 On this episode of Skeptico, a show about looking like you're in control. I think the biggest concern for a military is not looking foolish. So let's say that is true. Let's say they do have 70 years of information that proves undoubtedly or everything that we think is happening is actually happening. How do you release that information responsibly? How do you do it? And a show about what we're willing to give up in order to feel protected. We live in a world that has walls and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties. You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. Stick around for my interview with creator and host of unidentified celebrity review, Luis Jimenez. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Acarrison. Today, we welcome Lou Jimenez to Skeptico. I have a kind of a cool picture of Lou up on the screen. This is from his unidentified celebrity review podcast, which has got to be the hardest working guy in the UFO community pumping it out with all these unbelievable interviews that he does so many times a week. Lou is also comedian, actor, impressive IMDb page. I mean, some people put up an IMDb and they just have like a couple of credits. You got a lot of, you got a lot of appearances here, man. What's up with that? Well, yeah, man, that's, that's 20 years of my life right there that you're showing. You know, it was, it's been a long, long road, you know, it's still continuing. It's not over. But yeah, it's just funny you had this, I haven't looked at that in a while. So when you bring it up, it's always like, yeah, that's pretty wild. I do have some pretty good credits in there and I've worked with some really, really cool people. Yeah, it's been, it's that right there's a resume of a working, but, you know, still struggling actor, still trying to make his way in the world. And you never know when that, that one rolls right around the corner. That's right. That's right. You know, and we were, we were chatting just a minute ago before we came on about actors because you're obviously interested in that and drawn to that. And you're also drawn to comedy, too, which I think is kind of an interesting angle on this. But what we're really going to talk about today is this really amazing, amazing UFO channel that you've developed on YouTube. And I say amazing because I think you bring that sensibility, you know how to engage with people, you know how to entertain us. But man, you know, you know the game. I mean, you know the the topic you're talking about. I don't know, man. I've got my my main training in acting is improv. So I've been doing improv comedy for for easily 20 years and unknowingly for a long time before that I was doing improv comedy. I think it was a couple of things that I saw that was like, oh, man, I feel like I'd be good at that. I watched the kids in the hall was like one of the first sketch groups I ever came across and became obsessed with. And then I saw whose line is in anyway. And I was like, yeah, I could absolutely do that. That looks like a blast, just making stuff up on the spot. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds fun. But then when you start training and you really get into it, you find there's a term in the improv community called group mind. And it's this point that you reach on stage where everything is clicking. The audience is absolutely into it. And then you as performers are making things up, but at the same time, you're able to know exactly the thing the other person's going to do because you've connected so well. So I think I bring a lot of that sort of to my interviews and to my show. Like the idea of no matter what happens on the show, when there's been a lot of weird things or awkward moments, I immediately fall to that training and just say something, say something, because something needs to be said, you know, or and address. Usually we like to address the awkwardness because if you can address it and talk about it and get comfortable in the awkwardness, I think that leads to even more interesting things that are said or more, you know, a different thinking in what you're conversing about. So I think, you know, I don't like to call myself or consider myself a journalist at all. I've never went to journalism school. I'm not trained in that whatsoever. But I am trained in listening, like listening to other people and trying to decipher what they're saying is is always something that I'm just always doing, body language, movie. You know, all those things that I do on stage when I'm having a conversation with people, I also try and read the room and read your audience, things like that. That's what comes through to me and that in you saying you're not a journalist. I mean, these are such amazing, amazing times that we live in. The topic you are covering can't be a more important topic. I mean, we are not alone kind of is one of the ultimate fundamental questions. And then to think about the time that we're in where whatever we think of Big Brother government, it is Big Brother and Big Brother has come out and said, all right, it's real, you know, we've denied it for 70 years. Now we're telling you it's real. So you're interviewing all the top people. This is the journalistic scoop of all time. Isn't it? Yeah. I mean, look, I got super lucky. What essentially happened is I met Lou Elizondo while I was working in a restaurant and and so that kind of I was already thinking about doing a channel before that and that and I wanted to talk about UFOs. But I also I'm an actor, I'm very self-conscious. I didn't want anybody looking at me like I was a weirdo or finding that channel and going, well, OK, yeah, we can't hire this guy for a brand new CBS pilot. I mean, those are legitimate. Those are the concerns I still have now. But after meeting him and talking to him, I was like, OK, this is what I'm going to do my channel about. And then it wasn't until about a year, almost a year after that, where I reached back out to Lou and said, hey, I was a server at this restaurant this day and this happened and and I'd love to talk to you again for my channel that I started a year ago and he came on. And I think that was sort of the the getting my foot in the door as far as interviews were concerned, because I wasn't doing interviews for the first year of my channel. And, you know, when he agreed to do our activism event, the Big Phone Home, and he agreed to come on the show, it was it was a really great sort of, I guess, solidification of of the channel. Like if he was going to go on that channel, I miss, you know, that was a good in or a good way to sort of introduce myself to other folks in the community that I just wanted to talk to. And I would find, you know, especially to what I would find interesting, fun ways to interact with them. And I think that's what got me a lot of these different interviews, just sort of my my my wit, you know, and humor. And I I I never thought about it in the way that you just laid it out. But then I was thinking of sort of like John Stewart, you know, and Tim MacMillan sort of compared our show to a late night talk show for UAPs. And I was like, yeah, that's about what we were going for. And we're going to really when we come back from our break, if we