Lt. Col. John Blitch — Ross Coulthart / NewsNation "Reality Check" interview (Jan 26 2025)

Speaker: Lt. Col. John Blitch (Ret.), interviewed by Ross Coulthart. ~1h16m. Part of Coulthart's Jake Barber crash-retrieval story.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/q38SwPmObho (NewsNation, 2025-01-26)
Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio -> Whisper.
Primary for ../../sources/blitch-darpa-abduction-claimant. Content: his verifiable CV (Pershing II nuclear battery commander, Special Forces detachment commander, troop commander at the Combat Applications Group/Delta, DARPA AI/robotics PM, cognitive neuroscientist, Ground Zero robotics); he VOUCHES for Jake Barber; and his own abduction/NHI-contact claims ("I know that I was visited by non-human entities... three irrefutable experiences"; childhood "beings... with huge dark eyes" at the window; a "biological robot" abduction; a forthcoming book on the abduction phenomenon).
NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; verify quotes against audio before load-bearing citation.

G'day and welcome to Reality Check in the continuing series of full-length interviews with the people who were part of our UAP primetime special Hunting UFOs.
Today it's Lt. Col. John Blitch. He was another of the interviewees who strongly backed the credibility of our primary interviewee
in that story, Jake Barber. Col. Blitch has an impressive CV. He's a former Pershing 2 nuclear missile battery commander, a special forces detachment commander, and he was a troop commander at the Combat Applications Group, otherwise known as Delta
Force, one of the most elite units in the U.S. military. For those who are unfamiliar, Delta Force is a top Tier 1 special mission unit along with the Navy's DevGru, that's the SEAL Team 6, and the U.S. Air Force's 24th Special Tactics
Squadron. It's very rare to get someone with a Delta Force background speaking on the record and
willing to step forward like Col. Blitch. John's also been a program manager at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, developing an expertise in artificial intelligence and tactical mobile robotics, as well as advanced
camouflage systems for the individual warfighter. He holds a bachelor's degree in environmental engineering, a master's degree in math and
computer science, and a second master's degree and doctorate in cognitive psychology.
This is not some ordinary grunt. He's an open-minded cognitive scientist who also served as a visiting professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, as well as as a consultant for the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy, NASA, and other agencies. And as you'll hear today in this full interview, he also has a forthcoming book on the abduction phenomenon, in which he tells the story of his own encounter with non-human intelligences,
NHI. Here's Col. John Blitch. So Col. John Blitch, it's an honor to be talking to you.
Well thank you. It's an honor to be here with you. Tell me a little bit about who you are.
What's your background? Well, I guess, let me see, in a nutshell, I'm an army nuke turned, I guess, Green Beret,
dabbled in hostage rescue, turned robot geek, turned cognitive psychologist. You were at the one stage, at the very top, one of the elite of America's special operations
peoples. Well, I wasn't. I was part of that unit. I would say that I was tolerated while I was there, but yes, I did serve there for about
three and a half years. Right. And in your time in the military, did anybody ever talk UFOs?
No, no. I have never had any official discussions about UFOs or extraterrestrials or interdimensionals
or anything. Did you ever think about it? All the time. Now, why? Tell our audience why.
What happened to you? Well, several very deep, emotional, terrifying, what I considered to be dreams at the time,
and I still consider them to be dreams, all the way up until 2018. And there were several incidents that convinced me otherwise, that I could not scientifically
attribute to dreamscape. What happened? So my dreams as a kid were terrifying beyond a normal fear.
You know, I've been shot at, I've been in mock POW camps, slapped around. I've had a number of emergency response, very deep traumatic activities, pulling people
out of wrecks. You were at Ground Zero, weren't you? Yeah, I was at Ground Zero. I was also at Ground Zero in two places. One was the Oklahoma City bombing.
The other was at the World Trade Center the day of 9-11, that evening, actually. So I've had plenty of trauma and reason to fear.
But these other experiences were terrifying to the point of paralysis. And so I can't dismiss them as I have other, and process them as I have with other traumatic
experiences. Are you okay about talking about what you saw? I am. If I, you know, you'll see a lot of times when I'm talking about some of these irrefutable experiences, I'll rub my arms or whatever, because I get a chill down my spine and you
get, you know, the classic chicken skin that is indicative of terror versus just fear. And a lot of my colleagues have the same. What happened to you?
What were those traumatic incidents? So a variety of them in childhood, but again, I scientifically, as a skeptic, myself as
a kid, dismissed those. What did you see as a child? What do you think was happening? I saw beings through my bedroom window, staring at me with huge dark eyes, here we go, that scared the bejesus out of me. And it was terrifying to the point of paralysis. And you told yourself as a child, it was some kind of dream. Not just me.
I told my parents I would scream once I returned to a state where I could scream.
So a lot of folks I know as a cognitive psychologist, I used to claim that I was a cognitive neuroscientist.
I dabble in neuroscience. But cognitive psychology is very clear about a lot of behavioral mechanisms that we use
when we're afraid. And paralysis, with many of us, when we're in that terror mode, you're paralyzed to the
point where you open your mouth and you try to scream and you can't. And so it was like that. As soon as that paralysis was lifted, I screamed to holy hell and my parents came running in
and they tried to calm me down, both my dad and my mom. My dad was an aerospace physicist who I pushed back routinely on, especially for lecturing
me about the great Santa Claus conspiracy. And it infuriated me that he was trying to push this ridiculous notion of this chubby
guy orbiting the earth with a sack of presents, like John Glenn, who he would lecture me to. So I didn't take a lot of what he was telling me, that there are no such thing as monsters, there are no such thing as little spacemen with big eyes, there's no such thing as people, and just trying to calm me down.
