Jake Barber & Matthew Pines on Skywatcher — “Unveiled” Ep. 13 (WatchMojo, 25 Apr 2025)
Source: WatchMojo “Unveiled” Ep. 13, ~2-hour interview with Jake Barber (Skywatcher founder) and Matthew Pines (national-security analyst; Bitcoin Policy Institute; UAP-policy commentator). URL: https://youtu.be/PNyJPRjITXQ (2025-04-25; ~2:02:10; ~140k views). Captured: 2026-07-01. OpenAI Whisper (whisper-1) via scripts/speech_to_text_remote.py; timestamped paragraphs, verbatim. Multiple speakers (interviewer, Barber, Pines), not diarized. Provenance only. Analysis: barber-noc-retrieval-claims. What this is: the most consciousness- and methodology-forward of the Skywatcher interviews, with Pines supplying the intellectual/national-security framing. Notable content:
- The “neural meditative process”: Barber claims an “ability to interact with the quantum field” — the psionic/CE-5-adjacent core of the method — and describes being able to “wave away” persistent airspace intruders.
- The sensor stack: radar, electro-optical cameras, multiple infrared bands, laser rangefinders, and trained human observers, used to categorize phenomena into the Skywatcher UAP classes.
- Consciousness theory: an extended discussion (largely Pines) contrasting the “functionalist/materialist” model of consciousness with a non-local view, framing UAP as a challenge not just to “are there anomalous things in the sky” but to how we model reality.
- Lab-style claims: double-slit and random-number-generator experiments in which a “neuromeditative protocol” is said to bias an RNG toward anomalies, including an experiment pairing an AI with the RNG. Offered as suggestive, not proof.
- The data-maturity argument: moving from “anecdotal, suggestive first-person accounts, camera videos, declassified reports” to “structured data collection” and hypothesis testing; plus the publish-or-perish stigma that keeps academics away.
- Aerial intercept: co-locating a helicopter with the radar and vectoring it as close as possible to targets (they claim within a couple hundred meters).
- Ethics framing: “virtues” of humility and a “loving, welcoming disposition,” “intention matters” as “the only real security”; the stated end-goal is to obtain exotic material (“invite something to land… get a donation”) to “usher in a revolution” in science. Weight within the Skywatcher venture’s contested-credibility context (see the Skywatcher page); the psionic/RNG/quantum-field claims are extraordinary, unverified, and the underlying data unreleased. Companion Skywatcher interviews: michels-skywatcher-summoning-ufos-2025-05-22, barber-fowler-chris-cuomo-project-2025-05-06.
[0:00] Through our neural meditative process, there seems to be an ability to interact with the quantum field. Things that persistently kind of invade your airspace is a problem, but you kind of can wave your hands away. And that is actually kind of a national security problem because adversaries are aware of that potential gap and will exploit it. Can you imagine being the first person or group of people to stand on a beach looking out at the vast expanse of the great blue ocean and going, I don’t know, should we go in? Hello, everybody. Welcome to WatchMojo and the Unveiled podcast. I’m your host, Rob. And with me today, I have two very special guests, Jake Barber and Matt Pines from the organization Skywatcher.
[0:47] Jake Barber is a former U.S. Air Force veteran who was involved in UAP crash retrievals. And he is the Skywatcher founder. And Matt Pines is a national security and technology policy expert who is acting as Skywatcher’s strategic advisor. Gentlemen, welcome. Welcome to the show. It’s great to speak with you both. How are you doing today? Great. Thanks for having us. All right. Let’s jump into this with just a little bit of an introduction to Skywatcher. Many people who are watching this will be familiar with the work that you guys are doing. But for anybody who is completely unaware, what is Skywatcher and what is your mission? Yeah, I’ll kind of give the bumper sticker, right?
[1:25] So Skywatcher exists to collect rigorous data on anomalous phenomenon in the sky and to understand what those anomalous phenomenon might represent and share our findings publicly. And we want to document kind of our journey in the public domain. We want to sort of show our work and bring people along as we embark on this process of discovery and exploration. We have certain expertise that’s a part of the team, folks that have bad careers inside the military and the intelligence, as well as scientific communities, folks that are bringing a lot of different skills and perspectives to this highly exotic question, right? Which is, are there anomalous phenomenon in the sky and other locations?
[2:09] And can we identify and demonstrate with a sufficient level of rigor that can stand up to scientific scrutiny the reality of those phenomena? And this is a question that has vexed lots of lots of folks. And it’s a question that I think lots of individuals have an acute interest in getting an answer to. And so we we put together the right people with the right intentions and the right skills and resources to try to at least take a crack at it and move from a domain of speculation, of anecdotal information, limited government declassification and limited government reporting. But, you know, very suggestive firsthand accounts from individuals such as Jake that that guide us in this direction and motivate a very serious effort to move from, you know,
[2:57] somewhat ad hoc, suggestive information to structure data collection and scientific analysis. And, you know, that’s I think our our focus. Yeah, Jake, maybe just a little bit of background on yourself and what was your motivation for starting this this organization? Yeah. So as you stated, you know, I’ve got 30 years of service, both as an enlisted man in the U.S. United States Air Force and then also working as a contractor in the broader intelligence community. My my work has been extremely diverse and has included participating in operations related to crash recovery and more specifically enough interest crash recovery of interesting and exotic craft and material. As fun as that sounds, I’ve had some fun doing that. And so we are what makes Skywatcher unique is that one, we’re autonomous.
[3:53] So we like to say the skies are not classified and your consciousness cannot be redacted. And so we take that liberty to go play. We’re fortunate enough to be financed by some folks who truly embrace the frontiersman spirit. And we’re trying to do this in a way that’s practical and scientific and reasonable, because this is a subject matter that is very hard to palette, because it can lead to places that are worldview or disruptive to worldview and are shocking and and lead to an endless number of other questions that folks end up pondering all day long. So what makes us unique other than our autonomy is that we can get things worthy of study to show up. That’s really the crux of what makes us special and capable and of interest. And that’s really this. That also speaks to where we are right now.
[4:55] We just started this in the beginning of 2025, and we have a couple of different methods that are reliable and we can get things that are anomalous or, let’s just say, interesting to show up regularly and repeatedly. And what’s exciting about that is, regardless of how good we are at deploying the scientific method right now, we have something worth deploying the scientific method to begin with. And so we’ve caught the interest of a lot of credible and respectable scientists and organizations to help us out with that. And that’s what we’re looking to do now is to get as many reps in out in the field and refine our process of getting interesting things to show up and invite trusted and qualified individuals to come out there and help us capture data, experience it firsthand,
[5:50] have their own anecdotal evidence to motivate themselves to be involved in the first place and to have a basis for deploying the scientific method in the second place. And so what’s exciting right now is that we have had a lot of folks take an interest, both on the government side and in the private sector. So it’s given us a lot of hope that we’re doing something that’s not only meaningful to us personally, but is meaningful to possibly those who have the means and the responsibility to integrate results we might come to into our culture, into our policy, into our economy and into our technology. So just to kind of put into layman’s terms, what is it, what it is exactly that you guys are doing?
[6:41] You have a couple of different methods for essentially calling UAPs and then you can collect data and study their behaviors. Is that correct? Correct. Can you tell me, what can you tell me about the two different methods that you use? Yeah, so I’m going to give a high level description and Jay can kind of give some more operational color about how we execute these what about the field experiments. And so these are quite resource intensive activities. We have a significant number of individuals with different skills and backgrounds out in the field, in a remote location suitable for testing these different methods. With the objective of attracting anomalous phenomenon to our location, where we have in place a variety of sensors to try to capture as much information about those phenomena as possible.
[7:31] Right. So the main sensors we’re using a sort of data collection for for these activities is radar, electrical optical cameras, multiple bands of infrared, laser range finders, as well as human observers, trained professional human observers, both on the ground as well as in air platforms, such as helicopters. We might be integrating additional sensors, additional modalities as we continue to refine and expand the maturity of the data collection. That’s kind of like if you visualizing this, there’s a, you know, large desert area. You’ve got different sort of observation posts established for technical data collection, for interrogation using different sensor modalities and these these ways of trying to attract UAPs to our location.
[8:21] And we’re trying to, you know, run these operations over multiple dates, right, and try to generate a large evidence based data collection base of of these elusive phenomena, right, that that sort of mystify a conventional explanation, at least on first on first examination. And so that’s kind of the basic setup. The two methods that that Jake alluded to in terms of the means of attracting UAPs to our location, at least that’s the hypothesis, are kind of two different flavors, right, that you can view as either machine based calling or man based calling. And we have sort of technical terms in the framework that we released to kind of lay out our scientific and analytic approach to this activity, which is our Skywatcher Discovery Framework,
[9:08] which sets out our objectives and kind of the different levels of confidence that we hope to gain as a result of doing these field experiments and data analysis, is ultimately around setting controlled conditions as much as you can in a field experiment to demonstrate the effectiveness of, on the one hand, this machine based calling we call the dog whistle, essentially a series of electromechanical signals that we have reason to believe result in UAP appearing near our location and then try to capture those UAP on our different sensors. The other modality is what we call neuromeditative interaction, so colloquially termed psionics. So using humans that have a particular claimed ability to enter into an altered state of consciousness through different personal practices, meditative practices, and attract UAP to their location.
[10:05] And so those are very suggestive hypotheses. One, essentially, is that there’s a certain electromechanical signal that is of interest to particular UAP. And the second hypothesis is that there are certain human capacities that can be turned on or triggered with certain practices to engage UAP. Those two hypotheses, of course, touch on the two most foundational questions that lots of people have, which is, one, like, are there anomalous phenomenon? And like, how can we engage with them in some fashion? And then get to a point where we can understand potential their nature and origin. And the second hypothesis, that’s a question about who are they? Like, what are they? And maybe ultimately, you know, set the foundation for answering questions of, like, why are they here, if they are here?
[10:54] And then the second bucket of hypothesis opens the door for, well, like, what what are the capacities of human beings? And what’s the nature of human consciousness and how does it relate to UAPs? And so these are ultimately metaphysical sort of foundational physics questions. We’re doing field experiments to just collect data. Right. We’re at the stage of moving from anecdote and first person compelling experiences to structure data collection that can at least motivate hypothesis generation. And we can get into that a little bit further. But that’s where we are now. OK, we have reason to believe that these two techniques could be effective and we want to go out into the field and take the right people with the right capabilities to try to collect the data.
[11:39] Yeah. Why there’s so much work to do right now is because there’s a number of questions like not only are we looking to construct experiments that can help us identify what’s in the air. Our methods themselves are things we’re trying to research. So we have the man based calling and the machine based calling. We’re trying to understand exactly what it is about those two processes that work or don’t work. So those are those are not established means or processes themselves. They’re as much a part of the question as the stuff we get to show up in the sky. So, you know, there’s really four. Maybe there’s four things we’re looking at is one. How and why does our dog whistle machine based calling system work? How and why does our man based or psionic or neuromeditative process work?
