 2021 now, okay?
We're getting out of Afghanistan.
We're completely pivoting
to near here adversaries.
And then just like that,
I show up and you know,
the Russia-Ukraine conflict happens.
And and special forces group again
serendipity is the
the organization in the army
that deals with Russian aggression.
So very busy.
I will say this.
You know,
I've talked to a lot of people who have
told me they've joined the military to fly
and for whatever reason
or had the intention to, I got the bug
and didn't work out,
but got to do some free, amazing stuff.
That makes me very jealous.
So, you know,
I think he had a pretty wild career.
Hey, I'm jealous of you.
So it's it's mutual.
That brings us to a great point
in the in the conversation
where we run into your UAP
encounter does do not.
Here we are.
Time to get into that. Well.
Well executed.
Where would you like to start?
Well, where are we?
And what are you doing
and where are you going?
And what do you see?
Yeah. Brilliant.
So this is this is a,
this is chronological
and kind of the very next step
in the story that I was just sharing.
So in February of 22,
you know, we had been obviously monitoring
the build up in the in,
in or around Ukraine, Belarus,
western Russia, in the intelligence world,
you go off of indicators.
And in February of 22,
as has been previously reported,
you know, all of the red balloons were up.
We knew that it was going down
on February 15th.
And the reason why I remember
that day of this brief is because
it's tied to the UAP experience
we got would arguably be,
you know, one of the biggest briefs
of anybody's career at the time.
And it was, hey,
you know, we're the invasion is happening.
The group that you guys are responsible
for is invading another country, right?
Not just like it's
a big global. Event, but.
This is your. Yeah, exactly.
This is our Super Bowl.
This is a Super Bowl that we never
imagined would ever be a Super Bowl.
Yeah. Well, you know, and yes.
And in a world of extraordinarily
high testosterone,
people who want to be doing their job.
Yeah, yeah.
As I'm sure you have experience.
You know, no fighter
pilot wants to sit on the boat.
No person in our shoes wants to be back
home.
Yeah. And so it was a wild time.
And I just kind of share that to stress
the importance of this brief.
And this brief was,
hey, you know, this is going down.
I can kind of feel it, honestly.
Like the energy of
just even reminiscing back, back on it.
And so on the 15th, we on the commander
of the intelligence detachment
for a special forces battalion.
So I have more than a few dozen people
under my command, and we get the word.
I work in a skiff
for most of most of my job
when we're in garrison and not training.
And so I get to get the call that,
hey, you know yourself,
your second in command
and some of your best analysts
go up to the group headquarters
building at a certain time.
I think it was 11.
I think it's 11 in the morning.
Yeah.
If I remember correctly,
it might have been a weapon,
30 might have been 1030,
but it was late morning,
you know, go into the group skiff
to get this update brief.
So I, I get my second in command,
I get two of my better analysts.
So imagery from satellites,
and I get one of my all source analysts.
And so he was like a jack of all trades
intelligence guy.
And you know, it's the best people we have
in a group of more than a few dozen.
And we go up to our group headquarters
building and it's like maybe a seven,
eight minute walk.
Our battalion
headquarters is in a depression.
So it's like noticeably below.
And just to orient to Fort Carson,
you know, it's a major Army facility
with wire train area, but to the west,
directly to the west, across the highway,
is shy and mountain space for a space
which is pretty infamous
for like the doomsday bunker, whatever
goes on in there,
nor Add, but it's also a major facility.
But it's a base underground
and under a mountain, right?
It's often seen the movie is right.
That's classic, you know,
concrete entrance to the side of.
Yeah, yeah.
And we have nothing to do with them,
but we're directly east of them,
about six miles away
from the tip of the mountain to right
where the center of our compound is.
And the Special forces compound
is a major facility inside Fort Carson.
So it's like a compound within a compound
with different colored
roofs, different rules, different world.
And so we're just walking
from my headquarters
to the main headquarters,
and the first thing we have to do
is get out of our parking lot
and take a flight of maybe 40,
50 steps up
a, like the exit of a depression,
you know, kind of like a
I don't even know how, like an embankment.
Little bank.
But yeah, it's not a hill because it's
not 360, but it's just a flat embankment.
And so we're all five of
us are going up these stairs,
you know, pretty excited
thinking about what's going on
in our job
and our career and frankly, our life.
And we get to the very top of these stairs
and just naturally in our field of view,
just it's there.
It's like I'm looking at you.
It's just naturally there.
Cheyenne Mountain reveals itself
as you're going up the stairs
and over the saddle of Cheyenne Mountain,
a little bit
to the right of where
the crazy antenna array is, was an object.
That was when you saw it.
It was so shocking
that it pretty much sent.
I can I can speak for myself,
sent me into like amount of tunnel vision.
That was about the same level
as like your first firefight
where you're just locked in
because you're trying to process something
that's so outside your reality
that it just it captivates your attention.
You're all looking at this.
I was looking at it
and we're in a little cluster.
You know, it's five guys on
probably two steps of stairs.
And we're at the top now.
And and I'm looking at it, somebody
says, what the fuck?
Somebody says,
you know,
stuttering how I am a bit like,
what is that.
Clear to you that everyone seeing
what you were saying that.
Yeah. It's just there.
What? Let's describe it.
What it looked like.
Like an Apple product
thousands of years in the future.
Yeah. You know, like how?
Like a AirPod case.
Just kind of beautiful.
Like, it's well machined.
It's well-engineered. It's good plastic.
Like,
the seams are tight, you know, like it's
it's like a pretty object
and it's, like, impressive.
Just even though it's an everyday
thing for us, it was like that
with thousands of years more impressive.
It was very large.
Hard to describe the the size,
you know, other than the proximity
it had over the mountain.
So we did have the mountain right
there is kind of like a gauge.
And it was pretty apparent that it was
pretty much directly over the mountain.
It was definitely not in front.
And it was, I would say,
certainly like not far behind.
It was close enough
to where you could see that it was three
dimensional, you know, like a
like a ellipsoid, kind of like a blimp.
And you could see the bottom,
you know, like you could see that
it wasn't just a sticker,
it wasn't just two dimensional
and anything like that.
