 Okay, let's go. I assume if you're here for a subject hacking ufology 30 years in the Hall of Mirrors, it's because you're either interested in hacking or ufology, or you have the perverse sense of humor that would like to see me fail at trying to connect the two things in a meaningful way. I'm hopeful that I'm going to make some sense and address both subjects hacking in relationship to what it takes to enter into, try to understand, try to compensate for the distortions in any complex system in order to see what is really happening. I'm going to use some quotes. I'm going to approach a variety of dimensions or aspects of the subject to ufology, including black budget operations and gross media distortion of facts and events, just in order to suggest what it will take in order to do justice to this subject given what has been done to it over the last 60 years. If your primary sources of information on ufology have come from cable television or the internet or both, then all I can ask is that you please try to set aside everything you know in order to listen to a presentation of some of the benchmarks for doing a historical analysis of the data, which will enable us to make sense of the facts and how the subject has been handled so effectively for so many years and come to your own conclusions as to why. Now this is in a way related to encouraging people to be hackers. Years ago, this is my astonishing to me 12th time at DEF CON. I know, you didn't think I was that old, did you? And in the early days, 11 years ago, I got this email from rogue agent, probably using a different handle. He was at an organization then that's long gone called The Loft. And he said, you want to create hackers? Don't tell them how to do this or that. Show them how to discover it for themselves. Those who have the innate drive will get the point and find tutorials written by experts or better yet simply dive in and learn by trial and error. Those who don't will fall by the wayside. I never learned half as much being taught by others as when I taught myself. True, it's painfully slow at first, but you're building a skill set for how to find out what you want to know at the same time and that's more than worth the extra time and effort. I think that's just about one of the best definitions of hacking I have ever come across because it is empowering others to learn to build the skill set that enables them to find out what's real and to cobble together things that were designed for one purpose in order to see how they can be made to work for another. That's what I'm encouraging you to do. On the notes that I provided for the CD for this talk, there's something I've never done before. There's 30 or 40 pages of notes which are meant to suggest points of departure for continuing to explore if you find some of the data suggestive of something that's important. Now we all know when we talk about Ufology or UFOs, unidentified flying objects, unconventional flying objects, unconventional aerial objects, flying saucers or whatever else you want to call them, we're really only talking about one thing. We want to know if there are highly advanced technological civilizations superior to our own who have had the technology to come here and for whatever motivation have had the desire to do so as well. We're talking about extraterrestrial presence on the planet earth and there has been so much in the media about that that it is impossible to hear the very subject raised without images, ideas and preconceived notions coming forth into the foreground of our thought because they have been put there. People I know who do Psyops, remind me, don't forget they say, the purpose of Psyops is for people to do things for reasons that they believe are their very own but which in fact have been engineered to be done for very other reasons. By do he also meant think, to think things that they believe they are thinking on behalf of their own rational processes because social science itself, if you take a look at the subject, has itself been so compartmentalized since World War II through black budget research that much of what has been done is dual use and therefore social science like science is no longer done in the way in which it used to be done in an open domain in which information is widely and completely shared with one another for purposes of continuing research. So, I'm going to quote Timothy Leary, some of you may remember him, dead now. Thank you. You know, he said, you can never find out what's happening from the company Bulletin or the adult press. You know that. The king's messengers are always telling you what they want you to know for their own benefit. The evolutionary message, what is really happening always comes from outcasts, always comes from outcasts. I've used that as a prelude to saying that the truth arrives at the edge and moves slowly toward the center where it builds a consensus and by the time more and more people have believed it, so it is a consensus, it is already a lie because the new truths are already emerging at the edge and beginning to move inward. Or as Nietzsche said, those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by people who could not hear the music. When you talk about much of what is talked about here at a sophisticated level of granularity, it sounds insane to many people or it sounds like nonsense, that is certainly true of ufology. If you bring up the subject in any serious environment in the academic world where it is taboo, or suggest that research into the subject