“We Have Antigravity UFOs!” (ft. Nick Cook)

to date of Aerospace's formerly unknown, yet very deep inquiries into the world of anti-gravity. You're looking at something that is a complete quantum leap. If you're making something that is an some sort of a gravity propulsion system, and you've made a breakthrough, you're not going to put that on decades as a correspondent, and then editor for the prestigious British military publication, Jane's Defence Weekly. Entrusted at the highest levels,

your autobiographical story when it comes to this journey is is really important for people to understand because you don't seem like one of these UFO nut kooks or or even, you know, particularly into very out there stuff kind of a priori. And so, you were a an aviation journalist at Jane's Defense Weekly, right? And then, what got you into aviation in the first place? that's a really good question. So, I did a completely unrelated degree at

university, which was Arabic and Islamic studies. But then I got to the end of university and I realized that the thing I was really interested in was aerospace and engineering. But I didn't want to go and do another 3 years of engineering. Plus, I wasn't particularly great at maths. It was my dad, actually, who was an engineer who said to me, "Why don't you write about it? Why don't you write about aerospace?" That had never occurred to me until that moment. But actually, when he said that, a sort of light bulb went on. And I knew that

that was what I was going to do. So, let's talk about your introduction into aerospace's inquiries into anti-gravity cuz I find that story very interesting. There was an article that showed up on your desk. Is that right? Yeah, there was an article that showed up on my desk. I mean, people would send stuff to us at Jane's. We had a central mail opening facility. So, I never knew who sent it to me. It was but it might have been anonymously sent. And I was about to throw it in the trash um when I started to sort of read it.

And there were these company names that I recognized, you know, they were still familiar like Convair, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Lear. And it said, you know, there's real activity going on, lots of, you know, scientists are involved, and, you know, we anticipate a breakthrough by, you know, the early 1960s, you know, by which time we're all going to be flying around like the Jetsons. And And there's a a George Trimble is the VP of Martin Corporation, pre-Lockheed

merger. Their group called RAAS, which is studying anti-gravity at the time, says this could be done in about the amount of time it took to build the first atom bomb. And so you you get this sort of like, you know, it's around the bend feel. Correct. And and in my mind's eye, I had an image of the bomb program as a kind of progenitor for this, you know, this was the kind of time scales, probably the kind of money that was being going to be thrown at this, and the architecture that would be employed, except that it would seem to it was all, of course,

being talked about talked about openly then. And I I filed it away, yeah, intrigued, but, you know, I've got real stuff to be getting on with. Right. Until I ran into a Lockheed PR exec I knew pretty well. And I said I'd like to interview George Because it just sounded intriguing. And and I I think I'd found out that Trimble was still alive or maybe I'd asked this person to find out if Trimble was

still alive. Anyway, the answer came Trimble didn't want to speak to me, and he was really quite spooked at the idea of speaking to me. And I was politely sort of invited to drop this interest. But, he seemed open to initially speaking to you. And then he goes back and he says, "You know, I don't I don't know who this man is, but I won't speak to him now or ever, and I suggest you drop it." You know, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And so what caused this sort of 180 What caused the 180 flip? I have Do you know, I have no idea. Like I say, it it it could have been Oh my god, there's something really secret there that I I George Trimble, you know, inadvertently stumbled, you know, I sort of re-stumbled over. Um because I was once told never to talk about it. Uh or it could have been the prosaic version, you know, which is it's just this is not something we talk

about in polite company in the 1990s anymore. Okay, so the door gets shut in your face, and of course, as a journalist, that makes you more interested. Yeah. It is that moment when you go, "Okay, well, if I wasn't interested before, I am now." Yeah. And then what What did you encounter next in your anti-gravity journey? What What I did was I did that thing that you and Hal had that very interesting discussion with Eric Weinstein about, which was the

physics piece. Uh-huh. It would only be if it were the case that in fact we have mastered and they're being built by aerospace corporations, then new physics would have to be involved. I I did look at the the the the piece that Eric Weinstein referenced, which was all the sort of physics that was going on at the Um and he did that brilliantly. My understanding is that there were really twin loci of activity. Babson contacted

Louis Witten, who was coming out of Johns Hopkins, and then oddly, a the similarly named individual named Bains and reaches out to Bryce DeWitt and asks whether he will found an institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And then there's a famous gravity conference at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill that sort of kicks a lot of this off. It's a tremendous flurry of activity at a time when anti-gravity was trying to break into

I mean, I couldn't get the trail that far, but I realized that there was there was a you know, big physics trail to this story. Um, but I decided that I was going to pursue it sort of chronologically. And of course, when you're talking about anti-gravity, you're talking about something that is a UFO that looks probably like a flying saucer. So, I start to do my due diligence, which is I look at the first sightings of this kind of shape.