Instantly I was processing
why it was just perfectly still.
And like, that's a weird thing to say
because, like, this table is still,
you know, like there's many things
in our lives.
The microphone still,
it was like still beyond a level of still
that I had ever seen as far as,
like it just being fixed in a point in
like not even the sky,
but like dimensionality or something like.
You just.
Yeah, it's it's right on x y z.
Yeah, yeah. Scale.
It's fixed. Yeah. Fixed.
Except the body of the object itself,
which,
you know, I hate to throw out a number,
but it was hundreds of feet in width.
If you were, you know,
if you were holding your arm out,
you know, like this, how big in your sight
vision was it?
About half a thumbs length.
Half a thumb length? Yeah. Six miles away.
Okay. And you know, we don't know.
We're making an assumption
about how far it is
based off of your perception of it
being over the mountain.
There's probably some buffer in there,
but I'd have to I'd have to do the math or
see what actually works out
to the size, right.
For the range
and all that good stuff to a little trick.
But, you know,
that's something we could figure out.
And given, you know, I think
a pretty rough estimate of the size.
But this is a pretty large object.
In relation to the mountain.
You know, it was probably a few thousand
feet over it, but still like close enough
to where you could tell where it was in,
in relation to the mountain in the saddle
that is Cheyenne.
It was really large.
And you've described it in the past
as almost peanut shaped or been shaped
where there's almost an indentation
on the bottom
or it's not wasn't like perfectly flat.
Right?
I think the best way to describe it,
and this thing is so hard to describe,
and it's taken me years to honestly,
like have the vocabulary
to give it kind of justice
because it was so far out there,
it did not make like,
anything that I could have come up with
would not have been that,
but it was generally ellipsoidal.
I when I reported to Aero
and I reported to the FBI,
I said it was asymmetric, which is true,
but it wasn't like fully lopsided
or anything like that.
It was more asymmetric in that.
And this is a key feature.
The whole thing was comprised
of the same uniform panels,
and the panels were
my best guess, all pentagonal,
but were all irregular.
They seemed like they had
they all had like a similar area,
like they weren't different sizes
and things like that,
but they were different shaped.
But they seemed like
there were all pentagons
and they were just completely across
the object, like,
like I don't see any reason to believe
that it wasn't wrapped all the way around,
didn't see the back side, but like,
there was nothing to show that it wasn't
just this uniform whipsawed of panels.
So not like panels
you'd see, like tiling on a floor.
Each one had like a different shape,
but you had five sides, right?
So like if a, if a floor
or if like the bottom of,
you know, a space shuttle or something
like that is two dimensional.
It was, it had a texture,
it had a pattern to it.
And that was the thing that I think
gave it the most,
not perception because it was true.
But like the most asymmetry.
And the texture was caused by
at the intersection of the panels.
Right? Yes, yes. Yeah.
The texture was the field of panels
themselves.
They did not overlap like a fish scale
or anything like that.
They were all uniformly seemed.
It seems like, you know, that at hinges.
And it was just in
a, one of the most shocking things about
it was just the pattern of them.
It just did not make sense into my mind.
Like it looked miraculous
that the pattern fit together in a way
that it was all contained without overlap,
but it was still so irregular.
And then the crazy.
And then even one more level.
It was ripple.
It wasn't just stationary
as far as like and three dimensional.
It was like that
fourth dimension of movement.
The panels that.
Were rippling
almost like ripples in a pond,
but in a geometric way, because it wasn't,
you know, a pond ripple all across.
All across the vehicle.
Just slowly, casually, you know, like,
not just like slowly rippling across
from, like, disparate points.
Not a reflection, though.
It was clear that they were
the panels are moving.
You could see the shadows
like of the surface.
I also said this when I reported it
like it gave it like a glint or a shimmer,
and that kind of went a little too far.
I think with some of the representations
make it look like, you know,
like crystalline or something.
It wasn't that.
It was. Was it?
It was like kind of porcelain,
definitely all white instead of like,
no brown in it or anything like it was
white porcelain, but that was kind of like
creamy and translucent,
almost like
if I think the best explanation is
if you have like really watery milk,
if that makes sense.
It was kind of like that.
It was like really watery milk
with like a little bit of a shimmer
that was kind of similar
to mother of Pearl,
but not like extreme in the rainbow
effects or anything, just like a little.
More shimmer.
But but it wasn't outputting any visible
light.
Best you could tell,
perhaps reflecting any.
Or it was reflecting
for sure to some degree.
Because just again,
I guess into the weather of the day,
it was just one of those classic
perfect Bluebird Colorado Springs
days, especially in the winter.
You know, in the Springs, it'll go from
snowing one day to two days later.
It's 50 degrees.
Most beautiful blue sky.
Only the sun out.
It was one of those days.
Not a cloud in the sky.
So it was plenty sunny
and it was pretty close to midday.
And so they're definitely was a glint.
But it wasn't like,
oh, it's going to, you know,
refract into your eye and like stun.
You kind of glint, you know, it was just
an object interacting with the sun's rays.
Could you tell if there was a forward
or aft direction to it?
What do you mean? Like what?
You know, you see an aircraft, you know
where the front is or the back, right?
Was there any sense of that?
A potato is not the right word.
And a blimps not the right word either,
but like kind of
just a ellipsoid in the sky.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Great description. Thank you.
I mean what happened next?
I mean you're all looking at it.
You're hearing your friends next to you.
What's what's going through
what happens here.
So I do not have a confident gauge on time
just because we were locked in.
And anybody I think
almost everybody has had an experience
where they're tunnel vision,
whether it's almost getting a car wreck
or whatever, like your perception of time
is extremely diluted.
And that was the case.
I mean, I was it had my attention,
but enough time elapsed to where,
like a terse conversation occurred
between us of like, do you see that?
Yeah, I see that.
What the fuck is that stuttering
like time elapsed enough for that?
I don't know, honestly,
if it's 10s or if it's three minutes,
but I think it's probably in that range
and I know it's a big range.
But again, and this is the part that like,
is so unsatisfying.
And it was it was unsatisfying
as soon as it happened.
I can only speak for myself
and what other people said at the time.