[12:37] Can they measure each other? So if we can get to a place that we can determine that one is one method is solely responsible for a set of phenomenon showing up, can the other system provide input or data on that other? So, for example, like if we’re running just strictly a DWO, which is our acronym for dog whistle operations, if we’re running DWO and we have the neuromeditative group isolated and a bit of a controlled environment where they are unaware of what we’re doing and where we’re directing our effort. What type of information are they getting during that process and does any of it correlate? And and the reverse, if we’re if we’re focused on neuromeditative summoning or calling the DWO or our radar and data collection team, the dog whistle itself becomes.
[13:39] It moves from the role of being the stimulator or the the evoker of the phenomenon to measuring and capturing data that is available because of the efforts of the psionics team or the neuromeditative team. And we’ll use those terms interchangeably here. And so those are our processes. And then the other two categories relate to what shows up in the sky. Of course, the big question we all want answered is what are these things? Where do they come from? Who’s in control of them and how do they operate? But that’s a big question that has to be answered like very slowly and methodically. We have to take a very serialistic approach to that. And so the first step in getting there is being able to first say conclusively that we don’t know what these things are. And that’s a big question that that we have to ask first.
[14:34] And if we can answer that question, that’s pretty exciting because we just don’t we just don’t throw the term anomalous or unidentified at anything without being rigorous in that process. And it’s a big statement to make for this team, for the combination of qualified individuals we have, the equipment we have and the processes we have. If something comes into the airspace above us in broad daylight and we can’t quickly go, oh, that is an airplane, that’s a balloon or a helicopter. That’s a big statement because we should be able to identify very easily with our resources and the diligence we’re applying here. What is in our sky? So it’s actually a really cool thing to be able to just say we don’t know what it is.
[15:19] And that’s the first step, because that then allows us to categorize things worthy of study. And that’s kind of what led us to the categories or classes of UAP that we have this far, is we put them all into different categories based on their visual representation, the means at which we’re deployed in order to get them there, how long they’re on station, their movement and a number of other things. And then from there we can begin to dissect and then look at that bigger question of the origin, who they are and how they’re operating. And it might be the case that some of these things end up being explainable by conventional means. But at the onset, it’s the most important thing to first qualify the information or, excuse me, the phenomenon that we are going to study, because the last thing we want is for all the armchair quarterbacks out there on the Internet to be able to quickly rule out that something we captured and shared was a balloon or was explainable. So, anyway.
[16:37] I want to definitely dig deeper into the nine classes of UAPs that you guys have cataloged. But before that, just to follow up on the two methods, I’m curious to know how you determined that these two methods were worthy of experimenting with. Is there a history of military use of these methods? And are there any other methods that you are aware of that you haven’t yet integrated into your field experiments? Yeah, good question. So, we got here because there is a history with it. So, members of our team that we put together under Skywatcher, like my partner, James Fowler, who’s been making his way out there as of late, telling his story. He was featured in Episode Two of Skywatcher, and he’s out there doing podcasts now.
[17:29] James is the engineer of our dog whistle system that was originally, it’s where our name Skywatcher comes from. It’s a Skywatcher system that he put together in his past life, if you will, and has been deploying the dog whistle system, which we did call Skywatcher, and has been conducting operations for a number of entities in the government and outside of the government for years now. It’s been a system that’s been developed, I would say, mostly over the last six years, and has proven itself to be unique in the form that nobody else seems to be able to mimic its results, let alone the method. And I do have to say, we do keep the dog whistle configuration and how we do it.
[18:32] We keep that pretty close to our chest, and that’s not because we’re being unreasonably secretive. It’s our secret sauce, and it’s something we’re very proud of, and a lot of time and energy has been invested in developing that system. And we aren’t sure exactly how serious the implications are of running this equipment, so I think there’s as much responsibility in keeping this private and trying to get as many government agencies involved who have the responsibility when it comes to national defense and also air domain awareness. And so we’re trying to work with them to make sure, because there’s a potential there’s a Pandora’s box here that could be opened, and if we aren’t prepared to deal with that, that could pose a number of problems.
[19:26] On the neuromeditative side, there’s a large body of evidence that there’s been a huge interest in this, both in the military worldwide and the broader intelligence community worldwide. Anyone can do their research and look into remote viewing and the programs associated with that, a number of other programs associated with human consciousness and testing the capabilities and the boundaries of those capabilities. There has been some research done in the private sector as well, and it is our assessment that there is a there there, and there are things that can’t be currently explained, and there isn’t a large body of science on this either. So it’s something that definitely needs to be looked at, and some of the most basic things that we’ve discovered so far, some of our means of measuring whether or not this actually works or that there’s a there there, can’t necessarily be ruled out.
[20:31] So, you know, there’s there’s two efforts. There’s like trying to prove that it’s capable or trying to trying to rule out all other explanations for why certain correlations or effects happen when we’re using that process. And you very quickly get into probabilities, especially with the correlation side of things. So, you know, the probability that any alternate explanation exists for why these correlations are repeatable and measurable leads you down a path that starts to become worthy data. And that data can evolve into evidence. I think correlation gets thrown around quite a bit as maybe being something worthless or not concrete, which is true. But, you know, the phrase correlation is not causation.
[21:21] It’s a true statement, but I think it’s a lazy way of dismissing correlation as something of value. And it really isn’t. Even when deploying the scientific method, correlation is a very important thing. And so that that’s where we are with the neuromeditative side of things on within our program is like we see a very interesting level of correlation. And we’re trying to get as many folks as we can that have experience and have done research with telepathy. And as it relates to a variety of humans with with dispositions and training and trying to really get as much correlation as we can across a number of experiments. And the experiments are the key to to furthering our research when it comes to neuromeditation. We need a lot of creative scientists that understand how to deploy the scientific method and understand how to construct experiments.
[22:23] And I think that’s a lot of fun for the folks we have involved, because we do have quite a variety of people with doctorates, their doctorate in a number of sciences, and they’re all coming together and trying to formulate experiments that we can conduct in the limited time we have in the field. I don’t know if that answers your question, but definitely. And one thing I wanted to add on top of this is, you know, I studied physics and philosophy in undergrad before I moved into public policy and national security technology related professional domains. And my observation, you know, coming in from the outside to Skywatcher is that they’re they’re really bumping up against very strong as a social and academic taboos on both of these core questions.
[23:12] Right. I’d say that the default prior by most practicing academics and other other folks that are serious, sober minded individuals and professionals in different areas is that on the UAP question, we’re most likely alone. We’re most likely the only advanced civilization in our local neighborhood. Maybe there’s intelligent life out there in the broad expanses of the cosmos, but the proposition that there are advanced intelligences nearby and exploiting maybe alternate degrees of freedom associated with foundational physics or propulsion and materials, etc. is the prior for that proposition is set very, very, very low by the most most practicing scientists and academics. And I say the same the same sort of prior is also set very low in fields of social psychology, neuropsychology, even philosophy of mind about the nature of human consciousness.
[24:03] Kind of the prevailing model of human consciousness over the last several decades has kind of been this functionalist materialist conception of human consciousness, where it’s kind of an emergent higher level phenomenon associated with neurobiological activities in the brain. And I think both of those two sort of priors are very difficult to dislodge in the minds of a lot of practicing academics and lay lay observers without highly suggestive anomalies being at least brought to the table and the progress of science. And there’s a philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn, who wrote this famous book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is essentially making the argument through a historical study that there’s a dominant scientific paradigm in place at any given moment that sort of sets the boundaries around what sort of is acceptable science, what sorts of hypotheses make sense to to formulate and to sort of share within the discourse of practicing scientists.
[25:00] And then there’s propositions that are outside that domain that are considered fringe or trapped or taboo or, you know, not not properly scientific questions. And so the progress of science in history has been kind of the accumulation of anomalies that don’t fit that prevailing paradigm until there’s like a crisis where there’s a recognition that the anomalies are building up and the paradigm is not properly suited to kind of do a lot of contortions. We have to explain a lot of things away or we just have to pretend that those anomalies don’t exist in order to kind of keep keep the psychological comfort that you have with your well-constructed model that you’ve grown up with, you’ve been trained in, that you’ve reached professional status kind of reinforcing.
[25:38] And so there’s a lot of institutional and psychological resistance to one, paying attention to the two anomalies that are outside of that prevailing paradigm and then to generate novel hypotheses that maybe your existing paradigm isn’t isn’t able to isn’t able to to produce. And I think we’re seeing this process take place. And one of the things that really attracted me to Skywatcher is the sort of going headlong into that and try to break through that crust around kind of the what’s considered the acceptable frame of reference for serious scientific exploratory research. And these are the two most important questions I think lots of human beings have. And on the other side of the fence, as Jake can allude to, it’s been clear to me that elements of the government and associated entities were not restricted by such taboos over the past several decades.
[26:33] And they’ve been pursuing with earnest and with large resources, serious investigations into both of those questions. And they have made a substantial amount of progress, I believe, in coming to a certain understanding of those questions. But all of that, from my view, is tucked well behind the curtain, is not shared with the broader public. And so we have this dissonance between an apparent sense of what the world is and what its possibilities are and what human beings are capable of that is known within a very tight cluster of individuals behind a shroud of secrecy and then the wider scientific and social and technological communities. And I think Skywatcher, you know, at least one higher level ambition that I see as a guiding star here is trying to bridge between those two worlds and to bring out into the public domain and allow some information to be integrated that takes seriously the possibility of these anomalies, right, as being hints or clues to a larger, more significant revaluation of what we think the structure of the world is and where we sit within it. So very, like, very, very ambitious.
[27:42] Right. Right. Like, let’s be very clear, like Skywatcher, it’s essentially a startup. Right. As Jake mentioned, started in the early part of this year, has done a few kind of trials out in the field, getting these reps in, getting good data and bringing the public along the way. Right. We’re kind of trying to do this in full view, which is extremely high risk. Right. So we’re both setting extremely high bar for what we want to achieve or at least try to get progress made on. And we were doing it in public. Right. And so there’s a sense of, OK, let’s just this is a this is a one of the more compelling projects I think someone could engage in. There’s going to be risk. There’s going to be uncertainty. There’s probably going to be mistakes made.
[28:21] But it’s fundamentally not something that is meant to be behind the curtain anymore. Right. This should be done in full view as much as possible. I’ll just add real quick, you know, it’s not boring. I’ll tell you that much. So anyone that’s looking for adventure, which is probably most people, we can certainly offer that. And probably the reason there hasn’t been a lot of research done that we know about in this is because it’s not a real good ROI. It’s not clear exactly how investing money in this is going to quickly provide a return to those deploying the money, whether it’s government or private, because we really don’t know. You know, what kind of toys can we make? What what type of technology can be developed? What kind of services can be developed by exploring this?