come back on the 28th of this month, you know, that'll be very evident in the production. We're we're really ramping up the production of the show. And as far as segments and things that we're doing in the second hour, we're shortening our interviews for two hours to one hour. But but yeah, I mean, you know, I got lucky in a lot of ways with a lot of these interviews and they just sort of steamrolled in and it seems to be a place where. Where people feel safe about talking about the topic because we're not judging either way, but we also want to call BS where we see BS. And we want to we don't want a belief system and we don't want to create a belief system for anybody. We want to make sure that people are looking at the evidence and how can we move the discussion in a place where it doesn't require a whole bunch of stories and conflicting information to to be something worthy of looking at. So we don't go totally inside baseball because a lot of this stuff I'm going to put up an interview and it's going to have UFO on it. A lot of people are just going to skip over it because a lot of the interviews I do are on other topics of near death experience or consciousness science, parapsychology and all the rest of that stuff. Who is Lou Elizondo? And then let's talk about kind of the good, the bad and some of the things that people are saying. And then we'll play a clip from a recent interview you did with them. Yeah, so that's, you know, it's a great question. I don't I don't know all every bit of Lou Elizondo. I've only, you know, I've met him and I say only, but it's a lot compared to some other people. But I've met him nine times, including all my interviews and my actual personal interaction with him. I from what I gather, you know, who he is as from for me, you know, if you're trying to educate your audience of, OK, who is Elizondo? What does he mean to this discussion? He is a gentleman who ran a government program called ATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and essentially helped. He was a whistleblower. He helped release three videos and and. Cooperating pilot testimony in 2017 in the New York Times article. And that was essentially the the realization that our government has a lot more information on the subject of UAPs and UFOs. The government likes to call them UAPs because there's a lot less stigma to it. The UAP means Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, UFO, Unidentified Flight Project. But so that's sort of his is in a quick nutshell, and there's a lot to it. But that's sort of who he is, who he is as a person. I mean, he's he's a war hero. You know, he's been involved with catching terrorists in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you know, for what we could see, he is the most we've always, for me, I've always wanted a government. I'm like, why don't more government officials come forward and say if there is something to this, why don't they come forward more and do more whistleblowing in in the case of Elizondo? And he's got the most bona fides out of anybody that's ever come out from within the government. And so I think those bona fides are what add legitimacy to this story. You know, so that's who he is in a short nutshell from my perspective. So so my first kind of encounter with even the name was I interviewed Leslie Cain, you know, you know, Leslie Cain has interviewed her a couple times. And, you know, she's kind of really interested in after life kind of stuff, too. She did a Netflix series, was top ten on Netflix, all about after we wrote a book about it, very good book. And before that, she wrote what was at the time one of the most respected UFO books, you know, generals, government officials, something go on the record stuff. So then she's the one who breaks the New York Times story, like you said, December 2017, which again, a lot of people don't even get what an important date that is, you know, but her and Ralph Blumenthal interviewed them both on the show. But my first reaction was fucking Leslie. Co Intel Pro, I mean, give me a break. You go to the Pentagon and they put you in a private room and they walk in Lou Elizondo and they say, OK, here's the thing. Here's the story. And by the way, it's declassified. I mean, how does this not stink from high heaven as a fed story? No, it's a great question. I think it's very easy for us to go there, right? Because the government has been caught doing a lot of nefarious shit in the past. And and that's where my mind went to when I heard the the name of the program advanced aerial threat identification program. I'm 42 years old. I was born in 1980. Since the day I was born, we've been sold nothing but threats and war. And and look at the world around us today is because the consequences of this of our foreign policy constantly needing a threat to survive, to get the new contracts, to build the new planes, to do to improve on a nuclear weapon. Like it blows my mind that they're still a part of our budget that is going toward making a bigger bomb than what we already have. It's like, I don't understand it. It'll I'll never understand it. And so I understand from from just the citizen's perspective, all of this shit is coming from the government, all of it. Roswell came from the Air Force, you know, and it's so funny because most of these people who hate Lou Elizondo or don't like his story are all very anti government. But when you talk to them, they believe everything about Roswell. And it's like both of these things came from our government. Both of these stories came from our government. It's it's it's easy to paint that brush. Of skepticism over this story, it's super easy. And it's very I think I don't know where I'm looking for. But it's it's easy to pursue because hell, the government lies all the time, all they do is lie. They've perfected lying. So yeah, I I think the thing that we do is and we're really focused on, especially when we come back, is what have you done for me today? Attitude, what information have you released today? What what is what is the thing that catches my attention is that lawmakers are paying attention to this and writing laws and legislation to look at this more closely and other things as well within the umbrella of that bill. