Cabinet Official Denies UFO Claim After Whistleblower Contact

Show Transcript

So that's all of I. And then I told him that I'd been locked away for a month and I'd seen people from another planet. It's just total BS. That is former Secretary of Energy John Harrington speaking on camera for the first time about the claim that he once told a young family friend that aliens are real.

Hey, UFOlogers, I'm Christina Gomez, and this is your UFO News Update. For years, Hollywood writer and producer Brent Friedman said that in the summer of 1981, the man next door told him aliens are real. That man later ran the entire Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. Now, John Harrington, who is 87 years old, has sat down with Jesse Michaels on American Alchemy and denied nearly every part of the story.

But the denial doesn't end there. Brent responded on the same episode, and he says Harrington warned him 44 years ago that this exact moment would happen. Harrington also confirmed he has been in contact with David Grush and he made an offer about Congress that could matter more than anything else said in this particular interview. So Brent says Harrington hired him to drive the family cars to Washington and then on his first night there, Brent says Harrington came home with two Secret Service agents and a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

Harrington told him he had been briefed for months. in an underground facility in West Virginia, and cried himself to sleep every night. Then, after a couple of drinks, Brent says this is the conversation that he and Harrington had years ago. I was briefed for months in an underground facility in West Virginia.

And I said, what? What was that like? And he said, well, I used to cry myself to sleep every night. So I said, well, I don't, what, what would make you cry yourself to sleep?

And he goes, Brent, this is not the the world I thought I was bringing my daughters into. And so I pressed him on and he kept saying, I can't talk about that. I can't talk about it. I guess this is like classified information.

And finally, after he'd had a couple of drinks, he said, all right, look, I can tell you this. Aliens are real. They're here and I've seen them. Harrington went through the story piece by piece, and he said he arrived in Washington at the bottom of the ladder with no chained briefcase, no limousine, no security and no secret sites.

He said he never threw a football with Brent and only knew him as a baby next door. He did confirm one part, however. Brent really did drive the family cars to Washington with two friends and the family dog, and he was also paid to do that. So, does this account line up with the record?

Well, Harrington described himself as an intern-level staffer in 1981. The official 1985 White House announcement of his nomination as Energy Secretary lists him as a deputy assistant to the president in presidential personnel from January to September of that year. That doesn't prove anything about aliens, but it does prove that his role was more senior than what he described. Brent said overall that he was disappointed.

He says he lived next door to Harrington from age 6 to 12, and that Harrington taught him football. His mother says Harrington threw her 33rd birthday at his restaurant, and she still has photos of it. But of course, we haven't seen them. And then Brent brought up the end of that 1981 conversation.

I kind of took all of what he said in, and I said to him, How do you know I'm not going to tell other people about this? And he said, well, I'm sure you are. The question is, who's going to believe you? And I didn't really think anything of it at the time.

And he said, and by the way, if you use my name and everything, I'm just going to deny it. When was this exact interaction transpired? 1981, right? Yes.

The summer of 1981 was when I had graduated high school and I was then going to go off to college at UCLA. And what was John Harrington's exact position then? I believe it was something to the effect of he was on special assignment for the president. Brent says that denial was promised in advance.

He also says that the week before his podcast Sound, Light, and Frequency launched, he received a note card from Harrington's desk congratulating him on finally getting his story out. He has not found that postcard since, but he says it is somewhere in the files. He also says he is willing to take a polygraph test as well. If that card does surface, would it change how you see Harrington's denial?

Or would a note of congratulations prove nothing about what was said on that veranda? Now on to David Grush, because Brent asked a simple question. If Harrington knows nothing, why would Grush want to speak with Harrington? He said to me, the gist of it was, we've identified John Harrington as one, as a very important person who has oral history of a period where a bunch of documentation does not exist anymore.

I don't mean to malign your next guest. Is it David Gersh? David Greif? Yeah.

Yeah, what about him? So I turned on his testimony to the Senate and listened very carefully to it. He loved it. He was in the center of attention and he's telling them all this stuff and not telling them anything.

And then afterwards, he's interviewed on the street by about 20 reporters and he's doing the same thing and he's loving it and he's the center of attention. Harrington and Luis Elizondo both mispronounced David Grush's last name. Was that a small sign of how they view him or just a slip that anyone could make? Harrington confirmed that Grush wrote him a two-page letter and that he spoke to him on the phone.

He says he told Grush he had nothing to add, and he also criticized Grush's testimony to Congress, saying it gave very little detail, and he says he wants Grush to name exactly what he saw and who he spoke with. If you enjoy updates like this, take a second to subscribe so you do not miss tomorrow's update. Then Jesse Michaels asked whether Harrington would speak to Congress in a closed setting, possibly alongside Grush, and Harrington said yes. He said he has already offered and that he has testified in restricted sessions before on Energy Department secrecy issues.

Earlier this year, American Alchemy reported that official attempts to get Harrington to testify had gone unanswered. Now on camera, a former cabinet secretary says he would sit in a closed room with Congress on this subject. Harrington also did not dismiss everything on the Navy videos. He said this.

I am not blind to what I see on television with these Navy gun cameras that are picking up off San Diego. The thing... traveling at warp speed, diving into the ocean. I frankly, Jesse, I don't know what they are.

I don't know where they're coming from. My guess is the amount of power to send somebody with that kind of propulsion is not within our capability. And it's not within the capability of any country that I know of. He also described running into secrecy himself.

A huge line item in his budget turned out to be the F-117 stealth fighter, and he was told he didn't need to know about it until he insisted. On the claim of a CIA-run crash retrieval program, Harrington pointed to Reagan CIA Director Bill Casey, who sat next to him at the cabinet table for five years. Bill Casey was President Reagan's CIA director, and he and I sat next to each other at the cabinet table for five years and passed notes back and forth, and we played golf every Wednesday. afternoon if we weren't busy.

We discussed all this stuff. We used to build the satellites for the CIA and the National Laboratories. This subject never came up. And if it was on Bill's agenda, he would have talked to me about it.

Near the end, Jesse asked Brent whether 1981 could have been a test of what he would do with that information. He pointed to Rolf Mowat Larson, who led the intelligence at the Department of Energy in the 2000s. Moat Larson described a prank briefing given to new senior appointees. As part of the hazing, officials told newcomers that the government really did have aliens.

They said two beings were recovered at Roswell, one injured and one not, and that alien technology came out of the crash. The briefing used real program codenames and even props on tables, and it went on until someone in the room started laughing. Now that leaves three possibilities. Harrington says the conversation never happened.

Brent says it happened and left a man he looked up to to be visibly shaken or it was some kind of test. Though no one involved has said so thus far. Brent is searching for that card and Harrington says he will talk to Congress. Both say a setting under oath is where this all belongs.

If Congress could bring in only one of them to testify, Harrington or Brent, who would you want in that room first, and what would you ask? The origin of this story starts with Brent Friedman and Bryce Zabel, and what they say happened at the Dark Skies premiere party in 1996. To see my breakdown, watch this video next. Be safe, and remember, keep your eyes on the skies.