Much like I claim our government is doing to us about this subject. So let's start with that.
Do you believe that we are being visited by non-human intelligences on this planet? So I'd like that you use that word belief, because there's a broad range between belief
and knowledge. I asked you last night where and when you were born, and a lot of us automatically consider that to be a fact, because we're told it time after time after time, and we're shown
birth certificates. But I don't know that I was born in Idaho Falls, Idaho in 1959.
I have to believe it, because I don't have any alternative. But I do know that I attended Burke Elementary School in Peabody, Massachusetts in my young
years. I know that I attended Peabody Veterans Memorial High School from all of the deep emotional
experiences that I had. So emotion is a really, really important aspect of this. So I know that. The reason that I believe that we, well, no, I'm going to say that I know that I was visited by non-human entities. I know that for a fact. From childhood?
No, I believe, in retrospect, that those childhood instances were of the same nature. But I have three, what I consider to be irrefutable experiences.
Okay, let's talk about those irrefutable experiences. What convinced you that irrefutably, there is a non-human intelligence that's been engaging
with you in particular? Okay. Well, dreams don't cause bruises. And I had, I woke up after a terrifying night with some very mysterious circumstances surrounded by my, prior to my going to bed, I woke up with three dark bruises on the inside of my
right bicep. Not my left, just my right. And there was another bruise up here. And the only way that I can imagine those bruises occurring was with that sort of a
grasp. A three-fingered hand. Four fingers, because one was on the back. I suppose, yes. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't, I don't, I could not, and I racked my brain time after time to try to come up with some way that I could have those three almost puncture kinds of bruises on the, I can't even, I can't even reach that.
But there's another aspect of the, of the anomalous behavior with that. And that is as soon as I got up in the morning, I went straight downstairs to get a video
camera to film it. And that is totally anonymous behavior for me. Now I'm no, you know, like a lot of tier one guys, I'm no stranger to the gym, but I've never done, you know, bodybuilding or posing or any of the rest of that stuff. I've never taken a picture of myself in the mirror. Why the heck would I do that on that particular morning?
It's, it's, it's, it's not a rational behavior. Do you believe you've been abducted?
That experience leads me to believe that. Yes, absolutely. Because I clearly didn't want to go if something, somebody or a non-human entity, I think it was a biological robot, but I didn't want to go where it wanted me to go. So technically that is the definition of an abduction, right?
You never had any exposure to UAPs in the course of your operations as a serviceman? Nope. I was hired in on a number of special activity or special access programs.
I started one myself and didn't get anywhere. It was canceled about a month after I started it. So I've been in that realm quite a bit, but none of it had anything to do with UFOs, aliens or anything like that.
What do you think of the idea that we are being visited by a non-human intelligence? I mean, why, why would a non-human intelligence, an alien being sneak into your bedroom at
night when you were a little boy? Yeah. So to me, it's a, it's a numbers game, right? When you, when you look at the age of the earth, when you look at the billions of stars
seen by Hubble and then galaxies seen by web, I mean, the numbers are just astronomical. So when all of that stuff, it makes no sense that we're the only, it's such an arrogant
perspective to take that we're the only ones. So in and amongst all of that, a wide variety of visitors have come to our little island in the ocean, just like a wide variety of visitors came to the West Indies and came
here and there. So here's the counter question I would pose to anybody that would ask me this, I pose
to you. If you were part of a culture sailing from Australia, you know, westward or eastward, wherever you want to go, and you come across an island full of life, are you just going
to sit there or are you going to study it? It is a natural curiosity that all beings have. And so I believe that at least one or two, from my perspective, two species are visiting us and I feel like many other abductees, like a lab rat, that we are being prodded and poked and experimented with as part of scientific discovery. You're a former, very senior, high-ranking Tier 1 operator. Okay. I consider myself middle management, but that's okay.
You've had a top-secret SCI clearance at times? Oh, far before going into that world.
I had a TSSCI and a bunch of other clearances as a nuclear weapons delivery officer.
You were entrusted with guarding nuclear weapons and deploying them if necessary in combat?
No, not just guarding them. I was a Pershing 2 missile battery commander. Not a very good one. I happened to be placed in charge.
I was blessed with the opportunity to command troops on five separate occasions.
The first one of those was as a Pershing 2 missile battery commander. But the particular point about people who are put in charge of nuclear missile silos, nuclear missile batteries, is you have to be emotionally stable. Yes.
And the way that we establish that is through the Personnel Reliability Program, the PRP. And so one of the critical factors there is that as a BC, as a battery commander, every morning I had to review the sick slips for everybody under my command that went on sick
call and I had to determine whether or not they were still fit for nuclear duties. So if anything, if there's a domestic disturbance at home, if they get administered narcotics, I have to remove them from their duties and it's a problem because others got to fill in for them. So it's a problematic situation.
So all of them, all of us, were heavily scrutinized, more so than even some of the other UAP witnesses. I know I have the utmost respect for David Fravor, Alex Dietrich, for Ryan Graves, and all of the credibility and reliability that they have to fly that $15 million, $18, $30 million jet. But it's different when you can start World War III. An F-18 isn't going to start World War III unless it launches a nuke.
My guys could start World War III. And so those records, their medical records, are actually locked away in a separate part of the clinic under intense scrutiny because of that factor.
So John Blitch was a particularly stable person to be in charge of a nuclear missile battery. That might be a good question to ask my daughters or my wife, but arguably, I'm not telling
you that, the United States Army is telling you that because they kept me in that role.
