2024 Dept of Defense AARO UFO UAP Report Review Analysis with Micah Hanks

Show Transcript

It's been a pretty interesting week. First, we got the UFO hearing on Wednesday. And then, bam, the next day, Arrow dropped their yearly UFO report. And there are some things we got to talk about. I'm very excited for today because helping me out is the co-founder of The Debrief, Micah Hanks. I'm going to bring him in right now. (00:37) Micah, it's so good to see you. How are you? It's wonderful to be here. I think we're overdue for one of these. And as you can see, Like Dale Cooper, all right, I am trapped inside the Black Lodge where time sort of means a little less than it does in other places. Now, I know we're working on some of the Doctor Who references. (00:54) Do you get the Twin Peaks reference? Of course. Ah, there you go. So anyway, but yeah, I mean, we all feel kind of like we're in the Black Lodge right now, given all the weirdness that's been going on over the last few days. Quite an eventful week, my friend, wouldn't you say? Yeah. It is. And you know what? I'm l oving it. (01:12) I felt like earlier this year, it seemed a little dry with UFO news. And then near the end of the year, which is consistent, we get bombarded with all of this stuff. And the Arrow report snuck up on me. But see, you have people that you know when you chat with and they give you a little bit of tidbits. Did you know this report was going to come out before it did? Or were you shocked like me? The Arrow report. (01:37) So, yeah, I did know it was going to come out only a few minu tes before it dropped because... And you didn't call me? I know, right? Yeah, I know. I'm going to have to get better about that. Obviously, she keeps telling me this, folks. I've got to clue you in a little bit more quickly on these things so that we can get on the mic, but... (01:55) Yeah, the ever-diligent debrief team, which, by the way, Christina here is debrief alumni. Once you're a member, you're always a member. And so you've kind of been in our periphery and having helped us really sinc e around the time of our launch. But certainly when this report was about to drop, we had begun to get word from people. (02:15) Hat tip to Chrissy Newton also for very quickly flagging me in our chat and saying, Micah, Big news is about to come down. And of course, this is right before our weekly newsletter. So those who subscribe to the intelligence brief already got a quick kind of recap. But really, I would say that the analysis of the report, I mean, a short eighteen pages, that's a little longer than some that we've seen in recent years. (02:37) But still, there's there's quite a bit, I think, still to unpack in this report. And again, some very notable references to things like UAP following aircraft reports. Shadowing, I think, was the term that they used. And also, twenty or so cases that are currently still under review because they're intriguing enough that AERO officials are still wanting to try and understand what they might mean and what technologies, if any, they could r epresent. (03:00) So, yeah, for me, this was quite interesting. That's good to hear because people have had mixed feelings about the previous reports that we've gotten. Even the volume one that we received in March, we're still waiting for volume two. The last year's annual report, people were pretty darn disappointed, specifically Christopher Mellon. (03:20) And then he in his tweet last year, he's like, read the debrief article. And what a shout out right there. This time around, you also wrot e a summary article on the debrief to give people an understanding of what this report is about. Something that caught my attention was the term jellyfish craft, shaped craft. (03:41) It's been trendy. I feel like the right word to use is trendy in twenty twenty four from Jeremy Corbell releasing his stuff and then just people becoming more knowledgeable on these type of craft shaped objects that have been happening since what the late nineteen forties into the fifties and while they're a little bit more sparse in shape we have seen them in the past and for it to come up again compared to all the other reports where it's never shown up I found that interesting and I feel like it displays that (04:13) Those that wrote it, including John Klotsky, the new chief of Arrow, is definitely keeping an eye out in UFO news, which he should. He should be. But that word jellyfish seemed strategic. Do you think so? Or just casual coincidence? Well, you know, it's a little hard to know at this point. I think what I would say about the interesting placement of that term within the new report is primarily that there is a long history of jellyfish being used as a term to describe UAP and whether or not that is an accurate description of how these phenomena appear, (04:51) what they may represent. That's anybody's question. Again, I think what it really comes down to is people often when they see something, and I know this personally from just, you know, spending time in nature. And when you in , in a Danish publication back in the And it literally seemed to show a large jellyfish hanging in the sky. What the official explanation was, was that this was a smoke cloud that was produced like by a smokestack on a factory. (06:11) And that this smoke cloud arose from the smokestack and that as it was beginning to dissipate, it had the tendril-like tentacles coming down and it gave the appearance of a jellyfish. Someone saw this, photographed it and said, look, there's a UFO. It's like a fly e you know, I'm going to share my screen here so that we can talk about this error report because not everyone's read it as of yet, which is disappointing. And yet I'm also not surprised because like many of you, it snuck up on me. And so we're going to get into that today. And we are very lucky to have Micah here who has read it thoroughly and even wrote about it in for the debrief. (08:14) But I want to start off with with this first question, and it's actually going to I'm going to back it up Dr. John Kozlowski. And the Arrow investigations continue to produce what I think, frustratingly for some, is very conservative language with regard to UAP and how to characterize the phenomenon. (09:53) Now, some, like Rear Admiral Tim Galladet, who was one of those providing testimony during the hearing earlier this week in Washington, He, again, is very explicit when asked during that hearing, what do you think these things might be? Both he and former counterintelligent agent Lou Elizondo a ators, the WIZOs on board those F-A-XVIII Super Hornets at the time, who directly observed this object. (11:35) And then