And in light of the recent UFO Day, it’s time to take a closer look
at the very real battle raging right now between the US Pentagon and Congress,
over the alleged existence of alien spacecraft.
Congress seems certain that the military is hiding retrieved alien technology.
And the Pentagon is not doing a very good job at proving them wrong.
But why do I say that? Well, let’s start at the beginning.
Those of you who are long-time viewers of this channel will remember that back in May 2023
we did a video on the US Congress’s resurgent interest in the topic of UFOs.
It’s a topic that carries a lot of stigma – people who claim to have seen flying saucers
are often treated as delusional, believing in or even deliberately fuelling urban legends.
And yet in 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report on
“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP), that made the whole idea seem much more mainstream.
According to the government report, UAP – a less stigmatised acronym than UFO, but referring to
the same sorts of sightings – were real and were messing with America’s Navy pilots.
Their frequent appearances in US airspace and training areas
“clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to US national security.”
To be exact, they were getting so close to US jets that pilots
sometimes had to swerve to avoid them. In 2022 in an open congressional hearing,
high-ranking members of Defense and Naval Intelligence told Congress that this was happening
frequently enough that it had become important to find out what these things were.
This was no easy task, as UAP came in many different varieties – and so presumably,
required different explanations. Some were drones that followed navy ships for hours. Some were orbs
photographed outside of cockpit windows. And some seemingly exhibited strange flight characteristics
that couldn’t be accounted for – incredible top speeds that broke the sound barrier yet created no
sonic boom, being able to accelerate and turn on a dime in a way no fighter jet could hope to match,
or hovering motionless in the face of high winds with no visible means of propulsion.
It was these that had Congress and the Navy worried. While the others could
possibly be explained as enemy spying action or simple weather balloons blown off course,
some of these hinted at an intelligent force with a technological advantage over the US.
And the Navy had no idea who was operating them, or what their intentions were.
Congress ordered the Pentagon to create a new department called AARO,
or the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, in July 2022 and tasked them to use a data-driven
and scientific approach to figuring out what UAP were. AARO set to work, and quickly identified
510 cases of reported UAPs – such as the curious and inexplicable Mosul Orb, which was seen flying
over a warzone in Iraq. However, Congress became unsatisfied with the answers that AARO was giving.
AARO’s first hearing in April 2023 downplayed the anomalous aspects of UAP, highlighting that they
were likely all perfectly explainable with the right data. To many watching on the sidelines,
this answer felt like the continuation of a long history of obfuscation and outright
deception that had been going on for years. And their suspicions were seemingly confirmed
when David Grusch became a whistleblower in 2023, claiming that not only did a part
of the military know about UAP, but they had recovered some of them.
David Grusch was an intelligence officer who had worked in the United States Air
Force and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency for 14 years. As far as witnesses go,
his character and credentials were impressive – his claim was assessed as credible and
urgent by the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community himself. Grusch had
little to gain from this – he was signing no book deal, and in his career he risked
becoming a pariah. Yet he testified before Congress that, in the course of his duties
as an intelligence officer, he had learned of a decades-long UAP crash retrieval and reverse
engineering program being run by members of the US government, without congressional oversight.
Ironically, for the methodical intelligence officer Grusch, this lack of oversight was what
he actually had a problem with - government money being spent without the government’s
knowledge. Grusch claimed that whistleblowers had gone to AARO claiming the same thing and
that AARO had hidden any knowledge of it. Could there be any truth to this? Unfortunately,
there’s some grounds to be suspicious - the Pentagon has failed every audit of its finances
in the 7 years it's been undergoing them, being unable to account for where it spends all its
money - so a secret program or two certainly could exist within the gaps. And unfortunately for AARO,
there has been a long history of US government UFO programs hiding facts from the public that
made this more plausible. Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Bluebook – investigations that
dated back to 1947, all came under fire for being more designed to downplay UFOs than
to investigate them. And these criticisms even came from the scientists who had run them.
For example, one night in 1966 police in Ohio spotted an egg-like object, over 10 metres across,
with a cone of light beneath it, flying a few hundred feet off the ground and glowing brightly
enough to illuminate the surrounding area. The object flew over the policemen, stopped,
then continued on its way. The police decided to give chase to the egg, but every time they
got close, it would dart away, although it would allow them to catch up again, almost like it was
waiting for them. In this way, the two policemen chased the object 60 miles, across two states,
until eventually - just as dawn was arriving, the object shot straight up into the sky.