be done, you will get laughter and ridicule, reminding me of a good friend of mine who practices deception on behalf of one of the agencies who has said to me, do not forget, illusion, misdirection and ridicule. These three are the hallmarks of operations of deception, but the greatest of these is ridicule. And therefore when something is in the public domain and has been widely observed and often documented and photographed and written about and reported by newspapers, then when people talk about it as if it is real, what can you do? What can you do? For those of you who are interested, you can pick up a copy of this, I have a few. This is not the National Enquirer. This is not some arcane, ridiculous journalistic outpost. This is the Washington Post on July 28, 1952. The headline reads, Saucer Outran Jet, Pilot Reveals. Now, I want to use this as just an elementary benchmark to think about the subject. All I'm encouraging you to do, and obviously I have gotten to a point in my life in which I am no longer worried about income primarily, or I could not dare to speak about this in public. Why? I was recently nominated for the board of an intelligence ethics organization, and a counterintelligence army officer said, well, let's go to the website and see what he's written. There are hundreds and hundreds of things I've written at the website. One is about UFOs, and it's the most conservative, hesitant, tiptoe kind of article you can imagine, just suggesting that it ought to be examined. And he came back to the board and said, if you take this guy on, I'm resigning. He would destroy my career and my reputation, because anyone who sees us associated with him would think we were all loonies. Now, that's a simple statement of fact about what it is that has been done to the subject and how people respond. And therefore, I have been careful because I have tried to make a living in serious environments, saying serious and intelligent things, not to mention too much about it. It's because I had said last year I probably wouldn't come back to DEF CON, and then three days left to the deadline this year. I got in touch with Jeff and I said, I can't stand it. I've got to come back. I can't stand it. I want to see people. I want to see my friends. I can't stay away. I'm weak, as Kathleen Turner said in Body Heat. I'm weak. You remember that scene, some of you. And Jeff, bless his heart, said, well, of course you can come back and speak. You want to talk about UFOs? Sure, why not? So where else but DEF CON could one talk about it? Saucer Outran Jet Pilot Reveals. What kind of benchmark is this? From 1947, when Kenneth Arnold first reported that he had seen nine vehicles flying near the Cascades in Washington, I believe it was, and he said that they skipped through the air like saucers skimmed across the water. And a reporter turned that into flying saucers. For the next five years, there were all sorts of documents, all sorts of news stories printed about flying saucers, printed in the newspapers as if they were news. Here's another example. Look Magazine used to be a customary news magazine for America. Here's an article from it. You see the map of the United States. It's called, whatever it is, the Air Force must hunt for the flying saucer. And the Air Force was hunting for the flying saucer, and there are little circles all over the map to show that there was a huge preponderance of sightings at Air Force and other military bases. This is a news magazine. It was treated as if it was news. Just one or two more like that. Here's an article, a little one, of the sort that appeared by the hundreds of thousands in small newspapers and magazines all over the country. But this was in the New York Times. Four Florida pilots, three of them World War II veterans, told today of seeing a flying saucer hovering over the Hanford atomic plant at Richlands, Washington. Captain John Baldwin of Coral Gables said the object was a, quote, perfectly round disc, white in color, and almost transparent with small vapor trails coming off it kind of like the tentacles of an octopus. Now, I'm not going to read any more. You can go to the library. You know, those of you who are older remember libraries. They're what we had before the internet. But what you find is, again, it's an archaic technology. This came off what they called microfilm when I was a kid. And it was photographs made of newspapers because that would be the permanent storage device. And it's pretty bad, and it's hard to get good hard copies off it. But what you will find if you do the research, that's all I'm encouraging people to do. Hackers start with what's real. They stay up all night reading about what obsesses them. No one accomplishes anything who is not an obsessive compulsive in my book. At least that's my story. And you will find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles just like that in which witnesses are named. They are credible military commercial pilots and people from other walks of life that are credible and serious. They are quoted as if they are saying what they saw because they are saying what they saw. So I asked Jennifer Granick, our resident legal eagle, how many credible eyewitnesses it takes in order to have a jury believe that something has happened, that it's real. And she said if you have like three or four credible eyewitnesses saying the same thing, reporting the same details, independently verifying the same event, a jury will find that to be the strongest evidence of all. And that's why when people