UFOs: Myths and Realities with John Alexander #GJWMotivation #GJWpsychology #GJWhealth #GJWscience #G

Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. Today, we're going to be exploring UFOs. We're going to look at the realities and the myths associated with them. My guest is Dr. John Alexander, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army and author of a number of books, including The Warrior's Edge, Future Wars, and UFOs, Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities. Welcome John. Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you. You began exploring UFOs seriously when you were in the military 30 years ago when you set up a working group called the Advanced Theoretical Physics Group. Is that right? That is correct. Now, I had been interested for much, much longer. I remember the first case in 1947, so I had a personal interest, but I finally got to a position where I said, you know, I think I've got the resources and we can make this happen. So we brought together people who were interested in the topic that you would not normally have access to. You yourself had security clearance. Oh, yes. These all had top clearances. It was an old Boeing that had to know who you were, had to be of interest. We had people from all of the services, from the intelligence community, and from a civilian aerospace industry that were all interested in the topic. And as I understand it, you began with the working premise, which was pretty common in popular culture back then, that the U.S. government, the military, may have actually captured a crashed UFO. That was our starting point, that Roswell was real and that the military did it. And we also had a premise that we thought they probably wanted to release the information and that maybe we could assist in doing that. But over time, we found something quite different. You basically found that the phenomenon was so complex, so mysterious, so confusing that really bureaucrats were essentially befuddled by it. Well, it's very interesting how we got to there. And I talked to, eventually, the most senior leaders of all of the intelligence agencies and that. You found people who had a personal interest versus an institutional interest. In fact, I tell a story about the head of one of those three-letter agencies who said, A, we don't do that, and they would have to be involved. And B, I'll tell you about the ones I personally saw. So he had no personal qualms about saying, hey, I know there's something out there. Well, you've also pointed out in your book that the government of the United States, as well as other governments, acknowledge there is a real phenomenon going on. Oh, yes. And the first line of my book is, UFOs are real. And I mean that in the most physical sense. Now, of course, I am, as you kind of alluded to, whatever this is, it is far more complex than we ever imagined, or maybe than we could imagine. Well, in your first book, The Warrior's Edge, you explore the range of mental abilities and exotic talents associated, for example, with the martial arts and shamanism and various mystical traditions. You look at the potential application of those sorts of things in the military. And as I know you as a friend, I know that you've traveled the world exploring these kinds of phenomenon in great depth. In fact, you yourself are something of a folk icon in terms of being involved in these sorts of exotic things. And the reason I bring all of this up is because, as I understand it, you now believe that if we're going to understand the UFO phenomenon, we have to look at it in this wider context, including interspecies communication, shamanism, higher states of consciousness, and so on. Right. Remote viewing. I did a lot of work with near-death studies. I was once the president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. And it is my premise that somehow all of these phenomena are connected. One of the problems in looking at it is we tend to stovepipe. And I think in doing that, you cut off a lot of the information that would be helpful in understanding a theoretical basis, which does not exist at this point. Using the term stovepipe, I think you mean trying to see it as a single discipline rather than an interdisciplinary approach. Very much so. And yeah, you look at near-death experience, poltergeist, remote viewing, UFOs, and they cut off access of the information in between. And I think that's a mistake. Well, as someone with a background in parapsychology, I know that many parapsychologists, even though they understand that parapsychological phenomenon are associated with UFOs, often feel that there's too much political, social pressure on them just doing the narrow work they want to do. And to try and handle several areas of the paranormal at once becomes overwhelming. That's why I get back to, in my view, that what we're looking at is something that is terribly complex, and there is not a single, simple answer for any of these, or looking at them in isolation. I really think, and I've asked for a step-back phenomena, where we look at the observations and then do a micro-pattern analysis on that, and say, okay, what are the patterns that come up? And I do believe that consciousness is going to be a key piece of that. Well, as a military man, I'm sure you paid particular attention to a number of cases, I should think at least a half-dozen very well-established cases, where it seems as if UFO activities have been associated with, and sometimes