The official report from project bluebook? This object was Venus, which had been misidentified by
the policemen. An explanation that was hampered when the lead scientist of project bluebook - a
man named J. Allen Hynek - claimed that he hadn’t even been asked his opinion before the department
made its announcement. Plus, Venus was in the wrong part of the sky for this to make any sense
at all - on the horizon, rather than overhead, and was seen at the same time as the object.
Some critics labelled Blue Book as the Society for Explaining the Uninvestigated, due to some
of the outrageous explanations they asserted, seemingly without looking into it properly.
Feeding into this suspicion of a cover-up were the very real events that took place across 2023 and
2024. You may have heard of the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the US in February
2023 before finally being shot down over the ocean. There are plenty of excellent images
of this 60 metre tall balloon, and wreckage was collected from it after just a day.
What is harder to find images for are the 3 other objects that were spotted on military radars soon
after, which were also shot down. But while the military was quick to provide excellent images
of the first balloon, or a Russian jet clipping a US drone just a month later, no images were
released of these other 3 by the American Government, and despite an intensive hunt,
all 3 were never recovered. Canada DID release a very grainy image of one of the objects,
and a story soon circulated that one of these car-sized floating objects was likely a hobbyist
balloon. But the lack of details surrounding it and the others left many feeling gaslit.
Everything is fine, these are explicitly not aliens,
but we don’t know who they belong to. A similar thing happened in 2023/2024,
when drones started appearing over military bases such as Langley, or American bases in the UK,
where the US were storing nukes or advanced jets. Although these were
most often reported in the media as happening in New Jersey, they occurred the world over.
Here’s one that was sighted near Australia in March 2025.
It shares a passing resemblance to one that was seen over New Jersey.
While many assumed that this was the work of foreign adversaries such as Russia or China,
the government at the time said it was all actually authorised by the FAA. But
it certainly doesn’t seem that way. After all, if the FAA were the ones authorising the drones
flying over sensitive airbases, why did the FAA go so far as to temporarily restrict drone
flights as a way of combatting them? Why fight yourself? And why weren’t the military told?
And why were the drones impossible to catch or detect on radar, even in the face of the
US military’s desire to do so? And why were they shining lights as they flew,
almost like they wanted to be seen? Drones the size of SUV’s, appearing the world
over and evading capture while investigating sensitive military sites, certainly sound
like this is not just the work of hobbyists. Were they technologies belonging to another
country? Perhaps. But the secrecy has apparently been enough that Congress is getting fed up with
all the stonewalling. Soon after Grusch’s testimony, Congress passed a law ordering
the Pentagon to hand over all of their files pertaining to UAP – especially anything to do
with Non-Human Intelligence, or recovered craft. The fact that a bill containing the
phrase “Non-Human Intelligence” passed into law is already astounding. The fact that there were
efforts to block it is… concerning. After all, why try to avoid handing over something unless
you actually have it? The Pentagon is now in the process of handing over files, though the full
report has not yet been released, and the Pentagon so far denies having any hidden UAP programs.
But seriously, tell us where the UFOs are. In the most recent UAP hearing in 2024,
members of Congress claimed that they were facing opposition to having these hearings,
and the Pentagon was refusing to hand over data such as satellite footage. And yet, more and more
high-ranking current or retired military officers are coming out and repeating this same story.