fictitious. He continued, there are objects approximating the shape of a disc of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft. These discs exhibited a number of common characteristics amongst them a metallic or light reflecting surface and absence of any jet and no propulsion sound. And he he talks about some observables of UFOs in in his day, you know, extreme rates of climb, maneuverability, no vapor trails which

would imply a novel form of propulsion. And then he says in the postscript it is within our present knowledge to build these sorts of crafts and then with a range that you know, I think the U-2 spy plane hadn't even come out yet. It was like, you know, seven years or something in the future it would come out. And on on its best day I think a U-2 couldn't meet the range of of the aircraft that he described at subsonic speeds.

they're real but we don't know how they're flying. So coming out of World War II there may have been stuff that going on in World War II that we just don't know about to this day. you have Allied and Axis fighter pilots seeing these sort of seemingly controlled ball lightning things. They call them the Foo Fighters after the Smokey Stover comic strip. And then in 46 you also

um there were lots of references to foo fighters and technologies which are really advanced, you know, like there was one I seem to remember called the German name was Windhund, so uh wind dog. It was for sniffing the air behind left behind bombers in the trail of bombers so that you could follow a bomber stream from detection of its of their exhaust And then as I say, I think in the hunt,

there are a bunch of technologies that you could package together that could go a foo fighter. But, you know, even doing that today would be Mhm. I mean, really challenging But yet, you still have the sightings evidence from Allied pilots, you know, a lot saying that they saw stuff. So, how do you square that circle? Well, you can't. But, you find a lot of interesting circumstantial evidence around the existence possibly of a

secret weapons program under SS officer Hans Kammler called Skoda Works. Yeah, I I don't even think that's circumstantial. I think that there's very good evidence to show that his what was called the Kammler he called the Kammlerstab, which was the uh Kammler's staff. It was basically a special projects office run by SS General Hans Kammler um in the latter part of the war for secret projects. I mean, breakthrough technology. The V2 was put under his control. I think until the hunt, you

know, very little was known about him. So, I thought that that was a trail worth following and it took me to some quite interesting places. officer who oversaw the construction of several concentration camps, including the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was deeply committed to Nazi ideology and became one of Hitler's most trusted officers in the last years of the Third

That is until Kammler turned on Hitler. By 1945, Kammler, who was already in charge of the Nazis' most deadly suite of weapons, had a secret plan to assassinate the Führer. Kammler's colleague and fellow Nazi Albert Speer once said of him, "I discovered him to be a cold, ruthless schemer, a fanatic in pursuit of a goal, and as carefully calculating as he was unscrupulous." As Cook writes, Kammler and his staff presided over the blackest of black Nazi

secret weapons projects in modern Czechoslovakia and Poland. The rumors around Kammler's work take the concept of Wunderwaffe or wonder weapons to the next level. There are six different accounts of his death, you know, which is always suspicious. You right. There was quite a bit of evidence that Kammler had been in negotiations with the Allied Western Allies before the end of the war. And of course, you know, if a deal was the obvious one, which is you get all

on all the technologies that I'd be in charge of and you let me live. Kammler oversaw V-weapons, rockets, remote-control aircraft, atomic energy, jet propulsion, and other similar subjects. And there are many who believe that flying saucer-shaped craft were a part of his mandate as well. Kammler recruited Rudolf Schriever, a German technician who claims to have worked on a disc-shaped craft in Prague that made its first test flight in February of 1945, climbing to 40,000 ft in 3

saucer with what became known as an impeller engine. You know, there are also some sort of pretty arcane stories about things that Schauberger had built that reportedly took off um you know, he was running air through at very high rotation speeds. He was running water through at very high rotation speeds. After leaving his home in Austria abruptly in 1942, the year Kammler secret projects began, Schauberger wrote to his son that he was in Jablonec in Czechoslovakia and that

what I am doing is secret. I was able to go and visit the Schauberger family and they opened up their files, the family files. And in particular, they showed me Viktor's diary from that time. All the places he's going to on a trail he says he can't talk about are all places which I'd already mapped on the in the Kammler These are secret laboratories and outposts and underground facilities that Kammler had built to develop his special

and created kind of time dilation effects on the inside of the bell and you'd put a human in there and, you know, you kind of as if time travel because time would slow on the inside, it would run at a normal pace on the outside, you'd walk out, you'd be a thousand years in the future. Um and you had, reportedly, uh you know, Ernst Gräweitz, who's the head of the SS medical division under which Josef Mengele worked, and a guy named Walter Gerlach, who's, you know, a prominent German physicist who explored gravity a bit before, uh you know,

working maybe on this this sort of exotic creative project. Do you have any reason to believe that this existed? Well, you know, I have to hold my hands up and say that um the the bell or the wasn't really my story. You know, I have to hand and I do hand in the book credit for that to a guy called Igor Witkowski who was is a Polish uh writer historian writes about German secret weapon stuff. I get this

connection with Igor Witkowski who tells me all about the Bell story, which is, you know, it's purportedly about this device that produces some kind of weird time dilation effect and anti-gravitational effect, and I pay this very atmospheric visit with Igor to the site where supposedly it was installed, which was deep in a mine in a place called Waldenburg in what is now southern Poland.