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. I mean, because especially in the last two months, you know, we've learned of sock puppet accounts. We've learned of of, you know, right now we're talking about somebody who's been fired within the DOD, who is apparently Louis Alessandro's boss and the woman that he was sexually harassing has now taken his place within that department, which seems it just seems like a circus. It's absolutely bonkers. So, you know, our our perspectives have changed on a lot of things. And I think that's the beauty of the show is like you see the growth of it. Like it this subject gets you in this roller coaster of ups and downs of like, oh, my God, this is absolutely real. Holy cow. This is this smells and looks like bullshit. So walking that line is difficult. In my opinion, the thing for me and this is just for me and I don't expect anybody to believe this or take this as as proof because I'll never make you take my story as proof. I have seen one of these things up close and personal when I was a young man. It changed my perspective on a lot of things. So for me, I I I know they're real. But I'd stop what I'm putting on the table's proof. I've got to really try and leave that out of the conversation. But the other thing that I really looked at that sort of leads me to believe that there's there is a there there, that something is there. What it is, I have no clue. But is that again, these lawmakers are going into classified meetings. They're looking at they're looking at data collected by the best instruments on the planet within our military industrial complex, and they're coming out of these meetings and going, OK, this information is not getting to the right people. We're not reacting to this information correctly. And we need a little more clarity on what the hell is in our skies, whether it's drones, swarms of drones or unidentified aerial phenomena that is displaying technologies far beyond what anyone is capable of. Well, on one hand, I think anyone who's talking about this from a purely UFOs aren't real. E.T. isn't real. That's a flat earth kind of mentality to me. I don't even worry about that. The thing that that I think is very real and you tuned into it is Cointel Pro, political sire. I mean, these guys have a long history of lying. Do you know this is see, I'm kind of old school in this. I've been doing this for a long time and I've interviewed all these people a long time ago that aren't even on the scene. But do you remember Colonel John Alexander? Yes. So for the longest time, you know, he was the guy who said, look, I am a colonel, been in intelligence for 20 years. If there's any truth to this, I would know because I know all the people who would know and there's no truth to any of this. And he held this line for just the longest fucking time and thing after thing. And Danny Sheehan, even, you know, confronted him with, we can talk about Danny Sheehan and, you know, you don't know what to make of him either. But Danny Sheehan, it's like, look in the face of this, in the face of this. And he just did that, you know, stick the chin out like a colonel and said, it's not real. It didn't happen. So I interviewed him, A.D. after disclosure and said, hey, what's up? What's up? And he goes, well, I was wrong. Now, let's talk about my new book on chaminism and all the rest of this shit. And I'm like, oh, man, that ain't good enough. That ain't good enough. It's like Richard Doty, you know, looked like the one thing John Alexander said that was a moment of like non-co-intel bullshit. He said, if Richard Doty did the shit that he said he did, he should be in jail. He should be in Leavenworth. And Richard Doty, in case we have to remind people, is the guy who did this. Just dirty, nasty psychological warfare on a guy named Paul Benowitz, who was a patriotic, flag-raising just American citizen who happened to live across from Kirkman in New Mexico and saw stuff and was just like, hey, guys, just want to make sure you're aware of this. And they just totally fuck the guy over every which way. And Doty was proud of it. Doty was like, hey, man, I did a good job. That's what they wanted me to do. And I did it. And can you believe that flag waving idiot, you know, is like falling for all the stuff? So it's like, how do we clear? Why isn't that the first question for Lou? Why isn't the first question for Louis? Well, what about John Alexander? What about Richard Doty? To what extent do you separate yourself from this shit that's been run on us with regard to UFOs? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's hard. It's hard to, like, ask him that question, because obviously he wasn't there. He didn't run those programs. He wasn't charged to those people. He had nothing to do with any of those people. So but I understand that those people also are the reason why we should be skeptical. They they're perfect examples of why we shouldn't trust anyone. We shouldn't we shouldn't trust anyone on this conversation until scientific papers start coming down the line, you know, until until real research on this that is shared publicly. What would you what would you want to see from scientific papers? I mean, here's an interview you did. Let me pull this up. I mean, because I've talked to all these people, too. Well, we'll talk about Chris Lambrite. Chris Lambrite, yeah. You did it. Like, again, back to the point, you do great interviews like the Christian Lambrite. You knew your stuff. You're asking the right questions. You're listening. And when people try and take another direction, you go, no, no, come back to the timeline, because the timeline is what's so important in his story, because he's the Paul Benowitz guy and really reveals the truth about that. And there's Lou, which I don't know, just. I mean, like you said, you put your finger on it. Threat. OK, so that's what this is about. That's all that comes out of your mind. Threat, threat, threat. But here's the interview you did. I mean, you did a fantastic. You've done a number of interviews with Melinda Leslie. Yeah. Fuck all the rest of these people. Melinda Leslie, just get to the bottom of that one. She goes, it's about abduction. It's about that kind of level of contact. I've had it. I've studied it for 40 years, interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people. And what does she say? This gets into my world, Lou. She gets into the first thing it's about is consciousness. They want to know about psychic stuff. They show you how to be more psychic. Threat. The next thing it's about. She's saying she's saying people who've been taken on the craft and have memories of it. Here's what they report. And so and then she says, and it's about technology and it's about all the rest of this stuff. I mean, when I compare that with what Lou Elizondo is saying, I'm like, I could care less about any of the bullshit you're putting out there, Lou. Here's what I want to know is how is E.T. interacting with these people and changing their consciousness? Some people are saying I had a spirit. It's like a spiritual awakening experience, all the rest that I mean, you're you're an experiencer. Where does this stuff hit you? Doesn't it hit you at that fundamental level of who am I? Why am I here? I mean, it does. But the problem is, is that we've been asking that those questions for such a long time and they're not moving the ball anywhere. You know, I just don't know if we're even ready for the answer to those questions. I think we've got to simplify it more. We've got to be able to get everybody on the same page. I love Belinda Leslie to death. I think she's a fascinating person to talk to. But like when I lay down for I don't think there's anything to this my laps. I really don't. I don't think there's any proof of it at all. I think to hide a program that large would take thousands and thousands and thousands of people to pull off. The budget would be almost impossible to hide. And I compared it to MK Ultra. MK Ultra was a program that ran for 20 years. It was really small. Very few people knew about it. But when the program was over two years later, they were asking about it at Congress and then we had hearings about it. And then the public the public knew about