Admirals. NASA administrators. Again and again, the claim is coming forward that members of the
government are hiding something. The recent congressional hearing even put a name to this
secret program – Immaculate Constellation – and claimed that military servicemen actually have
been hurt from the interaction with UAPs. And that was one of the milder claims. In the Immaculate
Constellation report, there are accounts of F-22 jets being boxed in by a flight of 3-6 orb UAPs,
which perfectly remained in formation with the helpless jet before ultimately driving it from
the mission area. Another describes a softly glowing orange orb that approached a US vessel,
causing those who watched it to experience altered perceptions of time. When it left, the
crew snapped out of a “trance”, before feeling a sweeping wave of profound unease. One last account
describes a 200-400m wide saucer UAP that was seen on infrared satellite footage skimming above thick
cloudcover. Apparently noticing it was detected, this football-field-sized behemoth then dips
below the clouds again, vanishing from sight. Sadly, other than the report itself there was no
proof given that any of this was actually true - no footage, no testimony. But just as the script
for this video was being finalised, ufologist Jeremy Corbell released a purported airforce
UAP video taken by an infrared satellite - and it bears a passing resemblance to one
of the Immaculate Constellation accounts. Take a look at this. Here the object is,
moving down from the top of the screen before veering to the right. From the size of the clouds,
it is clearly a massive sphere or disk. But its 90 degree change in direction suggests it’s no
balloon, or an object blowing in the wind. If Corbell is correct and this footage is real,
it lines up perfectly with the Immaculate Constellation claim of the behemoth UAP.
I also did find at least one instance of a podcast made in collaboration with NASA,
where the subject was UAP. Ecosystemic Futures positions itself as a conversation with the
experts at the cutting edge of technology in the quest for innovation. The whole podcast was an
interesting dive into possible emerging tech, but without going into everything that was discussed,
one of the guests - Richard Banduric, a former electrical engineer and mathematician and now
CEO of Field Propulsion Technologies - very casually claimed to have been part of a public
sector UAP reverse engineering company. He described smart materials that he had been
tasked to investigate that turned to dust if you interacted with them (if alien craft do exist,
they apparently don’t want their technology reverse engineered, it seems). And he calmly
detailed his attempts to study triangular UAP that could turn invisible at will. His claims
were taken as completely reasonable. And while it’s easy to make claims like this,
the setting the claims were being made in was the surprising part - I hadn’t expected NASA to
collaborate on a podcast that had guests making claims of this nature, as it implied a subtle,
tacit approval for what was being said. Sadly, congress has not published its own proof
of its Immaculate Constellation claim, and here we reach the end of what can be found
in the public congressional record. So let’s take a moment to review.
Judging by their complaints, and in a rare case of bipartisan feeling, members of Congress are
uniting in their apparent belief that their own military is hiding something from them. Of course,
they are privy to things that we cannot see, so whether you believe them or not
comes down to how much faith you put in their interpretation of those classified documents
and videos, and their own agendas. It is certainly true that there are objects
in our skies that we cannot explain. Although not necessarily aliens, there are unusual craft
in our skies – and if the government knows what they are, they’re certainly not telling us.
Whistleblowers have made claims that some of these are Non-Human. Of course,
witness testimony is the worst kind of evidence. People can misremember things,
or interpret what they saw according to their own biases - if they’re not outright lying.
But other proof is lacking. While there are military videos that
have been released that show… something, none of these are the high levels of fidelity that
we know the military is capable of, which is a little frustrating. We have no surefire “UFO lands
next to the Whitehouse and aliens shake hands with the president” video that settles the question
forever. And even if we did, without it being authenticated by an incredibly trustworthy source
as real footage, it might not be worth much: AI makes images very easy to fake nowadays.
We have the testimony of credible witnesses such as David Grusch,
but he has only claimed that he was told UAP exist – he never claimed to have directly seen one.
We have evidence of Pentagon stonewalling and obfuscation. Some of that is to no-doubt protect
sensitive military assets - either secret new technologies, such as the US Stealth
Bomber which the public was initially kept in the dark about, or sensitive devices that did the data
collecting that the pentagon doesn’t want everyone to know they possess. But while this explanation
is a good reason to keep it from the public, it’s not a good reason to keep it from congress,
who are the ones paying for it all. And congress are the ones feeling stonewalled.
As a side note, while not everyone in congress is informed about every secret program,
a select few congressmen are - the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence. That’s how it’s supposed to work - these congressmen being
read in, so they can oversee what the pentagon is doing while maintaining a level of secrecy. So,
if this was all just secret pentagon technology, all that would be needed is a quiet word in those
ears, and those committees could tell the rest of congress that this was one of ours, please don’t
draw attention to it. All this public attention could simply go away. So the explanation that
this is secret US tech that the pentagon isn’t telling congress about doesn’t make sense to me.
I could buy the idea that the pentagon does not want to publicly acknowledge they don’t
know what this is, or that another country has a technological advantage over the US,
for fear of inciting panic. But that is straying into speculation.
