Robert Salas — The Zach Show interview (2023)
- Speaker: Robert Salas (former USAF missile-launch officer), long-form interview. Posted 2023-08-27. ~1h12m.
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/VI4KAGQmmaw
- Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio download → Whisper (speech_to_text_remote.py).
- Primary for salas-malmstrom-missile-witness. His own current (post-2022-hearing) telling of the Oscar Flight incident, the date/flight distinctions (Echo vs Oscar), the AFOSI NDA, and his citation of Walt Figel’s audio testimony.
- NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; “Feigl”=Figel, “Fated Giant”=his book Faded Giant; verify quotes against audio before load-bearing citation.
The first thing I do is walk up to my commander, my squadron commander, and say, what the heck was that? Was this some sort of an Air Force exercise? And he assured me it was not any kind of an exercise, and he had no idea how this happened to our fighter missiles. At that point, the guy from AFOSI shoved a piece of paper in our face and said, sign here. What’s this? This is a non-disclosure agreement. You’re never to talk about this to anyone ever. From signing up for Auxoro Premium. Auxoro Premium not only supports the continued effort of the Auxoro Podcast, but you also gain access to bonus episodes, members-only AMAs where you can ask me anything, bonus writings not available to the public, and the ability to suggest questions for me to ask guests like Robert Salas. Head to Auxoro.Supercast.com today and sign up for $5 per month to enjoy premium access. That’s Auxoro.Supercast.com. And if you can’t subscribe to Auxoro Premium, please leave us a rating on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. More ratings are such a big help to push the show through the roof because a good rating nudges the algorithm to show the Auxoro Podcast to more people. It takes less than a minute, and the amount it helps the show grow cannot be overstated. And if you leave a creative review, we’ll read it and give you a shout out at the end of an upcoming episode. Thank you for however you choose to support. Now, without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Robert Salas. Bob Salas, thank you for joining me on the podcast. Great to be with you Zach. Yeah, it’s good to be with you too. I have to say that after going through the UFO encounter in your book, Fated Giant, which I first came across the encounter in various interviews online because I had done some research for other podcasts with former fighter pilots, military officers, people like that. So, I’ve had your encounter in the back of my mind that I wanted to go through in more detail. And the full encounter that you describe in Fated Giant is remarkable. It’s also frightening. And just to zoom in on it, this happened in the early hours in the morning of March 16th, 1967, correct? No, that’s the other one. Oh, sorry. Mine was on the 24th and it was sometime in the evening. The 24th, apologies. But the one that happened on the 16th of March, it was in the early morning. Okay. So, the 16th of March, was that the Echo one that happened the week before? The one in Echo Flight? That was Echo Flight. Okay, yeah. All right. Sorry for the confusion. I was in Oscar Flight. Gotcha. Yeah, I had my mic fixed up. Yeah, well, I was confused too. No problem. So, you were on— Can you briefly go over that if you’d like? Yeah, yeah. So, you were on as the Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander at Malmstrom Air Force Base on March 23rd, 1967. 24th. March 24th, sorry. Now, I’ll get the correct number by the end of the podcast. Just give me 90 minutes. What was the first sign that something was off that day? Well, I was on duty. In other words, my commander was taking a rest break. The two of us in a capsule. The capsule was about 60 feet underground. We had six guards upstairs. And it was just me and my commander downstairs. We were locked in for 24 hours. Couldn’t get out because of the—obviously, we were protecting nuclear weapons. So, sometime in the evening, I get a call from my security guard that’s saying, Sir, we’ve been seeing strange lights in the sky. They’re flying very fast, stopping in midair. Reversing course, making 90-degree turns. If this sounds familiar, it’s the kind of thing that’s been reported by pilots recently. And it’s one of the things that I think Lieutenant Commander Fravor pointed to, the operational capability of these things. At any rate, my guard told me all that at 67. And he said, they’re not airplanes. They’re not airplanes. There’s no engine noise. They’re just lights flying overhead. I kind of dismissed it because, well, we had had reports in the local newspaper about UFOs, by citizens reporting it to the paper. I just kind of laughed it off. I didn’t take it seriously. I kind of hung up the phone on him. And then he calls back about five minutes later. This time, he’s very serious. He’s shouting into the phone, just kind of not making any sense. I try to calm him down. Finally, he tells me there’s an orange-red-white, very large, hovering just above the front gate of the facility and wanted me to tell him what to do next. He had all the guards out there with their weapons drawn. And they’re all looking at this pulsating orange-red light. And I took him very seriously now because, like I said, he was very frightened. And this was something immediate, ongoing. I thought we were under some sort of an attack. It felt like it. So I said, make sure nothing enters the fetched area. You know, use whatever force you need to. And then he hung up. He said one of the guards got injured. Not from the UFO, by the way. But anyway, I went over to tell my commander about these calls. All of a sudden, we’re getting bells and whistles going off at our status board. And we don’t know. We knew what that meant. And that was the missiles were shutting off or shutting down. And sure enough, within seconds, all 10 of our Minuteman-1 missiles were offline. No go. Could not be