[29:12] And so because of that, I think a lot of people have left it alone because there’s too many questions. And it really is. It really is something that there is no guarantee of any utility coming out of this. It starts to borderline more on just even if we can’t answer these questions, it’s like, well, what do you do with the answers to these questions? Are there national defense implications that could provide our country an advantage by proving that there is something there is something inside the human technology? Our our our our biology that allows us to manipulate reality through consciousness like that doesn’t very quickly translate into things that could affect our economy or make our day to day life better or give us an advantage in war.
[30:03] And or maybe it’s the case that the advantages it does give us are so profound that we’re nervous about deploying those or making them available to everyone else. So I think the fact that we are private, we’re independent and we have investors that aren’t really concerned with the return on investment, that’s that’s what this is needed for a long time is you really have to have a frontiersman mindset, like I said, and be willing to explore the question just because the question exists. It seems to me, at least the sentiment that I’ve witnessed from people engaged in this conversation is that the economic implications could even be devastating globally if there is some sort of like free energy attached to this, which could crumble our fossil fuel industry and things of that nature.
[30:59] Does that play into it as well? Is there like a risk that we might upend our entire global economy if this sort of technology was released to the public and kind of allowed to develop? Yeah, well, I’ll stick with the neuromeditative side. Imagine if we end up proving that that humans can willfully adjust to the reality around them, that you can have an impact on reality or that there’s something like mind control. Like, oh, my gosh, who do we want? Who do we do? What what would it be like if, let’s say, the president of the United States could be subject to mind control by anyone that’s mastered these techniques? That’s a pretty scary thought. And so the big questions or the big implications are pretty obvious on the technological side. Yeah.
[31:57] Yeah. You know, with great power comes great responsibility, they say. So people that are not responsible or are not ethical or moral with with their power, you wouldn’t want them to to be privy to the fruits of these things that might end up being pretty powerful. If you go back to the 1930s, you had a bunch of physicists, the smartest people on the planet in a few countries, doing abstruse math and sending papers back and forth to each other and doing very primitive kind of tabletop exercise, tabletop experiments on nuclear physics. And then within about 10 to 15 years, that small community of practicing physicists resulted in world changing strategic weapons that within a few years after that became, you know, a threat to civilization.
[32:51] And that’s that human civilizational threats, you know, still looms over all of our heads. And so I think the lesson that I would have drawn if I was in a position of, say, national security, scientific industrial defense leadership in that era would be, man, physics is quite dangerous, right? Like open foundational physics research is something that within a relatively short period of time can result in strategic weapons being unleashed on humanity, and fundamentally changing the strategic balance of power and the existential stakes of such weapons. And so if there were other hints or clues to another physics breakthrough, like on the scale or larger than the physics breakthroughs, we sort of saw the early part of the 20th century where we formulated quantum mechanics, we formulated general relativity, we understood the physics of the nucleus and how to construct nuclear weapons.
[33:47] And then we, you know, we applied all of that foundational physics knowledge to both nuclear weapons, as well as to nuclear energy, as well as to space technologies, and then integrated computing, which took off in the later part of the 20th century and gave us, you know, this techno industrial civilization that we all live in now. All of that’s basically based off physics breakthroughs from essentially the turn of the century to like the 50s. And most of physics is kind of in the public domain installed, you know, since the 70s. This has kind of been well, well remarked upon a kind of this physics stagnation. However, if close study of UAP phenomenon or if the phenomenon was able to be retrieved, specific examples of it, and the materials can be studied, the manner of propulsion could be understood. Those would be clues to new physics.
[34:34] And they would be direct, you know, inducement to focus a lot of energy and resources to try to understand what that new physics is. But as Jake mentioned, you know, the lesson of physics is that it unlocks new degree, new orders of magnitude of energy effectively that you can apply via technology. And those can be weaponized for for ill or those can be applied in our civilization to lead to a whole step change in human flourishing and productivity. And so I think we’re we’re at this moment, though, where the ability to kind of keep potentially such knowledge secret is maybe degrading. We’re seeing other accelerations, say, in AI, where the degree of improvement coming out of these frontier models is accelerating very rapidly.
[35:19] And there’s a reasonable possibility that next few years it won’t be feasible to hold this sort of knowledge back. And and therefore the the manner in which we sort of adapt our society and our civilization to to understanding what the next sort of set of physics models are, as well as what the next set of understandings of human capacities are, is like the most critical thing that we should be doing. But first, we have to kind of get everyone in those practicing academic and professional domains to kind of first pay attention that this is like a serious question. Because the the taboo and the social stigma attached to both these questions of of psy abilities and, you know, NHI UAP phenomenon is still extremely strong.
[36:09] It’s it’s not something that like most, I’d say, academic research departments think tanks. I’m based in D.C. I talk to a lot of folks in their security communities and the traditional think tank kind of policy analytic community. And a number of those individuals are paying close attention to this subject, but they only want to talk about it right at the happy hours or under their breath or over lunch. We’re not at the point where, you know, Brookings or Rand or the Atlantic Council is going to convene a panel talking about UAP phenomenon and what the risks that it presents to geopolitics, technological spillovers, proliferation risks, social adaptation. Those conversations are happening, but very ad hoc and very kind of much like under like under under people’s breaths, which is for me kind of like a problem.
[37:00] Right. It’s like this is a very serious question. It should be addressed professionally. I think Skywatcher for me is like one of the, you know, the prime examples of just, you know, forget the taboo, forget the stigma. A bunch of folks have reason to believe there’s something very serious going on here and it needs a serious and well well organized effort. Right. And this ties in directly to the discovery framework that you guys have put together, which includes six levels of UAP discovery. And one of them being, you know, scientific scrutiny, which will come from those those institutions that you mentioned who are kind of, you know, maybe hesitant to embrace it. Is there any concern that there will be resistance from the the highest levels of academia and scientific study that will resist actually acknowledging the findings that you guys have put together?
[37:50] Yeah, I think there I think there will be resistance, but a healthy amount of resistance is a good thing as long as your own your own position or your own like motivation to resist doesn’t become contaminated itself because unreasonable resistance is just as unhelpful to progress as like biased in the positive in the positive direction of things. And so I like the idea of sticking to real simple questions like let’s let’s get something small across the line, the finish line first and to kind of stay in the lane of the history of physics. I think one of the one of the biggest challenges right now that everyone’s aware of is like how do we reconcile classical physics with quantum physics?
[38:39] That’s one of the most exciting frontiers. It seems like amongst those who like to think deeply about physics to begin with and who are qualified to do so. And one of the things that we’re doing that I think should be of interest to folks like that is real simply, it seems to be the case or we haven’t been able to prove again that this is not the case. And that is that through our neural meditative process, there seems to be an ability to interact with the quantum field. And what what we do, one of the things we do to to measure our neural meditators is we run what’s known as a quantum number generator and a program that works with this device. And so the quantum number generator is basically a laser beam that’s that’s housed in a container and it fires a laser through a slit.
[39:41] And that slit essentially there’s a 50 percent chance that the laser will fall on one side or other of the slit. And that creates a baseline number of essentially zero on our computer program or a chart. When our folks are on when our neural meditators are undergoing their their meditative process and they’re attempting to summon or at least connect to the consciousness field, we can monitor the impact that that effort is having in the quantum world via this quantum random number generator. And what we will see almost every time is that once they’re they’ve transitioned and they’re in that state, the random number generator starts to go off center line and starts to starts to put more hits on one side or the other. And it gets to a point to where it’s it’s significant.
[40:34] Like, you know, in my mind, like it should be 50 50. You run it over the great length of time. greater the length of time you run that random number generator, the closer you should get to a 50% ratio. And so, even if during a neuromeditative process that was taking place while being associated with the running of our quantum number generator, even a 51 or 52 or 53% feedback from the computer program would tell us, hey, we’re having some effect, we’re moving in it. But what we find is we’re getting a much more substantial push on the ratio on the slit experiment than even that. I mean, it’ll push within minutes of entering a meditative process, that random number generator will stay completely on one side or the other. And then after a couple of minutes, the curve takes off exponentially, and we get to a place where there’s no doubt
[41:43] that something, again, you could call it correlation, but while we’re under, while our subjects are under a neuromeditative process, the random number generator is no longer random. It is clearly leaning towards one side or the other. And, you know, Matt could probably talk about that a little bit. Yeah, well, and it gets to how we’re trying to do this data collection, right? So on the machine calling, I mentioned at the top, right, we have sensors that are well known to most folks that have either been in the military or done, you know, been around, you know, advanced equipment, right? So you got radar that both sends a signal out and then measures like the return signal. And so you can, you know, with good radars, you can actually get a lot of data about the objects, not just like their location, not just their altitude, not just their speed, but also some surface characteristics, right? Kind of how the signal bounces back, kind of its heartbeat, tells you a bit about that object. And there’s things you can
[42:45] do to help look at that data stream to understand, okay, is this a balloon? Is this a drone? Is this a plane? Or is it something anomalous, right? Because it’s not just their characteristic size, shape, speed, but also that sort of bounce back signal, right? What is it telling you about that object? And then you have cameras, right? Different types of cameras. We want to bring even better cameras out there. These objects, as Jake mentioned, they’re hard to image, right? Even when we think we should be getting a good crisp image of an object at like a known distance, where if it was a drone or a plane, we would be able to discern propellers or, you know, the fuselage, be able to actually like have the resolution that we would expect of a craft at that distance. But with the apparent distance of this object that we don’t get that same level of resolution, you get a bit of fuzziness around it. And then infrared, right? You get multiple bands
[43:35] of infrared where you’re trying to look at, again, its spectrum. There’s like lots of other sensors that we can bring out, and then we’re going to continue to explore. But at least in that domain, you have technical data. You’ve got sort of sensory information, and you’ve got to analyze it properly. You’ve got to fuse those different sensor data streams together to get a composite picture of a candidate anomalous object. So you can try to see, okay, it came in from this direction at this altitude with this apparent speed. What were the winds doing? What did the observer see? What is the radar signature? What is the infrared signature? And by putting all those different pieces together, you could raise your credence in the proposition that that object is truly anomalous. And then you can look at what was its apparent morphology, right? Did it look like a bright blob of light? Was it like a crystalline thing? Did it have kind of a manta ray craft-like
[44:24] shape? Was it like a jellyfish kind of aquatic, almost biological structure? So there’s lots of just sort of those are just data points to put together that point you in this direction of of being confident that it’s an anomalous object. But then on the neuromoditative side, right, fundamentally, we’re trying to capture data on what’s happening inside of a certain human beings or collection of human beings as heads. And, you know, I can’t get into their heads, right? So there’s the first person reports of their experience, which, you know, you want to make sure you get logs and reports of that. You can put on like EEG measurement apparatus to try to try to measure their their neurological activity or take other physiological samples like blood samples, you know, heart rate measurements, skin conductance, right? Try to get physiological measurements to try to associate when they say from a first person perspective, they’re entering into an altered state of consciousness and maybe even engaging
