Larry Hancock - Galactic Macro Series - October 18th, 2023

[00:00:07] Larry

Whatever they are, the UAPs have the same capabilities now, 60 years later, 70 years later, that they had then and our aircraft have no more chance of staying with them or following them now than we did then. So, relatively speaking, their technology hasn’t improved, but it still is far ahead of us as it was back then. And ours are avonta technology. The good news is, we can take better pictures and infrared or video, that sort of thing. All we can really do is capture a better picture of something that we still can’t catch.

[00:00:53] Intro

Imagine spending an hour with the world’s greatest traders. Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes and their failures. Imagine no more. Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers in the world so you can take your manager due diligence or investment career to the next level.

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Here’s your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kaastrup-Larsen.

[00:01:48] Niels

Welcome and welcome back to another conversation in our collection of podcast series that focuses on markets and investing from a number of different and fascinating perspectives. The father of quantum physics, Max Planck, famously said when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. For anyone that has made a long-term living for markets, that quote may resonate.

You see, the investment and trading world is filled with big personalities that are often battling out dogmatic perspectives. It is also filled with an abundance of brilliant and curious minds that are open to expanding their horizons. In our Galactic Macro series, we seek to open the boundaries of what is possible. We do this by drawing from experts working at the bleeding edge of technology, science, environment, global conflict, exopolitics, exploration of outer space and inner space, and consciousness.

A core theme that spans many of the conversations involves the growing government revelations regarding non-human intelligence from advanced civilizations. This core theme is fundamentally important because it weaves every other topic into its fold. You’ll likely have more questions than answers after tuning into this series, but it’s guaranteed that you would have changed the way you look at things, and thus, the things you look at will also have changed. With that, please enjoy today’s episode hosted by David Dorr.

[00:03:22] David

Niels, thank you for the introduction. Larry Hancock, pleasure to have you on the show with us today. How are you doing?

[00:03:28] Larry

I’m doing fine. Happy to be here.

[00:03:31] David

I appreciate it. Well, this is going to be an exciting conversation and I think that we’re going to be delighted to have you because you’re going to help our audience fill in, I think, some gaps around the topic of UAPs as well as how some of the functions of our government in the classified world work. Before we dive into those fun topics, Larry, why don’t you share just briefly a little bit about your background with our audience so they can contextualize the information that you’re going to be sharing with us today.

[00:04:04] Larry

Sure. I’ve been involved with this subject since about 1965. I was a member of a couple of the early groups APRO and NICAP. So I’ve been involved with the topic, following the literature, following the course. I did a few reports myself back in those days, and then went off to college, the Air Force, majored in Anthropology and History, had a career in communications technology, personal computers, and then finally after retirement moved back into writing and writing about history, primarily history related to the military, the Cold War, Cold War history, national security subjects, and also became quite involved in document collection.

I’m board member of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which has about 2 million documents online relating to Cold War history. So people generally refer to me as a document geek. With that experience in finding and reading documents, I’ve written a number of books, including Unidentified: The National Intelligence Problem of UFOs, which gave me kind of a relaunch into the whole subject of UFOs, UAPs in contemporary time by kind of restarting, going back through everything that’s become available in terms of the documents and files and contemporary information on the subject. So that’s my background.

[00:05:37] David

That’s amazing and the perfect background for today’s subject. So I was fortunate enough to kind of seek you out, Larry, as somebody that’s also been around the subject for a long time. There are two points of the conversation that I’ve noticed that have come up amongst colleagues, friends, family members, and I think you’ll be able to help shed a lot of light on this. When it comes to the subject of UAP or UFOs as formerly known, one of the first things that I hear pushback on is people tell me, well, there’s no way there’s really deep secrets like this in the United States. That’s the first thing.

The second piece is that, well, if there’s UFOs, where’s the evidence? Where’s the information? I always respond to both those things as one, the United States is probably better at keeping secrets than you might imagine, and two, there’s actually a lot of really, really good data that’s compelling and worth examining. These are the things that I want to get into with you today. Let’s start with the intelligence community and how things work.

When you and I spoke the other day, one of the comments that you made that I thought was so important, for folks that have watched recent hearings on UAP and the David Grusch testimony, there was a lot of conversation from House members. Well, let’s just throw this guy in a skiff and let’s get that classified information. It doesn’t really work like that, right? Maybe you can explain to the audience a little bit about how classified programs actually work in the United States.

[00:07:16] Larry

In the real world, classification, as you would imagine, has to do with reports, memorandum, investigative reports. One of the things that we saw throughout the history, decade’s worth of history with the subject of UFOs then was the fact that there were two storylines in play. One was the storyline that you were going to get from the public affairs office of the Air Force.