used. They were all disabled. The subject was still up there. Yeah, I remember distinctly reading the about the two calls. And it seems like the first call from the flight security controller. It was a little bit more casual. And then you describe him screaming and yelling on the phone the second call much more frantically. There’s one hovering outside the front gate. It’s glowing red. One of the guys is injured, not from the UFO. Not from the UFO. But when you first hear the guard’s voice on the second call, what was going through your mind in that moment? Was it more like the technicalities of doing your job? Were you thinking about the possibilities of what could be outside? What was running through your mind and your body after the second call? Well, you know, I tuned into his fear. He was very frightened. So the first thing I thought of, we were under some sort of attack. Now, I know that sounds a little wild, but it’s just the way he presented himself. So I took him very, very seriously. And in fact, as soon as we hung up, I turned to look at my status board just to see how our missiles were doing. And it was great. And when I went over to talk to my commander, I hadn’t said a word to him yet. I got to tell him about the phone calls, but then all of us will start going down. Yeah, I mean, if I was in that situation, I mean, I can’t even begin to imagine what would be running through my head. But the possibility of an attack seems pretty likely in that scenario. If you’re at a base with weapons that are designed to cause severe harm and destruction at multiple points around the globe, and all of a sudden they start shutting down without your control. I would be thinking that some outside force or entity or country, whoever it was, was disabling weapons because maybe there were weapons on the way or something, or that they were plotting an attack in the coming moments against the United States. That would be what would run through my mind, I imagine. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it’s been so long. I don’t remember exactly what was on my mind. Although, I do know it was serious. It was serious. Yeah. And then… So, next thing it happened… Go ahead. I didn’t mean to… Yeah, next thing it happened, we both jumped up and went through our checklist procedures. He had to call back to the command post, which is back in Great Falls. And we’re about 100 miles away. They’re a little town called Roy, Montana. And there were also a couple of indicators, lights, on the panel that showed possible incursion into a couple of the launch facilities. The launch facility is where the missiles are actually located, about a mile or so away from the central hub. So, I had to call back upstairs. I asked about the object, and the FSC said it had just flown off. Then, I ordered them to send guards out to these two sites where we had incursion lights. And when they went out there, they saw the UFOs again over those two sites. We ordered them back. We said, don’t go any further. Just come back, and we’re reporting this. On the way back, they lost radio contact, which is fairly common around UFO cases. We lose radio. And then, when my commander was finished with his call, he turns to me and said, the same thing happened on another flight. I do remember those words, but what he failed to tell me was it happened a week earlier. So, for a long time, I thought, you know, the same thing happened that night. But it was eight days earlier, and that was the Echo flight shut down. It happened under similar circumstances to ours. That was on March 16th. In command of that situation was Walt Feigl, Colonel, retired now. I’ve been in contact with him. I’ve gotten his testimony on audio. People are interested in the details of these two incidents. They can go to my website. It’s SpiralGalaxy.org, SpiralGalaxy.org. I’ve got a lot of my evidence there in the form of documents that we received under FOIA, and also audiotapes and videotapes, a lot of stuff. Yeah, and I’ll link that for people listening and watching in the podcast description as well, as well as Bob’s writings, the two books that we’re going to mention in this podcast. So, did you ever manage to get eyes on the craft, either directly or indirectly or any way, or were you in the command center the whole time? I was in an underground control center, 60 feet underground. We were locked in with a huge door. We had specific procedures to go through before we could open that door, because obviously, if we had let the bad guys in, they would have access to nuclear weapons. Yeah, we were always locked in for 24 hours until relieved by another crew. Oh, wow. So, no, I didn’t see the object. Yeah. Locked in for 24 hours. That’s pretty intense, but it makes sense if you’re dealing with a nuclear weapons facility. You’re not playing with Nerf guns. So, when the guys are—the flight security controllers are saying that there’s one hovering outside the front gate, it’s glowing red, and all of a sudden, the alarms start going off, and you wake up your lieutenant commander, do the lights on the console panel or wherever you see the weapons starting to shut off or deactivate, does that happen immediately after you find out about the UFOs? Is there a gap between that, or what was kind of your feeling of the passing of time? Oh, it was just a matter of a minute or two. Okay. Like I said, I hung up the phone, and then I went over where my commander was taking a little rest break in a cot we had down there. I wake him up and start to tell him about the phone calls, but before I could tell him anything, really, the missiles started shutting down. So, we got a lot of noise in the capsule when that happens. We got horns and whistles and the whole shebang. So, I’m just curious, on the panel, it sounds like there are lights representing each missile on the control panel, kind of like a series. Did you see those all go off at once, or was it a gradual, you know, one shut off, then another? How did that happen as you were looking at it? It happened