it. She's talking about a program that's been going on for 80 years, 80 years. I just I can't I can't wrap my brain around that kind of stuff. You know, as far as Lou's concerned, I I think he's, you know, again, we're signing NDAs and I hate to make this excuse. But there are things you can't talk about. There are things you can't talk about. I think. The thing that matters to me, I'm at this point, I'm like, I don't care who the personality is anymore. I'm so concentrated on what are what are lawmakers doing to get more information on this? I want to see nuts and bolts things. So when you ask me what more can science do, science hasn't paid attention to this at all. They're just now getting to it. You know, when you've got a Harvard professor, I'll be low looking at this topic in a very serious way, trying to get money to look at this topic in a very serious way. I think I think those hopefully those discoveries will lead us into the conversations of, OK, how do these things consciously connect with us? Do they if they do? What are the consequences of that? Or what are the the pros of that? There's a lot. It's it's a can. It's Pandora's box. It's a can of worms. There's once you once you solidify one part of this conversation, it leads to 15 billion other questions that have to be taken one at a time. And that's not going to happen overnight. And I don't think there's one person or one messenger that's going to come out and give us all the answers we're looking for. It's just not going to happen. I think it's too complicated. I think we're we're scratching at the surface of something so immensely foreign to the human consciousness and subconsciousness that we really have no clue what we're tapping into or doing when it comes to this stuff. And so, yeah, I mean, it's I understand that people want those answers and I get it. But I just don't know if we're ready for it yet. OK, and if we are, how do we explain it to people? That's the other thing. Like, how do we explain this kind of stuff to the American public? Well, now you're sounding now, you're sounding a little Alizandoish, you know, like, look what we've done in terms of getting hold it. No, seriously, wait, it's a tough conversation. No, Alex, like I like my sister. I use my family as a perfect example because they have nothing to do with this stuff. They really don't and they're supportive of me. They believe my experience that I've had, right? But do you have do you have contact experience, sighting experience, both? I mean, a close, a close sighting experience, not did it lead to entities? Did it did it lead to though? You know, because a lot of people have had sighting experiences. It also has kind of a valet, Davis effect, you know, kind of, you know, there's there's an effect to it that's beyond just the sighting. Or for you, was it just more like I saw it? Yeah, no, I saw it was like it was like, you know, and I know this is a very simple sort of comparison, but it's like seeing a very rare athlete or airplane or car that you like. Can you see it? You're like, holy shit. And all you want to do is get closer to it and get a better view of it. And that's what it was. I mean, like it absolutely affected me. But I don't think I had no subconscious messages or downloads or any connection with it in that sort of. Paraphysical way, it's it was simply something that I saw. So I, you know, I I didn't have that kind of it's the the the other elements of of, you know, the close encounters through all the way through C six, if we want to count those, I didn't have any of that. OK, so I'm sorry. Your sister, tell me more about. Yeah, so yeah, so going back to my sister and my family, like when she tried watching an episode, of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, which sort of is a very remedial way to sort of get into this conversation and sort of even start considering things like this. And it scared the shit out of her. She couldn't watch the whole episode. She hasn't watched the show since then. So this is going to be a very difficult conversation to have with people. It is. And I do believe that I look, there are parts of Los Alamos that I think are valuable and I think move the conversation forward. And then there are other parts where I look, I'm like, man, that's not valuable. That does not move the conversation forward. You know, I just take what I can and move on with it. And I think this part of the message of, look. Go when you Google painters interpreting cats from travelers that came from different parts of the world for the first time. And you look at these wonderful painters and they paint cats. Just Google it from the, you know, 15th, 14th century. They look awful. They look nothing like cats. And I think this is kind of like I can I can imagine a world in where our government sees a cat for the first time in the form of this phenomenon. And they come back and they meet on it and they have different interpretations of it and all of their drawings and all of their research don't paint perfectly what they saw or what they experienced. And I could understand how they're like, yeah, if we can't explain it internally, how the hell are we going to tell anybody else publicly about this? Like, I can see how they would get scared and not and not want to talk about it, honestly. And I may disagree with me. Well, I don't disagree with you. I just think there's it's like you're trying to say a bunch of different things kind of all at once, which I realize you have to because that's the nature of this topic. So yeah, on one hand, you're saying, hey, the government has to protect us and people hate when they hear that, you know, but it's true. You know that it's true. I mean, on one level, that's their fundamental responsibility is, hey, the Huns are coming over the hill and, you know, they don't give a shit. They're just going to do their thing and we got to protect that. But then we also would love to believe that we don't need to be protected from the truth, you know, that you can't handle the truth. You can't you don't deserve the truth kind of thing, which is kind of a playoff. And there's plenty of evidence that we do. We cannot handle the truth and that there's a role to play there as well. So we get that. But now when we're talking, you and I were like, OK, pardon me, I can't handle the truth. So I want the truth. So the truth, you know, like Melinda Leslie, OK, my lab thing, don't know, I agree with you up in the air on that. But if you just start stacking the evidence for burden or proof, I mean, go to Richard Dolan, who you interviewed here along with Grant Cameron. I've had plenty of interviews with Grant Cameron, great guy. He's kind of gone overboard on the consciousness thing without really understanding, I think, fundamentally, what it's about. But nonetheless. But Dolan, the interesting thing about Dolan is right. He was kind of playing the straight line of the historian till he marries Mrs. Dolan and Mrs. Dolan says, no, man, I was raped by the fucking aliens, you know what I mean? And he knows her and loves her and sleeps in the same bed with her. And she sounds pretty credible and he's pretty credible. And he's listened to enough of those stories with abductees. And he's