say these stories are great, they are only anecdotal, but where's the evidence? You can repeat back to them that in a court of law, in a trial situation, eyewitness testimony, widely corroborated over space and time, is considered to be the very best evidence that there is. Despite the many fallacies that eyewitnesses can make about this and that, when, as a friend of mine at NSA says, who conducted his own investigations for many years, when a phenomena is repeatedly reported in the same way over 50 or 60 years, and the phenomena is reported in a way so that the small details agree with one another over 50 or 60 years, and it comes in from all over the world. It is not an American phenomena or an East Coast phenomena. The reports come in from all over the world, then you know you are dealing with something real. Well, you may ask why didn't newspapers cover this sort of thing more than they did later? Well, they came to cover it in a different way. You've seen men in black, right? You've seen when he threw the tabloids down on the table and said, you want the real story, this is where you're going to get it. I think I might have mentioned before how the National Inquirer came to be. The National Inquirer is very similar to a newspaper, a periodical that John Kenneth Galbraith found operating in India when he was ambassador to India, being a serious scholarly man from Harvard. He was upset and demanded to know who was running this rag. They investigated and found out that it was 100% a CIA operation. It was just classic and typical disinformation, promulgated by the creation of a whole publishing enterprise. In this case, a sleazy one and a disreputable one, so that if they wanted to diss stories in India, they could do so simply by publishing them in a newspaper or periodical, which had come to have no credibility. Now, let's turn back for the moment to the National Inquirer. It was started by Genoso Pope, Gene Pope in 1952. For about eight years until around 1960, it did not make money. It was never successful until it got a boost in the 60s. But money continued to be funneled into it from another source that kept it viable until 1960. Frank Castello is the source through which money was moved to the National Inquirer. Frank Castello was the mafia chieftain in New York at that time, linked to Santo Traficante, Johnny Razzelli, the other guys who simultaneously were 1960, had to go back to the historical era, working with the CIA in order to carry out assassinations of, among others, Fidel Castro. So money was coming to the National Inquirer that kept it viable. When a friend of mine in the NSA and I were talking about what kind of organization would have to exist in the government for management of it to take place, he suggested I do an experiment to see if I could find out something else. He said, you know, the different agencies and police bureaus of our national apparatus all have favored campuses where they go to recruit. I'm going to give you, as an experiment or a test, you discover what those campuses are. And he listed a number of criteria, the size of the campus, the kind of curriculum that was there. It was not just technical, it was many other things. A place where you could be observed for four years in a wraparound environment socially as well as academically. A place that might have had financial difficulty in the 60s or 70s and where an infusion of cash came from an orthodox sources that were not always easy to identify. And whose seniors, before they graduated, from whom much promise was expected, somehow gravitated into companies, industries, or forms of work, which meant that you never heard from them again. I was on a train telling that story to someone, brief, between the airport and the rental car. And she happened to say that she worked for a particular Midwest college campus. Probably shouldn't say it because she didn't think she was feeding a talk like this. And I told her that story and she said, whoa, do you know there are lots of our graduates that I can't call unless I use certain coded language so that they know exactly who I am and why I'm calling to raise money for our small northern Ohio well regarded academic institution. I don't want to name it. So using their criteria, including the infusion of money from an orthodox sources, this is always important, follow the money and follow the people who talk to the people who talk to the people. So there are ways you can do the research if you are serious about it that enable you to identify what Edgar Mitchell told me was a reality. Edgar Mitchell was Apollo 14. He walked on the moon. He had a mystical experience coming back to the earth and it changed his perspective forever which he has tried to articulate ever after in physical terms, the terms of modern physics. In other words, the unity of all things. And he went to people he knew who were doing intelligence with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and he said, I just want to know if there is an organizational structure that still manages the phenomena on behalf of the government. It would have been likely in the 40s to have come together Vannevar Bush type people out of corporate, government, military and academic institutions to be deep black and not to be identified publicly in any way. His contact at general went away and he came back to him two weeks later and he said, all I'm going to tell you is the answer is yes. That's all I'm going to tell you. Don't ask me another thing. Yes, there is an organizational structure