later also, of course, we had another WIZO, the weapons systems operator on board these F-A-XVIII's, Chad Underwood, who filmed famously with the Raytheon at FLIR targeting pod. He filmed the so-called TIC-TAC. What we see in that video, Underwood says, and based on his monitoring it with the equipment array, the sensory array there on board the aircraft, and also based on the To me, I find it really strange, Christina, the arrow, if indeed this is what happened during this meeting, and I have no reason really to doubt Tim Gallaudet, but I find it very strange that he would be brought in and that the officials at the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office who are currently trying to resolve unknowns in our airspace, they would try to tell a former high-ranking U.S. (13:39) official this might have been our technology. What really is going on there? And that's one of the name? Kozlowski, I believe, yeah. Kozlowski, yes. You got it. You got to say it with an accent, right? Well, he gave his very first roundtable to the DOD a year after receiving his position. (15:31) If you try finding him online, you will hardly come across anything aside from his DOD background information. page. That's about it. You can't really find him anywhere else. And for me, it's remarkable that Kirkpatrick was a little bit more in the limelight. He was definitely out there giving infor realize that there are a lot of, you know, kind of issues that people have toward the, you know, former director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. whom I have also scrutinized in the capacity of my work as a journalist. I mean, that's really what I have to do. (17:32) I have to look at what government officials or whomever else are doing and saying, and I have to try and look at that fairly objectively and try to provide accurate information about them. What we can state as fact is that under Dr. Kirkpatr frequency of UAP sightings, you know, radio emissions that were being apparently detected from these objects, (19:19) the most common morphologies associated with them. That was all really hopeful. And so as Arrow started off, I think, pretty promising. Toward the end of Dr. Kirkpatrick's tenure, there were more and more of these problems, including and really truly culminating in the historical report. So that's why I say that, you know, I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. period is described right there in the report near the first page. (21:01) We're still seeing, I think, production of material here. that is better than what we've seen the last couple of times around. Maybe not quite as revealing as that twenty twenty one ODNI report, which a lot of people when that one came out, they said, look, this is a nothing burger. To me, it's significant in itself that the United States government, a Pentagon office tasked with studying UAP, is producing regular reports ted anomalous characteristics and or behaviors. (22:45) Now, yet again, a lot of people just kind of gloss over that, Christina, and they say, OK, great. There's twenty one reports they're still trying to work with. Let's break this down a little bit and I'll tell you why this is really significant. You have twenty-one reports, twenty-one cases received during this reporting period. (23:01) That means that within the last period of collection, they are not talking about reports that, again, in t nd review by Arrow, which is really intriguing because often we hear from intelligence officials and in fact, some of them testifying on (24:38) Capitol Hill just this week saying, That, you know, there's better videos out there than what the public is seeing. The ones that were leaked to the New York Times back in twenty seventeen. There are better videos than those. We often hear that there are, you know, other incidents that maybe involve multiple sensor detections. (24:53) And yes, Arrow and new chief of Arrow, he mentioned that he doesn't want people to mess around with it in order to create false data, which we're going to get (26:26) into just a little bit as the report does show a graph on that. There's actually a handful of graphs and pretty pictures here that some might classify as eye candy and kind of irrelevant, while others say, no, this is actually pretty good. But one thing that I want to mention here is in the hearing that we got on Wednesday, there it was asked twice o e what we might call like a passive threat. (28:24) I don't know if really that's the best term for it, but what I mean is a surveillance technology, some sort of intelligence gathering operation or platform being used by a foreign adversary. So if we're talking about, again, the region in question and the preponderance of phenomena that occur in oceanic environments or perhaps in the airspace above them, one would have to be concerned about the potential that U.S. (28:48) operations in the Indo e United States and its forces, these are very likely to be places where it happens. (30:14) And further, Arrow has said since its previous directorship under Sean Kirkpatrick, and Sean said this often, There is a reporting bias that is depicted in this imagery. In other words, the little map that shows the heat map where you see the concentrations of areas where UAP sightings occur, those are not really, and AERO leadership has said this themselves, those are not really places where more UAP si . People should definitely read it. And it's an eye-opener. I mean, it's a book full of government documents collected over several decades, many of which do describe UAP sightings near high-security facilities. (32:09) But there was also analysis more recently done by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies And it asked the question, well, here again, are we seeing evidence of a reporting bias? Are there more UFO sightings over these military facilities? Or is it just that there are military p nd there's this watered down version of that that's provided in this short summary report. One would really have to imagine that That Arrow has a whole lot more data about this and is conservatively worded as what we see in this report. (33:53) I mean, if you or I were shown, I mean, the hundreds of reports that Arrow has and we had, you know, complete access to those and we could go through and we could read. I have to feel like I would probably learn a whole lot more about this phenomenon, but artin, which you brought up a little bit earlier, Micah. But we also have to consider those – Unfortunately, those possibilities as well, because these contractors and these private companies do not have to follow the same restrictions as the government when