[45:18] consciously with a craft. That’s a first person subjective view can objectively verify it. But if you can collect like physiological data and you can show that there is a characteristic a pattern associated with when they are in or not in that associated state or that type of engagement that’s suggested. And then up to this more exotic kind of measurement apparatus, the quantum random quantum random number generator. Yes, I think that is like another domain where you’re trying to stretch the hypothesis out from from the person’s head to what sort of non-local effect could that altered state of consciousness be having or what’s the manner of its of its of its underlying mechanism? And that’s a very suggestive device in the sense it’s a pretty simple quantum random number generator, essentially a bunch of photon sources going to a beam splitter to detectors. And it’s a perfect 50 50. Right. I used to work on an optical physics lab doing terahertz spectroscopy in college, and I would set up
[46:15] these devices on tabletops to do sort of quantum computing and quantum materials experiments. They’re very, very precise machines that we kind of get to the point where that 50 50 ratio is extremely precise. And so if you see a characteristic kind of deflection or deformation in what you would expect to be a normal 50 50 ratio, that’s highly suggestive. There must be some either sensor malfunction or some exogenous effect changing the systematic odds associated with photons going to one source or the other source. So some sort of deviation from the bias on kind of where that coin is being flipped. And that’s there’s lots of other explanations associated with the connections between human consciousness and its non-local aspects and then different models of fundamental physics associated with quantum mechanics that also have kind of this non-local non-local character. We don’t have, I think, a fully fleshed out theory of fundamental physics
[47:10] yet, let alone one that can connect human consciousness in a systematic fashion. But that’s kind of where you wanted to go from, again, like anomalies that are outside the current paradigm that accumulate and that you can demonstrate with a certain degree of scientific rigor. Hey, we we conducted a number of these trials. I think we’re going to continue to do this now of of human beings that claim to have these abilities that can enter these altered state of consciousness. And if you have the right measurement apparatus to sort of systematically collect data on that to show, OK, this this apparent deformation or this anomaly or these other physiological measurements show a consistent and correlated pattern. We don’t know why that’s there, but it’s it’s data that we can then formulate hypotheses around. So in our discovery framework, we kind of have these different levels of confidence. Level one is just completely
[48:00] anecdotal, right? Suggestive first person accounts, camera, camera videos, declassified government reports. We’re now moving to structured data collection and then moving from when you have good data to then hypothesis generation. And so where we are now, we assess this in the framework that we released on the sort of machine calling. OK, how does this apparent signaling effect or operate? We’re about level three in the sense that we are generating hypotheses now where we have a reasonable degree of confidence that the signal is is effective, but we want to like nail that down. Right. We need to do lots of other trials in the field to get to this kind of go from sort of historical experience to like publishable research. Right. That’s kind of where we want to move going forward with the machine calling, kind of the dog whistle. And then also then characterize, OK, if the UAP come in, like what what are really anomalous? What actually fit these different categories? And then start to produce more information on each of those different categories, which we talked about in the second episode. But the human factors component of
[49:11] neuromeditative interaction is is much more, I’d say, slippery from a scientific perspective. Right. It’s not as repeatable in the sense you can’t flip the switch on someone’s brain. Right. And everyone, every person is a little bit different and they operate, you know, different moods and modes over time. It’s not exactly as a deterministic setting. So it’s a little bit harder to kind of design a really controlled experiment for that. And so we’re kind of a lot of things we’re trying to do all at once. And it’s like, OK, how do you prioritize your limited time in the field to try to answer a lot of these very tough questions? Right. So we’re getting suggestive information on each piece. But ultimately, like the North Star is to try to demonstrate the reality of UAP phenomenon and then along the way,
[49:55] try to collect as much dispositive information on the mechanics underlying these different techniques. Yeah. And that’s why there’s a lot of things that need to make their way through our six levels within our framework. And that’s why just to go back, why why I’m keying in on the random number generators, that would be, I think, an important thing to get across the finish line first is just simply is this is this happening? Is there are there can humans by by by way of their consciousness have an impact on a quantum random number generator? And we seem to have as crazy of a frontier as it sounds, as Matt laid out. That’s something that I to me, you know, I’m not a scientist. I’m just here learning as I go. But I understand it like that’s something that we should be able to take a real hard look at because. Proving it is one thing, but then
[50:52] proving that there’s an alternate explanation is also something that we should be looking at. I mean, that’s we we have that I’d say we’re like at level three or four with whether or not human consciousness or what we consider to be human consciousness and the willful ability to play with human consciousness can interact or have an impact on a quantum random number generator. Like that’s a big deal. I mean, when we think about all the different attributes of consciousness and the ability to play with it, as some of our trained neural meditators can, we think of things like, okay, telekinesis, can you use your mind to to move a ball or to move a pencil across the table? Can you can you be prognostic? Can you see the future? Can you remote view? There’s a lot of things that sound crazy. And those are the tests that people jump to when they’re like, well, let’s prove it. Let’s see if you can through telekinesis. Let’s see if you can move this pencil across the table. Well, we have something like that. And to me, it’s more exciting than
[52:03] dealing with physical objects. That’s more, you know, maybe that’s that we’re asking if consciousness can interplay with classical physics. The other side of that, can consciousness play with quantum physics? And right now it looks like the answer could be yes. So to just blow past that and get distracted by all the other questions, I think is a trap we want to avoid. We need to take our time. And this is a serious question right here. We can’t just say, oh, that’s interesting. We don’t know. And then move on to all the other questions that are out there. Like I’m all for focusing on one thing and getting more people to help us take a look at this alone, because that’s a big deal. If we can prove that humans can
[52:53] have an impact on things that are being their modus operandi is quantum physics, that’s a big deal. And that opens up a lot of questions. And we can’t just get overwhelmed with the number of questions laid before us and then not make progress on them. I don’t know, Matt, in your time, can we ask you, have you been able to produce results? We haven’t talked about this before. But have there been any experiments done to your knowledge that show there’s other things that can produce results using the number generator or random number generator to get us off of that 50-50 track? I’m not an expert in this domain, but actually, at Princeton, there was something called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab,
[53:43] the PARALAB, that was in operation for, say, 10 or 15 years. It got shut down some time ago. But they were the only group that I’m aware of in kind of the non-government domain that has conducted systematic research into anomalies associated with human consciousness. I think at the time, they didn’t have kind of, let’s say, affordable quantum random number generators. I think they were just using classical random number generators, which may explain why, you know, maybe some of the early results weren’t as effective. I think that the proliferation of these sorts of research materials that has brought the cost down in terms of quantum optics maybe makes this sort of research more feasible, right? You can actually just have this device that we have, right, just like in your pocket, basically. Whereas when I was in college, it would be like tens of thousands of dollars and something you would have to sort of stabilize on an optical
[54:35] table. So I think technology has moved much further. But I’m not sure, you know, Princeton, PARALAB shut down. So, yeah, I think it’s relatively low-hanging fruit. And I think that as was witnessed by the popular success of the Telepathy Tapes podcast, right, which really showed, you know, highly suggestive first-person experiences in a number of these families with apparent telepathy, right? And I think they tried to do some experiment-like setups during that show, but it wasn’t like a systematic scientific study, right, where you have double-blind control trials where the experimenter doesn’t know, the test subject doesn’t know the results. You have essentially the ideal setup to try to demonstrate with a statistical degree of confidence, right? You do your t-tests, you do the stats, you show, okay, this is what we would expect if it was just blind chance or guessing. And this is the results we get. And the repeatability of the, say, accuracy of the test subject’s ability to see what, say, the mother is seeing in another room is vastly above what you would expect if it was just a random guess, right? So you need to have
[55:46] the controlled trials, the repeatable experimental runs. And because you’re dealing with individuals, like these individuals in the Telepathy Tapes that are, you know, these are children, and so you need to get IRB approval. Like, you need to go through a lot to kind of do that test. It’s not as simple as, oh, like, yeah, like, just do the experiment, right? Like, you could just pull your buddies on a weekend, right? You need to do it serious. Serious science takes a lot of work, takes a lot of money, takes time. And I think up until now, like, because these questions were not considered viable questions to ask, there’s no National Science Foundation grant program that’s funding research in academic departments on this stuff. So if you’re a postdoc and you’re looking for a tenure-track position, or you’re a tenure-track, you know, or you already have tenure, but you’re still subject to a lot of, you know, in-group, you know, peer pressure to publish
[56:35] or perish, like, you’re not gonna waste your valuable research grant writing time to get out on this limb here, right? You’re gonna stick to your knitting. And so this is where I think, yeah, ultimately you need breakthrough research initiatives that aren’t, you know, motivated off of return on capital investment, but a return on, like, intellectual investment. And I think that we’re reaching a point now where enough sources of capital, as well as individuals with serious bona fides, such as Jake and the rest of the Skywatcher team, as well as the scientific community that is now kind of poking their head above water, right? Like, there’s a lot of folks that have been tracking what Skywatcher has been doing and reaching out to us, you know, from those domains, folks that have extremely, you know, like, well-developed academic and scientific credentials. Obviously, we have Gary Nolan, who, you know, needs no praise from me in terms of his academic and professional accomplishments, but we’re seeing more
[57:35] individuals of that caliber approach us and want to have a serious conversation about essentially the scientific aspect of this. And, like, to be honest, like, I think the folks that we have involved are, like, technical experts, sensor experts, operations experts. But finally, it’s about, you know, demonstrating this to the scientific community as well. And so that’s gonna be an area of continued expansion. Yeah, this is, yeah. I think that’s the problem right there, is people with the capability and know-how to explore and conduct experiments, their focus has and probably needs to be on things that are can be implemented to some benefit for people. So, it’s like you’re either studying medicine, you’re studying genetics, you’re studying technology, and so the time and attention and the financing behind that
[58:35] is driven by producing some goods and services that can, that are tangible. We understand how to make them applicable for improving day-to-day life or whatever, or making profit. And when you get into this stuff, it’s something like, we might prove that prayer is real. And it’s like, okay, what do you do with that? How do you monetize that? How do you turn that into medicine? How does that impact our economy? How does that improve our strength as a nation from a national defense standpoint? And you can’t really answer that question with that result. I think one of the interesting things is that this has existed in the spirituality sections of bookstores for a long time, but there might be actually some scientific backing to be able to prove that
[59:24] this stuff that’s been talked about, and it’s actually probably more widely accepted in society than UFOs or aliens, that there is a scientific grounding to this. So, I don’t know what that says about what the economic implications are, but I do think that society already has a kind of openness to this type of stuff, don’t you? Yeah, I think society does, but the people we need to study it aren’t focused on it because of those reasons I listed. So, I don’t know how to get there. The interest is certainly there, but the interest, the people we need interested are those in charge of our academic institutions, because they’re the ones that can look into this for us on behalf of the interested community or the government. The government has the money and the means to make people focus on this. There’s only so much time in the day for all of us, and it doesn’t matter how powerful you are. If you’re the president of the United States, or
[60:26] you’re the president of a university, or you’re the Nobel laureate, you still have to get eight hours of sleep, brush your teeth, take the kids to school, and then you have to spend most of your professional time focused on things that put a roof over your head and food on the table and keep you happy and healthy. I don’t think that there’s anyone looking at this because it doesn’t fit into the schedule or the goals that are already set out there. I think there’s not as much utility. It’s more novel, and so it takes a group like us, which I feel very fortunate that we have the opportunity to do. I don’t know how long it’ll be here, but if the ultimate goal is to prove something like prayer exists or that we can communicate with anomalous phenomenon, once we get there, is it sustainable? And just looking at other things that are sustainable that people have taken an interest in, it’s a different type