there, of course, there was this thing that's sort of hexagonal thing that he said was evidence of a test rig for some kind of, you know, disc-shaped craft. that this was a very secret installation of some kind. You can still see evidence of very thick cabling, lots of electricity into this place. So, you know, what else could it have been? Um, I mean, over time I've come to

conclude that it was probably a one of several sites that the Germans, the SS in particular, were using to look into nuclear weapon nuclear technology beyond the Heisenberg program, which was the one that everyone knows stopped in, I think it was '42 or '43. You one of your sources later in the 100.0 point does say that, you know, there's some sort of it was called Kronos or something. Was he referring to Die Glocke or was it another program? No, no, I I I I think

gravity particles. These gravitons would theoretically mediate the force of gravity, much like photons mediate electromagnetism. Gladish sites Stanley Deser and Richard Arnoux at Princeton as being actively involved in this research. The pair wrote a paper about these theoretical gravitons in their 1954 winning essay for the Gravity Research Foundation. Yes, there was a gravity essay contest involving the top theoretical physicists in the world at the time. This shows just how bizarrely

in vogue the study of gravity was in the '50s. As mathematician Louis Witten would say, "Antigravity was in the wind." This could mean one of two things. Number one, that it was ubiquitous. It was in the zeitgeist and sort of everywhere. But the second possible meaning is that maybe it was still everywhere, but it was scattered and obfuscated and hard to detect at the same time. "In the wind" is a famous term used by spies and intelligence when they go off grid. In fact, there's a

all of the same top aerospace companies in Glatzer's article that Cook found as being actively involved in gravity research. Martin Corporation, Lear, Convair, Bell. But it also lists top physicists you have all heard of, even Robert J. Oppenheimer, as being actively and deeply involved in anti-gravity research. Finally, it lists six top academic institutions as being the center of gravity research in the US. Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study, and University of North Carolina Chapel

Hill. All doing gravity research at the behest of the CIA's Office of Scientific University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's anti-gravity outpost called the Institute for Field Physics. He was an industrialist obsessed with anti-gravity, and in 1957, he held the Chapel Hill conference to discuss

gravity in the Einsteinian paradigm, kicking off an era from 1957 to 1970 in which general relativity moved from a novel curiosity to the centerpiece of modern physics. of relativity. In this conference, Bahnson convenes many of the top physicists in the world, John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, and Freeman Dyson. And the whole conference was sponsored by Wright Air Field, the center of all UFO rumors, who had its own theoretical

physics anti-gravity division under Syracuse PhD Josh Goldberg. Lewis Witten was at the Chapel Hill conference, too. And where was Lewis Witten working on gravity? At none other than George Trimble's Special Research Division at Martin Corporation, the Research Institute for Advanced Study. He also was studying anti-gravity for Wright Air The reason there was a laboratory at Wright Field was to find out what we were doing and to help us do it, and I got a contract for Wright Field to do

To do gravity, which I did very happily. So, with all of the money and resources funneling into gravity research in the '50s, and all of the time that's elapsed since, are we really supposed to believe that we've made no progress on the topic? Maybe, who knows? But, to frame things slightly differently, if we have made any progress on anti-gravity, but that progress got turned into special access programs or was militarized, it might look like we

haven't made any progress. You'd never be able to tell the difference. Maybe a hint lies with Agnew Bonson of the Institute of Field Physics. The anti-gravity obsessed patron wrote a science fiction book before his untimely death in a plane crash. It was called The Stars Are Too High, and it involves a team of rogue Nazi scientists who were captured and moved to America after the war, culminating in a collaboration to build man-made flying saucers utilizing anti-gravity. The makers of these saucers hatch up a plan to fake an alien

invasion in order to quell tensions between the Russians and the United Towns and Brown, who was, as you've ably, uh, covered in that previous film, an inventor. He had some connection to Lockheed.

about Teller's astonishment and decides to become the sole investor in Brown's Santa Monica-based company, Guidance Technologies. Odlum also happens to be a majority owner of Northrop before its merger with Grumman. While at Guidance Technologies, Brown continues his anti-gravity work on electrostatics. While conducting this work, he's meeting with Bill Lear, former Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, the RAND Corporation, and other titans of aerospace. In the fall of 1967, Brown

force my to sign a contract with my dad, that was open-ended. It was something like 2,500 a month. After your daddy died, it was what kept my mother going. That 2,500. Wow. That was it. And I had to thank I had to thank I had to thank all of them for But there are other conventional, prominent journalists who believe that Brown's work made it into the B-2 stealth bomber. I do cite in the book

Bill Gunston, who was another Jane's editor. And Bill Gunston was kind of like the doyen of aerospace, just a very dogged data guy. And he comes up with this story saying the B-2's performance data does not add up. Yeah, you know, it given the power of its engines, it shouldn't be able to take off. So, what's going on? And then I thought, you know, a lot of us thought, well, for you to say that, Bill, that's weird. That's odd. That's