The other was the documents that were being collected inside air technical intelligence, air intelligence. Those were not public documents. Those were confidential at best. Some of them, they range up through classification levels depending upon what the subject is and depending on how the information is collected. A lot of people don’t realize that sometimes it’s not the content that is actually classified, it’s the collections device. In other words, what instrument were you using, which reveals a lot about what you can collect.

So a lot of what is protected is your ability to collect information, not what you got. So lots of things are routinely classified and they’re called compartmentalized sourcing, as to the device. Did I get it from a radar site? Did I get it from a satellite? So that’s very much protected. But the short answer is over the period of time, there was a body of reports that were collected inside the Air Force and in air intelligence and inside the UFO project office that were not visible to the public for decades.

Ultimately, we did get those but only after the entire project was closed down and then they were made available in microfiche like, okay, here’s 20,000 microfiche forms. If anybody ever saw a microfiche reader, that should discourage you right there, little pieces of plastic. But researchers went through the effort of actually getting all of those, reading them, collecting them, making available in the database. So quite frankly, this subject actually could not even be studied until four or five decades after all that work had been done where we could see the data.

Occasionally, the Air Force had allowed a magazine to come in and do an article, but to see a very limited number of files and obviously in a very controlled manner. One of the things that we learned since then that the Air Force went through phases, and it was the body that was chartered with this. FBI did some investigations, Navy did some investigations, but the Air Force had the overall responsibility. We found that what happened in 1952, just kind of fascinating, the Air Force was convinced these things were real.

As early as 1947, we see Air Force Intelligence reports that say they’re real, they’re foreign and advanced technology. We don’t know what they are, we suspect they must be Russian because we know they’re not us. The Air Force remained convinced that they were real, and that’s a consensus story. In 1952, there were a huge number of incidents on the East Coast and in Washington, DC in particular that got them a huge amount of press coverage.

The president became so concerned about it that he called the Air Force in. The Air Force couldn’t give him an answer as to what was going on. Actually, they were a little embarrassed because they couldn’t even put interceptors over Washington, DC for an hour. It’s not something you want to talk about at the height of the Cold War. No, boss, we didn’t even get our aircraft there. So the president said, well, I’m going to call somebody else. Calls the CIA. Says, okay, I’m not happy with the Air Force explanation, you guys look at it.

CIA technical intelligence looked at it, started to laugh it off, then got into these same files I’m talking about and actually generated a memo from the director of the CIA saying, yeah, we and the Air Force think that this really needs to go all the way up to the National Security Council because they’re real, and in particular, there’s activity occurring over our atomic warfare complex in the southwest. They were very concerned about it.

It got kicked up to an NSC sub-panel, and basically, the sub-panel said, we will only consider, CIA and Air Force, what you want to tell us if you can convene a scientific panel that will support you so that we have somebody behind us. This is too hot. We need somebody else to weigh in on this to say you’re not making a mistake, then we’ll look at it. The panel was convened. The net result of the panel being convened was there was a decision to treat this whole subject from a psychological warfare standpoint and move it into a communications domain. They even called in Walt Disney.

Essentially, their concern was, yeah, there’s something real going on that we don’t understand. But if we don’t quash this, there will be so many reports that it will be a national defense problem. So we have got to downplay it. A long-winded answer to your thing is confidential documents are created and then access is controlled. Generally speaking, it takes something like 40 years to gain access to a normal document declassification process, or unless Congress does something special in the way of convening a committee that has authority to release documents for its own study or for the public.

[00:13:27] David

Is it fair to say, Larry, that at this point, we do have because of that time delay, and you’ve been in this for decades yourself, that one of the things that we’ve learned from information that is in hand and has been validated decades later is that effectively, the United States Air Force was saying one thing, but doing another. Meaning they were telling the public, hey, don’t worry, really nothing to see here, and yet behind the scenes, we now have records that have come out that are showing that they were absolutely, as you’re saying, deeply concerned and that this was something that should rise to the highest level of security conversations for the United States. Is that accurate?

[00:14:12] Larry

That is absolutely accurate. In fact, one of the fun things I do in the book is to actually give some of those statements side by side, what air intelligence were saying and what Air Force public relations were saying at the same time. There’s a total disconnect. This isn’t surprising in terms of anything that’s related to national defense. But what kind of troubles me, at this late date and time, is this week, NASA, there was a statement from NASA about their panel that’s been convened and studying it, and part of their statement was that one of the things they lack is vetted technical observations historically. That’s why we need new observations.

What troubles me is that I’m not sure that they have taken a look at actually what exists in the files because we do have numerous vetted technical observations from radar sites, actually radar video recordings of movements of UAPs, One of the most significant, and that actually shows that (I mentioned that this thing was studied not just by the Air Force, but the FBI generated reports of things going on at atomic weapons sites), the army was at an installation right beside one of the first national atomic weapons stockpiles and they started seeing a wave of UFOs down at ground level, very low altitudes. It troubled them.