interfered with, nuclear missile systems. That is correct. There's a very famous case at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in which we had two squadrons out there that had a substantial number of missiles come down simultaneously, something that never happens. When you say come down, you mean malfunction? Yeah, well, they came offline, they could not have been launched at that point. One of the wings was out ten for ten, another one was six or seven missiles down simultaneously. There's a logistical context called mean time between failure, meaning you know how often things are going to fail, you would expect maybe two of these a year, and yet at this time you had 16 or 17 down simultaneously. And this was in what we called the nuclear triad. These are strategic systems. This was in the bad old days, going to go to war with the Soviet Union, and you needed to know if you push the button that everything is going to work, and it would not have at that time. And were UFO sightings associated with this? There were. There was in one of the silos, there was a guy by the name of Bob Salas who was down below. Now the problem here is you had the launch control officers who were down below. You had on top of the surface, you had security police, and they were the ones who were making the observation and calling back and forth. Salas had acknowledged that, but then as the missiles came offline, he said, did not have time because they were in crisis mode down below. But there definitely was a relationship between UFOs being seen and the missiles coming offline. And I understand similar events were reported in the Soviet Union. Oh, there's a huge event that happened in the Soviet Union. George Knapp is the key guy who brought back the information, but this was a little bit different in that they had a very large UFO hovering over the base for hours, seen by hundreds of people. Instead of coming offline, they started spinning up, meaning they were about to launch, which scared the hell out of the launch control officers because they couldn't control it. And their thoughts were, my God, we're about to start World War III, and it's beyond our control. As it got further along and suddenly it shut off as well, but not because of the actions of the missile control officers. Well, these examples would lend one to think that we're dealing with aliens from another planet who are interfering with our nuclear missiles in order to warn us about a potential catastrophe. Well, there are books, Bob Hastings has written a whole book on nukes and the nuclear cases and UFOs. The problem is when you look at these, as we do now in isolation, we put them together and say, wow, look at all of these things that's happened. When I separate that over a world and more than half a century, really very, very isolated events. Not that they were ignored. I mean, people did study them to an extreme degree. The problem was they came up with, they have no idea what this is. Then you end up with a case of, okay, resource management. How much time, material, money are you going to put into researching something you're probably not going to get an answer to? So what you're saying is in spite of cases like that, that would seem to have enormous implications for national security, at some point the government, to your understanding, actually, officially sort of threw up its hands and said, there's no reason to study this any further. Oh, we do many of those and it's called the too-tough-to-handle BIM. And there are a host of topics that are in there. And again, it's a resource management. How much time, money, effort are you going to put in to things that are very, very rare? The case with Malmstrom, what they said finally, I mean, they looked at it extensively and looked for electromagnetic pulse and a host of potential causes. Malmstrom being the U.S. case. That's the missile case that I mentioned earlier. And they said, have no idea what did this kind of, if it happens again, we'll get really serious. But again, these are isolated incidences. Right. Now, I know you are associated with Jacques Fallet, the French UFO researcher, well, lived in the United States now for many decades. Someone I've interviewed as well. He has a unique hypothesis involving UFOs and one that I think you're quite sympathetic to. Yeah. And he did the forward to my book and our philosophical position on it is very, very similar. And I think it comes down to the same way he did, you know, Passport to Magonia. And it's, this is terribly complex and it doesn't fit any simple solutions. Well, as I understand it, Jacques Fallet goes a bit further. Do you agree with him when he suggests it's a control system of some type, that somebody is somewhere, some conscious entity somewhere is pulling levers, attempting to manipulate the human race in some way through these mysterious phenomenon, probably at a subconscious level. I'll go back. This is where I think we need to look in the broader context, because this occurs in all of these phenomena. As you know, in the book, I pointed out something what I call the precognitive sentient phenomena. And this is based on some things we did, and quote, Skinwalker Ranch, if you will, where very, very strange incidents happen. And the trickster is known throughout history. In all mythology. Yeah. There's a myth, there's a mythology that says, you know, there's somebody kind of screwing with us. Is it a control mechanism? Don't know. But what I