that manages it. But what happens to all these news stories, all these items of truth, all these facts, if you will, as they gravitate into the public mind, into the space of our popular culture. Well, here's one from the National Enquirer. Space aliens drain my blood. Then filled my veins with a mysterious yellow liquid, says shaken steel worker. The National Enquirer monitored what kinds of issues made money and they were very, very seldom UFO issues. They were celebrity issues, scandal issues and the like. They knew which ones had a wider circulation and yet they published more UFO issues than just about anything else. The question can simply be asked, why did they do that? A friend of mine, Terry Hanson, in Montana in the 1970s, got a call from a friend who said, can you believe what's happening here? He said, what's happening here? He said, the sightings, the impact of the events over the ICBM missile sites here in Montana. And Terry said, I haven't heard anything about it. He said, it's all over the news. Well, Terry wrote a book called Missing Times in which he subsequently detailed that there were many, many small local sightings, small local newspapers and television news stations over several days reporting the events that were happening, which was the buzzing of ICBM silos by unidentified flying objects. But it never made the national news. And as he traced it, four years later it finally surfaced because the stories just would not go away and Freedom of Information Act documents confirm that the stories did not go away and were documented by the Air Force, but where it finally wound up was, you guessed it, the National Inquirer. What I'm suggesting is that we have to, as a society, if we have the courage to want to know what's real, instead of allowing the media and its masters who distract us so effectively with nonsense, if you really want to know what's real, you have to create what my friend Sandra Brahman, a scholar in Milwaukee, calls tactical memory, which is the collaborative reconstruction of history as opposed to the creation of a pseudo-environment or a designer history. The higher purposes for which hacking exists is the creation of tools for building tactical memory and the purpose of tactical memory is to empower those with the courage to take the red pill. Everyone I know who takes this subject seriously began to take it seriously when someone they knew well, either they had their own experience and they knew they weren't misunderstanding what they were seeing, or someone they knew well made a compelling case for the reality of the phenomena. In my case it was 1978 and I was a new Episcopal priest one year into the ministry at a small, what we call a starter parish, outside Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah. I was sitting in the church basement with a senior warden who was the lay officer of the congregation. He was a major then, he retired from the Air Force as a full bird colonel. We had just heard about close encounters of the third kind coming out. I had read books like Alan Heineck's The Scientific Inquiry, still the best textbook for the subject which is what Alan designed it to be. And I was sitting in the basement with my friend, a fighter pilot, heavily decorated, the right stuff kind of guy, cocky. Usually he had a smirk on his face, cocky smirk. And I said, you know, Bob, all I know is what I read about these things and I read that you guys chase these things in your fighters and can't catch them. And he didn't look cocky for a minute, he didn't look smirky, he looked perplexed, and he turned kind of a scant and he said, well, you know, you're right. We chase the goddamn things and we can't catch them. Now, for me, and this is really kind of a plea, I'm trying to say that this was 1978 near a 30 years ago and I wasn't crazy and he wasn't crazy. And he was a fighter pilot and I knew him well as his priest and he was telling me that they had chased them and they couldn't catch them. Now, what did he mean by them? He didn't mean meteorological phenomena, he didn't mean Venus, he didn't mean radar echoes that were distorted by the propagation of the signal. He meant, in that case, a 30 foot disk, like burnished or polished aluminum, that paced a plane in which they were flying and that when it was done with whatever it was that it was doing which we do not know what it was not out here, took off at an extraordinary speed. The phenomena confronts us with possibilities we could not ignore. That's why I am urging people to go back and as a benchmark look at what was happening in the 40s and 50s because that's when the phenomena was initially reported straight up before the distortion began to happen. Why did the distortion happen? Probably for very good reasons. That headline in 1952 climaxed an appearance of objects over Washington D.C. with such frequency and such obviousness. They were mapped on radar, chased on radar and jets were scrambled to pursue them always unsuccessfully. They occurred over the White House, over the Capitol and in other airspace over Washington. So many people during that wave of sightings called the Pentagon to find out what was happening that the Pentagon switchboard was jammed and functionally shut down. The meetings that they had subsequently for which we have complete documentation discussed the threat that made to the nation in terms of national security, not because the objects themselves were that threatening but because the Soviets, 1952, the Cold War was ramping up, the H-bomb, the