They reported it to the FBI, they reported it to the Air Force. They got so little response from the Air Force that they deployed their own observation teams with theta lights, which are optical instruments. These people are trained to do measurements, to do calculations. Many of them were artillery spotters. They collected this whole body of information recording these things moving at tremendous accelerations, stopping instantaneously.

They recorded all of that and reported it to the Air Force, who actually didn’t study it. But we have all of those original army recordings. They’re still on file and we can see them. That is vetted, curated, technical information that was collected back in 1948 that nobody seems to want to look at.

[00:16:42] David

Interesting. For those listening, we’re recording today and this will be published in a couple of weeks. But today is September 15th, and for those listening that may not be familiar, yesterday, September 14th, NASA had their live hearing and their UAP report, which was pretty much a dud. It was embarrassing, really. They didn’t do anything meaningful and kind of playing dumb to your point, but there is information, there is good data there.

This is a good segue, Larry, into one of the areas where you spend a lot of time. This is a huge area of fascination and intrigue for me is the relationship between atomic laboratories, weapon sites, testing sites, and UAP activity. I think people are more recently starting to hear about this again from the Grusch hearings, and I think there may be some confusion that this was just recent type activity or in recent times. I think what you’re going to share with us is that this has been going on for a while. Why don’t you tell us? Let’s crack into that topic, UAPs and nuclear-related things.

[00:17:57] Larry

Sure. That is one that’s a very good point because even in the recent congressional hearings, and when you talk to people, you would get the impression that the atomic weapons connection goes back to maybe 1975 and that’s it. Some people talk about events at ICBM bases, but they don’t seem to go further back in history. Actually, the history and the real necessarily, the real concern started as early as 1947, 1948 when the real anomalous activity began over most of the radioactive materials plants.

The interesting thing is when you study it, which we have, there’s a sequence. First, it starts at the radiation manufacturing plants, weapons grade uranium and plutonium, then it goes to the engineering and assembly centers, then it goes to the stockpiles, and it’s sequential. There are bursts of activity over time. Whatever this is, whatever is driving the activity actually understands atomic weapons well enough to track the development of the whole complex.

[00:19:13] David

Yeah. I want to pause on that for a second, Larry, because what you’re revealing is almost a bombshell in its own right. I didn’t know this until hearing this from you. I was under the impression, from the stories from George Knapp’s reporting with pulling information out of out of Russia, I had this concept that they’re flying over armed nuclear weapons, and your research is saying no, that whatever is monitoring us has a much more in-depth understanding and it’s the process, it’s every stage of that. Is that correct?

[00:19:46] Larry

Absolutely. It’s every stage from development and design to stockpiling. One of the interesting things, of course, is that the early days, there weren’t thousands of weapons or ten thousands of weapons, there were dozens of weapons and that they were in one place, in one place only for a period of a couple of years. The Atomic Energy Commission had control, essentially, there were civilian control over the weapons, and they were all at a storage site outside Sandia Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You won’t hear anybody really talk about that.

But there’s a whole series of activities that goes on around Sandia Base, the Manzano storage site, that ranges all the way from overflights to actually ground level. You should be nervous when the UAP is hovering 10 feet over the atomic weapons stock, or if you’re not nervous, you should be really curious. The weapons were moved down and started to be deployed at different storage sites. What I talked about earlier was Killeen base, in Texas, which was one of the first ones of those where the army got involved. But then, the interesting thing is there’s a gap in the deployment. After we had maybe half a dozen storage sites around the nation, then the weapons were deployed to dozens of Strategic Air Command bases.

The interesting thing is, we don’t see the same pattern at all those Strategic Air Command bases. It just all fades away. There are time limited burst of activity, then they fade away, and then they show up again. The place they show up again, as soon as we start to emplace intercontinental ballistic missiles, they’re back. That’s in the early ’60s, and then they stop, kind of like, okay, fine, and then they come back again. But when they come back, they only come back at a very select series of ICBM bases that have had missiles before.

But when we do something special, when we put multiple reentry vehicle warheads on those ICBMs so that rather than carrying one H-bomb, they can carry 10 H-bombs, there’s a point in time where essentially, our ability to push the button and generate in a nuclear strike increased exponentially because of those warheads. That’s when we see another burst of activity in the mid ’70s, which is what everybody talks about but they don’t go any back further in time than that, so they don’t see the big picture.

[00:22:38] David

It seems that their interest, very much as I would imagine our own, like our own government if we were monitoring the Russians and the Chinese, or maybe this is a little bit more narrow, it’s in the development phases. It’s like, okay, great, you guys develop missiles, like we’re really interested in that. Now that you’re dispersing them, whatever. Oh, now you’ve developed a new missile or something that’s a lot more dangerous, we’re interested in that. Is that kind of what you’re seeing?