But from what I saw, you know,
we were on a hill
in a pretty open fort
on which is on a guy
which is on a hill where you can see,
like practically to Kansas to the east,
Colorado Springs to the north,
nothing to the south, and Cheyenne
Mountain directly to us to the west.
So you can see everywhere.
And our our eyes are pretty locked onto
this tart, like onto the object target.
Maybe we had glanced to each other
for like a terse word,
but I was looking at it and it was there.
And then it wasn't.
Just blinked, Elk.
It didn't even see a blink out.
Yeah, I wish I had seen it do something
because there would have been like
some closure.
It's like a firefight when, like you
don't, it doesn't have a conclusion.
It's like the worst feeling in the world.
Like you want a conclusion
even if it's not good.
It was kind of like that
where it just was no longer there.
I can say in enough hindsight,
whatever the time was that for it
to be there and then no longer there,
it must have been almost as fast,
if not faster than like our shutter speed
for like our perception or something.
It was just not there.
It didn't fade away. It didn't shoot off.
It didn't fizzle, it didn't dissolve,
it didn't blink.
It didn't pop like a bubble.
It didn't materialize like an bubble.
It didn't zip off.
It just wasn't there.
We didn't even gasp
because there wasn't anything to gasp to.
But we were like,
the next response was like, where?
Where is it?
Do you guys not see any more
like the conversation we had first
had of like us
confirming that it was there.
It was an inverse conversation where
it was like us confirming that it's not.
Yeah.
Which is not fun.
Yeah.
And then we start doing the dance,
all of us instantaneous, like,
you know, instinctively looking 360
in this sweet vantage point
that we're at,
and there's just not a cloud in the sky.
And so we have that experience.
Well, and somebody goes, it's
getting close to this brief,
and we still have five minutes to walk,
and we still have to go
get signed in in the skiff,
which is, you know, a process.
And we're going to be a little bit late
now to the meeting,
which is like the most important meeting
of our careers thus far.
Or perhaps not.
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Right. Well, so. Boring was a one day.
And so we,
I guess going into that process
and I can speak for myself,
but also asking the question to my guys
after this hour long brief
that was packed, did you all, like, catch
anything that was said in the most
important brief of our of our careers?
And the answer was, now.
There are two distracted
thinking about what? They just.
Didn't have a choice.
Did you guys recollect as a group
or perhaps
one on one with any of the other guys
after that?
Not formally.
So. It's an interesting
look into human psychology as well.
And I had a peep into that
to a great experience
working with ASA, working with reporters
and witnesses as well.
But everybody had their own
different response.
Right?
We became
very, very employed,
you know, after that brief.
So we had a lot to distract us, frankly,
which is maybe a good thing.
But I still took the time to document
the best
that I can as an intelligence officer,
what had occurred.
And in a formal way,
just with the understanding
that,
you know, sooner is better than later.
And I had a couple of the individuals
who wanted to participate in that, that,
you know, I asked everybody personally
like, hey, can you just give me some input
into this PowerPoint that I'm making?
And I got a couple bits of input.
Yeah, from two of them
and a couple of them, like when I had that
talk like that question,
you know, the next day or two
after gave me the response of,
I don't know what you're talking about
and I don't want to ever, like,
kind of have that question asked me again.
Well, they just shut it right down.
Strange. It's strange.
I mean, so that's how
I mean, I've witnessed it myself.
Of course you have to, obviously,
but that is, you know,
one of the responses
that you see sometimes.
Yeah.
And it's it's honestly understandable.
The people who kind of had that response
were older in tenure.
They were more career oriented.
They had crossed that Rubicon to where
it's like, okay, I'm doing this for 20,
and if I'm doing it for 20, I'm
going to go as far as I can.
And so, like, I can completely sympathize
and empathize with that
response, frankly, you know,
there are great people to that.
I respect a lot.
I think it was just like, you know, in
some ways it's maybe a healthier response.
Yeah, I won't I won't argue.
That I'm going to go back to reality.
You know.
My perceived reality anyway.
The consensus one. Okay.
Well, so, you know, so what I'm hearing
is that you guys just kind of
all right happened, you know,
we got a few inputs.
Some people didn't want to touch it again.
Other people provide a little input.
What happened?
What happened there?
I will say the only other effect
is based on our extremely privileged
access to information
and the line of work that we were in.
We had a lot of
resources available
to where, if you're curious, individual
who wants to get a little more information
about something they may have perceived,
we had resources, you know, so myself
and a couple others in that group,
after hours, just trying to make sense of
what we saw went down some rabbit holes.
Yeah, yeah.
Anything fruitful.
At the time which and that was 22
a level of fruitfulness where I was much
more reassured about my experience.
In what way?
Much more reassured.
Reassured that, like,
I was very fortunate, frankly.
And I also can relate to people who saw it
by themselves or with one other person,
if it was just
even with my background and,
you know, trust with information and all
sorts of, you know, if it was just me
or one other person, I might have just
completely put it into a recess of my mind
because it was so far out there,
you know, like, what can you do with it?
It was honestly nice for my perspective
to see a level of information,
and I think I'll leave it at that.
Plus being with four other very,
very vetted people,
you know, that I wasn't losing it.
Yeah.
And I never had doubts before and
I don't have doubts after that of that.
But it was reassuring.
You know, I will say back in 22
there was more reassuring information
than, you know, 20, 23.
Yeah. That's post crush.
Yeah. We have
you have your PowerPoint deck.
You've got your input from the other folks
that were there.
You guys have done a little digging
and research and you know.
Yeah. Helped you understand.
There was a there
there were over a few months.
What happens next.
Where does that deck go?
Oh, it's a good question.
So I guess what happens next
to stay chronological.
We are very, very employed during our job.
You know in Eastern Europe that took
the priority all priority frankly.
You know, and as like a fighter pilot,
the profession kind of demands everything.
And so it takes your entire life.
And so I've lived that,
you know, and frankly,
that job was about as fascinating as
I don't want more fascinating than that.
You've reached your limit.
Yeah, I got out because I was like, okay,
that's that might be the limit for me.
