Jim Semivan on Engaging The Phenomenon — highlights (1 Jul 2026)
Source: “Engaging The Phenomenon” YouTube channel, a highlights cut of an interview with former CIA officer Jim Semivan (TTSA co-founder). Host + Semivan. URL: https://youtu.be/oJYV8k-2els (2026-07-01; ~29:26). Full interview: https://youtu.be/5dPkW8QxYV0 Captured: 2026-07-03. OpenAI Whisper (whisper-1); two voices (host, Semivan), not diarized; merged into timestamped paragraphs. This is a curated highlights reel, not the full interview. Analysis: semivan-cia-experiencer
[0:00] I mean, here’s a guy who comes out and says, Hey, it’s me, I’m telling you this. And it’s the truth. And he puts himself out there. You got to admire that, to a certain extent, I mean, you really do have to admire that. And he put a name to it. And you don’t see very many of those. Most of the whistleblowers are, you know, what they’ve shown themselves to Congress, but, but their names haven’t come out, or they didn’t want their names come out, which is fine. I don’t have any issue with that. I mean, everybody chooses their own poison that when you, you know, get a guy who like David who comes out, you know, and he’s pretty much unimpeachable, as far as I’m concerned. Yeah.
[1:00] And I have a number of questions I wanted to get to some some are of a speculative nature. So one of them was the idea of non human intelligence walking among us. That’s something that that has been coming up from time to time. So when you hear something like that, what do you think? Yeah, I think it’s an absolute possibility. And Dave Jacobs, you know, formerly from Temple University, written numerous books on this topic and about the idea that they are among us, and they’re trying to transform the human race. I mean, you look at it on the face of it, it sounds sounds like sci fi, fiction novel or something like that. But given the capabilities of what we know right now about non human intelligence, I think it’s, it’s reasonable to assume that that might be the case.
[1:56] Now, here, here, here, we have the same issue, right? Where’s the proof and all this? This is what drives scientists crazy, right? And because they’re working in within this model, and the phenomenon doesn’t fit into the scientific model or the paradigm. William James, you know, century ago, talked about the need for what he called a radical empiricism, the science that allows the anomalous inside, even though it doesn’t have testability, you can’t replicate it, you can’t test it. It’s just there. So how, but, but it’s there.
[2:39] So what do you do with it was science has become almost atheistic on this, right? I’m sorry, if it doesn’t fit our model, it doesn’t belong here. Well, that’s ridiculous. They should open this up a little bit more. And they have been finding more and more scientists that are willing to basically engage with this. But that’s the real issue here. The phenomenon gives us radar data, sonar data, the occasional photograph with eyewitness testimony. But the craft doesn’t land in public. The craft doesn’t land in front of the National Science Foundation, and said, hey, we’re here and let’s talk.
[3:21] They don’t do well, I don’t want to I don’t want to talk about it too much more of it. It’s it’s when credible people come out and say things fine, but you notice, like when David, but David said, David said, to the, he followed the rule, he said it to the inspector general and, and it was all TS, top secret stuff, code worded and everything like that. So he, he kept it that way. And you notice, Dave isn’t on television, or he isn’t on thing saying, oh, it’s here, it’s there. And he knows, I mean, this is where everything is.
[3:56] He told Congress and but he didn’t, I’m sure he didn’t even tell Congress everything. He knows the system, how it works. So and as far as downcraft and everything like that, if you ask me, do I believe that? Absolutely. What do you what do you make of the claims that David Grush or David Grush made saying that people have potentially died to keep this secret, that there’s been retaliation against individuals who spoke out of terms in regard to the program?
[4:38] I mean, what would and can the program do such things if they? Yes, and no, yes, in the sense that if the program was, and I believe it was, I mean, if it was done under a presidential executive action document, the president then says to an agency or entity in government, you run this, and by the way, you’re running it through these rules. And these are the guidelines. And that entity is then given extraordinary powers by the president to prevent this thing being leaked. For instance, somebody once asked somebody flat out, does this program exist?
[5:39] And the person just said, absolutely not. Well, as it stands under certain restrictions, particularly regarding unacknowledged waived unacknowledged special access programs. That’s the response you’re supposed to give. No, doesn’t even exist. You don’t say no comment, right? You say doesn’t exist. And you’re allowed to lie to anybody about it. I mean, this is this is part of the government when Lou was starting to talk about. When Louis went to the stars, Lou talked about national security issues with that.
[6:18] And he was right. Absolutely right. When you’re in the intelligence business, your first your first order of business is protecting the government and protecting the United States. And you have to be 100 percent sure that whatever you’re dealing with is not a threat. And you have to find that out first. And once you find out that it is or is not a threat, you take the appropriate action. So I don’t think we we know for sure. I would tend to think that it’s not. But there is probably 10 percent of what I’ve read and experienced points to points to less than a positive.