When the facts are all reviewed together, it certainly feels like something is going on. To
sum it up in the words of Senator Marco Rubio: “Either what [the whistleblowers are] saying is
partially true or entirely true,” he said, “or we have some really smart,
educated people with high clearances and very important positions in our government who are
crazy and are leading us on a goose chase.” There is not a clear reason why many of these
whistleblowers, who are actively serving in distinguished careers,
would want to jeopardise their reputations. While some UFO enthusiasts have made money
off discussing the topic, people like David Grusch had no book they were trying to sell.
Perhaps what would be helpful to hear is evidence from someone who actually was
part of the secret government crash retrieval program itself. A whistleblower with footage of
what they saw, from much closer up. As it happens, we have an example of
that. Although I will warn you, this is both less substantiated,
and also an example of where ufology can get seriously weird. Let’s talk about Jake Barber.
A lot of the big names in UAP circles started making a big fuss back in January 2025 about a
big revelation that was about to take place – a whistleblower was coming forward with
unprecedented levels of information, by the name of Jake Barber. Like Grusch, Barber claimed to
have been working on classified projects for the government. But unlike Grusch, Barber claimed to
have been a pilot working within one of those programs. And although he claimed that there
was a danger to his life, he felt that the footage and information he held needed to come forward.
Congress has not officially vetted Barber, nor do we have proof that he was working on this
program at all. Of course, such is the nature of clandestine programs – they are, by nature,
difficult to fact-check. We should likely take what he says with a grain of salt. However,
what he says is certainly interesting. Barber claimed that he was a pilot who
would sometimes transport highly sensitive objects from one location to another.
On one such mission, he flew his helicopter to an unspecified patch of desert, only to find a large
egg-shaped object there. While approaching this egg to transport it, Barber felt an overwhelming
emotion come over him. He felt sadness, happiness, and the feeling that something had connected with
him on almost a spiritual level. It was guiding him, and the whole experience was so overwhelming
that he began to cry. He pulled himself together and continued the mission. Later,
he claims that other personnel confirmed to him that what he encountered was a UAP.
Apparently, the military transported these egg-shaped UAP often, and this footage came
from one of those other missions. Barber himself claims to have not just encountered UAP once.
In a later mission, Barber claimed that exposure to a UAP – or possibly
reverse-engineered technology from a UAP – led a doctor to conclude he was suffering from all the
hallmarks of radiation poisoning. The doctor in question was Gary Nolan, another ufologist,
but one with an extensive background in immunology and cancer research.
Later, Barber left the military, and, together with other business partners, founded the company
Skywatcher. Rather than force the military to divulge what it knows in its clandestine programs,
Barber is now trying to replicate the results in the private sector. But the method he is using
is surprising. He and his team are not just using cameras or radar, but are attempting to
connect to UAP psionically - using their minds to reach out to UAP – in the same way Barber
claims that the first UAP connected with him. According to Barber, there are many people
capable of doing this. And for whatever reason, whatever the true nature of UAP,
many of them seem to want to be connected by us in this way. And if you do it right, they are willing
to come out to play. Through a mixture of on-site psychics and the use of an electric signalling
device they refer to as a “dog whistle”, Barber’s team claims that they can successfully call UAP to
their location with a near 100% success rate – an extraordinarily high number,
making this an extraordinarily bold claim. There is video footage. It is grainy, and when
I look at them, at least a couple seem likely to be balloons or birds. But this tactic of psionics
and dog-whistles is the method that Barber claims the US government is using, and is the way that
the first UAP egg was called down to land in the first place. I’ve often heard the argument that if
UAP are so advanced, why do they keep crashing on Earth? This, allegedly, is the answer.
What evidence do we have that this is true? Well, it is a documented fact that the CIA did run a
psionics program running from 1975 to 1995. Called Project Stargate, CIA agents recruited those
who were psychically gifted and attempted to use them to remotely view targets of interest, amidst
fears that the Russians were doing the same. While this might sound extremely out there,
consider that, unlike the UFO projects Sign or Grudge, which only ran for a
few years each, Stargate went on for 20 years. That implies they felt they were onto something.