I got back, though, for my last
deployment, had a exit plan to get out
and had a little bit of a window
as where like, I'm
how processing out of the Army
to where I don't really have a job.
I've been backfilled,
I've trained my backfill.
I'm just a piece of I'm
just a guy on a piece of paper now
in a skiff, and I reach out to you
because I can't honestly remember where.
Actually, I heard it from you. I.
And this is kind of like hindsight,
so I honestly don't remember, like,
my full motives, but, like,
I think for about a year
after that experience,
I had the feeling of like,
yes, Cheyenne
Mountain has every sensor known to man.
Yes, they have cameras everywhere.
Yes, they have to be aware
that this is going,
you know, that this incident occurred.
But like, I didn't do my diligence
in helping them out.
Closing the loop wrapped. Yeah.
And I think for plenty of valid reasons,
you know, like,
you have the ability to rationalize
a lot of things.
That makes sense.
And I don't feel bad about it, but like,
it kind of daughter me a little bit.
I think that's always a good indicator
that there is a whip to close.
So and I didn't know what to do
because I'm working
in this extremely privileged
like space
with access to insane information,
and I don't know what to do
with with this, aside
from when I was deployed,
the incident occurred and.
Garage incident. The hearing.
Yeah, when I was deployed over overseas
and that got the interest of
like my task force,
you know, so
aside from that and, you know, having
kind of an example is not the right word,
but like maybe it is
the right word, like an example of like
somebody trying to do the right thing.
I didn't know what that is.
I honestly still don't know what that is,
but I'm trying.
I mean, I reached out to you.
I heard of a guy named Ryan Graves.
Yeah.
And,
you know, just to be clear, obviously,
about some of the information he you. No.
Casey may have rummaging around
and knocking there is classified.
But as I always like to say
so doesn't want classified information
we don't solicit for
and I wouldn't ask for it.
And of course case
and didn't provide any to me.
But we did do have connections at ASU
in order
to work with organizations
and executive branch in order to,
through the right channels,
get that information through to people
that can incorporate into the the corpus
of what we're trying to understand here.
And at the time when you first came
forward, the first option for that,
the really the only option at the time was
the ultimate novelty resolution office.
And this is intended necessarily
to to bash the current office, I will say.
But at first that was kind of the door
that was open to receive this information.
And that's where I recommended you went.
Yeah.
And you gave me a nod to a,
if I remember correctly,
the North Comm general order.
So the commander for North
Com had a geo saying if you had.
Several order. Yeah.
Thank you.
If you had seen,
if you had like a UAP experience, it's
your obligation to report it.
And if I remember correctly
and he pointed me in that direction
and crazy as it is for somebody
who is looking for shit like that on TS
and NSA
and sipper machines could not find it,
apparently it did exist somehow.
I had you on the current orders
within the DoD, right?
Yeah, you had to have,
like a map to find. A thing.
Yeah, yeah. So not
well distributed at the time. Right.
Which was one of the problems. Right.
Because, you know, it's all a sudden it's
oh error has reporting process now.
But you know how
well promulgated is that right.
And just because there's been an order
issued somewhere in the bowels
of the Pentagon doesn't necessarily mean
that things are now operating smoothly.
Well, and so, yeah. So you went there.
We like Sheraton.
You know about that?
Yeah. You you pushed me to arrow.
I was I was eager to be useful
and I was it you know,
I just wanted to be like, hey, maybe.
I mean, I'm as aware of the importance
of Cheyenne Mountain as anybody.
It was an extreme intrusion
into our airspace.
If it wasn't us, I assumed it wasn't us.
And I think that's a safe assumption.
And so I'm just like, hey, I'm here.
I am to finally be helpful, you know.
As per this order. Yeah.
And I think that's a pretty general
trend in my career.
It's trying to be helpful.
And I reached out to them, provided the
PowerPoint that I made,
and had a pretty disappointing experience
from the start, a uniquely disappointing
experience from the start.
Yeah.
I don't want to necessarily bash arrow
too hard, and that's only because
at the end of the day,
they are
still the congressional mandated office.
And for those that perhaps aren't
following as closely,
and we'll talk a little bit
more about this,
you know, Kaysen had an experience
that wasn't positive.
You know, and, you know, we might be able
to get into some of the details.
But generally,
you know, at that early stage
in the organization, they just one
didn't have the resources or capabilities
or seemed like the wherewithal
to properly conduct an investigation.
But it nicely.
But recently,
it seems under the new leadership of John,
I have personally had positive
interactions with him in his office
since he's taken over.
And lately
it seems that the new congressional member
or congressional members are now
reporting back, perhaps amended fences.
So I don't want to start slugging
in the chest too hard.
Right.
And, you know, we're talking maybe about
yeah, this is these are early days here.
You know, you had a bad experience.
Do you want to add any more color to that?
I already talked about it
and there's not a ton to talk about.
The first red flag was I've I've worked
with almost every organization
there is in the IC and a lot in the DoD
and almost all in special operations.
And I've never had
an overtly unprofessional experience
in even small things
like sending an email to someone.
But the responses I initially got
when I said I had information
that I wanted to give to them,
even the email was just like terse
type ode, like it was almost like
it had been outsourced to like.
Someone that didn't know this.
Like the normal protocol,
perhaps. Not even that.
Just like overt, like overt indifference,
like just overtly unprofessional,
where that's not how you would start
any conversation or engagement
or relationship with a organization
that you haven't touched with
and with somebody you don't know.
And I never had that experience.
The IC in special operations world
is pretty competent, so that was weird.
They kind of did
nothing with the information,
but I was like, hey, I'm getting out,
you know, I'm going to business school.
I've done my diligence.
I was okay, honestly, with them not doing
much with the information or responding
or like, yeah, maybe they have,
you know, 50 of these a day.
Like it was possible
based on some of the things I'd seen
that was kind of that for the moment.
Got out of the Army, went to business
school,
started a completely new life
after getting
back from an early deployment
two months later
and did not think about it,
I got a LinkedIn message
from an individual
who said that they were with arrow,
who was an engineer,
obviously a contractor in the organization
who wanted to have a conversation,
did that in a car in Boston.
The person was very cordial, very nice.