And yet you are saying you've had encounters with non-human beings. Not just me. There are four other PRP-qualified military abductees who have gone on record.
And so this is my question to you. And Terry Lovelace is probably the most prominent of all. And Mario Woods, Jeff Goodrich, Bob Jacobs, who I know you've talked about, and of course
Robert Hastings, who investigated all this and himself was an abductee. Here's the thing, is if you can't trust a sergeant who was in the PRP and had this experience and then went on to leave the Air Force and not only rise up through the ranks as a prominent
lawyer, but become a prosecutor and an assistant attorney general for the state of Vermont.
If you can't trust that guy. You're talking about Terry Lovelace? Yes. How are you going to trust?
And I challenge anybody in Congress to have that level of credibility. There's a correlation obviously between your involvement with nuclear weapons and your
encounters with these beings, but do you think there's a causation? Do you think the fact that you were involved with nuclear weapons in such an intimate way caused them to take an interest?
So I sponsored what we call a glamp out here recently where we all get around a fire. There are things that military people tell each other around a fire that they'll not tell anybody else. It's kind of like the proverbial hairdresser, right? Your confessions, hairdresser confessions. And we bantered that around.
We've been around the round the horn collectively. Chicken or egg? Horse or car?
Did we get grabbed because of our proximity to the nuclear industry? For me, there's another level because I was born next to a nuclear reactor, the Army's first nuclear test reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho. That's where I was born.
And so I have to wonder about that. So what I do know from our own science, our own behavioral science and biological science is we would grab polar bears, we would abduct polar bears in the Arctic and do the same
thing that they do to us. We scoop their fat, we take tissue samples, we process that tissue to analyze whether or not the evil Russian empire was launching nukes in excess of 20 kilotons, 50 kilotons,
a megaton. And so it's really important to not only analyze what the yield on those weapons were, but what the magnitude of the absorption in the entire bio, the vegetation and the bioaccumulation of that vegetation into the animals. So why wouldn't they do that with us? It makes all the sense in the world. The logic of it is irrefutable. A lot of people watching this are going to be going, this is insane. You're saying you've been abducted. You're in charge of nuclear weapons.
So if I'm insane, why did you put me in charge of nukes? Why did you let Mario Woods secure those? Why did you let... and he has another irrefutable experience where his truck ends up in the middle of Arctic tundra in South Dakota, covered with ice and snow, and here's this circle
of mud, no tire tracks. Here's this truck. It's just been dropped back. How does that happen?
That's not a dream. So you believe alien beings are visiting this planet and taking an interest in people like
yourself? There's no doubt. There's no doubt in my mind anymore. I can dismiss my childhood dreams.
I can't dismiss bruises on my arm. I can't dismiss my kids and my wife telling me that I was gone for five hours approximately
for a one-hour bike ride. So let's tell that story. I find the bike ride story fascinating.
What happened? I had returned from Oklahoma City, pretty traumatic situation where there was an amputation
from somebody. It wasn't me, but her leg had to be amputated just to get her out of the rubble. A lot of people don't realize the horrific decisions that incident commanders have to make in collapsed structures because you have to make the call as to whether or not to bring
in heavy lift material. You could be literally squashing potential victims as you bring this just to get to other victims. So it's a horrific decision to have to make. So very traumatic.
I had a lot of that going on in my head. So I adopted a mountain bike ride meditation protocol on the weekends to ride from my house, which happened to be in a little sprawling, little yuppie kind of suburb of Denver called
Highlands Ranch. And at that time in 1995, MacArthur Ranch was an undeveloped area, so it was about seven
miles away. And so I got on my mountain bike and I would ride up to a place called Daniels Park, which
is now heavily developed. But at that time, it wasn't, and it was a gorgeous place to go up and meditate with
the Rocky Mountains. I used to claim that it looked like a Coors Light backdrop.
I'm looking at a beer can and it was amazing. So I would go up and sit on, they have a bunch of, at that time they were concrete, I think they'd been filled in at this point, picnic tables.
And I would meditate just like I learned through my martial arts training, it was wonderful.
And so I would be totally calm and relaxed after that. And it was a moderate climb up.
It wasn't anything that got me into a high zone. It was a, it was, I would barely break a sweat.
It wasn't a particularly difficult climb. And so on my way back down, and I'd done this ride several times before, and on my ride on the way up, after I came, it was a dirt road at that time.
There was a chain link fence with three strands of barbed wire along the top. And I thought that was very curious because why would a farmer, what are you farming back
there? Is that a little bit of, you know, this was before marijuana was legal in Colorado.
So but then I saw a sign that said Indian burial grounds, please respect and keep up. So it made sense to me.
Now I am, my great grandfather took an Indian wife as part of the migration. So I have, I guess, some portion, maybe an eighth of my bloodline has Native American
background. And I've always been very respectful of that culture. Which tribe? Sioux. Right.
And so he came straight off the boat from Scotland and made the launch across there. So I had never, I was mildly curious, but I had never entertained even the slightest
notion of violating that request. And on the way back down, I'm gliding along and all of a sudden, so I go past it and suddenly there is an urge, sort of an uncontrollable urge that I got to get in there.
Into the Indian burial ground. Yeah. So I turn my bike around, get off my bike. I go back to some of my special forces training and you get, you know, I go into Jason Bourne
mode, right. I'm trying to figure out how am I going to get over this doggone fence. And then I noticed that on each side of the fence, there was a, there was a gate with
a lock, but the gate isn't as heavily barricaded as the fence and it dips down a little bit.
So we naturally were trained to look for little niches like that. So I climb up the pole, throw my, or toss my mountain bike over the top, catch my jersey in a couple of places and get back down and I'm about to get on it.