And and he adds this kind of epithet "Well, you know, I think I'm going to draw the line under this story cuz I don't want to end up in the Tower of London." AKA, you know, a a deep dark prison that once was. And um He says, "I've long been familiar with the rudiments of Towns and Brown's work, but I don't want to reside in the Tower of London, so I will refrain from speaking about leading edges of millions of volts positive followed by trailing edges of millions of volts negative, which is a description, of course, of Towns and Brown's kind of capacitor

was kind of a um it was very skeptical. It was It was just hardheaded. And it was so you had all this epistemic humility like you were a real journalist in a world of quacky woo-woo, you know, looking for meaning types of people. And so I go I go in, you know, reading the book and I'm like, you know, to the Schatzkin book and I'm like, you know, is there is there anything here? And honestly, the stuff that made me higher conviction in Brown is not only these sort of threads we've pieced together in aerospace, but it's like the way he communicated with his family

about a lot of this stuff where it's like, I don't think he's sci-opping You know, that that just fascinated me. And it it felt like it almost begat uh an expanded worldview. I mean, what is what is interesting about Brown, you know, is his involvement supposedly in the Philadelphia experiment, you know, about a disappearing warship and time travel and all of that. And you think where did that come from? And and why? The Philadelphia experiment was a long-rumored supposed Navy experiment in

1943 that turned the USS Eldridge invisible and teleported it from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia. It spawned a book, a movie, and all sorts of crazy time travel and teleportation mythology. I think the lore around this experiment is mostly total quackery and a bit insane. And the experiment likely just involved a high-voltage envelope created around the ship in order to render it undetectable, scrambling its magnetic signature to avoid underwater mines, torpedoes, and radar. That

As we all know, the best kind of disinformation always has a little bit of truth seeded in there somewhere. So, what on earth was going on there? You know, they Yeah, there could have been a breakthrough there. They could They could have been. Yeah. Um people say secrets don't keep that long. Well, you know, I've already talked about a couple I know of that kept for 35 to 40 years. Um the answer is they do keep for a long time. They can do. And particularly when you put in special measures, you know, the disinfo stuff around them.

lab test experiments which were going on in in NASA at the time. NASA had exhibited, weirdly, an interest in anti-gravity in the sort of mid-1990s following reports that a guy He was a Russian called a Yevgeny Podkletnov who'd been working out of the University of Tampere in Finland had noticed a weight loss effect in objects suspended above very rapidly rotating So, NASA wanted to replicate that. And to the best of my knowledge, they were

never able to. That's That's just kind of snowballed. Yeah. Yeah. The final thread here is this woman named Ning Li, who is in uh and she's working on anti-gravity experiments. And you actually interviewed her, right? She's been brought up actually in the context of She's brought up by by Joe Rogan and some other podcasters very recently because she has this bizarre You heard of it, right? There's a story

about this Chinese scientist that was working on anti-gravity and vanished. That's where it comes from, Marshall. Ning Li was a Chinese-American physicist who's experiencing a resurgence of interest in the last few years. Li was born in China in 1943, and at the age of 40 in 1983, she moved to the aerospace mecca, Huntsville, Alabama, joining the University of Huntsville, Alabama's physics department. Along with her colleague, Douglas Torr, Li developed a

theory of gravity manipulation involving the alignment of the rotation of ions into a lattice called a Bose-Einstein condensate that she thought could counteract gravity. And nobody found any mistake in my calculation. Then she tested it, suspending a test mass above a spinning superconductor, and according to her, saw some pretty paradigm-shifting results, publishing that the various masses she tested would lose between 0.5% and 2.1% of their weight across multiple trials.

Achieving weight loss or any gravity reduction on a suspended object through the simple input of alternating current electricity would break our conventional understanding of physics. It would unify the field, finally reconciling electromagnetism and gravity, something Einstein could never do. But people don't believe it. I know. Until I got the experimental result that can show After claiming to achieve these groundbreaking results, Ning Li then makes an interesting move. She leaves

University of Huntsville, Alabama to start her own company, AC Gravity LLC. In fact, Li's physics chair at Huntsville, Larry Smalley, was so convinced by the groundbreaking experimental results Li had shown that he also left the University of Huntsville to join Li at her company. When I heard this story, it rang a bell. I had remembered that name, Larry Smalley. Where had I seen it? Well, he's the same guy on NASA patents filed in 2004 out of the Marshall Space Flight

clearance, and she seems to go silent for 20 years. At the time of her winning that contract, her son George noted a stark change in Li's cheery demeanor and an increased secretiveness and somberness around the house. In 2008, Li was approached at her home by the CCP to continue her work in China. She refused, causing them to retaliate by banning her from the country even to attend her own mother's funeral. If this part of the story is true, Li is an absolute American patriot.