Korean War. Europe was not yet reconstructed. You have to imaginatively put yourself back in the era and understand how it seemed. Meteorological phenomena aside, these aerodynamic vehicles were demonstrating something that caught the imagination of the public. And as they were seen all over the country, people wanted to know what was going on and that prevented the Air Force and the government and other arms of the military to remain focused on what was important, which was combating the Soviets because they could be used as a mask for an attack on this country by the Soviets. And so for the first time that we know of, an official group was put together called the Robertson Panel in 1953. And again, we have the documented minutes of the panel, which was we must debunk the subject and render the public unenthusiastic and skeptical about it so that these calls will stop and so that this phenomena cannot be used to create an event which can then be used to cover an actual invasion or attack by the Soviets. It was not the reality of the phenomena that was questioned. It was the use of the phenomena by a real enemy to invade or injure us. And from that point on, these kinds of newspaper articles were discouraged. Now, our newspaper is going to follow along. Why would newspapers follow along? Well, let's go back to what was happening in 1952 again. The CIA was really just ramping up. We were about to do a CIA covert operation in Guatemala, Iran, one was called Operation Success, I think. It was successfully done. Regime change took place. A duly established elected government in both cases was overthrown and replaced with a right-wing government, much more favorable to ourselves. It was the beginning of a Cold War strategy that you may not agree with, but which was very, very real. And the people who were forming the CIA, all a matter of historical record, were close to friends with the people who were also the media establishment. So by the time Carl Bernstein of Woodward and Bernstein wrote his famous article in 1978 for Rolling Stone, documenting the use of the media by the CIA, by that time he could say that he knew of at least more than 400 reporters who were directly in the employ or contracted to the CIA. And then, because individual reporters were not enough, there were the people who owned and controlled the media. Sulzberger, who owned the New York Times, who was the publisher, was contracted with the CIA and signed an oath of secrecy. So was CBS. So was Time Magazine. So were the other media models of the day who again simply saw that it was their patriotic duty to cooperate with the CIA and do what it requested. That theoretically ended in the 1970s when the church and pike committee hearings in Congress exposed the unfortunate activity. But what we know, too, is that, for example, under the terms of the guidelines adopted by the church commission report, the CIA director retained the right to approve such recruitment if he judged it necessary. Deutsch explained this and he got public support for his interpretation from Stanfield Turner, who when he was CIA chief in the Carter administration, conducted several operations in which he admitted using journalists. So it is no surprise that with the inauguration, now there's a big history, a lot that went on subsequently, but with the inauguration of a policy of debunking, it began to feel like you couldn't say anything about what you saw or else, as the major said, they will think we are all loonies. And yet these events continued to come in. When I mentioned that loony comment to a friend of mine at NSA, his spontaneous common-sense reply was, look, it's just a matter of record by now. And he mentioned the 1967 USS Mueller incident over Cuba when a tractor beam of light pulled up a vehicle and a message was sent to addresses that included the Intel community. Again, he says if you want to know what's going on, follow the communications. Who is it addressed to? He was an intelligence analyst who knew that you could get sometimes more information than was in the message from knowing the headers of the message and who it was sent to. So the event in 1976 in Tehran in which a fighter plane encountered a UFO and when it locked its weapons on the vehicle, found all of its weapon systems shut down, that documentation went to the DIA and it was checked credibility highest, strangeness highest. Because there is a strangeness often associated with the event which baffles people who have the experience. I don't know if I'll have time to talk about that or not, probably not. But it challenges our physics and it challenges our understanding of what's real. Or there is the case in the case of Alaska, JAL, Japanese Airlines pilot reported over a long period of time a huge, huge, huge walnut shaped what we only could call a mothership but that's our term, a huge vehicle nearby radar returns and several other pilots simultaneously vectored on the same object, reported the same phenomena to be real. The pilot was relieved of his responsibilities when he landed but my friend Richard Haynes who was a psychologist for NASA and it is documented in a database commercial airline encounters with UFOs on the question of safety because it should raise questions of safety because it has historically in the past. He talked to the people in Japan about the event because it was so well documented and very quietly without any more to do the pilot was reinstated and given his command back. Publicly it doesn't exist publicly it's ludicrous