[6:58] I don’t want to say evil or demonic, but less than a positive side to this. Jacques Vallée once commented to me, he came to me, he came to my house actually at one point and spent the day with my wife and I and going over everything. And I had asked him, what do you think? And he said, well, he said, I think in general, it’s just the phenomenon is indifferent. I mean, it’s it’s it’s just not one side or the other. And I think he’s absolutely right.
[7:32] There may be times I mean, some people have experiences. I think most people who have an experience, contact experiences or what they call abduction experiences with these non-human intelligences. It’s frightening at first, but then it’s also transformational to a certain extent. And they if you talk to them a year later, they’ll tell you it’s probably one of the best experiences they ever had. Maybe their life changes for the positive. It didn’t happen with me at all. I still see it as a human rights violation.
[8:04] And because of what happened to my wife and what happened to me. So was there a sinister, more sinister element, in my experience, possibly, possibly I was told that by somebody who knows and said that they think there could have been a more sinister element involved. What that actually means and what that entails, I don’t know, but that’s why I don’t I don’t disregard the people who like my friend, Melinda Leslie, who had a really number of frightening experiences. And she relates those to what she calls military abductions, malabs. And that may be easy to dismiss for some people. I don’t dismiss that at all.
[8:52] I know Melinda and heard her story. I find her completely believable and her story compelling. So I don’t, to me, everything’s up in the air. We don’t know. And there’s different parts of that. And for me. I didn’t have anything akin to an abduction. My experience, for whatever reason, seemed very positive, right? And empowering and caring, right? And I’m open to the idea that the manipulation, right? I could be I’m dealing with an advanced intelligence that could be. Doing whatever it wants, more or less. At my gut, it felt genuine.
[9:37] It felt like that these entities or non-human intelligence cared about us. And I got these kind of downloaded messages, but I understand that it’s, I can’t take that necessarily at face value. And that’s why I like to speak to people like you and other people who have different experiences. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to piece things together and begin to try to make sense of it. Which I think is, that’s why we need this out in the open.
[10:07] We need everybody working together on this, because we’re not going to get anywhere. If this is kept as a coverup or the secrecy. The only way we’re going to move forward on this is if everybody’s working together, doing their best. I agree. When you say those different things that you piece together and different things you were told or confirmed, was any of it like, did any of it seem like it could be potentially positive or opportunistic or did, or is your sense of everything that you learned concerning?
[10:44] I would, I would say, I mean, I’m generally a very optimistic guy. I mean, I, and I don’t, I mean, people always talk about who is the phenomenon where these NHI, non-human intelligences, are they in any way or shape or form an existential threat to the human race? And I would have to say no, only because they’ve been around for so long. And if they wanted to do anything, they would have done it already. The second thing is, I don’t think, I’m actually, I’m pretty sure that, that most people, particularly in the government, don’t really understand this phenomenon very well. They know it’s real and they know that it has an intention, but they’re not sure what the intention is, why, why the communication, why, why things happen the way they happen.
[11:43] They have a decent idea of their capabilities. But when I say that, I know there’s, there’s a, it’s like a superficial understanding of both their intentions and their capabilities. They don’t know the full capabilities. They don’t know the real intention. So you sort of look at that and what do you do? I remember when Lou was starting to talk about, when Louis went to the stars, Lou talked about national security issues with that. And he was right, absolutely right. I mean, when you, when you’re in the intelligence business, your first, your first order of business is protecting the government and protecting the United States. And you have to be 100% sure that whatever you’re dealing with is not a threat. And you have to find that out first.
[12:27] And once you find that, that it is or is not a threat, you take the appropriate action. So I don’t think we, we know for sure. I would tend to think that it’s not, but there is probably 10% of what I’ve read and experienced points to, points to less than a positive, I don’t want to say evil or demonic, but less than a positive side to this. I Jacques Vallée once commented to me, he came to my, he came to my house actually at one point and spent the day with my wife and I, and I went over everything and, and I had asked him, what do you think?
[13:12] And he said, well, he said, I think in general, it’s just the phenomenon is indifferent. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s just not one side or the other. And I think he’s absolutely right. There may be times, I mean, some people have experiences. I think most people who haven’t experienced contact experiences or what they call abduction experiences with these non-human intelligences, it’s frightening at first, but then it’s also transformational to a certain extent. And they, if you talk to them a year later, they’ll tell you it was probably one of the best experiences they ever had. Maybe their life changes. Really interesting question. And the, the, the ultimate answer is I don’t know whether there’s going to be any kind of major opening where either something shows itself or the government says anything.