And then I had this, again, respectful notion come welling up, nope, I'm not going to ride.
I'm going to walk my bike and just be respectful and see what's back there. So I do. Come around a corner, long dirt road, and I'm just kind of hobbling along my little bike shoes and I feel a little bit of moisture on the tip of my nose.
And I'm curious about it because I, I haven't been working hard on the way downhill to sweat.
So it must be sweat. And so I kind of ignore it and it drops onto my hand on my handlebars.
I had these weird ramshade handlebars and I had duct tape across it to hold my GPS. So I was, I was, I was involved in the very early testing of small portable GPSs for the entire special operations community, primarily because I'm convinced I was lost more than any tasking commander in the history of special forces.
So they gave me a bunch of these gizmos, me and a couple of my guys, and we tested them out. So I was a, I was a techno geek and I was all about GPS. So I'm looking down and I do a double take because it's not clear, it's dark.
And then I realized with shock that it's blood. And so all of a sudden I get this kind of a gusher bloody nose, which I had not had
since I was a kid. Now I have had my nose broken on multiple occasions, twice by women, believe it or not, testing for my black belt and in a relay, a medley relay where I swam, I think I was
swimming butterfly and the other guy hit me in the face on the way into water. So it's not unconscionable or abnormal, but it was abnormal in the sense that I had gone
a year, we had been living in Denver, you know, for a year. So it wasn't, you know, that I was desiccated from the high desert air and it was, it was
sudden and it was vigorous. It wasn't a slight drip. So it was just kind of weird. So of course, Boy Scout training, I lay down, put my nose back and I'm figuring, well, I'll
just, I'll get back up here in five minutes, get back on the bike and continue this. And then eventually I'll get back on the bike and ride home. And as soon as I lay down, I am out, I am unconscious. And the next feeling I remember is like a very deep chill. Like I had been sleeping outside a sleeping bag. I was chilled to the bone.
It was, it was a core temperature problem. And so I, I bolt upright and I grabbed my bike and there's a, there's a light so that
this road had turned like this. And so I was at this corner and I did a very curious, again, anomalous behavior that I
can't explain. Instead of getting, walking my bike down that road or getting on my bike because I was cold and walking the rest of the way downhill, gradual decline, I feel compelled to climb up through this scrub oak, scratching at my legs and they were bloody and scratched up,
you know, when I finally got home to go up to this light. I'm like a moth to this flame.
And now I was a graduate student, student at the Colorado School of Mines. I was still on active duty, but Colorado School of Mines, naturally I'm used to seeing
mining apparatus. So my, my mind goes there and I think, oh, this must be a drill rig. I'm not sure why people would drill at night instead of during the day, but I'm not thinking
any of that. I'm just like, okay. So I am naturally, again, drawn to this thing and an anomalous behavior to go uphill and through a crazy route to get up onto this plateau.
So I get up there and I, I, I see what I think, but it's a very fuzzy memory, is a fuel truck.
And so I walk my bike along and I purposely put my bike between me and the truck.
There's something about the truck that doesn't feel right. And I positioned the bike and as I go past the cab, I look into the cab because I want to talk to somebody and see what the hell's going on. And what I, what I remember in my mind's eye is a red plaid shirt. And I, I, I don't have a image of the face.
I feel like it's a male presence, but I, I, I don't have an image of a face. Is it human?
I don't know at that point as a conscious memory. I don't know. What I do remember is stopping, becoming terrified and not wanting to go anywhere closer to the light. And I turn around and I sneak my way back around the back of the truck.
And I, there's this, some sort of activity over here. And I sneak my way back around the back of the truck and I am dragging my bike through scrub brush until I finally come upon an open road. It was the scrub there, the scrub oak there would have been very difficult.
I don't like the word impossible. I don't like ever, always, or any of those absolutes, but it would have been very, very
difficult for me to, to, to even get one pedal stroke through it. So I made my way to this dirt road and as soon as I got to that dirt road, I jumped
on that bike. And again, with sheer abject terror, pedaled that bike as fast as I could to get the hell out of there. Huge adrenaline rush.
So I make, make it up this gradual incline and now I'm coasting down this dirt road. Nevermind it's, it's taking me in the opposite direction. I need to go home. I just need to get out of there.
So I remember coasting down this road and I'm thinking, okay, well it's after dark. It can't be that long after dark.
I mean, I was, it was the middle of the afternoon for crying out, you know, it was a nosebleed. It's not like I was knocked unconscious and I didn't fall off my bike or anything that
would have explained that longer term of unconsciousness. And as I'm riding down, I started thinking about, oh geez, Cindy, my wife is going to be worried about me.
So I probably ought to call her because it's probably later than I think it is. So as I'm coming down and I see this lone ranch house off to the right, as you may know, a lot of the ranch world leaves a light on, right? It's the old Redwood thing.
We'll leave a light on for you. And there was one light on. And so I, I deviate and I'm going to go up and knock on the door and ask them to use
their telephone. This is 95, no cell phones. And I stopped, I skidded to a halt because I suddenly realized there are no lights on
in that house. So then I realized it, it has to be real late. It's not an hour or two after sunset.
This is really, really late. So I get back on my bike and I cruise down and I finally make it to this hardball, which
I now know is a highway 85 and I've taken this trip since then. And I, I hit the wall. It's kind of like a bonk during a bike race or any endurance race where you are just devoid
of any fuel. And I was barely keeping myself vertical. So I, I'm cranking and I use an odd number of counts, one, two, three coast, one, two, three, and I make it about a mile until I get to this.
And there's another indicator of how late it is, is there's very little traffic. Every now and then, maybe once every five minutes, a car goes by.