In 2014, Li was tragically hit by a car, the shock of which gave her husband, who was walking with her, a lethal heart attack. And it gave Li brain impairment until her recent death in 2021. I yeah, I I well I met her and I did sit down I interviewed her and this was at a conference in 2003 just outside of Washington DC run by the oversee by the MIT Corporation. And it was looking at I think high

frequency gravitational waves. And um you know, she she was an interesting character because she had been involved in some of those experiments I mentioned earlier about superconductors and weight loss she she chaired one of the sessions. I talked to her afterwards about it all. She had this view that this was science and technology that should be

that could end the world which would obviously be you know, you'd have to be very conscious about how you release something like that. Probably never want to release something like that. At least in our present state of consciousness as humanity. So Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um no, yeah, definitely a dual use aspect to it I'm sure. Um so uh yeah, we have to slightly get ourselves up to point where we're responsible enough to use it responsibly.

aerospace industry who talks to me about, you know, anti-gravity and um it's not crazy, you know, and he even gives me some pointers and says, you know, you should go and check this out and go and check that out. and so I did. Uh one of the pointers he he gave me was to a guy called John Hutchison, who was Canadian inventor in working out of Vancouver, who apparently had been funded, whose anti-gravitational experiments had been funded

by the DoD. Um in fact, by um the guy who headed that up was quite well known in sort of parapsychological circles, uh Colonel John Alexander. And it involved a lot of kind of crazy equipment which John had assembled and put together in one place, which I witnessed when I went over to his home. It was stuffed full of old oscilloscopes and, you know, Van de Graaff generators, called those what? I then spoke to John Alexander about it, who said, "Unfortunately, when I set up all the equipment under laboratory

none of it worked. Couldn't replicate anything. But off camera, um and out of the laboratory, you know, people saw stuff fly across the room, and the big question for John and the team was, was this the equipment that was doing it, or was it somehow John Hutchison doing it with his mind? And John always says it's the equipment, but you know, there are others who became relatively convinced that there was some

psychokinetic kind of influence on it originally hired as a thermodynamicist for Lockheed Martin, before moving over to its most secretive aircraft and weaponry division, Skunk Works. In 1975, he took over Skunk Works from the legendary Kelly Johnson, and would go on to play a vital role in the development of American stealth planes like the

He did this by resuscitating the work of an obscure Russian mathematician in the '60s named Ufimtsev, who developed equations for predicting the reflection of electromagnetic waves. Sounds like a conventionally successful career in aerospace, right? Well, at a UCLA speech in the '90s, towards the end of his life, Ben Rich, the former director of Skunk Works, made some very strange comments alluding to Lockheed Skunk Works having the technology to, quote unquote, take ET home and travel

across various star systems. When asked how exactly that would work, this is what he said. He said, "Well, let me ask you a question. How does ESP work?" And it just threw me back. I thought, "Oh my god." I wasn't expecting a question. I was expecting him to just say something. And he said, I said, "I don't know. All points in space and time are connected?" That's how it works. Turned around, walked away. Later, Ben Rich apparently said this on his deathbed to John Andrews of Testors Motor Corporation. We already have the

couple of times. He talked in parables. He talked in analogies. You know, when we were talking about stealth, and he said there was a time when stealth was deemed to be so challenging, you know, it wasn't an easy thing at all to get an algorithm, basically, a radar-baffling algorithm to fly. he said we considered actually burying the whole thing. I mean, before we even got started.

And burying it so that no one else got the idea. It was a little bit like bomb physics, you know, at the moment when Einstein wrote that letter to Roosevelt saying that a bomb is possible, you then started to get all or a lot a lot of traces of what then had been open discussion about um the atom, splitting the atom, all of began to disappear. And it was was for a while contemplated by the DoD, the few who knew about stealth and the Skunk Works, that they should do the same thing. This thing was so

they wouldn't go ahead with it. They'd do something else. And meanwhile, they'd erase all trace of, you know, talk about radar-baffling algorithms and stuff. There was even a rift, right, between Kelly Johnson, Ben Rich's predecessor, and Ben Rich. Ben Rich was very pro-stealth, but Kelly Johnson was kind of anti-stealth at the end of his career, right? I believe that to be the case. I mean, I I Yeah, I There are lots of sort of book, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, there are Yes, I'm I'm pretty sure that was the case. I mean, there were lots of sort of there were lots of different camps uh for and against stealth, for sure. Um

but in the you know, as as and then as Ben Rich said to me, so in effect, what we would have done, he said, we would have, you know, we would have boxed this thing up. We would have put a kind of date stamp on not to be opened um until, you know, 2050 or whatever. And we would have slid it into a warehouse that a metaphorical warehouse, that would have looked or resembled that which you see at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the ark. I have no idea what he meant by that. Um

gets interested in the whole topic when Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda start talking about celestial ascent practices and Kabbalah. And so, is there is there anything there? Like, is there is there a through Is there a through line with aerospace and like this interest in mind over matter? I mean, James McDonald was a famous patron, obviously was very interested in parapsychology as well. At McDonnell Douglas, they had their own institute. He's very close with Bob John, who's running the pair lab at Princeton. So, is there is there Is there like a reality to this, you know, this interest