very quickly. Yeah, each of the missiles had an individual column of lights, and the two lights at the top, one says, I think, alert status, and the other one is, I forgot what it had on there, but it’s the status that says the missile is unlaunchable. So, it turned from green to red, just big, big, big, big, big, just rapidly. So, we lost all of them within seconds. So, was there ever any other exercise or another reason that that would happen, that was a plausible explanation for this? Were you ever given a plausible explanation, or is it something that was left up to, this is something that happened, we don’t know what it was, we don’t have an investigative, definitive answer? Well, let me just go through what happened, the sequence of events. When we were relieved by another crew the next morning, we were ordered to go back to the base, and ordered to go to our squadron commander’s office. They helicoptered us back, we walk into his office, and in there is a commander, Colonel Eldridge, and a man from AFOSI, Air Force Office, Special Investigation. Just the two of them. The first thing I do is walk up to my commander, my squadron commander, and say, what the heck was that? Was this some sort of an Air Force exercise? And he assured me it was not any kind of an exercise, and he had no idea how this happened to our fighter missiles. At that point, the guy from AFOSI shoved a piece of paper in our face and said, sign here. What’s this? This is a non-disclosure agreement, you’re never to talk about this to anyone, ever. There’s no time limit on this. We challenged it because, I said, is this classified now? He said, yeah, it’s highly classified now, you can never talk about it. Sign here, and that’s all he wanted. They didn’t even want to hear our story, you know, what had happened. So, we signed, and we were dismissed. That was it. There was no further discussion ever while I was in the Air Force about this. Usually, the crews get briefed every day, they go out on alert status. We never got debriefed about either the two incidents, either the Echo or the Oscar incidents. We were never told about any investigation or the status of any investigation or the fact that these things happened. Nothing. So, we were muzzled for the rest of our careers. It was not until 1994, I’d left the Air Force in 1971, and it wasn’t until 94 that I came across a book called Above Top Secret by Timothy Good. I just happened to pick it up. I was just curious. I happened to turn to page 301, and on that page, it’s the only page in the entire 500 pages that talks about UFOs being shut down by, I’m sorry, missiles being shut down by UFOs in 1966 and 67. The Airmen from the Air Force Base. So, I got excited. I went home, and I decided to tell my wife for the first time. I never told her anything about this, but since it was published in a book, I thought the Air Force might have declassified it. So, I got a hold of an investigator from Mutual UFO Network, asked him, his name is James Klotz, by the way, outstanding investigator, asked him to submit a FOIA request. Don’t say anything about UFOs, just ask about these instances where missiles were shut down for no apparent reason or for some mysterious reason. The Air Force wrote back, said this was classified. However, because of, I think it was a 12-year limitation at that point, it had been exceeded. They’re going to declassify the event. And so, they declassified the Echo Flight incident, the one that happened on March 16th. Of course, at that point, I didn’t recall the date of our incident. I didn’t recall where we were. I didn’t recall who my commander was. I had just a few scant memories. And so, I came to the erroneous conclusion, turns out, that that was my incident because of the description. So, I went public very soon thereafter and spoke about this missile shutdown UFO incident, and it was my incident, and started talking. And I went on the Art Bell show. I don’t know if you remember Art Bell. You never heard that one. He used to talk about these paranormal. I think I’ve seen some clips of him on YouTube, people posting clips. Yeah. And he used to talk about the paranormal all the time. I was invited to speak with Wendell Moulton Howell on that show when I was in 96. And I started getting a lot of witnesses come forward. Yeah, it just seems so strange. I’m familiar with the government secrecy surrounding the topics of UFOs, but it seems so ridiculous that this event happened that shut down these nuclear weapons at the base that are the very weapons that are supposedly protecting us from annihilation, not only in our own country, but around the world with nuclear proliferation. And it seems like that would be a primary concern of anyone who’s at that base that’s investigating the incident. So, the fact that they didn’t even consult you or just have a brief conversation before they made you sign that NDA and say, hey, what did you see? What did you experience? Talk to the other guys that were up top because the military has a vested interest. Even if they want to keep things secret from the public, they have a vested interest in knowing what are the types of things that can completely disable our weapon system that would leave us entirely vulnerable. So, to me, I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that you were never consulted or briefed for even a five-minute conversation. Well, yeah, there’s a reason, a rationale for that. So, eight days earlier, the Echo Flight went down. That got a lot of attention from Strategic Air Command headquarters. In fact, Walt Feigl, who was in charge of the Echo Flight at the time of the incident, was sent back to SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska and was interviewed by the Deputy Chief of Staff of SAC, I think. Again, this information is all on my website. They can actually hear Walt Feigl in his own words talk about it. So, there was a lot of activity, if you will. It got a lot of interest. So, by the time the Oscar Flight went down, which was eight days earlier, the