And I don't have any reflective lights or anything. This is an afternoon ride. So I remember climbing up this hill and there was a 7-Eleven and I pull into this 7-Eleven
and I had some emergency cash on me, just typical mountain biker stuff. So I, I, I make it into the 7-Eleven and in the front of the windows, I prop my bike up
against it. And I noticed that there's a police cruiser pulled up and the windows are down. And as I'm walking, clicking along past this police cruiser to go into the 7-Eleven because I'm severely dehydrated, I am, I am dying of, of thirst.
And so I thought I'd hear my name come across this police radio, which is weird. So I go in and I get three large 32-ounce orange Gatorade jugs.
One, I open the top and chug it before I even get to the counter. And the clerk is looking at me and I plop that down and I put a 20 on and they're like,
okay. And so I leave it, the empty one, and then I go outside. And as I exit the store, the cop gets out and comes up to me and says, excuse me, sir,
is your name John Blitz? And I said, yeah. And he said, okay, well, I just want to let you know that your wife put out a missing
person's report. And I've already called in that I thought that that was you and can I offer you a ride
home? Now this is where the athlete's ego would normally say, hell no. Man, that's like asking me to carry my rucksack. How dare you? What an affront. What an affront to my physical stamina. But what I really said was, oh yeah, thanks a bunch, because I felt like I'd run a marathon. Was it a fuel truck? I don't know. I can't tell you. You think you
were taken? What I don't want to get into is a reconstructed memory after a hypnosis session.
You just don't know. What's that? You just don't know. At that point, I did not know. What do you know now?
What I believe now is that, yes, I was taken. I'm very clear in my book about what memories I have consciously and then what memories are reconfigured, restrung together
in a hypnosis regression session. You've been a warrior, but you also have a doctorate.
Yes, I have a master's degree in math and computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence and robotics. That was my first trip. That's what I was studying when this event happened. There were two other curious events at that time. But later, after running my search and rescue business, and I had to shut that down after destroying my femur, life-threatening event, it happened immediately after Hurricane Katrina. I'd love to give you some wonderfully heroic story, but the truth of the matter is I was goofing around on a
jet ski and ran it into a dock and broke my femur, got infected, had to lay everybody off. Then I went back to graduate school a second time for a second master's degree in quantum
psychology and a PhD in quantum psychology. So you've got a master's degree in psychology.
And a PhD. You know when somebody's suffering from a delusion or a psychosis or a hallucination. Was it that?
Well, let me back up a little bit because I appreciate your supreme confidence in me,
Ross. But I am not a psychiatrist. So I am not trained to diagnose who's crazy and who's not. That being said, yeah, I have a lot of training specifically in
mental state of robot operators. That's what I focused on. I use EEG. This is what I used to call myself a neuroscientist, but I'm not. The fact of the matter is I use neurophysiological equipment to get at how people are thinking when they're driving robots around. So based on that,
and again, I'm not crazy, not because I'm claiming it, because the U.S. military and
the Army and then the Air Force say that. Because I wouldn't have had a clearance. What I do have now a distinct appreciation for is the crisp memories versus what I consider to be manipulated memories. And it's a very clear thing for me. Because when I was in that classified organization, we didn't use typical military name tags. And so facial recognition, there's a part of your brain called the fusiform face area that is specifically lights up when you're trying to
recognize faces. And so we know this through occupations that are inherently dependent upon facial recognition. So I'm not going to claim, you know, my ego wants me to claim that I have some sort of eidetic memory. That's not true. That's not the case. But I had a really good
memory of faces. And I couldn't at that time, get over the notion that I couldn't remember that face. So something was screwing with your perception, you think? Yes, absolutely.
If something's capable of screwing with your perception, how do we know what it is? And how
do we have any idea of whether it's benevolent or malevolent? Yes. So concurrent with that experience, there were two other experiences that
are very crisp for me. And independently corroborated. The first was walking into a mall
my youngest daughter and I were late to link up with my oldest daughter and my wife. We cut through a Barnes and Noble. And we're walking along and and she's, she's in a rush because she wants to link up with mom because mom's going to take her clothes shopping get ready for the for the school year. And I stopped dead in my tracks. Because as I was walking along,
I glanced over to my right, and there was a bookshelf kind of like those shelves there.
And there was the Whitley Strieber book communion. All right, with the alien face on the front. And I, all I had to do was glance at that.
All I had to do this, this is what happens. This is the tingles that are going on. So it's very real to you. Say that again. It's very real to you. There's no doubt in your mind that it's real.
Oh, it's a physiological response. I mean, I am I am on the edge of terror right now.
Every and I've recalled this hundreds of times, but every time it's still. So looking at that face, and I froze in the middle of that store, my daughter walked all the way out of the store, realized I wasn't behind her, came back in in the middle of my paralysis, looking at that face, there's a tug on my hand. And she's like, Dad, come on, we're already late. And she brings me out of it.
So this is, again, anomalous behavior. So we go link up with my wife, and I turn right back around. And I go up and I buy that book.
And as soon as I pay for it, I rip the cover off and I crumple it up and throw it in the trash. What had it done to you to make you feel that terror? I don't know.
Do you think there was something or was it just the look of the face, the strangeness of the face? I so so looking back through the childhood experience,
that face was identical to the faces that were looking at me through the window. More anomalous behavior, I would have to close almost an OCD like obsessive compulsive disorder type of behavior. I would have to check the drapes and lock the doors. Five or six times. It's that behavioral aspect of this that I can't get away from.