like, no, that's real. That stuff is happening. So if that stuff is happening, unless Dolan is just full of crap. And then where are we to understand Melinda Leslie? And you know, the other interesting thing about switching around for a minute. So that would be kind of question one. And that leads to the, I think, the deeper question of good ET versus bad ET, you know, and just like good MK ultra versus bad MK ultra, if you can, you know, some of that was maybe for a good purpose. Let's understand it because it could mind control could be happening to our soldiers, could be happening to our American citizens. So MK ultra, let's figure out what it is. And then the bad part of it, the evil part of it is, hey, why we're at it? Why don't we weaponize it? So we can do it to all these people? Well, why would we assume that that isn't going on here? We would have to assume that it is until proven otherwise. So kind of bounced around with a lot of things. What do you make of the Dolans and Richard Dolan coming around to? Yes, that's about abduction. And yes, people are being forced to do kind of some pretty nasty stuff with ET. That's his that's his account. Right. That's his account. I mean, I I there's no there's no proof for it. There's no proof of it. There's no study. No, other than, you know, well, there's the study. You know, you know, Ray, do you know Ray Hernandez with the Edgar Mitchell Foundation down there in Miami? I mean, I heard the name, but I'm not familiar. Super sharp guy, attorney, IRS attorney, also a PhD. And he's getting his PhD. Just very, very smart guy. The first large scale study of contact experience done in a scientific way. Leo Sprinkle was a scientist who designed it. Great Grant Cameron totally hooked into those guys and knows all those guys. So no, the data is yes. And the data, you know, consistently has come back. Yes, yes, yes. So when you say there's there's no evidence for it, it's like saying there's no evidence for near death experience. But here's here's my thing, right? That information's out there. It's not changing the zeitgeist. It's not it's not convincing lawmakers. It's not convincing academia. It's not convincing the soccer mom. It's not compelling enough to get the entire world talking about it like a soprano's episode or, you know, the last episode of Game of Thrones or whatever. I think when this topic is in 60 minutes, it gets on that level. I think when this topic is discussed in the Atlantic or any one of these high brown magazines, high society magazines, it's being discussed and it's being taken seriously now. I think when you hear conversations between, say, Alex Friedman and Gary Nolan, who are both PhDs and looking at different aspects of consciousness as well. And you hear about Gary Nolan every single one of his speaking engagements that he goes to at these universities. After the engagements, there's a dinner and at these dinners at some point, this conversation comes up and then he gives his point of view and one of two things happens. Usually the entire table chimes in with their own stories or people they know that saw something crazy or have even experienced something. And then it becomes a safety in numbers thing at that table. Or after the the dinner, someone will come up to him privately and give him an account. And these are smart people. These are very credible people. They're either IRS attorneys, they're doctors, they're lawyers. They're they come from all walks of life. I'm not saying that the proof is not there. What I am saying, though, is that academia hasn't taken it seriously enough to legitimately try and start to answer what people are dealing with from a from a especially a PTSD standpoint. Like there are there are accounts that people are really experiencing things and I don't want to write that stuff off. I think it's valid. But again, and how do we take these stories and translate them to the bigger community at large, the community that doesn't look into the stuff, the community that doesn't research. That's that's where I'm trying to get this conversation to. I'm trying to get my mom and my sister and my and my dad's to call me every day going, hey, did you hear about this? What about this? What about this? I think that would be an exciting place to be. But all I'll say is I'm not doubting the research or the work of the Dolan's and the Melinda Leslie's. I'm not saying they're liars. But what I'm saying is is the data that they've put on the table so far and that in some cases they've presented in a mock congressional setting in front of real lawmakers hasn't moved the needle at all at all. And now you get this 2017 article, you get this guy from the government saying these things are real, you get lawmakers starting to write laws. And those are the things that are moving the needle. It's not it's not these stories of abductions or these, you know, in some cases, half concocted experiments on what we're looking or trying to figure out. Like, I think just labeling this thing as E.T. is incredibly naive. How do we know that? How do we know it's E.T.? How do we know it's coming from another planet? How do we know it's coming here in a vehicle? Is that even the best mode of transportation for something that could think telepathically and communicate? You know, like I just I think again, there's nobody has the right answer on this. Nobody knows anything. And I think that's the trepidation. And if you're an experiencer, especially an experiencer with high status within society, you're never going to talk about this because it's it's it's there's so much stigma that comes with it. There's so much fear of losing your status if you become one of the people who seem or experience these things. We're still there. We've got a long way to go. And so that's why I understand why if the government looks at this and I'm like, we have no fucking clue what we're looking at. And that's a very honest answer. But I don't think from their perspective, that's an answer they want to reveal. They don't want to tell you that they don't know. So when you talk to Grant Cameron, did you guys talk about the Wilbert Smith memo in Canada? Did he give you that whole thing? I don't know if he gave us the Wilbert Smith memo because it was a panel of people and we had a discussion over a year ago. It doesn't ring a bell. You do. You do so many. You do so many interviews. We were doing three interviews a day. That's why we're going down to one a week. Well, you're going to do one. You're going to do one a week. Yeah, we're going down to one a week from three a week. You know, it's it's it's it's labor intensive. Oh, yeah. To book three guests a week. It's a lot of work. You're talking about 16 guests a month. That's oh, yeah. Times 12, you know, but it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Yeah, like I said, I just work in man. And so sometimes it's difficult for me to sort of go through rifle through the file of interviews and oh, did we talk about that? It's possible. Yeah, we may have. But honestly, I don't remember. Yeah. And briefly. So Grant Cameron is from Canada and he had a contact experience like you did in Winnipeg and it was kind of all over the news. And he said it went on for months and everyone would kind