reason the AFOSI didn’t ask us any further questions was because they knew already about these types of incidents because they’re already or started the investigation of Echo Flight. In addition to all that, the Condon investigation was ongoing. Have you heard of the Condon investigation? Yeah, you mentioned that as this farce of an investigation. It’s kind of predetermined to not find anything about UFOs with the ways that they were investigating. It was kind of a farce. Right. And again, I’ve got that evidence of this cover-up farce, if you will, funny investigation on my website. But that investigation was ongoing. The Air Force did not want the Condon investigators to get wind of it. However, they did get wind of it. Anyway, but it was shut down. The Condon involvement in the investigation was shut down by headquarters Air Force. And as a result, it never got into the final Condon report, which was supposed to investigate UFO activity at Air Force bases. Air Force bases. And because it didn’t get into that report, the Air Force finally issued a statement in 1969 that they would no longer be investigating UFO reports. And partly because of the Condon investigation stating that this would be a waste of their time. There was no incident that affected national security. Well, we lost 20 nuclear missiles within the span of eight days. That certainly affected our national security. Even before that, in 1966, there was another incident. Again, similar to ours, 10 more missiles were shut down at Minot Air Force Base in 1966. So, within the span of six months, we lost 30 nuclear weapons, UFOs. Yeah, there was also, I thought, a fascinating insight into the mentality of the military decision-making at the top about UFOs. There was a message that you included in a declassified report in the appendix of Fated Giant. And it was a message from SAC, Strategic Air Command Headquarters. And in part of the message about the incident, they write, quote, the fact that no apparent reason for the loss of 10 missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern to this headquarters. But then, taking that into account, you have this grave concern, but then you’re never debriefed or consulted about the incident. There was a strategic missile wing historian that approached people on the base about the incident, and you described him as being met with zero cooperation and this get-out-of-my-face type responses. So, I wanted to ask you, how do you reconcile the headquarters’ acknowledgement of their, quote, unquote, grave concern of the incident, while they seemingly have zero interest in actually getting to the bottom of it? Well, we’ll have to ask the Air Force that. How did they go from grave concern? Yeah, like, who are these human beings that just, like, they have these high-level military officers with experience that would be directly applicable to figuring out what shut down these nuclear weapons, and they seemingly, you know, their system seems to be put an MDA in front of someone’s face, and just, that’s it, just never open your mouth. Well, what they’re doing is, again, this is a cover-up. In other words, the fewer people that are able to talk about these events, the better off they are, because they can go back into the darkness of high secrecy and study the issue on their own. Like has been disclosed by the recent hearing, we have had recovered craft, the Air Force had recovered craft, had recovered bodies of the craft’s occupants, and they have, they understand full well the implications here that these are not, these craft are not from Earth. And again, this was stated over and over by the witnesses during the hearing, and I’ve stated it many times in my books. It’s a very simple calculus. Many observers, and not just the recent ones, we’re going way back, even to the World War II days, the flu fighters. And then again, in 1952, over the Washington, D.C. area, there was a flap over the span of a couple of weeks. They saw these things of doing maneuvers and operations that can’t be done by aircraft. So, simple logic tells you that if we’re not making them, then they’re not from Earth. Simple as that. There’s something else that, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, so the Air Force has been hiding this since Roswell, at least, 1947, where they recovered craft and bodies. They knew full well, in 1947, what they were dealing with. And they have not been able to figure out what to do about it, and therefore, they didn’t want to alarm the public by telling them, yeah, they’re here, but we don’t know exactly what to do about this. Yeah, you mentioned Roswell as sort of this jumping off point of the secrecy tactics that the U.S. government started to use with the disinformation campaigns and the whole cabal to, you know, whatever the source of these UFOs, to make sure that the information stays clouded and behind closed doors. Yeah, correct. And, you know, it sounds like a conspiracy theory when I talk about a cabal, that there are these, you know, men, black people in the background that are doing nefarious things with this subject. But during the hearings, if you listen to them carefully, over and over, it was reported that there are people that will do pretty serious things to keep others from talking about what they know about these secrets. And this is an international cabal, by the way. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Varginha case. Yeah, I actually just watched a documentary on that, on Varginha, Brazil. Yeah, it was an amazing documentary. Yeah, it is. It’s well done by James Fox. But I knew about the Varginha case long before that documentary. But in that case, there was a crash. Actually, the US military notified the Brazilian government, even before the crash, that they were tracking this object. The object crashed, and I think there were two survivors. The occupants of these crafts survived and escaped initial capture. But then, the two of them found their way into the town of Varginha. They were seen by witnesses, eventually captured. One of them died fairly quickly. The other one held on for about a day or so, and it died. Autopsies were made, and the bodies and the craft were sent back to the United States. Again, in order for that to happen, there would have to be a well-organized group of people that worked with other international countries around the world. in a cooperative effort. And obviously the U.S. would have had probably the best qualified people to take a look at these craft and their occupants. So this is another thing that David Grush mentioned during the hearings that these things have been taken, the occupants have been taken, and studies have been done in high secrecy for a long time. The public is not aware of this. The public should be aware of this. Yeah, that was one of the biggest mysteries to me from the documentary on the Varginha case. Aside from the actual UFO craft and beings, it was how the hell did the U.S. arrive almost immediately once the UFO crashed in Brazil? And you point to the fact, which I didn’t know, that the U.S. was tracking this craft beforehand. And it seems like that would have to be the case. Because if I’m in New York and a UFO crashes in Thailand, how do I get there, you know, within hours of this craft crashing down across the globe, unless there was some sort of tracking system or communication between the U.S. and the Brazilian government or whatever agencies were tracking this UFO on Brazil’s end. And then it was like this pre-set, it seems like this pre-set negotiation or agreement between the U.S. and Brazil. Because it didn’t seem like Brazil really put up a fight or maybe just didn’t want to when the U.S. came in. Yeah, this smacks of a previous agreement that they have with other countries to, in a way, they will cooperate. You know, the same thing happened in Rattlesham. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Rattlesham case. Colonel Holt is a witness to that. But this happened in 1980 at Bentwater’s base near Suffolk, England. Three nights of observations of UFOs close range by Colonel Holt and his men and others. But these men were interrogated by an international group of intel people, including the British Intel, American Intel, NSA, etc. So, they already had a cooperative agreement to do this. Anyway, that’s a long story. I won’t go into it. But it’s another incident, incidents where we can point to that says there is an international cabal, a secret cabal that’s working together in order to keep this information hidden from the general public. Yeah. So, to go back to the nuclear sites for a second, another just very compelling series of events or a compelling notion about everything that’s going on with UFOs and nukes is just like the sheer number of cases of UFOs appearing near or at nuclear bases, which I was not aware of until I started looking into your testimonials and also UFOs and nukes with Robert Hastings, because I’d watched the interviews with David Fravor, I’d watched the interviews with Lex Friedman, Ryan Graves, and they talk about their own individual sightings. And they kind of gloss over nuclear sites, which makes sense because it wasn’t their individual encounter. But then I started looking into just the sheer mass numbers of these sightings with UFOs on nuclear bases. And I wanted to ask you, what do you think the beings or the civilization, the things that are behind or influencing these UFOs, what do you think they’re interested in, where they keep going back to nuclear bases? What do you think motivates them to be near or at facilities with nuclear weapons? Did you ever see the movie, The Sum of All Fears? It’s been a very long time. Anyway, nuclear war. You ever think about nuclear war? It’s the sum of all fears, right? Yes. If you thought about nuclear war, you’d be pretty frightened, right? As a human being, 100%. So, I don’t know if you saw Open Hybrid. I have my tickets booked for the IMAX in Philadelphia. So I’ll be seeing it on the 70 millimeter IMAX. Yeah, you got to see it at IMAX. Yeah. You got to see it at IMAX, for sure. I’m actually driving from Brooklyn to Philly. Anyway, we’ll call them ETs, okay? The ETs knew about nuclear weapons even before the first atomic bomb test. If you go to my website, I did a two-hour press conference in 2021, October 19, 2021, for the National Press Club. And I went through all these incidents involving UFOs and nuclear weapons. Starting in 1945, actually, 44, UFOs were seen over the Hanford facility, which was producing plutonium for some of the first bombs. And so, they knew about our weapons testing, our nuclear program, as even from the beginning. I think, you know, bottom line is they are, our visitors are warning us about the threat to our entire planet, every living thing on the planet, including us, from nuclear war. Just today or yesterday, some Russian officials said if Russia is backed into a corner within this war in Ukraine, we could use nuclear weapons. So, this is serious. This is really serious. And it has been serious for a long time. Threat of nuclear war, it’s even more serious now because Russia has a substantial number of tactical, so-called tactical nuclear weapons that they could use in Ukraine. There are also nine other countries in the world that have nuclear weapons that could be used at any time. Once a nuke is used, it would escalate quickly. Maybe NATO would get involved in Ukraine. Maybe the U.S. would retaliate in some way. And this could just turn terrible very quickly. So, that, I think, is the bottom line as to why these objects are being seen over nuclear facilities so often. They are deliberately showing themselves, deliberately warning us about the threat to ourselves. To see if they can motivate us to go back to abolishing nuclear weapons, which we were on track to do in the last treaty we had with Russia, called the SALT II treaty. Yeah, I’ve been learning more and more about the nuclear proliferation and the effort to get rid of nuclear weapons. And it’s unreal how casual people in government have