The idea behind what we're discussing in this story is that a group of men are coming forward
to corroborate that the government is aware of a non-human intelligence engaging with this planet.
Yes. That it's lying. That it's lying. I mean, as recently as a few days before this interview. That the government's lying. Yeah. Yeah. So for me, the abduction... In my book, I have a chapter called The Elephant in the UAP Room.
To me, the abduction phenomena is the linchpin to this whole thing. And what it does is it gives the cabal, if you want to call it, the lying cover-up organization or loose organization, whatever it is,
everybody involved in that cover-up a way up. And the reason is that there is nothing more terrifying as a parent to have your kids taken from you, kidnapped from you, while you are sitting there paralyzed, powerless to see it, powerless to do anything.
What do you think of a government that's concealed such a secret, if this is true? Yeah. So this is what I haven't been able to resolve through 65 orbits around the planet and 25 of those in the U.S. military as an active-duty new SF DARPA program manager, and then another seven years as a senior scientist for the Air Force.
That the government is full of great people. They, especially the military folks, firefighters, law enforcement folks, law enforcement folks, none of them get paid enough for the risks that they take, compared to other folks that, you know, you take a high school class, the folks that go into the military versus the folks that go to law school or learn a trade and become million, gazillion, billionaires, whatever.
There is a selfless service of joining the military. I know that a lot of the civilian world look at us kind of like Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, you know, you can't handle the truth, right?
The way we look at ourselves is, hey, look, we're more like kind of rocky in the Balboa thing.
Look, the world's not sunshine and rainbows. So this gives them an out that we can't protect you. What I want my government to admit to me is, sorry, we were powerless. I don't think we're powerless anymore.
You heard Dave Grush's testimony about, you interviewed him about the crash retrieval process. I know you've recently interviewed some other folks with direct personal experience,
not just watching reports, the folks that have been involved in that. And what makes sense about that to me is that the reason why Dave is still alive and Lou is still alive and a lot of other whistleblowers are still alive is I believe that we now do
have the ability to protect some of us. We do have the ability to shoot down some of these craft and to interfere with this kidnapping, kidnapping, abduction process.
I consider it a universal right of any being, any living species to be able to protect their children. So what makes total sense to me is a government that has kept it secret, just like we would keep secret from our own children. Look, there's Mr. Jones down the street there. My wife and I know child molester. I'm not going to tell my kids that.
Just stay away from this house. But dad, he's going to pay me $50 just to shovel his driveway.
Stay away from him. Why? Don't worry about it. So I think that's where we are with our government. Nearly a year ago, I asked you if you could help me check somebody out. Yeah. His name was Jake Barber. Yep. And you took him out on your boat. Yeah. Off Santa Monica. And you met him and some of his team. Yeah. Special operators configure each other art, can't they?
You know, as tier one operators, you know whether somebody's embellishing their record. What was the impression that you gained of Jake Barber and his colleagues?
Well, so you asked me a while ago, or to give it some thought about why I believe it. Several reasons. Top of the list is demeanor. We do have that ability to recognize the way someone carries themselves and the way they present themselves. If it's one person, that's one thing. Four, folks all acting in that manner. Hard to dismiss. Second is documentation.
And the documentation that I have been provided from these folks lines up very consistently.
And the third is the behavior. So you have demeanor as one thing. Behavior is another. So as a leader, I feel compelled to take risk first. So I laid out three forms of identification, my passport, my military ID. I think it was my, maybe it was my Air Force Academy ID and some of them. And without hesitation, every one of them laid out their ID. I was looking for a little hesitation because it was four against one.
And these guys could kick my butt up one side, down the other. I'm worried that I'm going to slip my drone and they're going to dump me over the side and they're going to sail my boat, I don't know, to Australia, I don't know.
So those points, but the key aspect of it is that their stories connect the dots. The dots of why keep this a secret, right? Why are we trying to... So when you compare this to the Manhattan Project, which a lot of folks do.
Manhattan Project was kept secret for five years. Thousands of people involved in that. Five years. How the hell did we keep this secret?
We're going on 80 years since Foo Fighters were originally reported. And that's one of the arguments that people often make to me, it's impossible to keep this kind of thing secret.
And it's not a secret, we're talking about it, aren't we? We're talking about it, aren't we? The secret is out. And it has been out from the get-go in open literature. So I think I mentioned to you, I'm kind of part of the invisible college. I've been studying this since grade school, reading my dad's books. He has, and what's interesting is he and I have both purchased multiple books.
He passed away and I have inherited his library. Now I have duplicate copies of them.
I would say 25% of that library is duplicated between the two of us. So everybody else, while they're on boring sentry duty,
and they're reading, you know, comic books or, you know, I'm reading this. Could what you've experienced and Jake and his colleagues have experienced, just be a bunch of special forces guys deluding themselves? Is it possible? Sure, it's possible. Is it probable? No.
Occam's razor cuts through all of those, every single... So when you're connecting dots, I liken this to my grandkids'
sketch-by-numbers set, right? Where you've got to connect 15 or 30 or 50 different dots.
Their story connects all the dots. So the implications of these Min's allegations, of Jake's allegations,
the implications of Jake's allegations are that there is a UAP crash retrieval program. That we, the United States, together in collusion with some private aerospace companies, is concealing, lying to the American public and the world about the existence of non-human intelligence engaging with this planet. Sure.
And I am okay with that. I was okay with that lie up until the turn of the century in 9-11. Because it is so terrifying. Look, lights in the sky, that's not terrifying enough to keep a secret.