I had no indicator
that there was any malice or miss.
Intent seemed to be trying their best,
but it was also very obvious
that they did not have professional
experience in doing witness interviews or
casing or, you know, knowing
how to diligently collect information.
And it was 15 minute conversation
on a cell phone and that was that.
Like, all right, I did my diligence again
for the second time.
Whatever. Fruit service, no big deal.
And then, frankly, then in the event
that I still don't understand
kind of happen where a couple months
later, no interaction out of the blue,
I get an email on my MIT
provided email address,
if I remember correctly, from the director
deputy director of arrow,
a few officers from Air Force,
a few officers from Air Force
Special Investigations,
a pretty large list of people
with something along the lines saying, Mr.
Best, we think we may have found
what you and your peers saw.
Is this a picture of what you saw?
And it was a aerostat balloon.
Classic balloon strikes again, man.
And you can probably tell
I shouldn't have taken it personally.
And I don't a lot,
but I do a little, you know,
because it takes something to, you know,
put yourself on a limb to some degree
to give information about a UFO incident
while you're in the intelligence
community.
Like that takes some level of courage,
I think.
And for that to be like the conclusion
after,
frankly, a very unimpressive experience.
I mean, they sent some sort of message,
you know.
Yeah.
It was not a peated or an arrow stat.
Yeah.
And so, you know, for people
who might not be familiar with these,
these are tethered balloons,
typically with what looked like
little wings in the back
to kind of keep them stabilized.
They look a lot like balloons.
And they are yeah, they are balloons
and they they just hang on a thread and,
you know, they provide surveillance
and things of like, like that on borders.
Yeah. I think they're very big. I've,
I've stood next to them.
Yeah I've flown past them.
I've seen them in there.
You know,
I think most people
that have done anything
operationally military in the Middle East
is probably familiar
with what they look like.
Or on the Mexican American border.
They're floating around there too. Yeah.
They are.
Yeah, they're in Key West as well.
So anyway, something
you know, just as kind of summarize here,
they basically after
what from your assessment was a very low
quality investigation, came up
with the lowest common denominator thing
that they could use to dismiss the.
Case that was the most publicly
broadcasted internally,
like, you know, for the biggest audience
with the most important people.
Oh, yeah. Exactly.
No experience with. Yeah.
So yeah, this is them,
you know, including the witness, you know,
in front of their bosses, I guess.
Right or the right people that.
You know. But it was
it was a long list of them.
Yeah. Okay.
I keep saying this,
but what's next. Right.
I mean, this is pretty
chronological story. It's pretty neat. So.
And, you know, just because
you skipped over a little bit, you're now
MIT's business school, your Massachusetts.
We actually don't live too far.
I'm in New Hampshire.
You come and visit once, you're twice
went for your diet.
Yes, sir.
Oh, we are now in Austin,
and I intend to get you here as well. But.
Yeah. What?
What do we do next? Who in this space?
Yeah.
I mean, we said, who else
might be interested in this information?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that was all you.
You should be talking about that.
Well, okay, maybe I'll bring this up.
So, you know,
without getting into too much detail.
So I have spoken about this publicly.
There was a small group within the FBI
that wanted to investigate UAP,
in my opinion, earnestly,
you know, the whole the whole
whole bucket of what might UAP be?
Not necessarily just like a clever way
of doing counter UAV.
You know, they were truly interested
in all aspects of it.
And it was a relatively small group.
And we knew the cases.
You know, some of the cases that we had
were impactful to representative Congress
and different committees.
We were hoping for them
to be useful at Aero,
but at least at this current time,
they didn't seem to have the
operational capability to do that job
very well.
And I said, well, you know, the FBI
has a lot of experience with these cases.
If our witnesses are okay with it, then,
you know,
perhaps by ingesting this information
through there,
they can pull the information
through the networks
that they have available to them, such
as Far data, etc., etc.
that would do all the investigative work
that I think people were expecting
Aero to do, but weren't necessarily
staffed or experienced to do so.
And so we asked our witnesses
and many in fact, most of them agreed to
have that conversation.
And you were one of those people.
You want to talk about that experience?
Sure. Yeah. So this must have been
of 24 when that conversation was had,
because I was getting ready to go
to my summer internship in New York City,
and I just shared that for the context.
So, yeah,
I start that conversation with the Bureau.
They want to start it off
with a field interview.
We said it to be done in New York City,
where I'm located over the summer,
go into the bureau building,
do the interview.
It was, you know, you can just tell, like,
I don't know what the intent of it was.
I still don't fully know the intent,
but like, at least they were trying,
you know, which is a good start.
Yeah, yeah.
And I was just there, frankly,
for the exact same reason of, like,
I don't see any downside.
I'm confident in what we saw.
I'm not worried about my reputation
in this day and age.
Frankly, thanks to
some people like you, there's no downside.
Like, let's give it a shot.
And the experience
was certainly better than arrow.
Yeah,
there weren't any negatives about it.
And I didn't know certainly
what the intent of it was back then.
And I still don't fully know now, but like
at least they treated you respectfully.
And so it was a good experience.
You know, I spoke with a forensic artist.
She tried her best to paint something.
That is, I still have hard time
visualizing.
And I saw it,
you know, so, like, it's not perfect,
but, like, better than I could do.
That's for damn sure.
Yeah.
So that
was kind of the start of that experience.
I don't know.
100% either.
Exactly what the overall goal,
I would say of the FBI as they see it is.
Right.
But I will say the effect that it's had
is that it's provided,
you know, a stream of highly investigated
and processed information,
not just within the FBI, but to Congress,
who they have been briefing
both the House and the Senate,
as well as working with the white House.
And I understand,
you know, the leadership of the FBI.
Well, let me let me say this first.
You know, that that that I think, you
know, that's the impact that we've had.
And that small group has grown,
to my understanding, to to a larger group
that is, is moving forward
in a pretty big way.
And I think more to follow on that
in the future.
But by provided, you know,
if you will, a little good old fashioned
interagency competition
that I think finally, you know the truth.
You know, at least the data is jostling
now in between in between that a bit.
Right. And it's. Always good to have that.
It's always good to have competition.