at aerospace and consciousness? Well, very aware of the McDonald one that you mentioned. Um and you know, there are declassified papers to show McDonald uh instructing his company or or members of his, you know, officials within his company to go study UFOs to see what you can learn from them. The idea being you transpose that knowledge into

aerospace programs, presumably. I'm not I'm not aware of it at the Skunk Works. I'm not aware of it at anywhere else. The thing that I am aware of is that these companies look at anything they can that can confer possible advantage. Uh whatever that is. And the I mean the other thing that impressed itself upon me and has always impressed itself upon me

uh to explain remote viewing, but still they went ahead and did it anyway and funded it for 18 years or something. Yeah, you told me once that Ben Rich would refer to UFOs as unfunded opportunities. Well, as we've already you know, these these organizations aren't past misleading you. I mean, and why not? I mean, I get it. I don't I'm not aggrieved by the fact that I'm playing a game with them or at least, you know, when I was doing this, I was playing a game with them. I sort of I knew that. It's the

It's a very fine line. It's a double-edged sword. You cannot be seen to be misleading the You Or or or even more than that, don't get caught if you do do it. Because that's self-limiting. You know, after a while, people then begin to question, you know, you, the ethics of your company, you know, what you're up to, etc. So, whatever game is being played is incredibly subtle. I mean, I think Ben Rich was subtle. I mean, he he made some very

enigmatic statements about these things, and particularly, you know, where they classified aircraft butted up against the whole UFO law. Um the unfunded opportunity thing, I mean, you can take that at face value, which is that that he really did see um in everything, or in a lot. And you know, part of the char- the charter of the Skunk Works was

replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird, which remains to this day, I think, the uh jet-powered airplane ever built, even though it retired in And Bill, again, he could became convinced that there was that this aircraft existed. Bill was a kind of Sherlock Holmes of um our world. He would piece together clues that the black world left in

public or hadn't even intended to leave in public. And would follow these clues and build them up. And so between us we went on this kind of hunt for classified aircraft of which there were a few in the '80s and '90s. And so that's sort of that was my grounding in the world of sort of, you know, secret stuff. Doesn't he he kind of documents an oil rig engineer right in the North Sea uh

um purportedly. So the US Geological Survey had detected through its seismic sensors in California, which are there to obviously to monitor for earthquake activity. It had detected um booms, site booms, coming in from the Pacific heading towards Area 51 in Nevada. Uh because that that you could the sensors you could the sensors were positioned in such a way that you could track the progress of, you know, whatever seismic disturbance or sonic disturbance there

was. And all of these um booms were tracking towards Area 51 in Nevada. Um it wasn't the space shuttle cuz the space shuttle wasn't flying that other aircraft were deemed uh not to be responsible for it. So, that was kind of one pointer towards a secret aircraft that was under test um in at Area 51 in the late 1980s.

The oil rig sighting was interesting. Um so, a guy called Chris Gibson who was working on an oil on an oil rig in the North Sea uh somewhere between the UK and Germany, I guess, or Norway. He looks up and he sees this dart-like black arrow-shaped thing um high uh escorted by what he took to be I think it was three or four F-111s, which

uh swing-wing American aircraft which were based in the UK at the time. And it was being tanked in midair by an a Boeing uh tanker uh 135 tanker. you know, we used to get reports like this all the time into Jane's, you know, and I would or Bill would. But uh what made this one credible was that Chris Gibson was a Royal Observer Corps observer. Hm. Uh the Royal

Observer Corps was set up as a sort of monitoring service for the impending war, Second World War. And is incredibly disciplined in its approach to how it observes things. So, Chris Gibson was no ordinary plane spotter. He was a Royal Observer Corps plane spotter. And he drew a sketch of this thing immediately afterwards. Um and I I think he sat on it for a while, but then um eventually sent it to Bill

this thing was due to fly from the US to somewhere in Singapore, China, Hong Kong, wherever, um in 45 minutes. And Bill became convinced that NASP was actually a cover program for Aurora. In that it it sort of channeled through the white world, so sorry to say through the non-classified world, a bunch of technologies like uh scramjets, you know, uh supersonic

combustion ramjets, uh which is what you'd need for a very um sort of supercruising uh aircraft uh like Aurora. Um and also things like um new materials. I mean, uh in hypersonic program um are key because, you know, um basic metals had kind of reached the end of their useful life as an airframe um material. You had to come up with new

new stuff like sort of pyroceramic. And Bill had tracked a lot of this through NASP. NASP then died, went nowhere, supposedly. Um but it was felt, at least by Bill, and I tend to agree with him, that there were spin-offs from that program that went into a classified program. Uh so, while Bill was off doing all of this stuff, um I was uh interviewing various people about yeah, it was mainly day-to-day

bread-and-butter stuff. And one of the series that I wanted to run was about how the Skunk Works, which is the secret sort of development height very high-tech arm of Lockheed Martin, how techniques from these companies, which were then beginning to come out of the just after the end of the Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Um how they were spinning out their

business acumen and sort of how to build things quick and cheaply. Um cuz of course they'd done that in the black. Um uh into the overall corporation. So, there was a business story there. Um and I went to talk to the head of the Skunk Works guy, then head of the Skunk Works. I think he took over after maybe a couple after the famous Ben Rich, who I'd also interviewed. Um but uh