privately, privately the phenomena exists. How do you hack the phenomena then? I spent the weekend incidentally not by design but incidentally with some of the people who have been investigating this for the last 50 or 60 years under the auspices of KUFOs the Center for UFO Studies started by Alan Heineck. What these people seem to believe is that the reports that we have are almost as good as many of the reports that must be held collected and responded to inside. We know that project sign which I mentioned as the Robertson panel created an event of debunking was followed by project Grudge and project Grudge was followed by project Blue Book and Alan Heineck came to realize as the astronomer and scientist associated with Blue Book that he wasn't seeing any of the real cases that he was seeing cases that even though there were still many unknowns he wasn't seeing the best cases because as someone said to him later they would make you flip your wig if you saw what we really have in the files. But still when people report them and we database them and document them all I am saying is that where hackers start is with reality not with the distortion of reality what the masters of perception call perturbed information where information is stored in a distorted form in a database and an algorithm determines what can be recollected with accuracy. And so a hacker begins by saying what is the data? What is the data? Let me tell you what the mind of a hacker from my point of view really sounds like. This is a CIA profiler who did some incredible work for some of it she was highly decorated and she said about profiling and about her work with information security which I think is a methodology or a model that works for a number of domains she said to know who is the enemy you must first know yourself in her case Zen meditation helps her distinguish between her own mind and the system of complexity which it is encountering so that the leakage between mind and encounter system does not perturb its clarity. You know the Zen Buddhist speak of a reflection of a moon in a still pond which is the way phenomena should be reflected in the mind if it is trying to observe correctly. When we looked for warnings and indicators she said look with a beginner's mind look with no preconceived notions the data will tell me what I need to know whether it's hackers crackers serial killers the data will tell you what you need to know stay with the data any stereotype any preconceived notion like a young male hacker must be disregarded there is no template in most cases but nevertheless people bring preconceptions to the cases and the mind can't help but impose patterns automatically and prematurely and I guess what she was begging me to do and I am begging you to do is impose no preconception or assumption upon data if you have not seen the data and allowed the pattern of the compelling data to begin to reveal itself for infosec the customary approach then she said is sophomoric only the data will tell you what they're doing what they left behind focus on the evidence that was left behind same for ufology what were they after track the data be meticulous covering tracks completely is very rare every person entering a system whether it's a network or a house has a method of operation unconscious or conscious and that pattern next to their identity will reveal itself over time and that's why the work to be a true hacker or forensic analyst or ufologist requires intense concentration and constant self-monitoring there are a thousand puzzle pieces and no box with a picture the degree of clarity required is great if I had a stereotype in mind she said to me I always blew it I learned never to form a pattern too quickly notice yourself she said jumping to a conclusion thought or word and once you see it or say it stop wait interrupt yourself and back up and ask is it really true or does it really merely seem true or feel true or do I only believe it's true because I've been constructed in such a way to believe it is true ask yourself how do you feel about thinking that way stop yourself from completing the loop too quickly look at yourself and ask who am I to know that who am I to even think that without sufficient data in pursuit of insiders look for the one who does not fit the pattern this MO is appropriate to the study of ufology to forensics and to hacking it requires that we back up from how over the past decades I mean it if only cable TV and the nonsense promulgated by it and the half truth lies in distortions promulgated through it and in movies and in misinformation and in disinformation is the only source of the images and ideas you have about this subject which invites such ridicule and for someone like myself serious thoughtful who has listened to people in depth and in detail if you can't back up and ask what is the data then you are owned you are owned and they cannot control the data or perturb it to the nth degree we priests talk to each other we did then I'm not a priest anymore and I have to say I was an Episcopal priest I was robustly heterosexual I I mean right still am I do not take blood pressure medication therefore I do not need any chemical assist not like the brethren of another I'm just trying to make the case that I left quietly and by intention because I was suffocating to death wanting to talk about what was real and I was being offered the jobs I thought I wanted and they would have killed me if I had taken them because they would have put on such blinders but we priests did talk to