[00:23:07] Larry

We have an intentions team that has looked into this with some pretty rigorous methodology and that’s what we see. It’s a survey, but it’s not a total survey of our military capability. It’s as if it were a survey of our atomic warfighting capability that is monitored as it changes over time. Like what type of device can you build? Can you build an A-bomb? Can you build an H-bomb? Okay. How many? Did you build in quantity or did you deploy them out all over the place or you kind of keeping control over them?

So what they’re really looking at is our strategic atomic weapons capability. In between, it’s not an assessment of the total military capability of the nation, it’s what’s going on with strategic atomic weaponry.

[00:24:07] David

So let’s do this. We’re going to take one step back and then we’re going to jump back to this because I love talking to scientists and people at the cutting edge of this like yourself, and your leadership in this has just been amazing, is I like that you guys are looking at the data and you’re saying, hey, what do we know for a fact? Like, let’s take real data here and then maybe build some hypothesis off of that. Before we do that, because I’m very keen to hear your thesis as to what you think may be going on. I want you to actually speculate a little bit, but before we do that, I know a lot of people listening will be like, “Oh, well, that just sounds like the Russians and Chinese spying on us.”

Let’s take a step back and talk about maybe the physics, the defying of physics, as at least we currently understand them, of UAP because you guys have done a lot of work on that stuff as well. I think a lot of people maybe presume or people that don’t believe in it are like, oh, well, maybe it can be explained away as something else. But there’s now a lot of sensor data that is captured and for a long time on the physics.

Maybe you can give us some examples of like, what do we know or what do we think we know at least about the physical capabilities?

[00:25:21] Larry

Which is a fascinating subject, because we do have the air intelligence studies from as early as 1947 and 1948. These are serious people. As something that’s being seen, the assumption is that it’s reconnaissance, it could be the Russians. In fact, almost all the reports initially are written as if it probably is the Russians. The early speculation was that the Russians had some advanced air technology that they had gotten from the Germans at the end of World War Two. Jets, the Germans were flying reconnaissance jets so there’s a good possibility. That’s the first thing that they looked into was could there be advanced jet aircraft that have some of these capabilities?

The interesting thing is that they even went to Germany, and they went to Russian sources intelligence and it’s like, could this be? Do they have rockets or missiles? The answer was no. Which really was a problem, because when you read the memos, you can see that the air intelligence staff think that they’ve got it. There is an easy answer to this and when it turns out not to be an easy answer, the whole thing changes.

Interestingly enough, from a historical standpoint, at that point in time, the Air Force gets rid of the entire first set of investigators which were operating under a project called Sign and replaces them with another set under a project called Grudge. Now, maybe that doesn’t mean anything, but it sure sounds like it does. In any event, to answer your question, even back in those earliest days, we knew that whatever was being observed was operating at an extreme speed, even supersonic speeds, even then.

We knew that it had the ability to accelerate faster than any of our aircraft. Matter of fact, it would be recorded that it could accelerate faster than you could see, literally speed of a bullet. This thing disappears from view when it wants to move. By the way, it can hover. So it can go from hovering, station keeping, to some max speed so high that you can’t see it instantaneously, we can’t catch it. So the interesting thing is that there’s a profile there of a device that can hover, it can station keep in position, it can accelerate under an extreme G-load, an extreme G-load that certainly no human could bear. We’re talking about hundreds of G’s.

The interesting part of that is there’s an implication there not just for the G-loading on a potential occupant but on the structure itself. We know of no physical structure, no composition of any size let’s say larger than a bullet that can do that and stay intact. So there’s a material science issue there as well. There’s the issue of the fact that there is no breaking of the sound barrier, there is no audible shockwave. So whatever this device, it can transition through the air as if the air is not a barrier at all. So even from the first, you could spell out a technology that we didn’t have, that we knew the Russians didn’t have, that the Germans hadn’t had, that nobody had.

The fascinating thing is that technology is the same thing that we see in this century. Whatever they are, the UAPs have the same capabilities now 60 years later, 70 years later that they had then, and our aircraft have no more chance of staying with them or following them now than we did then. So relatively speaking, their technology hasn’t improved, but it’s still as far ahead of us as it was back then. And ours are avanta technology. The good news is we can take better pictures in infrared or video, that sort of thing. All we can really do is capture a better picture of something that we still can’t catch.

[00:29:41] David

Are there any good theories, there’s been the allegations, both past and present, of crash retrieval programs and reverse engineering programs from the United States and likely other governments. I think one of the things that befuddles a lot of people new to the subject is, well, why are these things crashing? If they’re so advanced, why are they crashing? Is that a result of that it’s just a numbers game? If you have just millions of visitors, if you have enough traffic, you’re going to have some traffic accidents.