it comes to filing FOIA reports. (35:49) They don't have to. You can say, give me the information. They can literally tell you no. And there's nothing you can do about it. But when you file your FOIA report to Congress or the government, the g to be enough when it comes to this subject to have the full picture and to truly understand what it all represents. (37:34) And for my own part, You know, I'd rather not allude to what we know and what we don't know. I would say let's look at what's publicly available that we can all look at, what we can all process and discern from and try to piece together a broader, bigger picture that helps us all understand what this phenomena represents. (37:51) Now, I will say this. Yeah, I do, as a jou ct might not only broadcast, but how those sensors detect that. (39:19) If China or Russia knows these things and they say, cool, okay, the U.S., they're out there operating in the Pacific Ocean and on their aircraft carriers, they have those sensors. And we know now what the range is, what kinds of things they're looking for, and that those kinds of sensors were useful in detecting these weird little objects. (39:33) We don't know what those things are. But what we do know is how we can avoid t any forthcoming videos, let's call this a prediction. I can almost assure you that you're going to see more videos coming directly from Arrow. (41:03) in the fairly near future. And by near future, I would say the next maybe four weeks to six months. Now, let me tell you why I know that. Because we already have a history of Arrow doing exactly that. Arrow has been pretty good, in fact, about producing resolution reports where when they have analyzed sometimes what looks like very compelling vid dent that had occurred down there off the Florida Panhandle Coast some time ago. We had this Eglin Air Force Base incident, as some refer to it. The case resolution on that one was unsatisfactory, at very least to me. The images of the object, which Aero said with moderate confidence was most likely a lighting balloon, a commercial lighting balloon. (43:10) did not look like the lighting balloon that they said it was. And I'm not the only person that holds that view. I'll note that skeptic Mick Eglin Air Force Base photographed? What is the object? I don't know. (44:40) I think, however, skeptical analysis and that of UAP proponents gives us a strong indication that the government's determination was pretty unsatisfactory. And yes, that could actually be a genuine unknown. So will there be more videos released? If past is prologue, we can certainly say we've already seen a few and that Aero does pretty reliably issue those from time to time. (45:03) The next time they issue one, and th mundane. So I'm having mixed feelings about that right there. But something that – because we only have like fifteen minutes left. Can you believe that? Time flies. always with you we gotta talk about this right here the gremlin and I'm just going to fix this up just a little bit here it is okay do I how do I zoom this in all right what micah you have better eyeballs than you do you have a better prescription what are we looking at right here So what you're looking at is essentially a infograph b. In very simple layman's terms, what you have is you have multi-sensory detection capabilities, all feeding information back to a central control hub that can be monitored so that you can be observing a wide range of information coming in from an environment and determining in not only, for instance, if a UAP is emitting radio frequencies and all you detect is a radio frequency. (48:53) Let's say, okay, cool, an anomalous radio frequency of unknown origin, that's cool by itself. The use of mul . But that all said, this is what Gremlin is designed to do, multi-sensor detection and monitoring of anomalous phenomena in a rapidly deployable, in other words, basically, a system that can be put on board an aircraft, flown out, (50:31) taken to a location, maybe even actually just used remotely from a moving aircraft or from another kind of a control surface, maybe one at sea on board a sailing vessel, maybe one on board some kind of land-based vehicle. Gremlin is basically designed to be ta ategic locations and continue to collect data from all of those observatories. But again, that information, the initial commissioning data that they have produced, that came out this week, too. So one might argue this has been a huge week and one of the most exciting weeks this entire year for UAP research, not only in terms of government, but also in terms of academic institutions. (52:31) And I'm really glad to see that. that on multiple fronts, this kind of equipment is being implemented in t But I know that it is a portable piece of technology, so I think it's going to be great for military officials to be using in the future. And then for the Galileo project, if they have something similar that's also portable, it would be great if it becomes a commercial piece of equipment where anyone can buy it, kind of like the Skyhub, and collect their own data. (54:20) That would be rather remarkable technology. But I think out of this report, the gremlin might have been one of the biggest ta igm shifting, because sometimes the most important data it's not something that will necessarily be sexy or attractive, at least looking at it in general terms. (56:06) And in science, that's usually how it goes. You think about all of the astrophysical data that we collect about the cosmos. And to the average Joe looking at it on a computer, we might go, okay, there's a bunch of ones and zeros, right? But to an astrophysicist who is trained to understand how that system works and to understand like that, they're not going to be the ones who bring about, you know, the truth about UAP. (57:57) It's not going to come through these kinds of disclosure channels. Now, some of it may, for all you or I know, Christina, maybe that will be how we learn the truth about UFOs. I would argue, though, that Dr. Loeb is probably right. It will be scientists collecting data on this phenomenon just like any other phenomenon. (58:14) And that data may seem really boring to the average person, but again, ditor and also one of the primary science contributors there at TheDebrief.org. So my team and I are always putting out information on a range of topics in the sciences, but we also cover UAP quite a bit. And, you know, as far as time goes, we're always running out of it. (59:50) And that may be one thing to consider. We should really look into time travel. I understand some of my listeners have reached out to you about that because I used to have a time machin