found was that there was something out there that was looking, I say, precognitive. It knew how we were going to respond to a certain incident before the incident occurred. It was certainly smart or sentient and absolutely in control. Can you give an example, say, from the Skinwalker Ranch study? Oh, Skinwalker Ranch. I mean, there are so many examples there. You know, the book by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp on it. Skinwalker Ranch was owned by Robert Bigelow. A number of us were up there, monitored 24-7. I'll give you one example that just defies total description. We had instrumented the ranch. We had cameras up there that were facing in certain directions. The particular incident involved here is I have camera one that happens to be looking at camera two, both looking out. And the wires come down back to the base where everything's being recorded. At a time that we know, suddenly these cameras are about 20 feet high. Everything pulled the wire out of the camera. There was about half a roll of duct tape around the post holding up. That's totally gone. There's about a three-foot chunk of wire that's totally missing. There's PVC down at the bottom that's been pulled loose and missing. And as it turns out, that at the time of the incident, which we know because you had the daytime recording back at the cabin, the cattle happened to be milling right around that pole. The reason that's significant is we know that if anybody got close to the pole, they would be spooked and scattered. That didn't happen. So you have an incident that happened absolutely in physical reality, should have been captured on camera and wasn't. The cameras, as I recall, were taking slow motion snapshots once every second or so. Second and a third. And so you have one picture where everything is intact and the next picture where all the damage has already taken place. You don't see the damage from the camera. But what you do know is that the camera, the outline camera, stopped recording. So you know when that was. But then you go in and you look at the physical damage that was done. Just no plausible explanation. Okay. So that's one example. And it's a... There are a host of those. And one of the points is, you know, these things would happen. You point the cameras out and it, whatever it is, control says, oh, you like that? And it would do something just off camera. So every time we tried to set up to understand the phenomena or you had something presented and you responded to it, it would change slightly. And that's the trickster component. And in this case, associated with poltergeist type phenomenon, cattle mutilation type phenomenon, which you're suggesting are also related to UFOs. In some way, yes. There'd be a host of phenomena. And again, the trickster, the control mechanism, this is where Jacques and I pretty much agree. There is something out there. Yeah. And now we need to talk about some of the myths. And in particular, a very well publicized myth by an associate of yours, Phil Corso, who wrote a book in which he claims that he was involved in the Roswell incident and alien technology was retrieved. And he was involved in disseminating information. This is some time later. Yeah. That was 47. He was like about 1960 that they're transferring alien technology to U.S. corporations. It's a very popular book. And so as a result of that book and others like it, many people believe that the U.S. has some sort of a treaty even with alien intelligences from other planets. Well, that's another leap. But yeah, there are people that were trading technology for humans. And what's your response? Well, my response. Now, Phil was a personal friend. I really liked him. And a person who seemed to be completely credible. Oh, yes. But when the book came out, I wrote him a letter that was seven pages at the time, appendix in my book that said, here are the errors. And it started with little things like it's Adelphi, Maryland, not Adelphia, as he had to know the Cold War was not a cover for fighting E.T., which he and others have said is totally preposterous. More specifically, with the technologies, the inference was that somehow they were going to inject technology as we moved along, and it would help advance our industrial efforts. Integrated circuitry, night vision, fiber optics were specific examples. The problem is when you go back and you check the history of the development of these technologies, you do not see a sudden leap where a big advantage was gained by the quote alien technology. I'm very familiar with the night vision because the guy who physically built my vision lab was a personal friend and we'd worked on and very open to phenomena. We'd actually done PK parties with him, the psychokinesics, metal bending parties. So he was open to phenomena. But the description in the book as to how night vision evolved is just totally wrong. So you've got a situation here where a person with a stellar career in the military comes out with a story like this, a person who's been a friend of yours, someone who seems absolutely sincere, and when you talk to him, he seems convinced that it's real. But when you fact check his story, it's very clear that it's preposterous. It does not accord with the facts. The title of that chapter is called the Corso Conundrum, and it turns out coincidentally that I was with Phil within two weeks of his death. What happened is he had a major heart attack, had recovered. I was down in the area for my son's