This is America, is it not? Right,
this capitalism.
You better run on the ground with a rifle.
You've got to see behind the curtain.
On the Intel side, you had fun of college,
you've gone to MIT,
you've seen a UAP,
you've a part of the FBI and arrow.
Pretty full experience.
And eventually, after a lot of this,
we asked you to join ASA as a volunteer.
And, you know,
had you leading our report intake process
for a while, and I'm sure that maybe
even another whole podcast.
But let's.
Talk for. Shift a little bit
maybe to that. Right.
So you had
you had all these experiences and.
Oh, actually, before we get into that,
I just want to put maybe a bow on on your,
your case. Right.
And so again today is June 13th.
Yesterday the DoD released their third
tranche of UAP files.
And your case is in there I believe
it was retweeted by the white House.
I thought it was interesting.
And there's a few files in there.
And there's both the Aero report
from when you reported the arrow.
There's also the FBI report in there
for when you report to the FBI.
I would encourage folks
to perhaps read both of those and see,
you know, how Aero assessed your report
and their conclusions, perhaps,
or what their thoughts were versus
the FBI's presentation of the data.
So you don't have really believe
anything we're saying.
You can kind of go read those right now
because these have now
come out the other side,
which is, you know, I don't think
either of us
are expected to be in this position here,
though I hope was retweeting
your UAP experience a few years ago.
So I haven't. Thought about it.
And the sketch of that case
and mentioned is in those files as well.
So you could see what
what they came up with there.
Yeah, I'm
not sure if they released it too,
but I think it's one of my counterparts
as well.
Yeah, yeah.
Might have some files in there too.
And there's a number of cases
from the last trance.
Yeah from Aza and I actually some are
I'm sure you've processed,
but either way you came out of Aza.
You want to talk about that experience
at all or any interesting cases.
Or maybe you've maybe you've discovered
this is all bunk.
I don't know, you tell me what.
What do you want to talk about?
You're opening up a big can of worms.
Well, thank you for again
for giving me the the leash
and to to take a shot on me
with starting to help out with the witness
reporting better.
You guys had obviously done
a lot of groundwork, and I was there
to just add on as far
as this topic goes
and as far as like the digestibility
required to absorb the information
that we're talking about with non-human
intelligence and UAP and,
and hyper advanced technology
and all sorts of things
that I just so fully understand
and sympathize
with people who have trouble grasping at.
Or choose a two to doubt, Sorry.
Or just like, I'll just tune that out
because that's too much for me to, yeah,
give to many ways.
That breaks my worldview. And.
Yeah.
Fair enough,
because I have had three kind of spheres
of experience to like, confirm not fully
what's going on, but like, well beyond.
There's something there.
Okay. Three. What were those?
I might guess two.
But I mean, my the fact that we saw
a UAP in broad daylight personally,
the exposure I had to certain information
while in the position
that I was in, in the military
and then being in this position with ASA,
you know, a couple years later, like it's
pretty cool seeing some very credible
individuals
provide accounts and things to back it up
and have those conversations
with whether a pilot or school teacher
in Oklahoma, you know, like the the thing
that it makes everybody the same.
As far as the witness to Assa
is that they were looking up at the sky
and saw something in the sky themselves
or on the ground.
It was a great experience because like,
even from like a psychological standpoint,
you got to just see the full gambit
of people and almost solely
positive experiences in that position
so we can talk about anything.
What maybe big picture.
I mean, did you learn from that position
or access to that data?
You know, there's a huge category
of sightings that get just dismissed
because they just don't
fit enough of the bill.
They're not weird enough. No.
It's like
I can't confirm this to enough degree,
and that degree is so high
that if anything doesn't meet
that bar, I'm just going to say it
didn't happen and completely dismiss it.
Like, I'll just it's like the
like, I never saw it.
Yeah.
You know, and we have a lot of reports
and a lot of those reports
I would not say or high confidence
or can be co-operated
or I have high certainty that occurred
or at least occurred in some fashion.
But like there's that middle ground
and there's a lot of them
and it paints a picture too.
Yeah.
And then when you have that large middle
ground, that large pool of data,
and then you do have some incredible
occurrences
that I personally have been done
the interviews
and taking in the information,
have high conviction
and have good reason for high conviction
and have been trained on assessing
conviction levels.
Yeah.
Yeah, for a year
plus the job at a high level.
It paints a picture that observations
with UAP
and likely NE is not that uncommon.
Like every single person, every
single witness that I ever interviewed.
And it was a lot like would apologize
kind of and be like.
Sorry.
I know you can't.
I know you can't believe this.
But like, this occurred because everyone
thinks because the experience
is so extreme and not talked about,
that everybody who's had
the experience thinks that they must be
the only one in the world.
And if you're in just like
a hyper privileged position, as I am,
to where I get to speak, these people
come to us and you get to speak
and interact with them.
You get to know that it's just not.
You get to see the full picture
in some way that the individuals can't
because they're all coming to you.
And yeah, I mean, I sometimes have lately
been almost just reminiscing on that.
And sometimes, you know,
this is just a heart feel, but like,
it's probably as high as 30% of people
have had an experience and are not.
People or aviatrix. People in general.
Yeah, people in general,
you know, especially, you know,
as I engage with more people here
in Austin and elsewhere and the
the temperature is lowering on this,
people are more willing to talk about it.
And, you know, it just always talks me
just how many people are willing to.
And it's not the only thing in life
that's like that.
You know, there's all sorts of things
that happen to people
that are far more common than they want.
They are told to believe
because it doesn't want to be.
You don't want to talk about it
or it's so awful or whatever.
And struggles, abnormal experiences,
which is frankly, kind of like another way
to say just like instead of
everybody understands the 1 in 10 because
everybody's had 1 in 10 experiences,
everybody understands 1 in 100 experiences
because everybody's had them.
And like, it's in the zeitgeist.
When you have a 1 in 1,000,000 experience,
there's
still 365 of those every year, right?
Like there's 360 million Americans.
That's still happens.
But then you can't take a 1
in 1,000,000 experience
and then talk about it with your friends.
Yeah. Because it's not in.
Yeah. They don't. Get it.