of get in the car and drive around and see if you could see the lights, you know. So we saw the lights and then he had that contact experience that you said you're aware of you didn't have in your case. But it was like more than just seeing it. You know, there was something that happened. It's not like he remembers being on board the ship. Anyways, that sparks his interest in it. He starts looking at FOIA stuff. They call it something different in Canada. But one of the things that shakes out of it is the Wilbert Smith memo. So Wilbert Smith is the guy in charge of the the weird desk for Canada in the 1950s, like everything that happens in the sky. This guy is responsible for and at some point he goes to the prime minister and he goes, hey, there's shit happening out there. And let's go down and see what the Yankees know. So he goes, OK, go. So he goes down and he meets with van of our bush. He meets with all the other right, right people, whether you believe in the Avery MJ 12 or whether you don't, he meets with a lot of those people. He comes back, he writes this memo to the Canadian government, to the prime minister, whoever, and says, look, this shit's real. It is the highest priority of the United States government, most secret, higher than the hydrogen bomb. And then he says this thing. He says, and there's a mental aspect to it that they're looking into, which is the consciousness thing. And see, that's why Grant is big in the consciousness. Grant is like, forget the nuts and bolts. That's just a distraction. Look at near death experience. Look at remote viewing. Look at psychic phenomena. Somewhere in there is the answer, kind of like a Jacques Valais kind of thing. But at the same time, don't look away from that. This ties directly into the MK ultra stuff, at least in Grant's mind. I think he's spot on. We look at MK ultra as mind control, as, you know, our soldiers in Korea might be being mind controlled, maybe. But it was also about what's E.T. doing in this extended consciousness space. We better know because that's we in the fifties. They knew that there was something happening, like you said, telepathy, mind control, you know, when tic-tac happens, when tic-tac happens and they meet, you know, they go to the secret spot in the sky. They're supposed to meet and there is E.T. There is the tic-tac already there because it's kind of this collective consciousness kind of thing. So they knew about that shit back in the fifties, fifties, 1950s, 70 years ago. So that's what makes it hard for me to stomach. You know, at Lou Elizondo, oh, it's a threat to our skies. And we don't know what's going on up there. Hey, bro, full fucking disclosure. If you don't, if you're Lou Elizondo and you don't know who John Alexander is, go look the dude up. He lives out there in the desert. You'll find him. Richard Doty. Go look him up. Find out who committed those criminal acts so we can get all the shit straightened out before we just kind of jump on your latest what this really means kind of thing. Let's get everyone on board with my story. Let's clean out the closet a little bit. I feel your frustration. I think, again, the part of the reason that I want to address two things. Part of I think part of the reason why that closet hasn't been cleaned out is imagine is since the fifties, you've poked and you've prodded and you've tried to gain understanding of this phenomena. And you failed for the last 50, 60 years to get any sort of understanding or explanation, possibly dollars have been spent into into trying to get those answers and has produced nothing but more confusion. The fact that it's real is still true. But the explanation of what is behind that real phenomena is still very mysterious. And so, again, I can understand why government would want to not talk about that because all of the questions that you're going to spit at them, they're not they're really not going to have answers to. And it's there's no it's a no win position for the government to say that. It's a no one position. Like they come out and they say, yeah, this there's lights in the sky. Sometimes they're mechanical. We think they're being piloted by things. We have no idea what those things are. Maybe maybe we recovered a couple of them, but we still don't know where they come from or who they are, what their motives are. There are there are a multitude of things that they would not have answers for that I think would would be. I would understand. I don't agree with it just because I'm saying I understand. It doesn't mean I agree with it, but I understand how a lot of people within that security apparatus would be like, just shut the fuck up about it. We would mum is the word mum is the word we're not going to talk about. And and then the other thing I wanted to address was your your the idea of Louis Elizondo saying that these are threats. I think you're right, both Christopher Mellon and Louis Elizondo were very much pitching this thing as a threat to national security, right? That was something that kept coming up over and over and over again. And I think the community reacted to that. They didn't like the idea that you're calling this thing a threat, especially if it's an unknown. And I think they pivoted. They changed the name of the office from the advanced aerospace threat identification program to what did they change it to? Oh, my God, I'm drawn a blank. No, we get the point. But yeah, but and that that's the idea of it being a threat hasn't been discussed in about three to four years. But it's just I'm just exactly. I mean, what are we how they're spinning it today? I mean, it's still it's still a Pentagon run program. Just consider this, Lou, what if it's the opposite of what you said? Oh, we've been poking around it for 70 years and it's always failed. And we don't know what the hell it is. What if it's the opposite? What if they know what it is? What if they have a really, really good handle on what it is? How does the whole thing look then? You know, I go back to the Stargate thing, the remote viewing thing because that's connected to this, too. You know, Stargate remote viewing. OK, so, you know, Ingo Swan is the guy who really, I guess you could say, discovered or created remote viewing. He's a psychic. And then he said, if I have to train other people how to do that, that's the here's how I'll do it kind of thing. But they were remote viewing the moon. They were remote viewing Mars. They were seeing aliens. They were all this stuff. And at the same time, there were remote viewing Russian subs and they were getting good results. They were remote viewing lost planes in Africa. And what they saw turned out to be real. So we don't know how all that stuff works. But what if it's not a failed 70 year thing? What if it's a pretty damn successful 70 year thing? Doesn't that put a whole different spin on the, oh, my gosh, let's tell you what it is now. Depends on how much information they have, you know, like again, like I think the biggest concern for a military is not looking foolish. So let's say that is true. Let's say they do have 70 years of information that proves undoubtedly or everything that we think is happening is actually happening. How do you release that information responsibly? How