[61:37] of thing. Yeah, and I think our objectives are pretty focused in the near term, right, is go out, collect more data, try to share our analysis with relevant experts for cross-checking, try to bring more, basically like sort of the water’s warm to folks in academic and other professional domains to sort of build a bridge between our activities and their professional expertise and generate a larger community of interest. I don’t think we’re going to end up answering all these questions by ourselves, but I think one of the key measures of success of Skywatcher is that we could hopefully catalyze a more serious, broader scale effort by other individuals and other groups and other domains of professional expertise to sort of perk up and take notice and then start their own research projects. And ultimately, this is about getting the government out of the corner that it’s backed itself into and building a bridge between maybe
[62:33] some information and knowledge that the government doesn’t know how to share or who to share it with if there are public, private institutions that are in the open domain, that aren’t just about exploiting for our military research and development or a strategic national advantage or counterintelligence or whatever, but are about scientific discovery, open engagement, research. That’s how you have to kind of, you know, build this, right? You’re not going to like snap your fingers and have new institutions that can help, you know, the social sense-making process, which is very difficult, takes long periods of time. And, you know, in different periods of human history, we’ve had, you know, different, say, folk metaphysics, which allowed the society to kind of incorporate a lot of different types of phenomenon into their belief
[63:22] system. They were sort of animist beliefs. They were, you know, polytheistic belief systems. There were, you know, lots of human societies that had, you know, a very different type of metaphysics associated with their cultural attitudes, right? I think in our modern context, we have a sort of secular, you know, very materialistic kind of folk metaphysics. You know, it’s been very successful, right? Motivating scientific discovery and sort of shaking off old, you know, kind of superstitious constraints on sort of rational exploration of the universe. But I think as we sort of maybe come full circle, in a sense, is kind of that rational scientific investigatory mode has now bumped up into certain aspects of reality that don’t fit the prevailing, say, metaphysical assumptions that have been in place in the last few hundred years, maybe since Descartes first kind of separated out sort of mind and matter and said, you know,
[64:16] the realm of the mind is sort of the realm of the church, the realm of the spirit, the soul, prayer, et cetera, religious salvation. That is one domain. And then there’s the realm of the matter. That’s scientific measurement. That’s rigorous mathematical model development. And I think human civilization, since sort of, you know, Descartes, has been really successful at kind of sticking to its lane and carving out lots of different new domains of knowledge that we can apply and building up this tower of technology that’s given us all the fruits that we take advantage of today. But ultimately, that separation, right, was maybe like it was a heuristic that allowed us to get to make some progress, right? But fundamentally, it had to make a certain division of our view of the world. And now we have to kind of re-accommodate these two different,
[65:04] you know, aspects of how we think about the world in a different fashion. I think that’s where the UAP question is so challenging, because it isn’t just, okay, are there anomalous things in the sky? If so, like, what kinds and what are they and where do they come from, right? This opens up this Pandora’s box of questions, as Jake mentioned, and the government isn’t necessarily going to be the right entity to answer all those questions. Like, we don’t go to the government for, like, theological or metaphysical answers, right? Like, that ultimately has to come from civil society, from different faith traditions and scientific traditions that all have to kind of take their own attitude. And so, I know, I don’t think Skywatch was going to answer all those questions, but I think now it’s okay. You need to have this tentative bridge be built between, at least in my personal opinion, is a large wealth of information on some of these
[65:55] topics that is not public and what we can now do in the private sector. And that’s a very, like, you know, when you first build a bridge, right, like, you got to trust the engineers. The first person to walk across it is sort of testing the bridge, and they prove to everyone else that the bridge is a real bridge and works, and then you can get other people to start walking across it, and then it just becomes accepted as part of the, you know, the architecture, right? And you’ve got a new mode of transportation available to you. So, I think that’s just, like, we’re in the very early stages of this, and I think Skywatcher’s objective here, and this is the balancing act, is to, you know, do this in public, which, of course, is, like, very much, I don’t know, like, expectations are so high, right? You’re going to prove the existence of aliens and prove that prayer is real and prove that consciousness is non-local. Okay, well, these are big claims,
[66:45] like, show me the beef, right? Well, again, this is the proposition is we want to aim at those core, like, almost existential-level questions, but it’s going to be a halting, you know, real, all-too-human, you know, messy way to get at some progress towards those questions. You know, folks watching this may not be aware of kind of the long-running kind of track of policy and law, and I won’t summarize all of it, but, you know, this isn’t happening in a vacuum, what Skywatcher is doing. There’s a large policymaker kind of bureaucratic focus on these topics that’s been in place for several years. In particular, different pieces of legislation have been passed, you know, even more introduced to try to peel the onion officially on the subject of UAPs and maybe unreported programs, what sorts of information does the government have that maybe folks in Congress and other folks with relevant oversight responsibilities feel like they’re not being properly made aware of. And so there’s like a separate track of advocacy for disclosure or for more government transparency and more accountability in Congress, and that’s
[67:57] been kind of a once, you know, two steps forward, one step back kind of process playing out really since 2020, 2021. There’s been folks that have been whistleblowers that have come to Congress and sort of shared information to help sort of move the needle and direct those government transparency efforts. Skywatcher, of course, isn’t an advocacy organization, we’re not like a lobbyist, but we have expertise as a group on some of these subjects. And in particular, as the government starts to try to move from, you know, a standpoint of denial to potential affirmation or confirmation of the reality of this phenomenon, right, that’s gonna mean they kind of actually have to do things about it, right? Like when you pretend that something doesn’t exist, then, you know, as things persistently kind of invade your airspace is a problem, but you kind of can wave your hands away. And that is actually kind of a national security problem because
[68:51] adversaries are aware of that potential gap and will exploit it. And so there’s a national security component of this, as well as kind of the scientific discovery component of this and the capabilities that Skywatcher have are kind of dual use in that sense, like the same sorts of sensors that we bring out to do scientific data collection can also be, you know, used for more tactical, you know, defense applications. I think our core focus is scientific discovery. But along the trajectory, like if we are right in our hypothesis, and some of the first person experiences is that there’s a real phenomenon that are not figments of imagination or, you know, misidentifications of balloons or drones. These are persistent incursions over sensitive protected airspace by potentially both exotic, you know, human capabilities from
[69:43] another government, as well as non-human, you know, technologies. Well, okay, once you’ve sort of shaken off the ontological surprise at that possibility, you still have to do something about it, you still have to put sensors and monitor what’s going on, you have to go like collect data, you have to actually put in place mechanisms and procedures. And right now, the government just isn’t because they haven’t affirmed or confirmed that this is a real thing, like the bureaucracy hasn’t gotten like the mandate to do much about it, or what they can do about it has to be done very slyly, very much, you know, with plausible deniability, which is not the best way to kind of do to do something like this. So… Sorry, Matt, go ahead. I was gonna say, it’s probably a good time, we may have kind of glossed over this, but your listeners may not have watched previous episodes or information we put out. But we have three large buckets, there’s a blue bucket,
[70:44] a red bucket, and another bucket is how we look at it. Things operating in our sky that are that are US based or owned or proprietary technology, that’s the blue bucket. The red bucket means it looks as though it’s probably adversarial. The other bucket is everything else from non-human intelligence, extraterrestrial, plasma anomalies, it could be anything, that’s the interesting category. And those buckets are what we further then break down into classes when we look at what we’re observing in the sky. Right now we have nine classes that we have publicly released. We have other classes that are in the works, but we don’t have enough information on those classes to confidently say, you know, that it’s something different from the other nine classes, or we just have one, like, only an isolated incident where we had one piece of equipment gather observation on it. So, there
[71:48] are other pending classes, but the nine classes we have right now are essentially things that that look like hardware objects in the sky. There’s a couple of classes which fall in that broader bucket. Then there’s a set of classes which are more light-based anomalies, like orbs, plasma balls, light effects that may or may not have a solid object associated with them. And then there’s another class, as crazy as it sounds, to us, move and behave like they’re some biological creature or animal. They look like an animal, they move like an animal, doesn’t mean they are an animal, but that’s how we look at them. And that helps us delineate what we’re looking at in the sky and put it in some just kind of gross organization to where we can then start to break it down and look. Because when we see something, one of the challenges, too, is that these things look different to the naked eye than they do under an EO sensor, under an IR sensor,
[72:57] under a thermal, under a scope, under binos. They look different from different altitudes and ranges. They also look different from different angles. So, we might get something on radar, for example, and then our EO camera is lined up on the same vector as our radar, typically, at least in the same quadrant. We zoom in with the EO camera and we get something on our screen that looks like, let’s say, a cube, a blue cube, let’s say. I’m not saying that’s one of them. Let’s say it’s a blue cube. And then, okay, now we send a radio call out to our other observation posts and try and point other equipment at it. Those observation posts are at different elevations and are at different angles, sometimes a mile or two away. They report back seeing something completely different than what is being seen in the radar signature and from the EO camera that’s
[73:51] co-located with the radar. We then dispatch a helicopter with a number of other observation equipment on board and try and vector the helicopter as close as we can to the target. And we’ve been able to get within 200 meters at times of targets. And we’ve actually not been able to see anything, despite the fact that our tactical operations center is telling us it’s right in front of the nose of the helicopter. And the operator in the tactical operations center, which we call the TOC, actually has us on frame, in camera, with the object floating right in front of the helicopter and the helicopter in the same frame. And so, they’re seeing it. They’re seeing both the helicopter and the target or the blue cube, but the pilots in the helicopter don’t see anything with the naked eye. And even more interesting than that, our helicopter gets frozen in midair. We’ve had, even as recent as last month, we deployed the helicopter and as we were getting vectored to the target, the helicopter stopped moving. Blades are turning,
[75:01] engines running, but the helicopter would not move up. It would not move forward. It would not move left or right. It was essentially stuck at what seems like a barrier that the object itself had set and was like, hey, don’t come any closer. Stay where you are. Instruments inside the helicopter, specifically the pitot-static system, which is an analog instrument that measures differences in air pressure around the helicopter in different modes of flight, those systems were going crazy. They were just bouncing around. The helicopter pilot could not push the cyclic stick forward, which is the center control stick, couldn’t raise collective. The collective stick was frozen and it was stuck there for a couple minutes. After a couple minutes, the helicopter was able to retreat, ironically. So, essentially, the only direction we were allowed to move if we were stuck
[75:55] there at the will of the target was away. It let us go away, but it didn’t let us come any closer. And so, you know, that experience itself, I mean, there’s just so many questions with that. And then the objects a lot of times will disappear and reappear in another quadrant. Some of the times they’re not visible at all. We might have a certain anomaly or what looked like a glitch in the radar system in a certain quadrant of the sky. And when we direct the cameras there, there’s nothing. We don’t see anything at all. And then when we go back and we scrub through the video footage frame by frame, we’ll go, oh my gosh, there’s something there. There’s something there. The Tic Tac, for example, is famous for this, is we don’t see it at all, but we have either through our neural meditators, like our psionics will say, hey, I feel this is going to happen. It’s going to happen here. And we just trust them and we point our equipment in that direction. Nobody sees anything. And at first it looks like, you know, it was a fail. And then we go back and we scrub through things and we’ll see things show up in frame. The Tic Tac does this to