Are they gifts? Are they leaving us some of this technology to reverse engineer? Or have we learned to maybe shoot some of them or disable some of them in the air? What are your views? What do we know about any of those things?

[00:30:32] Larry

The crash retrievals were really not a thing I would say until the ’90s. There was no discussion. Are there are a lot of documents about crashes? Yeah, but they were all hoaxes. So yeah, things did crash. Actually, the FBI got so fed up with it that they told the Air Force they weren’t going to go look at any more of them because they were just people playing games with them.

The Air Force said, well, okay, and the Air Force doesn’t have a body of reports from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ‘80s of crashes. That is something new. We have to accept the fact that we didn’t learn about crashes from anybody until people started talking about it 50, 60 years later. I have to tell you as at least a pseudo-historian, that’s a really dangerous thing. If you don’t know first-day evidence, nothing in the records, if people weren’t reporting it back then and suddenly people start talking about it. Unfortunately, Roswell was the real trigger for that.

Now even Kevin Randle, who did amazing work in investigating will tell you that a lot of the people that came forth to talk to them where they were more sensational were hoaxes, they really were. Even his take on Roswell is that something did come down that we don’t know about. Could it have been a part of a secret research project? Actually, that’s another story in itself in regard to sonar buoys and high-level atmospheric balloons in any event.

But the point is, he’s come down to, even after having written books on hundreds of crashes of this, is the only one he’s still comfortable with. I think the people that really have dedicated themselves are really not comfortable with the crash retrieval thing. It doesn’t pan out. What has panned out is there are a few instances of materials, not artifacts or pieces, but let’s say metal residue that have been recovered, that have been analyzed, and that do offer some spectral analysis that show that they’re not standard manufactured materials. Don’t know. Maybe something did crash in the ocean.

One of the most solid examples comes from something that might have crashed in the ocean and magnesium was recovered from it. But that’s an area that gets a lot of talk. One of the things though, it could be resolved right now, because I’m sure you’ve seen it. AARO, after the Grusch and the whistleblower committee hearings and everything, has actually published a statement on their website, an official government statement, saying that as of right now, legislation from Congress has waived any requirement for classification, any confidentiality agreement.

Anybody that claims to have handled, seen, touched, a crashed object, they’re not bound. Whatever they thought might have bound them, they go to AARO right now, and AARO will interview them. The thing is, it’s no longer a classifications issue. So they waived all that. I have never seen language like this in any government document before, waiving that. So someone is taking the claims very seriously, let’s put it that way. If they’re real, then they should be put to bed by AARO because they have the authority to waive anything.

[00:34:24] David

Yes. With the UAP Disclosure Act, which is just a fascinating read, anybody listening that has not actually taken the time and read through the legislation or the proposed legislation, it’s just fascinating what’s in there. One of the pieces that always jumps out at me re-reviewing it, I’ve read it several times now, is the imminent domain language, which I find very interesting. Also, I imagine, is there any historical precedents for something so unusual? Not that I’m familiar.

[00:34:58] Larry

There is not. I’m in another subject right now where a foundation I’m associated with, we’re actually suing the National Archives over some document releases. I can tell you, there’s never language like this before. I wish we had language like this in other areas of history. It is sensational. I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I first read it. It’s like you guys finally did what? One other remark on the crash retrieval thing, one of the things that really drove that, and I hate to say this is there was a book published by an Air Force General named Philip Corso which I think was the stimulus for much of this.

The problem is, once you start dialogues like this going, they’re self-perpetuating. He made a lot of claims about technology release, fiber optics, semiconductor materials. All of those have been investigated at great length and there’s a real-world history behind all of them. We don’t know what compelled him to say what he said, what we know is it’s just not true. So that has driven this.

The other thing that’s driven this, unfortunately, is back in the early days, there were some cover stories that the CIA did plant for various things, whether they were the U-2, the SR-71, DARPA projects. Cover stories have been planted at different points in time that have fed this as well. It’s disinformation and that’s just the reality of what happens. So once you mix it all together, I wish AARO luck and I’m glad they have that legislation.

[00:36:48] David

Yeah. I tell people, I’ve kind of created a working model for beginners, and this is how we visualize it. What I say is, look, what makes this subject really complicated, you could divide it into maybe four general buckets. Here’s how we do it. Feel free to opine on this. You probably have a better working mental model on this than we do. But we look at it as in four categories. One, you have the hoaxes, of which they are numerous, they’ve always been around, they get more sophisticated with CGI and other stuff.