each other and it happened that Edgar Mitchell who I mentioned was an Episcopal Episcopay and I talked confidentially to his priest and he said I'll never forget being in a hotel room with Edgar Mitchell and Alan Heineck because out here in public where we have to be so careful we must say things like well perhaps if you look at the data perhaps you have to be so careful because the ridicule is so effective the debunking in academia there is no one I was told over the weekend no one with less courage than the typical academic to stand up to the paradigm which must be imposed or they will be ridiculed and what Mitchell said what the priests said Mitchell and Heineck talked about in that hotel room when they were alone and not on the public stage where Alan was so cautious and tentative they didn't question the data they didn't question the reality of the phenomena they didn't question that they were vehicles by that point in the conversation there had been so many humanoid cases from all over the world that ultimately consistently coherently described by credible witnesses in association with landed vehicles which left physical traces or did physical damage to the environment or to the person observing them as for example a microwave radiation which cooked them a little bit they didn't question that that was real they knew that was real the conversation was 100% about how do they get here and where do they come from and is our physics an understanding of multiple dimensions sufficiently adequate or do they use black holes to pop out in white holes or how do you account for what has been often reported as a sudden manifestation as if out of a mist as if a light blinks on and a light blinks off it wasn't like it went it wasn't like it was a propulsion system it was like it was there consistently again documented and reported their questions focused on how can we bend our poor terrestrial minds around our poor terrestrial science in order to begin to understand what is well documented in order to stretch ourselves to see what the universe is really like well, if you believe you are the top of the food chain and if you believe you are the only apple of God's eye this is not good news the mere existence of extraterrestrials is no longer a problem for the American public as long as it's out there and as long as something like SETI continues its fruitless efforts to try to reach something using a primitive technology like radio and refuses to even question this kind of data I talked to Jill Tartar Jill Tartar was the model for the contact Jody Foster person a heroine in the movie Contact and she said well you know I had my own UFO experience we were flying home one night and I saw this light following and I said well I'll be god damn there's a light and then the clouds parted and it was the moon and I said you're a scientist you know that the fact that this was a negative has nothing to do with the bona fide cases that suggest that there might also be positives that are not the moon when Dick Slayton reported what he saw in orbit and took photographs of it he came back to earth and subsequently reported that the photographs shown to him were not the photographs he took nor was the object in them purported to be what he observed what he had in fact observed and when he had the balls to say that at a public press conference the spokesman for NASA said well you know Dick he's just one of our bleary eyed astronauts if any of you know what it is when you love flying that will stop you flying it is being bleary eyed commercial pilots by the dozens on the record I've talked to them they tell me what they saw and they tell me that they talk to each other about it but once you hear the superior officer in the military or in the commercial airlines or any other domain say he must be drinking and you know what that threatens to your career or your trajectory or your livelihood in public again people say to me well if it were real wouldn't it leak out well gee whiz it has that's what we're talking about there's lots of data in the public domain but it's also true that there is a lot of secrecy with our current administration for them against them they are obsessed with secrecy and you know what has happened information state in which the government knows more and more and more by virtue of the technological transformation of politics about individuals and individuals know less and less and less about the machinations of the government because it is increasingly not transparent and therefore not accountable this is just a phenomena about the technology so secrets can be kept when during World War II we were shooting out of the water every ship practically that we tried to ship across the Atlantic do you know there was an oil slick when they sank a convoy of tankers that was the largest oil slick still in the history of the world that went up the Gulf Stream and all the way across the Atlantic it covered hundreds of square miles from all the tankers that the U-Boats took down and that bodies and oil and debris washed up on the Atlantic coast for a long time and then they make out and destroy the U-Boats but no one knew about it in this country because there was an agreement that it must not be known and once the newspapers and the media agree that it will not be known and the people believe it is their patriotic duty not to say anything then it was not known the same was true of flying balloon bombs from Japan which were said to cause no damage or destruction and which never went east of Idaho