[77:06] us regularly. And I think we showed some of this in episode two, but you’ll see the Tic Tac appear in sometimes pairs or three or four, or maybe it’s the same one. I don’t know. And it’s making quantum leaps in the air, but it’ll jump around in the frame. And so it’s moving so quickly that you, and it’s not making any sound. You can’t see it with the naked eye. And also the radar that we’re using is limited on airspeed. So if we’re getting stuff that moves thousands of miles per hour, it’s also not going to show up on the radar. And it’s really hard if you can’t first get the radar to tell you what direction to look to even know where to point your equipment. And this is one of the biggest critiques that we get is how come your imagery is so poor? Well, there’s a
[77:57] number of reasons. One, you have to know where to point your zoomable equipment to begin with. And so you start with a broad field of view with either binos or the camera system. And then if you can identify a target, you have to know where to zoom to concentrate those pixels on a particular target to begin with. And you can’t do that unless you know where it is. So a lot of times we’re stuck zoomed out almost entirely, and then are forced to scrub through and post processing and try and zoom in with the the editing program. But you’re when you do that, you’re not getting the pixels on target, you’re stuck with the pixels that you have. Additionally, the objects themself, if they are manipulating time and space, then there’s probably something like a gravity bubble or vacuum around them. And if you’re dealing with that, you’re dealing with distortion of photons like light is not making its way out of that sphere, or if it is, it’s getting distorted. And so
[78:58] you might be looking at something that just looks like a colorful, like splatter of paint in the sky when really it’s a white tic tac. And so when viewed from different angles or under different equipment, or at different times during its phase of flight, you may get one object that look like three different classes of UAP. Which is which is interesting, but it’s really frustrating when you’re then trying to share your progress with the rest of the world. And this is this is all you have to share is this variety of weird things happening and stories and not able to provide conclusive guesses, or well, just any type of conclusive evidence as to what it even looks like to begin with. The phrase Pandora’s Box was mentioned a couple times during this conversation. And one of the concerns that I’ve seen online among people following your work is that we don’t really know what this phenomenon is. Could it be dangerous? Could there be lasting
[80:03] effects from repeated calling? Where do you stand on that? And what precautions are you guys taking? And what are you looking out for in terms of potential dangers or problems that may arise from this? Great question. Great question. Yeah, there’s potential danger. Historically, there have been injuries associated with the phenomenon. I mean, me personally, I’ve been exposed to radiation and some form of directed energy a number of times. And it’s not clear to me what the long term health effects are of that. There are a number of other individuals that have had similar experiences. So we do take precaution with that from a radiological standpoint. We do have equipment out there, which which measures radiological signatures in a number of different types from gamma rays. And I don’t remember the other type of radiation it measures. So there’s there’s more that, you know, that more physiological threat that’s there. But then, you know, if these are
[81:13] the question comes up a lot, especially, you know, on the more woowoo side is are these if if it is non-human intelligence and if it is if there are other sentient beings operating or even inside some of this stuff. what is their intent? Are they benevolent or are they malevolent? And whether or not they’re malevolent or benevolent, nobody really knows. And, you know, that’s a risk we’re all willing to take because we feel, you know, this is our personal decision, but we feel that frontier has to be explored. That question has to be answered. And it’s like, we can’t just ignore the phenomenon because of that. Because if their intent is malevolent or benevolent, we need to find that
[81:57] out is a strong argument to make, rather than just let it exist and let it do what it wants with us and with our airspace. So that question has to be answered. You know, something interesting about or something people might find very interesting about our core group and our mission is that we have an oath. We have a very well thought out and meaningful oath that everyone takes and it sets intentions for our operation. Everyone on our team, regardless of, you know, I’ve said before, regardless of whether you’re flying the helicopter or you’re a neural meditator or you’re cleaning the Skywatcher toilet, you are held accountable to swearing this oath. And that oath is one of, I won’t go into it, it’s about 500 words, but we actually sign it and we set those intentions through that oath every morning. And the oath is very focused on a number
[82:56] of virtues. I would say humility is first and foremost, a loving, welcoming disposition. And although there are potential threats associated with this, the biggest risk I say we’re taking is that we aren’t taking an offensive or defensive posture, despite the fact that there might be something worthy of being defensive, defensively positioned against. And so that’s part of our risk that we’re taking in doing that. But we feel it’s vitally important, even though there is no proof that there is, in our effort, there is no proof that there is another sentient being or non-human intelligence involved here, but it is one of the possible outcomes. And the last thing we want is to be someone that acted aggressively against another entity or another form of consciousness. Yeah, and just speaking from my own research and relationships outside of Skywatcher, right, like it’s my understanding or my belief that,
[84:05] you know, some of these activities that have been, you know, undertaken by, quote, unquote, the legacy programs since maybe, you know, World War II, and in some of the nuclear testing that we did in the 60s, may have like given these sorts of things a bad rep, right? And so like, I’m operating on the assumption that human beings going out and doing these sorts of experiments from the perspective of NHI, like that maybe has seen similar activities, but done with a much more, I’d say, aggressive intention to bring objects down, you know, maybe we have to kind of do extra work to like demonstrate that we’re different than that. I mean, there was a great interview given by Harold Malmgren, who recently passed away, who was a senior advisor to multiple presidents on Jesse Michael’s American Alchemy podcast, not to show another podcast on your podcast. I love Jesse Michaels, don’t worry. He’s great. And Harold Malmgren is an individual I had
[84:59] come to know. He’s a remarkable individual. I would encourage folks to watch that interview of his life and his first person testimony of his knowledge and experience, you know, regarding kind of the early history of some of these activities, in particular, you know, nuclear tests that were done in the 60s around the Cuban Missile Crisis, like the Blue Veil Triple Crime Test, which involved kind of a gold encased nuclear weapon that generated like a massive X-ray pulse that was seen on the test cameras, essentially knocking an object out of the sky that was retrieved, allegedly by the Navy. And that, from my supposition, you know, gave certain elements of the military, you know, intelligence system, a hypothesis that they could start to reproduce, which is there are ways of knocking these objects out of the sky with high powered microwave or X-ray or other sorts of direct energy weapons. And, you know, that might have been systematized and operationalized over many years. And so from the perspective of NHI,
[86:02] there’s a bunch of humans running around, you know, shooting stuff out of the sky. And of course, we are very clear that we are not doing that. We are not shooting anything out of the sky. One, like it’s illegal for us to do that. Jake can talk about the FAA and FCC authorizations we’re operating under to conduct our flights, conduct our radar operations. You know, these are things that are sending energy out into the electromagnetic spectrum. These things are highly regulated activities in the United States. And so we are very clear that we’re staying within our legal mandate, but we also are staying within our ethical mandate to have a peaceful, you know, curious and kind of good faith engagement, right, to have, you know, to approach
[86:46] this whole activity with good intentions and curiosity and openness, right, fundamentally. But again, like your deep sea submersibles, right, like you’re going down to the depths, right, and to go find a novel species of jellyfish lurking 30,000 feet under the ocean. And there’s risk attached with that, right? You know, the jellyfish attacks your submersible, right? Does that mean the jellyfish is malevolent? No, it’s like you just kind of, you poked it, right, or you showed a bright light on it and it reacted to you. So I think these sorts of terms are our sort of phraseology, and clearly we are doing things actively to provoke a response, and we’re trying to study that response. But, you know, how we label that and how we interpret that
[87:35] is a different thing. Yeah, I think I like the analogy of the ocean as a frontier. I mean, can you imagine being the first person or group of people to stand on a beach looking out at the vast expanse of the great blue ocean and going, I don’t know, should we go in? Like, it looks scary. Like there could be sharks out there. There could be poisonous jellyfish. But it’s like, yeah, there could also be hot mermaids and sunken treasure. So we need to go. Like you can’t, you can’t turn your back on it. It’s a frontier. And because it’s there, you have to explore it. And the good intention thing, it has a very practical purpose, too. Like it actually works better. And this gets back into, you know, more of our spiritual side of what we’re doing. But we have proven to ourselves that having something like a loving disposition and having everyone on the team locked in to that as a group, we have more success in the field when we all are, when
[88:40] all of us are oriented to this good-natured, loving, humble disposition. And it’s funny, and it makes me think, you know, again, maybe that’s something we prove in addition to prayer is that intent matters. Intent matters in everything you do in life. You know, I can imagine that even if we were just contractors showing up at a build site and we had to frame a house and pour concrete, if at the beginning of the day all the contractors got together and we formed a circle and we set good intentions and we welcomed everyone in and we had a loving, humble intent, that we would probably build a better house that day than we would having not done that. And so there’s a very practical reason, I think, for setting those intentions. Do you think that there’s any concern over, let’s say, copycat organizations trying to emulate the work that you guys are doing, but maybe not up to the same standards or,
[89:38] you know, maybe not as conscious of the risks involved? Yeah, there are other groups doing this. And I’m like, I’m all for it, man. We need all hands, all brains on deck right now. I would hope everyone is doing it ethically and is following the same guidelines as us. But again, the skies are not classified. Your consciousness cannot be redacted. It’s free reign. And the same thing, the same reason we’re able to do this, it’s anytime you have freedom in the most fundamental sense of the word. I think it’s consistent with the basis for the argument for X and Twitter. It’s like, you know, altruistic freedom of speech, like, be careful what you wish for. But ultimately, it’s one of the only ways to truly explore the frontier is because it’s a slippery slope. If you start limiting certain individuals or organizations from playing with things, well, then you have to establish a basis for or criteria for why some people are allowed and some aren’t. And that you get into a lot of trouble doing that right away, because who’s to decide
[90:51] who should be excluded and why they should be excluded? Ultimately, we would like our government agencies and institutions who are paid with our tax dollars and who are voted to have that type of authority would get involved. But right now, it’s a complete frontier. And maybe ultimately, once we learn some lessons, you know, some of the most valuable lessons are learned the hard way. And I think, you know, suffering and setbacks seem to be the currency of wisdom. And because this is such a frontier, we almost have to pay our dues and make some mistakes. Granted, the mistakes that might be made in this work could be huge. And, you know, we aren’t, we’re not, we’re not moving forward recklessly. But there is a balance between
[91:43] being adventurous and persistent, and not crossing the line into recklessness. And again, that to me, that goes back to intention, and that we sure hope intention matters, because that’s the only real security we have, as we venture out at the end of the day with some of these things. I’ve spoken to some remote viewing experts who have said that everybody has some level of psychic ability, some more developed than others. Do you believe that anybody has the potential to be able to attract UAPs? Let me frame it a little differently. My personal belief is that everybody has what I call a light inside of them. There’s something special about human beings in my mind. We are not animals, but we’re not gods. We’re something in the middle. I think we are a hybrid of beast and benevolence. And you can think about it in a number of different ways. But, you know, we’re the only creatures on the planet that seem to really lean into empathy. We have evolved in our capabilities more than any other creature
[92:54] on the planet. Some other indications to me are that, you know, humor is something that I think may only exist within the human species. And humor is really a subset of humility. And so, we also are the only creatures that seem to understand the fact that our time is limited. We’re the only creatures that know we will die. I don’t know that other creatures know if they have a subconscious and a more prefrontal lobe-based consciousness that they’re even aware that they’re going to die at some day or at some point in their life. At any point, either due to old age or perhaps most animals understand that there are certain threats involved with their day-to-day life as hunters and prey. But, you know, just knowing that we may be the only creatures that are contemplating whether or not there’s a god. And that, I think, yeah, I don’t know which comes first there, the chicken or the egg being the knowledge