Even the fact that some of those lights in the sky are craft with beings on board,
that's not terrifying enough. That's not something to protect society from. Kidnapping, plucking children from the bed with their parents, or off of a mountain bike,
or while they're at school, the aerial school. I know you're familiar with all of those. And of course, the- West Allcast. West Allcast, yeah. Yeah, I know you're familiar with all those.
That is a level of terror that would threaten any sort of society. So this is interesting. You think that one of the reasons for the government cover-up, and it's only a very small number of people, obviously, in the government who do know about this. I doubt a lot of presidents have been told about this secret.
You think that a large part of the reason for the cover-up is because the abduction phenomenon- It is the reason. Is real. It is the linchpin to this whole thing.
Imagine you're Harry Truman, 1947, pieces broken out all over. And you get brought, or you are shown, wreckage of egg-shaped craft, disks, avocado-shaped craft,
and bodies inside that are clearly not human. And mixed in with that are human body parts. What are you going to do? So you've heard the allegation. Oh, there are many stories about that within the special ops community. Because we're the folks, you know, in Vietnam. So during Vietnam, there was a-
there was friction between the Air Force and the Army, in particular, the Marine Corps, where if a pilot went down deep in the jungle,
and the closest Americans to that pilot happened to be a Marine platoon or a special forces ODA, an A-team,
they were retasked. Never mind setting an ambush over here. You got to go get this pilot. Major, lieutenant, colonel, whatever. Well, wait a minute. I'm going to put 30 of my guys at risk for one freaking colonel?
Maybe. And then there are all of it. So there was a lot of risk and friction with regards to that. So the Air Force stood up its own recovery efforts because it got to the point that, hey, look, if you're not going to go rescue our pilots, guess what? Next time you call for close air support, good luck. So you're going to have to do your own close air support. And it made no sense.
So the pararescue community stood up within the Air Force. And those folks are full-on, flat-out heroes every time they go in because they are deep behind enemy lines, just like special forces guys, just like Navy SEALs. And they are specialists at plucking people out of twisted wreckage.
That's a special skill set that you have to do. So fast forward to Harry Truman.
If we shoot down another one of these things, and I am here to postulate, again, this is a belief, not knowledge,
that we were playing with radar at White Sands and Wright-Patterson and a variety of these things. And we were cranking that power up. Not with the intent to shoot anything down, because we can't shoot down our aircraft with that.
We don't have electronics that are vulnerable to that. But as we're cranking up that power to extend the range, here's this vehicle, advanced vehicle with electromagnetic navigation, not propulsion, but interferes with the propulsion.
Next thing you know, it flies into the side of a mountain. So if we use PJs, pararescue folks, to rescue our own astronauts, pluck them out of the water after Apollo 11, 12, 13, you know,
who are you going to send to grab the wreckage? It makes all the sense in the world. So you believe Jake Barber is telling the truth? Absolutely.
There has been a cover-up lasting 80 years. Absolutely. We've recovered craft. Absolutely.
Alien bodies. Yeah. And we have reverse engineered that to the point that now we can shoot down, at will, not by mistake,
using, you know, just cranking up the power on our high-powered microwaves. One thing that strikes me about the difference between the way you talk about these beings and the way the other people I've interviewed for this story talk, you're the first person to suggest possible malevolence.
Well, so the title of my book is The Abduction Amnesty Knot. Little K, big N-O-T.
And I use knot because knots can be complicated, right? Have you ever tried to untie, you know, some sort of, so especially as now a reluctant sailor. So, but the subtitle is The Case for Forgiveness in the Disclosure Age.
And so there's two entities to forgive here. One are the abductors, because they do bring us back.
I mean, I was brought back to my bedroom. I was brought back to my bike, put back on my bike,
or put back next to it, and I got back up and got it. And many of us have our memories tampered with
in much the same way that we pharmacologically do the same thing. Talk to any anesthesiologist. We can pharmacologically remove, prospectively remove memory
with an injection, plus or minus 30 seconds. So I've had, happened to have 21 different surgeries to repair my umpty-dumpty body, a lot of it with my own just lack of skill.
And I can tell you several cases where I know that that occurred. So if we can do that right now, it makes all the sense in the world that with directed energy, fine-tuned to the hippocampal region, and all of the memory consolidation networks in our own brains, it makes sense that they could do it.
And so one sign of benevolence is to remove the memory of the trauma. Look, I told Ludus, I abducted my lovable black Labrador retriever every three months to go to the vet. He did not want to go to the vet.
He had the equivalent of the bruises on his arm. I don't know if he had bruises under his coat of his harness,
but I had to drag him in there for good reasons. What you're suggesting begs the question,
there will likely be secrets that lie behind what's happened inside the legacy retrieval program. Sure. That many people will find confronting. Sure.
But is any of that sufficient reason not to reveal it? Well, so let me ask you this in an analogy. There's good secrets, bad secrets. In my mind, I am not going to tell my grandkids the code to my gun safe.
We should not be advertising a cookbook of how to take plutonium and create a nuclear weapon. So clearly those things we need to keep secret.
However, the existence of extraterrestrial life, and it's not just extraterrestrial life. If you can travel faster than light than it takes to get here,
you can bend time and you can cross dimensions. Those three are linked. We know this. In fact, this page, there's several pages in Lou's book where he and Hal Puthoff diagram a bubble that dictates
that you can manipulate time. So what I have issue with right now with the common verbiage right now is the word threat.
Just because a object or craft is in our airspace, that does not make it a threat. It is clear when you read that part that time, they can slow that down. And so it is child's play to avoid collisions.