Second, we know now for a fact because of your work and the archives and stuff like that, that there were also legitimate disinformation campaigns. Then you have what we do know, the science, the data, the radar data, like, hey, something’s going on. Then you have when you get into a lot of this too is you have some of the complexities around, just for lack of a better term, the phenomenon. It’s strange. It’s not just these objects, its effects on people, maybe the connection between consciousness, many have thought that.

It’s a little bit abstract. It’s not so easy to just pin down and say, hey, this is ET from Alpha Centauri visiting us and we’re dealing with an advanced civilization. There are some more complex things I suspect to it. So you have those kind of four categories. To your point, yeah, you put all that together, yeah, good luck. It’s not the easiest domain to just tread into and get a grip of what’s going on. That’s, by the way, one of the reasons we do this show, is that we want to help people kind of parse through some of the noise.

I’m sure you saw the other day we had the Mexican UAP congressional hearing. Everybody thought those bodies were new. Peru has been flashing those bodies around for years now, and it just creates a lot of noise en masse and it’s confusing, and nobody knows what to jump on. Larry, here’s a question for you. Tell me if this is accurate or not. These are things that I’ve heard and I understood, but I’m not sure that it’s accurate and you would know.

Is it true that it’s not just that we have better quality sensors? What I’ve heard is over the last couple of years, there’s been an exponential increase in, let’s say, sightings, observable data. What I heard, and again, I’m not sure if this is true, what I heard is that is not just because we’ve got better data systems, better radar systems or anything else. It’s that we’re going through a period of increased encounters; we are seeing more stuff, and not just because we’ve got better things to pick them up. Is that correct? I wanted to just kind of take the opportunity to speak to you as an expert to fact-check that.

[00:37:57] Larry

That is true with a condition. What’s happening is there is no sign. Of course, one of the problems is we no longer have access to all the reporting. Matter of fact, it’s unclear whether there was any reporting going on two years ago of anything other than an aircraft safety incident. We had no UAP UFO reporting mechanism and we’re still unclear. We’ve seen some forms that have come out of AARO, but what there always was essentially where there were operational reports, operational security reports, situational reports that would go partway up the chain of command.

Let’s say I’m running a carrier group and let’s say something’s coming over my carrier group, whether it’s drones or whatever it might be, I need to generate a situation report if I react to it. That report was going to a certain level of command within the Navy. It was going towards the squadron command, maybe it would get to San Diego. That didn’t mean it got to Navy intelligence. Before at least when the Air Force was in charge, it was taking reports from everybody into air technical intelligence. We did not have, for 40 years afterwards, any collection of that nature.

So in terms of your question, I don’t have any source of vetted legal official reports that I can look at what has happened, quite frankly, as once the Air Force ceased in 1970 taking reports. You could call the FAA to report something, they would send you to a local UFO group, maybe. Or if you call the Air Force, they would say, we’re not doing that anymore, not our problem. So, I can’t do a relative measurement of collections.

Unfortunately, what did happen was with the advent of the online technology we have, databases were set up to collect reports online, text it, enter it, whatever, with no vetting whatsoever. So do I have more reports now? Do I have thousands of thousands of reports now? You bet. Are they any good to me? I’m sorry, no, not really. Not to me, because they’re not investigated and they’re not vetted.

In our studies that we have done, we had to create our own database, vet our own reports in any event, the bottom line. So to answer your question, overall total numbers, you might see numbers, and I think Rand looked at some numbers in a report that comes from NUFORC, which is an online automated reporting system which takes anything from anybody. I’m sorry, that’s…

[00:42:54] David

That’s a huge problem. Yeah, that’s not the source of truth that you’re looking for for data.

[00:42:56] Larry

Now, what has happened, there, only the Navy (we have no idea what homeland was seeing, what the Air Force was seeing), only the Navy started encountering this burst of incidents that you’re talking about in very localized areas over their deployment and test ranges off San Diego, off Norfolk, and it got to be so frequent. The problem was, and many, especially off Norfolk on the East Coast, these weren’t plastic UAPs.

They weren’t doing what we just talked about. Extreme rates of speed, high acceleration. They were just sitting there. Could they be balloons, could they be whatever? But the Navy pilots were concerned enough so they did start getting reported as air traffic issues. That’s the only reason this whole thing really surfaced is that even in the most well-talked-about TicToc case of San Diego, a radar operator initiated the whole thing because there were appearances of UAPs over a task force exercise that were so continual and descending to such a low level the radar operator said, look, we’re going to start exercises in that area, we may run into those things, we’ve got to deal with this. But it wasn’t a national security alert. It was an air safety alert.

So to answer your question, in a couple of areas, it has really gone off the scale, made itself visible, but that’s a very tiny picture of the overall. If somebody asked me, Larry, what about those ICBM sites? Anything happen to them since 1975? No clue. What about the Strategic Air Command bases? What about Whiteman, Missouri where the B-2s are? No clue. We just don’t know. There’s this huge gap, from a national security standpoint, that we can’t see, and I’m not sure that anybody will ever see.