[94:00] that your life is limited or the idea that there might be a god or something afterlife. But those two realities are coupled together. Once you realize your life is limited, then you’re forced to ask, well, what happens afterlife? And that leads you to some question of whether or not there’s a god or some other state of existence. And I think that light exists in every single human being. I don’t think children have to be taught that. I think, at least for me, those were things I was contemplating at a very young age, regardless of, you know, my family’s influence or weekly visits to church. And so, this also goes back to why I’ve said before that I don’t think that these discoveries being made public or being adapted into our public culture are going to be an ontological shock. I think it’s going to be an ontological relief because I believe everyone knows that there’s some deeper meaning and something beyond our own personal perspective
[95:09] or walk through life that’s going on and in play. And I think it’s going to make people just go, oh, thank God there’s more to life. Thank God. Because it’d be an awfully lonely place if you weren’t embedded in something bigger than yourself and having the burden of understanding that at one point in your life you will die. There’s also animals, I don’t think, have any knowledge of the fact of the past. I don’t think they realize they have grandfathers. Like, my dog doesn’t know that dogs have been around for hundreds of years. So, no concept of the past or the future makes you a different creature than a creature who understands that there is a past and a future and that the future has in store, well, that there is a death and maybe something
[96:05] beyond. And I think that, again, has to do with that light that exists in every human. I like the analogy of the animals and how you’ll give a dog his bowl of food and he’ll know that it’s food and he’ll know that he wants to eat it, but he doesn’t know that it was made in a factory somewhere 18 miles away and that it was delivered by truck and things like that. And so, as humans, we’re seeing these things in the sky. How do you go about dealing with the unknown unknowns that are out there that we just can’t fathom at this point? But I just say you can’t deal with it. You’re going to have to trust yourself to improvise and adapt and overcome when you’re put in that position. All we can do is set good intentions. I think there’s both a, in life, there’s kind of a practical attitude and there’s like the philosophical attitude, right? And everyone kind of code switches, right? You have to get through your day and then you’re in your practical attitude and then you have your moments
[97:05] of reflection where you want to understand what’s really going on, right? And I think everyone has those moments where you flip in between those different attitudes. And I think it’s the same for this subject. And when I have my kind of scientific philosophical attitude switched on and I think about these questions about is remote viewing just a quirk of some small subset of human beings or like a core feature of our nature as conscious beings, I tend to move to the latter because I have a certain set of scientific and philosophical sort of orientation to thinking about consciousness as fundamental to reality. And there’s a lot of metaphysics, I won’t go into the philosophy of mind there, but essentially the structure of causation kind of has two aspects, an outside aspect we describe through physics and an internal aspect that we have kind of the language of subjective first person experience to describe. And so human
[98:07] beings are particular complex objects that exist in reality that evolution has selected to create. So we have a 4 billion year history of kind of evolutionary construction of a really complicated object that we call the human brain. And so the human brain has been the evolved object through all these different forces. And if there was a degree of freedom in reality that connected to this aspect of reality that we call consciousness, it would be something that evolution would select for, right? If it provided any sort of advantage, right? If there was a bit of say phase information and kind of the quantum branches of the future that could be accessed non-locally or that you could tip the probability weights of exploring one branch or the next in your sort of path as an observer, taking its way through this complicated causal structure, then that would be an evolutionary thing to build in to objects that are selected for
[99:05] over time. And it would likely mean that what we call intuition, right? And Lou Elizondo and other individuals have talked about this as being something that is very prevalent in special operations and intelligence personnel that are in high risk situations that either the government selects for intentionally or they get sort of self-selected or they’re in battlefield environments where there’s an intense selection pressure on individuals with such abilities. You would see that kind of natural kind of latent disposition potentially be more explicitly manifested. And so I think that’s likely, you know, it leads me in the direction to say this is like an inbuilt capability of any conscious being, but human beings are the most kind of, you know, advanced conscious being that we think exists, right? We have kind of both the lizard brain, you know,
[99:55] kind of mammalian social kind of attitudes. And when you create a language, we develop this sort of whole stack of conceptual vocabulary. And we think with a, you know, with a top dog that might not actually be the case, but we think so at this moment. And so I think this is just a feature of reality, right? That we have to sort of reintegrate into a more holistic worldview. But it also means that, yeah, there’s maybe more like practical applications associated with that knowledge. And I think we’re just now kind of scratching the surface of that. And this goes back to like, you know, I think this is where connections between fundamental physics and philosophy have like very practical application, right? I think if you talk to someone in the 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s, that was paying attention to the frontiers of science, they would be very, very much attuned to like, what is fundamental physics say about the world as like a groundbreaking
[100:51] new way of just understanding what the world is. And then that would immediately then, you know, gesture at these practical questions. Oh, man, what can we do with this knowledge? What sorts of weapons are we creating, right? What’s the risks that are then presented to society by this knowledge? And I think we sort of lost that sort of sense of direct connection between physics and risk in our society. We sort of see a hint of it coming out of like AI, like now that we have a new technology bursting on the scene that is presenting a type of disruption that we haven’t seen in many decades. These like new questions are presenting themselves with new urgency, right? What if there is an artificial general intelligence that leads to kind of a self bootstrapping artificial superintelligence that, you know, becomes, you know, essentially a new entity that may or may not share our values. And these sorts of questions about relationship between human beings
[101:46] and artificial intelligences, right, maybe are analogous to the questions that we’re talking about in the relationship between human beings and non-human intelligences, right? There’s like other structures of intelligence and consciousness, potentially, that relate to humans in a way that maybe where we are not the top dog, right, or where we have to integrate into a larger order. And that’s going to be a very hard process to adjust to, you know, over time. And yeah, that gets much more, you know, esoteric. But I think we’re on this sort of, we seem to be entering into an era where lots of these disruptions to our mental models and our social and our political frameworks are going to be converging. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if AI at any point becomes something that we didn’t, that wasn’t in the ingredients that we put
[102:44] in there. Like, it’s interesting to think about that all creators make things in their own image. So, if you think back to just the classical story of God, the Christian God making man in his own image, any technology we produce or even artificial intelligence that we’re making, we’re making it in our own image. So, for me, it’d be interesting to see if AI evolves to anything or there’s, you know, if one plus one ends up equaling three at some point. Like, is there something else that AI ends up becoming that wasn’t in the original ingredients, let’s say, that we put into the cake that is AI? That would be something very interesting that might make us look a little harder at our place in the universe. And if we are truly something special or if we’re something that
[103:37] is just a stepping stone to the evolution of the universe being aware of itself to begin with. And I think more practically, I mean, Skywatcher, you know, in its near term is looking to incorporate AI, right, just for data analysis. And then also, I think in the next year or two, maybe sooner, you know, these things are moving fast. You know, I mentioned there’s a taboo problem in modern academic science. There’s a kind of social kind of preference falsification. Like, AIs don’t have a sense of taboo. They don’t have a sense of the reputation. They’ll just throw their horsepower at a particular query, and they’ll give you the best answer they can give you. And so, I think we might see, you know, as we see an increasing capability frontier being explored with AIs, that they’re not just kind of chatbots, but they actually are helping with scientific discovery pretty soon. I mean, there already are in certain domains, but where they effectively are helping to kind of advance the frontier. And they can
[104:38] synthesize all of human knowledge. And they can just take, you know, an unbiased, you know, no peer group pressure view of this information and actually help, you know, generate inferences that push our knowledge pretty quickly in these directions. So, I think that is a, that’s just over the horizon. We’re going to be looking at sort of the possibility of AIs accelerating scientific research across lots of different domains, including in UAPs. And I think amateur researchers in UAPs, with lots of information and knowledge, are sort of throwing this into these models and just asking, you know, given this historical record, given these official statements, like, what’s the best explanation? And the UAPs, the LLMs are just like, yeah, the high confidence conclusion from this data is that there are legacy UAP programs, that there have been attempts at, you know, crash retrievals and reverse engineering. And there likely are novel aspects of physics and propulsion and material science and even,
[105:38] you know, biological research that are associated with those activities. And those are just like straightforward inferences from the historical fact pattern, right? I think a lot of folks in the, you know, scientific and academic domains don’t even look at that fact pattern. So, they don’t even try to draw those inferences. But the LLMs don’t have those sorts of taboos. I think those will start to accelerate what can be done with this topic. I think we’ll also allow, the one danger, though, that I’ve also seen with the LLMs is they are really good at coming up with like a self-consistent story that will sort of fit what you throw at it. And human beings, we love coherent stories. We love narratives that kind of pull it all together. And I think the UFO
[106:22] community and the larger kind of lore has faced this issue of sort of battles over different interpretations of what’s going on. And you have a whole kind of constellation of different data points and suggestions and whispers and, you know, different things to kind of stitch together and puzzle pieces to put together. And they don’t all easily fit, right? And so, you can kind of, you focus on the pieces that you can kind of fit together and you become, you know, enamored with a particular story or frame of explanation. And LLMs are, while they could accelerate a lot of fundamental physics research and scientific research, at the same time, they’ll, I think, empower a lot of people to kind of create their own narrative explanations of what’s going on in a way that’s very compelling for kind of their particular way of thinking about these things. And there’ll be like a lot of difficulty now, I think, of generating more like a consensus social agreement on what’s actually happening. So,
[107:17] I can see like two processes play out in the next few years where we start to accommodate ourselves to the reality of these phenomenon as being, you know, things happening in the world or capabilities associated with human beings. But we don’t really understand how to put it all together. Like, what’s the master narrative? What’s the master frame of explanation for all of these things, right? Whether it’s legacy programs, everything from abductions to remote viewing and, you know, the history of humanity, like all the sort of big existential questions that run from, you know, that span the full gamut, right? And we want to understand it all. We want to have a nice, you know, a nice story that kind of makes us feel comfortable about what’s happening here. And LLMs will be really good at telling those stories to us. And they’ll fit all the pieces together. But they might do many different versions of very different stories that are
[108:08] compelling to different human beings. And so, I worry that we could still have this dissonance go forward, where as we have more research in the field, we get a better handle on the objective data. We’re going to continue to kind of isolate ourselves in our own, you know, narratives. And I don’t know if I have a grand solution for that. But I do think that one mitigating activity is just to start now building a broader base of collective seriousness of purpose and professionalization of UAP and Psy and all these other different topics, so that there’s at least a common, you know, orientation before everyone kind of retreats into their LLM, you know, hallucinatory stories. So, that was a bit of a riff. But yeah, I think this is where there’s promise and peril for the path we’re on. Yeah, I don’t know if this would be a good experiment to run. But if we ever get to a point where we’re wondering if AI has become conscious,
[109:04] put it next to the random number generator and ask it to run a neuromeditative protocol and see if the AI piece of equipment can get the random number generator to generate an anomaly. You know, there’s an experiment maybe right there. Just to kind of segue, you know, one of the things when we talk about NHI, it might be, and there are some, there is some information from historic data and legacy programs, if we want to call it that, that says that what we’re seeing might be something, might be AI, might actually be biological AI. And that gets pretty close to human. There’s a reason people like David Grush chose his words very carefully when talking about what was recovered, when he’s like, yeah, there were bodies, and we have bodies.
