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the jurgen experience so when did you get interested in the subject of ufos that happened at a surprisingly early age i was seven years old at a boarding school and the principal of the school a friend of his had photographed a video an old reel the reel kodak movie camera taken a movie home movie of a video of a ufo flying in beautiful blue skies cumulus clouds huge golden disc that that comes into the picture and banks goes into a cloud and it disappears into this sort of wispy cloud in a way that would be very very hard i think to to fake somehow particularly in those days with no computer generated imagery and it comes out the other side and then sort of goes off over the horizon and i was you know stunned and flabbergasted and myself and all the other kids ran outside that night and were looking at the stars and it just sparked my curiosity a lifelong curiosity so once you got into government and once you were i mean you were there you're basically there you had to start asking questions like did you wait a while like how long did you ask for your hey what do you guys know yeah uh well uh for a long time i waited um very rarely i looked for openings i looked for opportunities so uh for example you know the stigma is is so great that you're reluctant obviously to uh to raise that issue a couple times there were some natural opportunities so uh one of my colleagues on the intelligence committee was going to hawaii for some oversight trips meetings and he went to the maui space optical tracking facility and i said to them while you're there why don't you just check and see do they ever see anything weird they can't explain and so forth so he did and pete called me up and said hey you wouldn't believe this i've got this videotape here and it shows these weird things and so i talked to the air force people they
sent the tape to us turns out it was totally unclassified um i showed it to senator cohen uh and some others and it ended up on a national tv actually but but didn't generate any further response everybody just kind of threw their hands up in the air and said well you know that's interesting but we don't know what to do with it it was a ted koppel's nightline show that this tape was played on it showed sort of five objects moving parallel to the ground possibly in formation they're in the atmosphere because they're burning they're interacting with something you know there's plasma coming off them which wouldn't presumably be happening in space but they seem to be too slow to be meteorites so it was mystifying and difficult to explain never did get an answer occasionally something like that would happen by and large the issue almost never arose the the issue is a weird issue because if you bring it up in the wrong company or at the wrong time you could be dismissed as a loon did you feel that when you were there like as a person who had a budding interest in unidentified flying objects and and what have you did you feel like this is a politically risky thing to discuss especially to discuss like in serious terms like do you believe in these things like what are they what do we know is was that an issue absolutely um i concealed my interest in the topic uh for years and uh very carefully and confided to a few trustworthy friends had a few heart-to-heart talks with a couple individuals when i found a fellow traveler who was interested in this topic but by and large uh absolutely uh wanted to conceal that and and not reveal that did you know clinton no no no he would be the guy that i would go to well there's a request that came to me once that i think was from president clinton
and it was one of the astronauts claimed to have seen um a ufo at edwards air force base and it was videotaped he said and he described this in his memoir and wanted the president to get hold of the tape of the video and secretary cohen came back to the pentagon from a meeting and a message came down to me to go to try to find this tape and unfortunately there was i got got nowhere with that the air force was adamant that there was no such tape there was no such information anything they had on ufos have been destroyed so i had one of these situations that's very common in this area which is you have just two apparently credible sources but utterly conflicting irreconcilable information which seems to happen often in this field now being as you were in government and very close to literally the machine that runs the world what what's the general perception when people are discussing these these things in in washington what is what's the general perception of what what's going on with these things i'm happy to say that it's changed that perception has changed considerably in the last few years people feel like they have permission to talk about it when do you think this happened this happened after the new york times article and subsequent press beginning in 2017 december 2017 and um that sort of gave people permission to talk about this and i've actually had pentagon friends who said you know this is kind of cool we don't have to go in the closet to talk about this anymore what do you think kept it in the closet before like when did the stigma start do you think this was like intentionally sort of set up this way it was uh it was the robertson panel commission 1953 and they concluded during the those cold war days that this was a a potential threat to national security because ufo reports might overwhelm our our air defense and communication system and that the soviets might
spook the public and somehow manipulate this issue so they actually advocated in writing that this issue be debunked and discredited and the government uh went ahead and did so um extremely successfully unfortunately and this all started with the project blue book correct correct it was during that era so uh what was the gentleman's name that was running project blue book again um well there were different people there's the guy who went on astronomer ellen heineck heineck and heinek went on to become a believer so he started debunking and was told essentially the way he reported it was that he was told to kind of debunk every single case everything he could find whether it's swamp gas or you know ball lightning find some way to to explain this away but then once he left project blue book he started openly discussing these cases and he started discussing his own belief that's correct and he felt badly burned as well because he was trying to carry out his mandate that the air force had given him as you may recall in one instance he went to michigan and famously declared that the people of michigan were misconstruing swamp gas for for flying objects yeah and so gerald ford who has represented that district got incensed as did the local population and congress took a fleeting interest in the topic and uh dr heineck was very embarrassed um and understandably so it was really uh quite insulting to these to these people who had uh had very clear sightings of these objects so um he did eventually um change his view publicly and was very critical of of project blue book catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre
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