The only way anybody ever retrieved any records on those ICBM incidents in 1975 was to do it for your freedom of information request and get information from the National Military Command Center or from NORAD on individual incidents, and those guys did a fantastic job. But unless you pry it out that way, and the thing is, you can’t request something that you don’t know exists. So they managed to hear about the incidents, anecdotally, and requested information to support them. Great. Got it. What happened since 1975? No clue.

[00:45:46] David

Yeah, that’s such an important point is that we have these gaps, which is worth commenting. Another shout out to the community, investigators and researchers like yourself, that have stitched together this picture for us to even have a clue as to what’s going on even within these gaps. But yes, the gaps are significant. Again, for the audience’s sake, because I think a lot of people, the TicToc video is pretty well-known and it’s kind of gone pop culture mainstream.

But for people that are not as familiar as you and I are with the actual incidents with our naval fleets, I think Kevin Day was the radar operator, and quoting him loosely, he would say it was raining UFOs. They were just streaming out of the sky, like just dropping from 80,000 feet, and they were all over the place. So most people think, oh, maybe it’s TicToc with Fravor and his pilots, but no. As you said, no, this was a continuous issue and there were not just a few, there were a lot of these things.

I’d like to take maybe the last 10 minutes here and get your views. Feel free to speculate, hypothesize. What is this? What are we dealing with? Are we dealing with an advanced civilization? Is it us from the future? What’s your best hypothesis as to what this is all about?

[00:47:24] Larry

Well, one thing that is clear, we’re dealing with an unidentified intelligence, and that’s the way I like to look at it. There is a whole phenomenological aspect to this, an experiential aspect. I think one of the things we haven’t done is to parse this out. It’s just like biology or anything else. You need to study things independently. If you mix everything together, you’re lost. But in terms of these actual devices, things that can reflect radar, we know it’s there if it reflects radar. If it emits heat, we’ve got an infrared signature, we know it’s there.

This is not strictly experiential. It’s not a hologram, it’s got to be there if it bounces radar back to me. In many instances, if it transmits an electronic signal to me, which has occurred. Many of the UAPs actually transmitted known radar frequencies to our own aircraft, like, oh, wait a minute, somebody’s trying to talk to me. Okay. Actually, interestingly enough, in some instances, they actually even sent coded messages to us. The same codes that we used to identify our aircraft, they’re broadcasting us to them, and it’s great.

Here’s one incident that I really love over a radar station in Arizona, it happened twice. This thing comes in at 12,000 miles an hour, stops. Okay, that’s good by itself. Then it gets interrogated with defense radar with IFF, kind of like, okay, I’m sending you a code and if you’ve got a transponder on, you’re going to recognize that and you’re going to give me a code back. The code comes back and says, yeah, I’m a friendly aircraft. Wait a minute. I don’t think you’re a friendly aircraft if you could suddenly come to 12,000 feet. What are you?

The Blue Book explanation ultimately was that it was a balloon. I don’t think so. But to answer your question, again, as far back as 1952, one of the Air Force staff members did a study and said, just based on nothing other than the fact that these devices, these things can interact with each other, they can maneuver with each other, multiple objects maneuver at high speed with each other, these are intelligent. There’s no doubt that intelligence is there. There’s no doubt that unconventional technology is there. I think we have to accept that, and we haven’t accepted that. That has nothing to do with extraterrestrial.

Again, I’m annoyed by NASA when they say we found nothing to indicate extraterrestrial. You should be looking for an unidentified intelligence. Answer the first question. Is there intelligence in play? Is there unconventional technology in play? Then let’s go from there. Forget the extraterrestrial stuff but get back to the basics. So yes, intelligence is there proved over and over again, the fact that these things do not act covertly, there is no sign of them really disguising that they’re there.

The only thing that we’ve seen in long-term patterns, and we’re now studying what was going on in the public domain versus the military domain during the time of our study, is that there was a definite transition from daytime activity to nighttime activity, which is interesting. You go, well, then they’re trying to disguise themselves and be covert. No, they still have on bright lights and they’re still really obvious. That’s not covert. Sorry. No, no, no, no. Clearly, if they wanted not to be seen, they cannot be seen.

So they’re not behaving covertly. Especially in the first years, they were highly visible, highly visible to aircraft. They would approach aircraft closely, they would engage with aircraft, maneuvering around them. So they weren’t covert, they weren’t trying to disguise themselves. They weren’t trying to conceal that technology. Was there a message in that? I can’t say there was a message in that. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t, but there was no attempt at concealment of either the fact that they’re intelligent and responsive or they have really good technology we don’t.