except that they did go to Virginia but in the same way you can very, very effectively keep secrets we do keep secrets through compartmentalization many of you know many of you sitting here just see what time it is the usual I'm off to page 11 I got 30 pages and I have 3 minutes many of you sitting here know that what I'm saying is who you are I find you from time to time the fellow sitting next to me at Black Hat for 5 minutes we chat I found out where he is M-O-D Royal Air Force I asked simply did you know Nick Pope oh I knew Nick yes Nick did the UFO desk for the Ministry of Defense in England Nick says it's real what do you think you know it's real don't you it certainly looks that way doesn't it and I mentioned that a person I talked to in Australia where I've spoken a number of times in the last 2 years Head of Intelligence for one of the branches of the armed services when I told him I was going to have the balls to just mention the fact of extraterrestrial surveillance and observation as one of the in the future most impactful powerful events that we needed to be conscious about said to me go for it he said I would tell them because as you know it's warm right now it gets warmer and colder not according to what we do but according to what's happening to us and I mentioned that to the Brit and the Brit said well then he knew what he was talking about too didn't he now I can't string together the hundreds of conversations I've had like that detailed interviews because I don't have time that I've conducted with normal ordinary people who were up hunting in northern Wisconsin and walked into a clearing and were scared out of their minds by what they saw our person I interviewed in depth who was fishing on a lake in Wisconsin at dawn and saw a vehicle enter the water and watched the light under the water for a long long time and he said well I'll never ever forget and it had the correct affect on the meaning of truth when it emerged from the water it wasn't at a 45 degree angle it was at about a 30 degree angle and I'm an engineer and I would have expected more of a 45 and what was striking was the way it was going because there's ionization plasma around the vehicle and the water cascaded off the sides as if it wasn't touching the material itself and once it was free of the water it accelerated so fast that it would start in a matter of seconds lots and lots of stories are they just good stories well according to Herb Strentz professor of journalism at Drake he said if you look at the documented newspaper stories of the sort I've just barely introduced here he said you will find that there were hundreds of thousands hundreds of thousands there is a great deal of data from people not the flakes not the fools not the disinformation artists not the crazies serious scholars have researched and are documenting that ought to suggest that we hold back our preconceptions and ask what is happening we cannot unearth from the bowels of the government whatever they do or don't know because the real question that you see is not is it real they have created that question it is so real and they say no it's not you're not so we say yes it is and that is the victory because it creates a domain of yes it is no it isn't and prevents us from asking the meaningful and serious questions which is who are they where do they come from, what do they want and what does it mean for human civilization why did the Brookings Institute get a commission to do a report on the impact of a higher technology civilization on earth peoples and cultures in the 1950s that I had hoped to say to document what was happening in the 50s and in the 60s so you can see that there is a historical data that compels a historical analysis and that is the evidence the witness of thousands of people is the evidence from all over the world it is not a fool's venture to ask where do we belong in the universe who are we and where are we going and why Jeff thought it was appropriate in a hacker convention to allow me at least to talk about these last 30 years of exploration because as a priest I listened to people's confessions and so did my friend at NSA when people came to him from all over the country and he could ask them in private what about this event what about that and then when we compared notes we found out we were on the same page you can multiply that experience many times if you're serious about hacking if you're serious about where it leads if you're serious about the social and cultural and psychological implications of the transformation of all of our systems through the technologies that you build and create then all I can do is encourage you to hold your preconception if I sound like an idiot too much to you at this point and say at least I'm going to look at the data check it out for myself begin exploring if you care most people don't but a few do and that's the hacker world the few, the proud the beautiful by you anyway now now I have to make this pitch my publisher Singris was taken over by Reed Elsevier they don't even put my book in their catalog anymore because it's a huge company and they're technologically focused I happen to have 10 of these available so cheap I mean so cheap there aren't many left of my collection Islands of the Clickstream there's 10 of them and if you want one make an offer we'll talk about it otherwise all I can do is say thank you very much for your kind attention you have once again given me the privilege of being taken seriously and there is no greater gift in the world