But I was escorted onto um the sort of secret part into the headquarters interviewed Jack Gordon, who said a few weird things like, "I've I've been responsible for 15 real flying uh aircraft in my time. Um but I can Sorry, I can only talk about 12 of them. So, there were these missing three, which, you know, we chit-chatted about for a while, but I didn't get very far. And those aircraft have never, to my knowledge, those have never been revealed, those those missing

And so, then when the interview finished, I was being escorted back out of the building to the waiting car that would take me back to the sanitized part of Skunk Um when I'm passing this org chart, and it's a chart that depicts in graphical form aircraft from the Skunk Works beginnings, which were in 19 some 1940s, um through to the then uh modern day, which was, as I say, mid-90s. So, I

um the aircraft that should have been at the top of that list that was acknowledged, it was either uh the the prototype of the F-22, the or it was Darkstar, which was a drone which got canceled. Um I think it was Darkstar. That's what I should have seen. Instead, what I saw above it was something called Astra. Mhm. And I I turned to my escort and I said, "Oh, that's interesting. What's Astra?" Yeah. And you've never seen anyone bundled out of a building so quickly as I was

uh when I uh when I mentioned that that plane. Now, a few post I I I I talk about that in the Hum Int point, as you say. There were a few postscripts to that which came after I'd written The Hunt. Um one was uh I ran into I just through the job I ran into several bosses of the Skunk Works after Jack Gordon at various trade shows and what have you. Um one of them

I sat down and talked to about that incident. I said, "Are you aware of, you know, that Astra incident and what happened to me?" And he said, "Oh, yeah." He said, "We're all aware of of that incident." Um, we we, uh, you know, there's no one in the Skunk Works who doesn't know what happened that day. I went, "Oh, okay." Showing that there's something there. Well, maybe. Or so I go It would be not memorable if there was nothing there. Yeah, because on the face of it, it was a major fuck-up. I mean, it was a real goof.

And so, I said, "Okay, well, let's talk about that." I said, "That's interesting." So, so what's happened to Astra then? He said, "Oh, it hasn't flown yet." Mhm. I I'm guessing this is could be a decade after this incident happened. So, I said, "Okay." I said, "Are you expecting it to fly anytime soon?" And he said, "Yeah, yeah, it'll make an appearance sometime soon." Okay. So, um, and I go, "Well, thank I said, "Thanks, okay." And he says something enigmatic

like, "Keep watching the skies, you Um, anyway, it hasn't appeared. To the best of my knowledge, it has not appeared, either. Uh, uh, various drone programs have, but I don't think they really account for what I saw or the description of it. So, I think that's the end of the story. And it was only relatively recently. I mean, like a few years back. Um, I keep all my diaries, so I'm flicking back through my diaries, and I come across the day that I went to the Skunk Works and I saw Astra at the top of that And I look at the date,

and it's April the 1st. April Fools' Day. And that makes me think, okay. Okay. I think I understand what was happening that day. Thanks. Which was Yeah. I So, why was I ushered into the headquarters building when no one else Mhm. They knew I was going to be writing a story about this stuff. It was all sanctioned. It was on the record. Mhm. Um and conveniently, as I walk out of the building, I see the org chart, which actually, I'm amazed I missed it on the

way in. Maybe somebody put it up while I was doing the interview. A- Anyway, I see the the org chart. And you could construe it this way, which is that I was meant to see it, and I was meant to write it. And Mhm. you know, there is no There are all kinds of tricks and games and things, you know, that yeah, wittingly, unwittingly, uh we we we get drawn into, you know, as as journalists. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if you know, going back home,

and when I did write about it, and I did put a really big caveat into that story when I wrote about it, saying, "I can't be sure that something like Astra exists, and I don't even know what it is or what it could be if it exists. It could be a stealth aircraft. It could be a reconnaissance aircraft. It could be a hypersonic plane. But I think someone somewhere wanted me to write about it." Interesting. And so, you know, those are the sorts of kind of breadcrumbs that you get fed, and of course, you've got to try and keep a watch watchful eye out.