They also did claim some successes. Former President Jimmy Carter spoke of an incident
where a crashed plane went down in central Africa. American satellites couldn’t locate it,
but apparently a remote viewer was able to do so – after going into a trance, the woman wrote
down some coordinates, and there the plane was. Whatever you think of the truth behind psychics
and remote viewing, the idea that the American Government also attempted to
reach out to UAP using psionics is actually pretty believable. What’s a lot harder to
swallow is the idea that UAP responded. Still, a good scientist does not dismiss
something simply because it seems outside our comfortable worldview. So, in an effort to be
scientifically rigorous, I decided to test the hypothesis myself. Together with my brother Jon,
who helped write the script for this video, we set out to call down a UAP using this method.
We travelled down to the coastline of South Wales, as some reports associate UAP with large bodies
of water, and we hoped that there wouldn’t be too many people around. The weather was cloudy,
but there were large patches of blue sky as the day progressed. The method we were using
was something known as Ce5; apparently Barber is not the only person out there claiming that UAP
can be contacted psionically, but there are many who say the same, and there is a whole
published methodology explaining how to do it. There’s some variation in the execution,
but the idea is simple: Meditate, clear your mind, then in a spirit of goodwill
ask mentally for UAP to come to you. We went during the day, as we hoped to
catch better images than just a little light in the sky. To that end, I brought along my Sony a1
camera and 600mm lens. Jon was going to be our psychic for this attempt – he had never done
something like this before, but was willing to give it a try – and I would capture an encounter
(if any actually happened) on film. We set up our camp, Jon got to meditating, and we waited.
We didn’t talk much. We kept our eyes on the sky and the horizon. Apparently
it’s all about the headspace you’re in, and although I did find myself a little sceptical
that anything would actually happen, I did my best to keep an open mind.
And after a few hours of waiting, we found… nothing.
No spheres or triangles in the sky. No outrageously fast spacecraft. Not even
any balloons, although I did capture a few nice images of some birds (which is the real
reason I bought that camera in the first place!). I’ll admit, we both were a little disappointed,
and I went to the beach to look for rocks of interest. Jon stayed out another half an
hour longer, but eventually even he faced the reality of the experiment’s failure.
It would have been cool to see an alien spacecraft. But sadly, this does not actually
prove Barber wrong. It, of course, might just prove that we were not very proficient at the
process – or maybe we lack the knack for it. Or maybe there simply were no UAP to call.
The one thing that did happen that was a little odd was that Jon woke the next day to find he
had been surprisingly sunburned – he also had a headache, and a resurgence in an eye-infection.
While this could have been the signs of radiation-spewing UAP hovering somewhere just out
of sight, I lean towards just good old-fashioned sunstroke. Jon does burn easily, even on a
cloudy day. But I have the same skin as him, and for the record, I was fine.
Well, anyway, it was worth a try. So, where do we land with all this?
When it comes down to it, many of the claims surrounding UAP seem to boil down to a question
of belief. A majority of congress believes Grusch, who in turn believes his sources. Barber believes
that you can psychically connect to UAP. AARO believes that what lies in the unknown
is innocuous – every example of an inexplicably fast UAP is actually a sensor error, or an optical
illusion at work. But that’s just it. This is anomalous. It exists at the edge of our sensors,
in the files of secret government agencies we suspect exist. Could it be true? Absolutely.
But could it all genuinely prove to be nothing more than an unexpected balloon, or a hoax,
or some emergent technology that one branch of the American Government isn’t telling another about?
Also yes, absolutely. And until we shine more light on it all, it’s really hard to know the
truth either way. All you have is probabilities. At the beginning of this video, I told you that
we probably have found signs of life on another planet. This, too, is an unknown. I find the idea
of life being out there somewhere exciting and fascinating. The idea that some of that life has
found its way here? It would change everything. But it’s important to exercise caution,
and to not let what we want to see cloud our view of what we can say with certainty.
The governments of the world are absolutely hiding something. That really shouldn’t be a
surprise. And it’s possible that what they’re hiding is something other than secret military
tech. But until the mysteries are all finally solved – whether you think the
answer to it all is alien craft, or beings from another dimension, or angels and demons,
or just ordinary men ordinary secrets – keep an open mind. One day, the answer
will be revealed. No secret organisation can keep the truth suppressed forever.
If space has taught us anything, it's that there is always another
surprise waiting just around the corner.