do you do it? Excellent point with you 100 percent on that, you know, like. And so I think they're in a conundrum, they're in a really tough spot. Now, on one hand, they're they're vilified and crucified for being the government because they lie and they cheat, they steal, they start wars. And a lot of them are full of shit. But that's like painting the entire planet, right? Because what is it? There's sixteen hundred billionaires in this country that control three quarters of the world's wealth. Like, could we point to those sixteen hundred people and use that as a representation of all of us? No. So I don't think it's fair to take. And we don't know what the percentage of this government is that could be hiding this kind of information if they are hiding it. But I don't think it's fair to label the rest of the government because this this entity is acting in a rogue fashion because they simply don't know what to do. It is it is it is a of a Pandora's box. And I think that's we just, you know, again, I think it's the perfect reason to just shut up, not say anything about it. And maybe this idea of getting scientists and lawmakers on board and slowly if it does feel like a drip, I will agree with anybody there. The last, especially five years, it's not that it seems like a drip. It seems like an app. And what you're saying is not for what? Well, as you point out, an app for exactly what you said, I think you framed it up perfectly. In my opinion, that's what makes the most sense is like. And I love that you did that. It's like, no, wait a minute, put yourself in their shoes. What the fuck are they supposed to do? At the end of the day, I want you on that wall. I need you on that wall kind of thing, right? We do want them. We have other threats and other allies, whether the E.T. is our ally or a threat, whatever. We got China is a real thing. China isn't looking to they have their own interests, their own perspective, and there's different factions within China that do that, same with every other country and every other thing. So it's a big world. It's a complicated world. And that's your point. And then we're looking to. Our government, collectively, to kind of manage that in some way that can only be managed by that big collective. Totally get your point, you know, in that. But our job, it would seem to me, Lou, is to keep pushing for the fucking truth. Your sister can't handle the truth. Hey, that's OK. I get that. There's a lot of people that can't handle all sorts of different truths about religion, about politics, about the way the world works. I'm not judging them. I'm just saying, for me, I'm going to keep pushing for the truth. Yeah, well, I mean, but you say it's an op. What is it? What is the objective of the op, if it's an op? Well, if it's an op and if it's a good op, then we'll never fucking know the objective. I mean, this is, you know, like you had Chris Lambrite on the show again. I'm going to pull that up. Like the amazing thing about Chris Lambrite is it shows the extent to which you have to go to even begin to uncover the op, right? Because his whole thing is on the back to the Paul Benowitz thing. And Paul Benowitz is this American citizen. He gets interested in UFOs. He buys some super high quality cameras. He's got a bunch of them set up on his roof and he starts looking at shit that's happening in Kirkland Air Force Base because he lives right across from Kirkland. What happens is then he goes and he says again, American citizen, hey, this stuff is happening. Who's the first guy who knocks on his door? Kind of to your point, is it a researcher? Is it a scientist? Is it a guy who's in charge of security and says, hey, you know, let's find out what you know, man, co-intel pro. It's Richard Doty counterintelligence. That's the first guy that shows up. And then like our community, I'm not really part of the UFO community, but the upshot of that whole thing is the Mirage men. They totally got the fucking story wrong because Doty's cover story was, well, Paul Benowitz saw stealth bombers and other shit that he shouldn't have seen. And that's why we had to feed him all this information that by your guest. And again, you interviewed him and did a great job with it. Chris Lambright totally blows that out of the water. So it's unraveling the layers of like, so that's an op. That was an op. Like Doty has outed himself and said, we ran an op. An illegal op, by the way, that he should be in jail for and his superiors should be in jail for. You can't do that. You can't go take somebody and put him through the American citizen who hasn't committed any crime and run him through the ringer and go give him false information to run him crazy and do all the right. You can't do it. It's illegal. But he exposes the op. Richard Doty exposes the op. But to this day, he just covers it up with another op. So when you ask me, what's the op that Lou is playing? Lou is a master. I mean, he is a smart, fricking guy for maybe 20 years from now, we can look back and have some clue of what the op was. But we certainly ain't going to figure out those guys are a lot smarter than I am in terms of running an op. Well, I just think if it's an op, it's the first op that's ever. Inspired lawmakers to look and talk about this publicly. That's that's the I think the difference for me is that you've got lawmakers who are genuinely curious about this and you can't control how they. You've got to stop saying lawmakers, man. You've got to I mean, no one buys that because it's it's it's so bullshitty. Our our Congress, our our idea of making laws. I mean, in what we've gone through in the last two years and all the and all the stuff that's been exposed. Yeah, there's some guys up there and there's something going on that seems to be of a political nature. But this idea that there's this intact republic where legal the Supreme Court, I mean, no one believes that any of that shit is functioning to the level that we used to believe that it does. Right. When has it ever? Exactly. It was ever thus. Yes. Well, so, you know, but with that said, it's the best we got. It's the best we got. So I've just got to deal with what is put in front of me. And so when I see congressional lawmakers who are on top level security committees going into classified briefings and then coming out and writing legislation that is specifically asking the all branches of the military for more information and more clarity on the topic of unidentified aerial phenomena, I think that is not an up. I think that's genuine curiosity after being exposed to some fantastic information. That's what I think that is. And we can sit here and discuss until we're blue in the face how broken the system is, but that's the only piece of legislation that I've seen in a while where both sides of the aisle voted on it and passed it with almost zero resistance from anyone. And I don't think you need to make up a fantastic UFO story or office or anything to get congressional funding for for the war machine, like they're going to get their funding no matter what. Every year, the funding for the war machine goes up with or without UFOs. So when I see these lawmakers going into these meetings and coming out and writing legislation, but not but also