So there is no threat of collision. I love these folks. I love the pilots that report these things, but I vehemently push back against the notion
that there is any threat of a collision. It's the equivalent of me being in a 50-knot Mark VI Navy patrol craft that can do 40 knots, claiming that I'm a threat with my sailboat that flat out maybe can do eight knots. There is no threat of that collision. So this notion of just being in our airspace as a threat is ridiculous. And it's a real problem for us as a galactic species.
John, if you have been abducted, and if there is a non-human intelligence, it's not inconceivable that one day you might actually get the opportunity to meet your abductors. I already did. I already did. A tall seven-ish foot praying mantis-looking being
was upset with me and was chastising me. This is during one of your abduction events.
This is right around the same time as this mountain bike incident. It was the environment that I thought it was, was in my bedroom on the third floor of a split-level house.
And it came through a sliding screen door. There was a deck out there three stories up, no stairs down, and just walked right through the door standing over me.
And again, I was terrified, frozen, paralyzed to the bed. And he, I got a male presence vibe from this being, and he's just looking at me very intently and explaining to me,
look, this body that you got, it is just a soul housing group. It's a brain housing group. It is just a machine that your soul occupies for this lifetime. And so, yeah, we're going to mess with it. We're going to get up under the hood and we're going to adjust the carburetor, right? I just dated myself there.
You know, we may swap a couple of parts out, but we can't steal you. We can't steal your soul. We can't steal your consciousness.
So quit screaming and writhing around and let us do our fricking job. And it's like the equivalent of a surgeon telling the patient, stop squiggling, just like the veterinarian to my laboratory retriever,
hold them down for crying out loud. Just, I got to be able to check this tendon.
And so I got that very condescending and vigorous instruction. But here's the thing.
As proof, there was this image that he put in and was terrifying. His mandibles that were kind of behind, like a casing or a shell opened up and he starts grabbing chunks of my cheek and he's ripping it.
And there's blood spattering on the wall. And I'm feeling the tug and I'm feeling this flesh, you know, and the whole time he is conveying to me, see, we can't get your soul. We can't get your soul. We can't get your soul.
We can do a lot of damage to your body if we want to. We don't. We're trying to help you.
But this is how bad it could get. So stop squiggling around and let us get this done. Was that physical damage to your cheek real? No, I felt the tugging and I had the visual, again, a false fuzzy memory. What do you think of the people that have concealed this secret? I think the vast majority of them are heroes
because they were doing it for the right reasons. The reason why people kept the Manhattan Project secret was not because you're going to threaten them with jail. That doesn't work. Out of 100 people, you threaten everybody with jail.
There's going to be a 10 to 20% that are just, they're going to do it anyway. If you can explain to them that it's in the best interest for society, they'll keep it a secret. I think that's what's happened here,
that a large number of the folks in this are unwitting. But once they understand and they're shown direct evidence of these crashes and the deceased non-human intelligent bodies, some of which are biological robots, some of it are sentient beings. The grasshopper guy for me, sentient being without a doubt. The little gray guys, biological robots.
So that is such a significant threat that they feel that society is not ready. As a cognitive psychologist,
one who's been trained as a cognitive psychologist, final question. The implication of this is that human beings have capacities that we don't yet understand to communicate with an intelligence telepathically, psychically, because the connection with this technology is done psionically.
Very little doubt of that in my mind as well. So my technical training is in EEG brainwave monitoring,
and I use that in a naturalistic sense. So I have big issues with, and I know Gary's going to,
we'll have a lively discussion about this. My claim is that your brain, when we put you in a laboratory,
that brain does not act the same way as when you're in a non-laboratory setting. So my focus is on what I call naturalistic measurement, naturalistic neurophysiological measurement of you. So I use wireless EEG underneath a ball cap or underneath a helmet. So that it's so comfortable, you forget you're wearing it.
The first time I wore it was climbing Mount Shasta in 2009. Another story at some other time. So there is no question in my mind that we right now, and you can look at many, many, and there's a vast literature about this, that we now know more about the human brain by gobs than even 10 years ago. It's an exponential acceleration of our knowledge.
So the use of that to guide advanced craft make all the sense in the world. The implications of it all though are, to come back to the point at the beginning of all of this,
consciousness may not be local. We might in fact be part of a bigger, wider consciousness. And what we're plugging into with our minds is something that's more what we really are as human beings. Yeah, I agree.
And there's a very big danger here with our reverse engineered ability to shoot these things down. On a galactic basis, I want to use the honeybee analogy, right?
So on this planet with these beings that are beneath us, honeybees, we tolerate them. We harness them. They do good things. We use them to pollinate our crops. And so there's a symbiotic relationship with these.
Enter killer bees or Africanized bees, if you'd like. Now look at the honeybees. You know, if you mess with their nest, their planet, they're going to come at you with stingers, which I would draw the equivalent as our nuclear weapons.
And that's not going to do anybody any good. But you'll stay away and you'll tell your kids, hey, don't go over by that tree. Just leave them alone. The Africanized bees, the killer bees, that's not worth it anymore. That they are so aggressive and they are now lethal. And that's what I worry about, that we have gone from this to this. Because we're using offensive weapons against them, you mean?
Yeah, and we're not discriminating friend versus foe. How do we know who's the bad guys up there? If you got a flying saucer or a little egg or whatever it is coming into our atmosphere,
how do you know they're going to kidnap a kid out of the bedroom? Or they're just going to welcome you aboard like the friendly space
brothers and sisters that are rumored to have occurred. So we don't know that yet. The key to that IFF, the identified friend or foe,
is what you just said, the consciousness. Because we do, we humans do have that spider sense. And so maybe there are some of us who are sensitive enough to maybe do IFF right now and to aid in that process. to click that red subscribe button to ensure you get more of News Nation's unbiased and fact-driven news coverage.