You can't. Yeah.
Or they choose not to. Right.
Because some people, like I said,
you know,
I've had experiences
and have chosen to ignore it.
And I mean, some of those are witnesses
that have come to us and have said, hey,
you know, I've only told my wife
about this, and it happened 30 years ago.
And so they,
you know,
they've self-centered themselves, self
nebulosus selves to the information,
either because of their own
particular hangups or perhaps
because of the implications socially of
how it might be perceived around others.
But at least something I've heard a lot
in witnesses
is that they actually feel like
this is a time where this information
can actually be useful
and they feel more comfortable
coming forward.
And one of the reasons they come to us
is so that we can
we can make that data actionable.
Yeah.
I'm not sorry to cut you off there,
but that is just a trend that I saw.
That was kind of when I previously said
that it was positive, like experience.
I think that's a huge reason why is like
almost like most of the interactions
that I had speaking with witnesses is
they're just people trying to be helpful.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And like you said, almost doing it
against their better nature.
Right. Having to apologize
first for how weird it sounds.
But I'll tell you,
it often doesn't sound weird to us.
Know what we heard?
All right, well, what else?
What else have
have you learned from that data?
How how detailed do you want to go?
I guess.
I do as you like, and I will.
Actually, this is a great time
to let people know and ask you.
Kason, we'd like
to provide the opportunity for members
to ask you questions as part of an AMA
after this airs,
and we put you on the spot right now
and ask you if you'd like to come back
remotely to join our members.
Happy for that.
Awesome. Yeah,
because I bet you have a lot of questions
if you'd like to be part of that.
We'll do that about a week after this airs
and you can go to Safe Space,
sign up to be a member,
and you'll be able to join us and ask case
and your questions.
To some, probably
some previous witnesses as well, because.
Oh, that'd be great.
Yeah, hopefully
we'll have some of them in there as well.
Awesome. So let's hear what else.
What else did you learn from that?
Okay. We got the general atmospherics.
I think there's very valid observers
regardless of their credentials.
You know, I you're told to use credentials
as a validation method and it is one.
But I think it oftentimes is like a huge
hang up
of people self-censoring and gatekeeping
because it doesn't fit.
You don't fit the bill.
You're not a police officer,
you're not a pilot,
you're not a West Point grad, whatever.
They're still tons of great people
who are good at describing what they saw,
who don't necessarily
have the accreditations
that are societally determined to be,
like, useful.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
For this task
or for this task specifically. Yeah.
And but I'll just add one thing
unlocks that I think for us is the fact
that when you do have enough data.
Right.
Because at the beginning
when you're figuring all this out,
what are you going to write?
How else are you going
to operate in this environment?
Right.
When you're going in with very little data
and a highly complex
information environment.
And so you do you lean on those crutches,
but once you start collecting enough
data, then you can actually pick out
the consistencies across cases
that are interesting and important
and apply that to people you might not,
you know, you can then say, okay,
I need to find these signals,
not necessarily
look for people that are the signal.
Perfectly said. Yeah. And that's
what I'm trying to do with your questions.
Like I'm trying to go big in the data set
and then we can go smaller.
But you're 100% right.
And you don't get there
without the high credibility
like perfect cases
and things like that, too.
I think to go one level deeper, you know,
you get to a point in your conviction,
and there's just a lot to be said
about being able to see all this data.
And it's not pretty
and it's not easy to digest.
And it requires a trained
I frankly, to parse together.
And it requires hundreds of hours
before you even start doing interviews
to see the patterns,
because it's not it's disparate data.
It is talking about the most fringe
thing you can talk about.
And describing things we
potentially don't really have context
or words to describe.
If I can't, if I can barely describe
the object that I saw with my own eyes,
then like, God help me, you know?
But once you start doing that, what starts
getting really interesting is not only
when you have those high conviction cases,
it's when you start having high conviction
cases and medium conviction cases
that are saying, describing
like the same thing.
You know, it's
like if you if you're a murderer and
the cops start saying,
hey, there's somebody who looks like this
and it's generally the same person, like,
yeah,
and I got to the point in the process
to where a few of those just seem
very high conviction
that people are describing a object
or series of objects, that the confidence
that that is the case as described.
You know, you have multiple flashlights
looking at the elephant
and the same spots of the elephant
at the same time.
And, you know, conviction rises. Yep.
Yeah, exactly.
Any cases that, you know, they're really
drilled down that, you know,
you might consider your favorites
if that's the right word to use.
There's
actually
quite a few I haven't seen about this in.
A get all the time.
But it's like which one? I mean, you know.
I think one that stands out
I'll break it down by like category.
I think as far as professionals
on the ground, there's a police officer
who has sent,
I think, 4 or 5 observations with video
and multiple witnesses, each observation
for extended periods of time
over months while they're on shifts,
night shifts as police officers.
That's showing the similar
same objects every time.
And that's an object
that we have seen more than several
other times throughout reports.
And so that gets pretty exciting
when you're just like,
okay, we have enough information
here to where it's like,
am I going to convince a skeptic?
No, I'm not trying to convince a skeptic.
I'm trying to convince myself
of what's going on.
I'm trying to take in this information
and paint a picture for myself.
And then the next step
is to try to articulate it to others.
But you start seeing that
and you're like, okay, this is a thing.
Yeah.
You've probably talked to folks
like I have about how their experiences
have completely,
you know,
maybe we can even lose the quantifier
completely, but change their worldview.
Yeah.
And I guess that would be
my first question is, do you,
you know, consider yourselves
among those people.
And two, do you have any reflections of of
what it's like to engage
in that type of conversation with people?
Yeah, it's the first question.
People, I should say people
that have had those experiences.
Yeah. Yeah, totally.
I definitely gives you
a level of empathy and sympathy
that you otherwise would not have.
Like, obviously. Right.
I was in a position of my life where
there's like a cognitive bias for it,
where it's like
the more you know, the less
I think you know,
the less you know,
the more you think you know.
And I was in a spot of, like,
accomplishment for a poorly
used word and privilege of,
you know, I'm a special operations
intelligence officer
doing the biggest mission there is, like,
I must know what's up.