become about the dialogue surrounding nuclear weapons and just, like, kind of just as a nonchalant thing, you know, like nuclear weapons may be used in the Ukraine-Russia war just like as a side note and just, you know, no really thought, rhyme, or reason about the potential for destruction and starvation, civilization collapse. I remember reading that even a small-scale nuclear war between two of the smallest nuclear powers, which would be India and Pakistan, that has the potential to starve out one billion people, which is absurd. So, even if the two smallest nuclear powers just went to war between them, the destruction would be, you know, in the billions for the planet as a whole. So, if I’m an alien, like if I’m looking at the earth from 100,000 feet, and I’m just, you know, observing, and I come upon a civilization that I’m interested in, and for whatever reason, I’m interested in the future of that civilization, and I just see billions of people that have over a dozen countries with nuclear weapons pointed in all different directions at each other, across from each other, and they’re essentially like civilization delete buttons, and I’m someone, I’m an outside observer looking at that that’s not from earth. I would be, you know, like at the least, I would be thinking like, holy shit, like what the fuck is going on with this planet? Like this is, this is insane. So, the notion that there would be a more advanced civilization trying to, you know, make us more conscious of nuclear weapons, you know, almost like a, like you tell a toddler not to put its hand over the fire, like you have to like take all these precautions, and you know, we’re basically like toddlers of technology with the industrial revolution happening a little over a century ago, which is nothing when you look back at history. It makes sense that there would be another advanced civilization that could be having those sorts of thoughts, and taking actions based on those thoughts, and running some sort of surveillance system. Yeah, and then you also have to consider the fact that we’re still exploring space. We’re going to be, we have plans to set up bases on the moon as a prelude to visiting Mars. The Chinese, Russians may also establish bases on the moon. Are we going to be taking our weapons into space? Yeah. Those nuclear weapons? Are we going to be taking them to Mars, other places? I mean, you can understand why an extraterrestrial civilization would think, and these people are really nuts, and we don’t want them to take nuclear weapons out there into our territories. So, you know, who knows what will happen, but what’s important is the public knows about this, and so far the US government has, in the last hearing especially, had failed to report the true nature of these UFO incursions at nuclear facilities, and make the public really aware. And then I’m talking about the global public also. There’s no real reason why we can’t embark on a new program for abolishment of nuclear weapons. We started building it up, building up our nuclear stockpile, because we were afraid of the Russians building up theirs. And there’s this program called nuclear, what’s it called? Anyway, it’s a foolish enterprise to start, you know, playing this game with the Russians on, you know, you have so many nukes, we’re going to have more, uh, because eventually there’s going to be an accident. Yeah, that’s a good point. The use of those weapons. That’s a good point. I wasn’t even thinking about it. Maybe, you know, maybe the beings or, you know, whoever’s running this UFO surveillance, or, you know, the reason behind these UFOs appearing at nuclear sites could be a self-defense tactic, because, you know, as we’re exploring space more and more, like you said, are we going to start attaching warheads to our spaceships or planting nuclear weapons on other planets and expanding that destructive force out into the universe? Yeah, we’ve already got a space force. You’re aware of that, right? Yeah. Space Command. And supposedly, they’re defending near space against all comers to protect our satellites. But they’re going to be putting weaponry in space. We may be firing at Russian attempts or Chinese attempts to destroy our satellite systems or who knows what will happen next. But the term I was thinking of was nuclear deterrence. Nuclear deterrence was a concept discovered in, not discovered, but stated in the 50s under the Eisenhower administration, whereas we would maintain a deterrent force, a nuclear deterrent force greater than our enemies. But the result of that, yeah, we haven’t had a nuclear war, and everybody’s afraid of a nuclear war. But the fact is, more and more countries now have them. Look at North Korea. Iran may have them soon, and other countries may want them in the future. But like I said, I think you said, India and Pakistan are currently at war. And they both have nuclear weapons. Yeah. And once a country uses even a small nuke in a war, it’ll open the door for other countries to say, well, if they can do it, we can do it, you know. Yeah. Pretty soon, we’ve got a nuclear war. 100%. So, we spoke offline a bit about the congressional hearings in Congress, and I’ve been following a good bit of the clips on YouTube, and you mentioned that you’ve been following the hearings very closely. Are there any specific moments or revelations that stand out to you that you’ve heard in the hearings that’s new, impactful information for UFOs going forward? Anything new that you’ve heard that has stood out to you in the recent hearings? Well, a couple of things were confirmed during those hearings. Number one, if you listen to what Commander Fravor said in his testimony, we have nothing, nothing that can operate like these objects can operate. They were able to, more than likely, I don’t know if he didn’t go into it, but more than likely, they came out of the water, were able to hover, were able to go to a very high altitude almost instantaneously. So, these objects are not from Earth, period. I think that was firmly