This was after you had been digging up with Bill Sweetman a lot of the kind of facts around the Aurora, and you'd been on record. So so that would make sense. We published a a big story about Aurora in Jane's Defence Weekly. Okay. Well, then they could have been trying to trick you. Could have been. Because, you know, if you're already on their radar, why have you in the, you know, next to the crown jewels at the, you know, the the center of everything in Palmdale? That's interesting. But, the Aurora, there's just some I mean, there's the evidence we just discussed, and then there's also, you know, I think, uh British Ministry of Defence

documents from the early '90s talking about uh hypersonic craft with kind of novel propulsion from the US. There's a 1968, or sorry, 1986 budget, uh where it shows up as a line item for I think it like $2 billion or something and Ben Rich has to kind of explain that away. Yeah. So do you I mean do you have like a base case of you know are these are these crafts real or not or you know obviously you have to think probabilistically but Yeah. I mean as you say there are very good

points as to say it existed not least of which it appeared a pretty firm conviction by the UK MOD that it existed. And that appearances of this aircraft over the UK there were rumors it was based out of the UK for a while at a remote Scottish base called RAF Um so there was that side of things. I've interviewed I mean I had a fascinating talk with an RAF pilot

that I ran into once who said that he had talked to pilots who had encountered the Aurora in the North Sea I mean over the North And actually uh if that was the case a Tornado RAF Tornado with swing wings actually looks an awful lot like an F-111. Um and despite the skills of Chris Gibson he could have mistaken a Tornado

swing wing Tornado for a swing wing F-111. So the I've had it you know I'm pretty good authority from people you know qualified RAF military pilots oh and sworn to secrecy as well on that that the thing was real. Um I sort of but just on a sort of gut level sort of instinct thing I think that the the the slam dunk for me was an interview I did which I also talk about in Hunt for the Skinwalker Point

with a guy called General George Moina who was the US Air Force's head of research and development until his in 1998. I was lucky in that I got to interview him on the day of his retirement. So, I think it was in June or July Um and the the subject was black programs. So, that was the official on the record. That's what we were going to talk about. Uh discussion. Uh I filmed it for a

documentary that I did uh at the time called Billion Dollar Secret. I bring up all of these sightings, you know, with him of weird craft that have been spotted in Colorado and Nevada and I said, "Look, you know, some of these things are silent, for heaven's sake. You know, they hover over witnesses. They make no And I'm talking about some pretty grounded witnesses here. You know, there are ranchers who they know the land. They might not know too much about aircraft, but they have a good sense of

what's going on in their and over their territory. Um and and I and so we talked a little bit about that and he was kind of joking about UFO sightings over, you know, Utah, Cali- Colorado and Nevada. And then we got on the subject of Aurora and I said, "Look, um you know, you're retiring today. What can you say about the existence of this Mark V hypersonic aircraft?" And he said, "Well, I'll leave you with

a sort of bit of a puzzle." And he said, "We had we had a problem in the late '80s, early '90s, which was um the SR-71 Blackbird was retiring. Uh we had a generation of um analog satellites, which was um coming to an end and was being retired, phased out of service, deorbited. Um and there was a new generation of these Keyhole satellites.

I think it was KH-11 Keyhole satellites which were digital satellites, which fed real-time imagery um back to Earth. He said, "But we had a gap between the two. We had no SR-71, we had no satellite coverage. So, what would you do?" well, what I would do is pretty much what um most people, Bill Sweetman included, kind of think Aurora was, a

what they call a deployable prototype. Mhm. So, you build a few to test the concept, see if it works. You might send it on a few You might even deploy it to somewhere like the UK for a bit. Uh but you know, this thing is expensive. Mhm. It drinks whatever fuel Um it uses. And whilst it's it it has a utility, the utility of a thing like Aurora, even when you have spy satellites, is that

you know when spy satellites are coming over, and you can scoot and hide from You don't know when a hypersonic aircraft is coming over. Uh or you don't have much warning time. So, there was real utility in this thing. But you know, I if you take General Moelner's advice at face value, uh this thing just filled a gap. And when it had done its job of filling the gap, they went back to spy satellites. Mhm. Interesting. That's an interesting

but actually it's sort of really more a journey of the mind. Mhm. It's about the notion that, you know, there are some things that we might never ever know about, and we have to live with that. And and that's that can be frustrating for people. I mean, it was frustrating for me at the time. all this? You know, we're kind of wrapping up here, but how how do you um

interest to just get immunity for themselves and try to refresh the talent pool if these people are, you know, it's their all old and it's completely compartmentalized and they haven't made, you know, Well, it's better than completely herodited. They're But, you can be sure that the Russians and Chinese, with their nationalized and centralized efforts, are recruiting their best scientists to work on these topics. They're not worried about losing profits. They're focused instead on national defense.

disclosure around the ontological truth behind a lot of this secret science and the UFO question, the national security argument just seems to get lawmakers attention much faster than anything else. Finally, I think that all technology is dual use and academia has completely stagnated and is stuck in the wrong frameworks. So, if we can funnel more money and resources into these heterodox science projects, we can make progress much faster. Personally, I'm far more interested in the potential for

this technology to actually take us interstellar. And if we do live in a multiverse as physicists and the public love to theorize these days, then cracking gravity might be the key to jumping timelines. are tightly coupled. So, the only way to manipulate time would involve the manipulation of gravity and all true interstellar travel would require time travel or space-time metric engineering.

Michaels and this is American Alchemy.