Yeah, yeah.
Like who else? Right.
Yeah.
I have a lot of privileged information.
You know, it's just tied to Russia.
But, like, I know what's up.
To a large degree, you never.
There's always more to know.
But like, I know what's up.
And then this happens and it's just like,
you know, apparently
people have the ability to shut it out.
And that's taken years to process.
And I'm still but like,
I think it was largely
a ego reducer for me.
Not saying I don't have one,
but like for the better,
you know, of like
you have an instance like that
and I've had enough experiences
in my life to know
that I don't know what I don't know.
You only have a bubble of knowledge and
you can't tell what's beyond the bubble.
And everybody's like that.
And some people are smaller
and some people are bigger,
but it's a bubble nonetheless, and
you can't cross that Rubicon until you do.
But that experience popped the bubble.
Yeah.
And it's a much more interesting way
to live life being like,
I wonder how that works than being like,
I've already got figured out.
And it's a somewhat modern phenomenon.
Maybe going back
originally to the enlightenment, you know,
the separation of the mystical from the,
you know, Newtonian mechanics of how
the world works, the clockwork patterns
that determine everything that happens.
And we very much,
especially in Western society,
have really focused on
or we identify ourselves
with a very rational and materialistic
and physical version of the world,
perhaps get these peaks behind,
you know, beyond the map a little bit.
It can,
you know, cause you to rethink a bit
about how firm your,
your understanding of the world is.
And yeah, you know, there's people
who have experiences that are very open
to mystical experiences or spirituality
and other things.
And for some, you know, it's
almost easier to say, well, that's not
you know,
that's just their own belief structures
manifesting themselves in some way.
But, you know, we also have, you know,
very ardent skeptics and rationalists
who have gone through the experiences and,
you know, it has opened up their minds
a bit to, you know, the world not being
perhaps as small as they thought it was.
For sure. Yeah.
And I like to think of it kind of as like,
I mean, if the scientific method is
a tool, it's a hell of a powerful one.
You know, we have some conductors now.
It's a thing.
We made sand think. Yeah.
I've never heard that before.
That's a good one.
Yeah, but that tool is just that.
It's a tool.
And that tool turned into like,
an ideology.
And that ideology turned to a religion
over the course of a few centuries.
I like to think that we're now
digesting that
into back of what it is,
which is a tool, and that's it.
Yeah.
And there's.
A tool for observing a very probably
infinitely mysterious universe.
And and the universe,
maybe it's not infinitely mysterious.
Maybe it is, but it's damn more
interesting and mysterious
than what we think it is in 2026.
Like, give me a break.
We were riding horses and buggies
a hundred years ago.
A hundred years is a lifetime
and and a half on average.
Like, we don't know what's going on.
And that can be okay.
And that's okay. It's okay, it's okay.
That's that.
You know, it's like growing up, right?
And no longer being a kid
and realize like, wow,
there's a big world there and it's scary.
And then, you know,
you grow up and realize it's okay.
You know, that's just part of it.
It's scary to.
But, you know, well,
speaking of scary things,
you know, maybe to finish this off,
you've been, you know,
seeing some of these releases
and conversations from the white House.
You know, what's going on.
Where where are we going here.
You know, where do you think
this conversation goes from here?
Don't put that on me.
You know? Yeah.
People always ask me that.
It's my pleasure to finally get to ask
someone else that question.
I don't know what's going on.
I don't have a unfortunately.
Unfortunately, as you can tell anybody
who has gone to this far in the podcast,
I, I want to understand reality.
I have spent my career
in some ways doing that.
I think I'm still doing that.
I would love to be in a position
of having more impact in this space,
having more privileged information
as to what's going on.
I don't I am in the private sector now.
It's all gone.
Like the ability to peer behind
the curtain is a ring of power
that is truly addictive,
and many people get addicted to it and
I miss it like hell.
So I don't know what's going on.
I only have speculation
as far as my stuff goes.
Like we've painted out what happened.
It's it's obviously useful to somebody,
or else nobody would have ever heard
about it. In what ways?
Or it's useful, I hope to God
that it's for the for the betterment.
I'm. I am also a national security guy.
You don't do the things that I did
because you don't believe in,
you know, the ideals of the system
and what we should aspire to
and make the sacrifices
to do what I previously did otherwise.
And so I hope that, you know,
it's it's all under control
and it's and it's all for the better.
And I can also recognize,
you know, that I have some secrets
tied to my normal, normal job
that are negative.
National security is a word that hides
a lot of just overtly evil
and detrimental secrets,
and at the same time, root
unearthing those detrimental secrets.
You know,
maybe the best thing to do is just stop
lying, as opposed
to tell the truth about everything.
And I don't know what this
if this is that people talk disclosure.
I don't think much about it.
I don't want to have the government
dictate much in my life, especially.
A good way of,
yeah, that's a great, great savior.
Having been in it
my entire adult life until now,
I've let alone thought,
which they spend a ton of money and effort
and very smart people doing exactly
just that.
I say all of that to know, to just say,
I don't know, but
it's useful to somebody
and I just hope it's for good, frankly.
Yeah. And I wouldn't be doing it
if I didn't think it was.
You know, thank you for being
a great witness for America today.
Farrow's face.
Thanks for stepping forward.
You know, there's two flavors
of leadership in the military, right?
There's the leadership that, you know,
everyone expects you to perform, right.
As, you know, a leader
in an office space, right?
Then there's people
who actually go out there
and make changes to improve the system.
Right.
You need to be a leader inside the system
or outside,
and often the ones outside the system.
The ones actually fix the system. Right.
So thank you for being a leader
inside and outside on this topic.
Appreciate that.
Yeah. Thank you.
There's so much more
we could talk to you about.
I'm sure.
And I'm sure our members are going
to have a lot of great questions,
but I think we'll end it there now.
We'll see you in about a week
for those questions.
And if you'd like to join Kaysen
and ask some questions,
go to Safe Aerospace
or join up to be a member.
And you can help support us
both in our mission
by liking and subscribing to this channel
so we can continue to produce
awesome content and bring people
like Kaysen out to share their story.
All right. Thanks, everyone. Thank Kazan.