[109:59] But he called them biologics. He didn’t call them creatures or humans or aliens or anything else. Because one of the potential outcomes might be that bodies or beings that have been recovered in the past were something like biological technology or artificial biological technology, like like lead meat to coin a phrase, or biological robots. And that would be an interesting thing if you could upload AI and give it a piece of equipment that was a biological piece of equipment as opposed to, you know, nuts and bolts. I know that we’re pretty much out of time, and I don’t want to keep you guys for too long. But if I could just leave you with one final question, I’m curious to know what you both think
[110:47] is the worst case scenario and best case scenario for the future of Skywatcher. Well, one of the things that would be disheartening is if we had to stop doing it, because we ran out of money or Men in Black showed up and told us to stop doing what we were doing. But that hasn’t happened yet. One of the best case scenario is that, and I’ll aim really high here, and I would say that the scientific discoveries, if we can get to level six on all fronts in our framework, that we might have discoveries that have an impact, not only for the United States, but the entire world, that could put an end to unnecessary suffering. You know, suffering seems to be, or a certain amount of struggle does seem to be the currency of wisdom and the mechanism by which we grow, not only physically, but spiritually and socially. But there does seem to be something like unnecessary suffering, which you could call evil. And if our discoveries on the consciousness side of things and on the nuts and bolts side of
[111:58] things, when we look at technology and hardware or advancements of physics, if we can, in a very short amount of time, put an absolute end to unnecessary suffering and evil, that would be the ultimate goal. Because right now, I think the majority of our problem that leads to war that we don’t seem to be evolving out of is a competition for resources. You know, we’re on this planet, there are limited resources, and ultimately, that’s at the root of our conflict. We’re all battling for food, we’re all battling for power, we’re all battling for mates and the survival of our children. And when there are multiple tribes that are hunting the same herd and trying to dwell on the same plot of ground, and there isn’t enough ground or meat to harvest from the herds for all the tribes and all its members, you’re left with the propensity for war. And so, some of this technology, hypothetically, like zero-point energy, or if it can get us off-planet, I mean, the universe is pretty much infinite. So, if we could get to other planets,
[113:18] and that would provide more resources, and yeah, that would be the ultimate goal. Matt, do you have something different or less crazy to say? No, I think those are good. I guess I’ll sort of bound mine a bit more kind of a sky watcher from my perspective, just in terms of worst-case scenario is, like, if we miscalibrate expectations and outcomes, like so much so that, I mean, sky watchers are the first to try to do this at scale with the amount of effort. There’s lots of other really good individuals with their equipment taking in good data and doing good analysis. But I think this sort of dog whistle approach, getting the sort of large-scale field operations and getting, you know, this is a serious amount of money being spent. If it falls flat, right, if it sort of completely miscalibrates expectations and outcomes, is there going to be someone motivated to do this again, right? And is that sort of poison the well, or does it kind of delay what would otherwise potentially be, again, that bridge being built between parts of the government and the private
[114:28] sector and the larger civil society on this? So that’s the risk. I mean, the worst case there is essentially we set things back, right, because we, you know, drew all this attention and we basically just completely, you know, rubbed everyone, right? That would be a failure mode. I think the best case scenario, as opposed to these maybe civilizational transformation things that could be downstream of a kind of an open discovery and disclosure process, for me, like a necessary precondition for all of that is essentially civil society kind of waking up to this subject in a serious and professional way. I mean, my whole bit for a number of years now has just kind of, you know, going out on a limb and being like, I think this is real. I think this is happening. I think there’s a lot of very serious people that are aware of this. But I look around at my professional colleagues and peers, and there’s still the sneers and the snickers and just the, you know, kind of anxiety about being laughed at. I think that’s an absurd thing that is in process of shifting, but it hasn’t accreted into, I’d say, collective institutional action
[115:34] or organizational, you know, sort of priorities being shifted. And I think when you see that happen, that to me is the sign of progress, where Skywatch could potentially act as a catalyst for other individuals in the government, outside of the government, in other institutions, academics, think tanks, nonprofits, new, you know, new private sector initiatives, right, new venture capital investments, new technological paradigms being invested in, new research initiatives in frontier physics. Like, these things need to get started, but folks that kind of need to be given that sort of water’s warm umbrella coverage that, yeah, there’s like a there there, you know, and this is like frontier frontier research. You know, there’s in venture capital world, there’s kind of like SaaS businesses that you invest in, that’s kind of just like, what’s your TAM, right? What’s your, you know, what’s your team? What’s your what’s your product
[116:36] market fit? Okay, here’s some money. Then there’s like deep tech research. So there’s like deep tech VC investing, which is okay, you basically de-risked some of the basic science, but there’s some technical and engineering problems you need to work out, you need to develop this new radar, this new sensor, this new material, and you need to, you know, get to that step. And then if you have breakthroughs, then you can get get some product market fit. We’re in sort of frontier tech, where like, the basic science is still not there, right? We still don’t understand what the science of UAPs really are, at least in the public domain. So you need to kind of, you know, do a lot of intellectual archaeology to like, you know, unearth what’s really going on in the in these fields. And then those could unlock a lot of different possibilities that could transform society in very positive ways, if they’re properly, properly managed. I think that’s like the promise
[117:26] of Skywatcher, in my in my view is, is, you know, actually that little that little catalyst, right? That’s sort of that that meme of the domino, right? It’s like a little domino falls. And then, you know, like, basically, Jake Barber meets a few people, a bunch of his buddies got into the desert with some trucks and some radar, like, that’s like the first domino, and then like, right, well, we, we get like, you know, we all live forever. And make no mistake, I should, I could have been less lofty with my answer to that question. But I don’t think it’s been said here. But it’s important. Our number one goal that’s on paper is material recovery, we want to get our hands on exotic material. And we want to do that in a legal and ethical way. And so that’s, that’s the best case scenario for scenario right now, as far as our business plan goes, is to Yeah, stuff in the sky is cool. But we would love an opportunity to
[118:14] invite something to land or get a donation, whatever you call it, we want to get exotic material, because then that that really starts. Now we have something that basically ushers in the revolution of scientific study when it comes to this stuff, something that is in a quantity enough that it can be shared with everyone. And start with that starts over a whole nother frontier right there, when we have something tangible in hand in the form of material that can be researched by everyone. But there’s also that, you know, it’s my understanding, it’s my belief that, you know, certain parts of human institutions have access to these materials, but they’re extremely well protected. And they’re highly compartmentalized and very, very, very tight clusters of researchers have been able to access them for scientific study with mostly a view towards maybe their military application or scientific understanding that’s kept very close to the chest. So fundamentally, it’s okay, you can either if you believe that those materials exist, you kind of have to two tracks, you either try to convince
[119:16] the government to like, broaden access to those materials, right. In fact, even legislation from the Senate said like in order to mitigate the possibility of historic, sorry, in order to mitigate the possibility of foreign technology surprise, the US government was brought an awareness of historic exotic technology antecedents previously provided by the federal government for research and development purposes. This was a statement written to written into legislation by the Senate, which basically strongly indicates that there are historic exotic technology antecedents that had been provided by the federal government for research and development purposes by some entities. I’m not aware of that research, you know, in the public domain, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist. So you either try to convince the government to broaden the circle and make that more transparent to our best and our brightest to get get scientific and technological breakthroughs. So that’s one track, sort of
[120:12] create like a bridge and a channel for some of that information and knowledge to be shared those materials to be shared in a much more transparent and public private kind of collaborative fashion, or, you know, gather gather your own material in a safe and ethical manner, and then create your own, you know, private institution to bring in, you know, other elements of civil society to to study and drive those, you know, R&D breakthroughs. And then, you know, that sounds fantastical to someone who, you know, doesn’t doesn’t have that prior elevated, but at least I’ve come to the view that that is not a fantastical proposition, and is now something that like needs to be like, seriously, you know, built towards, and both on the kind of the legislative side, as well as in the sort of, you know, private sector Skywatcher side. So that’s, that would be kind of this, you know, zero to one thing, right. And so, you know, you could have no progress, and then all of a sudden,
[121:04] you’re in a different ballgame. And you need to, you know, properly prepare for that, and put in place the right mechanisms and the people and the approaches to make it successful. It looks like the future is going to be very interesting. Gentlemen, Matt and Jake, thank you so much for your time. I really love the work that you’ve been doing with Skywatcher. I can’t wait to see it continue to unfold, as I know many of our viewers are. And I hope that we get a chance to speak again when you’ve done even more work and have more results to reveal and share with everybody. You got it. Thank you for having us. Thanks for being open to these type of conversations. I think it’s super important. So I’m happy to do it. It’s great to, it’s
[121:42] fascinating to have these talks with with you guys. All right. Take care, everybody. Bye.