[00:52:15] David

Do you think that in the coming decade, we will have more answers or more questions, as a ratio? For every one answer we get, that opens up 10 questions. It seems like we’re getting closer to perhaps disclosure if that’s what it is. Do you think we speculate that maybe the question-to-answer ratios going to go up a lot? We’re going to just be left with the more we learn, the more questions we’re going to have, which I think is a great thing. I think that’s exciting. But what are your views?

[00:52:54] Larry

Well, I guess what concerns me is that unless you address those two questions, you’re not going to make any progress, and I don’t see those questions being asked. AARO is simply going for identification. One of the problems with what AARO is doing is they’re doing exactly what the Air Force and Blue Book did decade after decade. They’re looking at each incident by itself and trying to explain each incident by itself. If they can explain it, great. Otherwise, it goes into an unidentified bucket.

Now, if it goes into an unidentified bucket, who’s looking at it to answer that question? Is anybody looking any further? Have they turned it over to DARPA? Have they turned it over to MIT? I haven’t seen any discussion of that. They’re just doing buckets. The only question they will answer is, are they drones, are they Chinese, but those aren’t the real UAPs that we’re talking about. So I don’t see getting any answers until the questions are right. They’re not asking the right questions.

What they’re also not doing, so let’s say that there are three questions: Are they intelligent? Is there actually unconventional technology that could be addressed and studied? If those two things are correct, what are their intentions? What are they doing? Which is what my study group is tackling. Certainly, nobody’s tackling intentions. They haven’t tackled the first two yet. There’s no sign that they’re going to, and you can’t do intention study without a full body of history.

As long as you’re looking at one at a time and you don’t have any time dimension to it, you’re never going to get there in terms of intentions. So no, I’m not sanguine that we’re going to get in need better answers. Something you and I talked about earlier, if you simply accepted the fact that they can do what we observe them doing, there should be teams of physicists, either in an academic environment or quite frankly at DARPA. Somebody said, look, if they can do it, we can do it. How do we do it? Is it quantum entanglement? Is it plasma physics?

But you have to accept, as long as you remain in denial, then you’re not going to make any progress. So I would like to say that I see a lot of potential but unless the dialogue changes, I think we’re going to play the same game that we’ve played before. We’ll look at them one at a time, stuff them in an unidentified bucket that nobody really wants to tackle, no more than they did in 1952, and that’s where it will stay.

[00:55:07] David

That makes perfect sense. That’s a great point to leave the audience on. We are very fortunate the audience for this show are a lot of folks like myself. We come from capital markets. There’s a lot of talented fund managers here. So for those of you listening, this is a call to action. There is indisputable evidence that we are dealing with some form of unidentified intelligence. I love that term that you’re using, Larry. So this is a call to action.

We need the private sector to come together, put pressure on the government, put teams of physicists and get them on this, and I think that’s the most important point. We have something fascinating going on, we should not be ignoring it. We should be furthering the pursuit of science and understanding on this.

Larry, thank you so much for your time today. Tremendously grateful for your work, your decades of work on this subject. You are a rare find and none of us would have any comprehension of what’s going on out there if it wasn’t for the fine work that you and your colleagues have done. So thank you very much for that and we’ll certainly have to get you back here on the show again for some follow-up as hopefully more information comes out. Thank you.

[00:55:57] Larry

Thank you. I really enjoyed it, one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time.

[00:56:57] David

Likewise, likewise. Niels, thank you so much. I’ll turn this back over to you.

[00:57:25] Niels

Thank you so much Larry and David for a super insightful and enjoyable conversation. Wow, what can I say? This was certainly the most galactic-oriented episode so far in the series. Larry came across to me as very credible, dismissing a lot of the sensational information that we have been presented with in the last year or two. I think what I was most surprised by was to hear Larry share the fact that since the 1970s, we simply have not been collecting the data and done proper reports on these incidents.

Even with the 280 or so reports over the last year or two in the US, he believes that many of them are simply not credible. That of course does not mean that he doesn’t believe they exist. Since distance seemed to be no issue for them, in Larry’s view, they are most likely interstellar. Perhaps Larry is correct that even after all these years, we’re still asking the wrong questions, and that the starting point really should be, do we think we are dealing with unidentified intelligence? Well, no doubt this topic and story will continue to evolve from here and I think we all need to pay attention to it.

That is it for today. Make sure you go and follow Larry’s and David’s work because as you can tell from today’s conversation, there are many ways to look at things and sometimes we need to change our worldview. We certainly look forward to challenging your worldview as our series continue. From David and me, thanks so much for listening. We look forward to being back with you on the next episode. In the meantime, take care of yourself and take care of each other.

[00:59:13] Ending

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