established by Graves and Fravor during that testimony. Number two, as David Resch said, he has been given a hard time trying to do his job when he worked for the Air Force in ATIP, I think it was. And there was obviously a backlash from those in power in the Department of Defense. They don’t want him to talk about any of this and are holding back on the secret. So, again, this, to me, establishes the fact that there is a highly secretive group in government, in our government, that is holding these secrets. And also, Representative Burchette echoed that because he tried to get other witnesses to come forward and pressure was put on them by the Department of Defense not to do so. I think I was probably not included in that group of witnesses because the Air Force, for one, does not want to deal with answering any questions about what happened in my case and in other similar cases because they’ve been stonewalling, they’ve been lying, they’ve been withholding this information from the public for a long, long time. And so, it’d be very embarrassing to say the least. But, again, these are the kinds of things that the public has a right to know and there’s excessive secrecy being used to keep the public from knowing what they should know in order to be able to control government and the expenditures of government and the activities of government in a democracy that people have a right to know. Yeah, that’s the thing that’s so obvious is you can see there are multiple people in Congress that are highly interested in discovering what is behind these UFOs, what are these pilots seeing, they want data analytics, better reporting. And at the same time, we also have these, what seems like corporations or other dark entities behind the scenes that are enforcing this secrecy without any sort of governmental oversight and they seem to have their hooks into the government. And I’m just wondering, what do you think, what would have to happen if five years from now, we had close to zero government secrecy when it comes to the UFO knowledge and we had a super comprehensive, reliable, accurate reporting system for military officers, pilots, and civilians, what would have to happen for that to occur in five years? Well, I think, excuse me, the new Senate bill requires, has some strict requirements for agencies having UAP information to turn it over within a certain time period. The real question is, that’s on paper. Do we have the wherewithal to force that to happen? We have got a quagmire in the national security setup in the United States. So, again, I wrote a paper and you can find it on my website called Endemic Excessive Secrecy in Government. And it talks about a report from, it’s called ISOISOO, which is kind of a watchdog for how the classification system is working in the government. But that report is pretty damning about the fact that a lot of agencies are getting away with the use of funds and over classifying material. They have been for years and they don’t see a way to fix it right away. So, our classification security system is a mess, a real mess. So, it’s going to be, we’re going to have to make a concerted effort and it may take five years to start getting the results of this new legislation. Yeah. I think the most jarring part to me of the congressional hearings, you know, I had seen the Virginia documentary, so I’m familiar with people’s accounts of recovering, you know, what seems to be alien being or beings not of this earth. I’ve heard accounts like that before, but it was jarring to see Grush on screen in Congress claiming that he’s had multiple colleagues having been injured by UAPs and that he’s spoken to individuals who have recovered quote-unquote non-human biologics from crash sites and that what he witnessed was very disturbing. To hear that and see that on YouTube in Congress, it’s, you know, it’s amazing because of the way it’s able to spread with social media and technology and how this is being spoken about in the public. But at the same time, it’s also, it’s a little bit scary that these things can go on without any government oversight or little to no transparency when you have things at that high of a level that are going on. Yeah, it is disturbing. That’s why the more we hear from witness testimonies like myself and others, the more witnesses that come forward in a public setting, like that kind of a hearing, a bigger hearing where there’s more involvement, the better off we’re all going to be because we’ll have more information. We can start asking more questions of the agencies involved and try to get to the bottom of this. I might just say that what Fravor said about injuries to individuals, it’s a pretty general statement and we deserve to know the details of that sort of thing to try to evaluate whether these ETs are really a threat to us physically or these injuries happened as a result of maybe exposure to radiation, things like that. So, again, that’s why we need more complete disclosure on these statements. What do you think is stopping ETs and UFOs from sharing them, or from showing themselves, rather, in a more direct manner? Well, you know, people say that all the time that they have actually shown themselves quite a bit. It’s just that the general public has not accepted it because, number one, they see the ETs from what they see in movies, and also the government has not come forward and admitted that, yeah, we are being visited. But people are taken all the time by ETs. They’re abducted. Abduction is a real phenomenon. The ETs show themselves, the crafts show themselves to individuals often. It’s just that they probably want to see us, let’s say, change our behaviors, like with nuclear weapons, before they try to make full contact and extend a hand. Let’s say they probably want to see us try to solve our problems individually. I don’t think they want to kind of intervene in what we’re doing. They would like to see us take care of business here on Earth so we can kind of meet them on an even keel. That’s just my opinion. It’s just