wedding. We went up and spent the day with him, and one of the things he told me is, gee, I really need to do another book to correct the errors that are in the first one, and he was working on it. Phil was not computer literate, so a lot of this was handwritten and all that. And unfortunately, he had the second heart attack that proved fatal just a few days later. But even if he acknowledged there were errors, I get the impression from you that he wasn't going to retract the whole substance of his story. Like I say, that's why I call it the Conundrum, because you do have somebody who is who he says he was. He was in the places that he said he was. He had an interesting relationship with the General Trudeau, who was legendary in military intervention. They are actually involved in something called Project Horizon, which was how would we fight from the moon. A lot of people don't realize the Army Ballistic Missile Defense, which was in existence at that time, really was the precursor to the Apollo mission, and were integrally involved in getting us to the moon. They were doing a lot of very advanced things. The problem, again, is when you do the fact checking, it just does not hold up. But now it's fair to say that there's, I guess you could call it a cult, or a small percentage of the population, but still thousands of people who accept these things as literally true, and when they hear you, amongst other people, saying, no, it's not, I've looked into it, it can't be real, they say, well, you're part of the cover-up yourself. Well, that's it. In my slides, as you know, one of the things I say, if you're going to join, you need three things. One of them, you better have some thick skin, you're going to get attacked, you better have day jobs, you're not going to make a lot of money, and the other is, you must understand conspiracy theory. Because either you believe there's a conspiracy, or if you don't, then you therefore become part of the cover-up. And the problem is, in my view, that the true believers are just as bad as the skeptics and debunkers. They will believe anything. One of my pet phrases is, there are no lower limits. You can come up with the most bizarre story that is demonstrably false, and you'll find people who adamantly believe it. Well, it seems as if it's a unique psychological phenomenon, not so much the wackadoodle people out there who might believe anything, but when you have highly credible people in every other regard in their life who are still espousing stories that you know from fact checking that cannot be true, that you've got a very unique psychological syndrome. And it's called paraphernalia. And it has been explored and is included in some DSM, and it does exactly what you're describing. It's called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. And the point is that they say there are these people who, as you've described, are perfectly logical, functional throughout their life, and you have a niche. They're crazy. You know, there's no other way to put it. Well, I suppose that's part of the human condition that we have to appreciate. And just as perhaps UFOs are essentially an expression of the human condition. Quite possibly. One of the things we didn't mention at the beginning is, and I address it, what is a UFO? Because you do have little balls of light that maneuver around. We've got craft more than a mile across that are hard, seen by many, many people, thousands of sensors systems, and everything in between. One of the things that bothers me is this extensive variability in the kinds of craft that are supposedly being seen. They do things you would expect, and you do see them on sensor systems. Conversely, there are things you don't expect. And for instance, hard craft that are there, that are people making observation of, and your sensor systems do not pick them up when they should. Well, you know, of course, that I've written a book in which I personally was involved in some research in which it appeared that a UFO sighting seen by hundreds of people was created through some sort of a psychokinetic or telepathic process. Well, this is why I get back to, you know, the core to this, I believe, is consciousness. And you're familiar with the Philip group, where they did other kinds of phenomena that were intentionally being brought about, you know, by groups of people. That's a very interesting story, and it may hit at sort of the core of this. The Philip group was in Toronto many years ago, and they got together and held seances in the style of the 19th century seances. They produced this kind of phenomenon that occurred at that time, table levitations and wrapping and so on, with a whole story about a ghost named Philip, but it was all made up. It was contrived. Well, the intent was made up. The phenomenon was real. But the point is, the phenomenon is real. Yeah. It's quite unusual, and it certainly suggests the interplay between the human psyche, which is really the last great frontier, and the phenomenon of this sort. Well, I do mention, when you look at UFOs and the history, you find early on very different descriptions. Jacques Belay, you mentioned, had one where... You know, I'm going to cut you off, though, John, because we're out of time now. But I know what you're saying, is that we need to look at mythology and stories, the ethno-historical literature in all cultures. John Alexander, thank you so much for being with me. You're welcome. And thank you for being with us.