the legislation is written in a way that holds these apparatus is accountable if they don't cooperate, but we don't know how that's going to turn out because the office literally is being made as we speak. You have to be patient. It is a process that is not perfect, never has been and it never will be. Many have tried to make the perfect government. It doesn't it doesn't exist. It doesn't it doesn't represent everyone. I mean, look at our own domestic issues that we have. Especially here in California, we have a homeless epidemic. It's literally on my front doorstep. I walk out to it and you could. You could cut if you cut one jet, just one jet out of the budget and put that and not just one one one time. And that's it. One jet every year for life, you cut out of the budget and you put that towards solving the homeless crisis in the United States. You solve it. Well, what does that tell you? What does that tell you? Hey, well, I hear you. I hear you, man. I hear you. It's perfect. But I'm going to I'm going to fight to try and get more data from the collection agencies that I know have the data. And I know I'm going to run into a lot of roadblocks. I'm going to get a lot of obfuscation. But every once in a while, we're going to get a really good nugget from the from they're going to slip up, especially through the FOIA process and through requesting and calling these lawmakers and being a pester to them and asking questions and demanding that they give us answers every year and asking for public hearings and asking for things that we know we should get. I believe that, yes, that that republic is still intact. I believe that that process as terrible as it is at some level still works. If I did it, I wouldn't live here. And that's that's awesome. I totally, totally commend you and agree with you at a fundamental level. It's like the only possible way out is to believe the ideals is to believe, you know, a force for good. You know, the Navy used to run those ads a long time ago. They've changed the byline now, but it used to be the big naval ship out in the water burning away billions of dollars a year. But but the tagline was a force for good. And I think I love that idealism that you have, because it's our only way out is to maintain, hold them accountable to what we're supposed to be. What what the republic is supposed to do. And that's what I hear you saying, even super open. I mean, you don't dodge one kind of thing and one question. Tell us so you're going to reboot a little bit, you know, just restart the show the end of this month. Where are you going with it? What's coming up? Big phone home campaign? How did that go? What's the next the next run of that? What's going on? Yeah. Well, so that's great because we had a production meeting yesterday. The we're going to be we took a break for the last month. And just because, you know, it's not just me that does the show. I have two other co-hosts. I've got a producer. I've got this a bunch of other people that helped me do the show. And so asking these guys to volunteer their time three days a week, two hours a day. Yeah, it's a lot of time. And I didn't want to burn anybody out. I didn't want to burn myself out. So we decided to, hey, let's take this three show a week schedule. Let's knock it down to one and and we'll still be doing other episodes about other things in between those one a week episodes. So yeah, we're going to be doing really cool segments. We've come up with a lot of funny stuff, you know, obviously things like, you know, UFO video of the week. Who do you got coming up? Well, so first, first episode back, we're going to have Brandon Fugel. Second episode, we're going to be having Stephen Green Street. We're looking, working on a few other, I guess I've confirmed that should be confirmed here the next day or two. Reese Darby, who's the actor from Flight of the Concord, is a really, really funny guy, Dave Foley. We'll be having Avi Lowe back. We'll be we'll be really catering the discussion to. The sort of the the the scientific and political aspect of discussions. And then, of course, we'll be breaking down daily news or any sort of current events that happens around the topic. So yeah, I mean, that's basically the new format of the show. You know, we'll be doing interviews for an hour, opening up the second hour to to talk about other things, current events and also just different segments of ideas that we're coming up with and just add a little bit of production, more production level to the overall show. You know, the thing the thing that I, you know, being an actor, I've written, I've directed, I've produced things, I've edited things. You know, I'm really a big advocate of making sure that the show always looks good, sounds good, is is entertaining and fun. So with more time during the week to be able to edit things and think of different ideas and different work on different initiatives like the Big Phone Home and and things like that. So so yeah, so that's basically what I've been doing for the last month. It's just relaxing and sort of thinking of how to redo the show. So that's that's the way we're going to be doing it. And then I think we've come up with a date for the Big Phone Home 3, which is tentatively August 19th, Friday, August 19th of 2022. We'll be doing another Big Phone Home event. And and just to give you a little bit of especially for the the naysayers and writing your representatives, calling your representatives, it never does anything and never changes anything. I'll remind you in 2013 when President Obama was thinking about putting boots on the ground in Syria and people were super fatigued of war in Iraq, especially. They were contemplating about putting more troops in Syria. And what happened? Do you remember what happened? The American people were so pissed off at the idea of putting troops in Syria that they called and they wrote their representatives and guess what happened? Now, one single U.S. soldier was put in Syria. You know, like the idea that the many of us have we do have the power when it comes to to foreign policy and domestic policy. We just very, very, very rarely choose to flex that power until it's important to us. Well, like we're saying, whether we do or not, we have to act as if we do because there really is no other option. So yeah, other than yelling, other than yelling into a hurricane. Yeah, there are no other options, you know, like this is this is these are the tools in the system that has been put in place. They were put in long before any of us got here and they'll run long after we're gone and dust in the ground or different versions of it. But, you know, we got to work with what we got. That's that's the best I can do. Great. Well, good luck. Be watching you, Sharon, Jan, and thanks so much for doing this. Yeah, absolutely. It was an absolute pleasure. Very fun discussion. Thanks again to Lou for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I tee up from this interview. Is it possible that this thin veneer of a story that's being offered up regarding UFOs and E.T. is really in the interest of the greater good or at least the greater good of the good old US of A. Let me know your thoughts and until next time, take care and bye for now.