an opinion. Yeah. I made a note to ask you this. I forgot to ask you it before when we were talking about the Malmstrom incident that you witnessed. It has to do with the psychiatric evaluation or the request to report to the base psychiatrist. You wrote that you received a message ordering you to report to the base psychiatrist’s office at the base hospital. You thought it was a strange order because I hadn’t complained of any psychological problems to anyone. You ended by saying, I have always felt a sense of relief that I did not see the psychiatrist. What made you feel relieved from not seeing the psychiatrist? Okay. This happened at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1965. I was there to get my master’s degree in aerospace engineering, which I did. But while I was there, I received a call from the base psychiatrist’s office. I hadn’t complained about any mental issues. Did I say 65? I’m sorry. It was 69. This happened in 1969. Gotcha. This was after my incident. Anyway, I was stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and got this call to report to the base psychiatrist on this date. I said, I didn’t make any appointment, blah, blah, blah. He said, you’re ordered to be there, sir. I’ll be there. I show up on the appointed time. I go up to the base psychiatrist’s office. I said, what’s this all about? To the sergeant who was there. He said, well, they’ll let you know. I sat there and I started thinking, if they bring up the UFO incident that happened at Malmstrom and put it on my record, they’re going to probably give me a black eye on my career. When he came back and said, the psychiatrist will see you now. I said, no, tell him to come out here and tell me what this is all about. Well, this is a full colonel on the base psychiatrist. Then he goes back and he comes back and says, you can go now, sir. So, I think they were trying to, frankly, bring me in and read me into classified material having to do with the subject. Then they could have some control over whether I spoke about it or not in the future, but I was happy to get out of there. I didn’t want to have anything to do with any secret program at that time studying this subject. Do you think they were also trying to mark you as someone with psychiatric problems or someone that underwent a psychiatric evaluation to discredit you? Well, yes. I think that’s one of the techniques they use with witnesses. If they can find a way to discredit them and put it on their record, then they kind of have control over those witnesses from coming forward and speaking up. I kind of sensed that at the time and that’s why I decided not to go see that psychiatrist. I’m glad I didn’t because now I can talk about this even though technically, I’m still under that NDA, but I’ve been speaking out about this for almost 30 years now. I want to keep speaking out about it to as many people as I can. Yeah, that’s something that Ryan Graves and David Fravor have been pretty adamant about in their own interviews and also the congressional hearings is the incredible amount of stigma that pilots and military officials face when they come out about UFOs or UFO sightings. I spoke to another pilot, Chris Lato, who’s a former F-16 pilot. He mentioned that even just seeing a therapist could be a red flag in the military. You’re labeled as someone who’s not fit for service or unreliable, crazy. I don’t know. Maybe it’s better now. I haven’t spoken to anyone about this that’s currently still in the military, but according to them and according to yourself, the stigma seems a very influential factor in pilots and military guys coming out and saying, this happened, this didn’t happen, whatever happened because they don’t want to be labeled as someone with psychiatric problems. Yeah, exactly. Way back some years ago, the Air Force instituted what’s called a PPO. It’s kind of a personal proficiency program where they could give you a black mark if you showed some signs of mental instability and that sort of thing. That’s another way they try to keep the witnesses clamped down. Another way they’ve been able to keep this secrecy for so long. Yeah. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. Do you have a few minutes to get into your abduction experience? No, I’d rather not go into that here. It is in my book. Like I said, abductions are a very real aspect of this phenomenon. Literally, I think John Mack, Harvard psychiatrist, came to the conclusion that millions of people have probably been taken so they’ve got an agenda. I don’t know what it is. That could be the subject of my next book. Like I said, if you want to see those details at this point, it’s all in my most recent book. Yeah. It’s in Unidentified UFO Phenomenon by Robert Salas. I’ll link that. It’s towards the end of the book. I was just curious because I started reading John Mack’s book, Abduction, recently. For people who don’t know, he’s a Harvard psychologist who was skeptical about abduction experiences before he started talking to people who actually experienced abductions. Then he, long story short, flips the script on the way he thought systematically about abductions after interviewing these people. Again, if you don’t want to get into it on here, people can go check that out in your most recent book, which I’ll also link in the podcast description. Very good. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bob, for your time. This has been a blast. I know that you’ve gone through this story many times, so I hope I was able to add some new or fresh aspects to that with this conversation. I hope that it was a good time for you as well. It was a good conversation, Zach, and I really appreciate your probing questions. Any opportunity I have to inform the public, I’m more than eager to do so. I’m looking forward to the time when I will be able to testify before Congress and the American public under oath. Hopefully, that’ll happen soon. Yeah, I look forward to that as well. I will definitely be checking out that clip on YouTube. Thank you.