[13:59] I think that’d be pretty hard to predict. What I will tell you is the intelligence community, say, for instance, you wanted to know about a particular topic. What’s the foreign, what’s the military capabilities of this foreign nation, right? Well, you would get some very, very smart people would say, okay, here’s all the questions we need to get answered. Right? So they would come to people like me, the, the, the clandestine officers, and they would say, all right, now you’re part of this process. So we’re going to, we’re going to be using satellite communications, electronic communications, and all these other things to find out as much information as you can, but we also need human information. So you go in and you, you try to recruit a spy and you try to find out what this military is like in this new country or this country. So you do that. And you take those questions and you go in and you ask this person who decided he was going to spy for you. And you say, what are your capabilities?
[14:57] And the guy comes back, he tells you all this data and you come back with the data. More information is then generated and it’s a snowball effect. And what happens is you now have a wealth of data after sometimes after only a period of like six months and, and you combine it with the other data and you get this bigger picture. And this is what is definitely happening now. What’s happening now is you’re getting more and more people involved in this who have more and more information. And as all of this stuff gets combined together and you have more, particularly more scientists and more social scientists involved in this, more papers being produced, more conversations.
[15:37] And it’s a fascinating topic. Let’s, no question about it, right? It is fascinating. It draws people’s attention. That is what’s going on now. And that is going to move forward and then it’s not going to go backwards. That’s going to go forwards. And I think we’re well into this. And, and that’s to me is the hopeful part of this. It’s up to the phenomenon to determine whether it reveals itself, but we we’ve, we’re creating, we’re creating the, the capability to look at this more. And I think you’re going to find, hopefully in the future, what we were hoping when we started to the stars that we would create this international community that would, would, we would be able to fund it, fund certain projects. We wouldn’t go to a university in, in Tokyo and say, Hey, work on this one particular problem. Here’s a hundred thousand bucks. Right. And, and, and then another university in Prague and maybe one in Germany and then a university of Arizona or Harvard. And you sort of direct the money that way. And it would have a group of people sort of running it.
[16:40] And then you’re trying to find out more and more information about this particular topic. That, that sort of what’s going on now. The problem with what’s happening now, it’s too disparate. It’s all over the place. You have so many good foundations, like the soul foundation with Gary and Keith Basterville started. Wonderful, wonderful organization. You got free that’s out there. It’s a little bit smaller. We got move on. And there’s, there’s a lot more that Excel, you got SCU another great organization, but they’re all sort of doing different things and are not really that they know one another because it’s a small community, but there are, there needs to be a greater focus and a more of a communal effort.
[17:21] And that’s extremely difficult to do because of personalities and funding and money. And we had the money that SETI had, for instance, I think it would be a different, different ball game. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I said, all we got to do is connect the dots. I said, show me the damn dots. I don’t even know where the dots are. And then, and then the other issue too, is like, what happens if this technology, what happens if there is a technology and let’s say this this, these non-human intelligences reveal themselves and they say, and they share things like you get free energy or something like that, or you get some type of energy form that is available to everybody.
[18:05] Well then you’re dealing with the same problem you’ve had since the beginning of time, humanity. Is humanity smart enough to be able to handle this, a particular technology without killing themselves? And we’re talking about AI right now, right? What all that could mean. Well, let’s, let’s put AI, advanced forms of AI into the hands of say the Iranian government or the North Korean government. I mean, what do you think they’re going to do with it? Or the Russians? They’re going to weaponize it. Just like I’m sure people on our side are weaponizing it too.
[18:35] Humans, I don’t know if we’re ready for all this. And I don’t know if we’re capable of basically subjugating our, our worst instincts and, and having our best instincts come forward. I don’t know. And I, I remember Hal talking to me about this, Hal Puthoff, he was involved in one of these. Think tanks. Yeah. Talking whether it should be talked about, should we let this out or not out. And his point was, look, in the beginning, almost everybody agreed that we should let this out. And he said, and after a day or two of writing, putting all the reasoning down, he said, we all decided unanimously, no, can’t do it.
[19:19] I think it’s one of those things that you can never be ready for it’s baptism by fire. I hate to say that, but it’s, you can always find a reason why to, to procrastinate even as an individual on an individual level with doing something that seems risky or scary, but it’s inevitable. So it’s, you have to take the plunge eventually. And yeah, I mean, I understand both sides too. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, look at it this way. Let’s just say you’re growing up and you find out that the person you thought was your father wasn’t your father. Right.
[19:58] And, and, and actually it was somebody else, a very, very jarring experience, right? And it’s an experience that’s going to affect you for the rest of your life, just like any kind of traumatic experience that happens to you now, now that’s on one level, right? Think about something that’s a thousand times or a million times more startling than that, particularly one that has an element of possible extinction or possible that you have no control over. I mean, you have control over this.
[20:32] You can go, you can, you can take cognitive behavioral therapy. You can have chats with everybody. You can get support groups, talk at that. It’s understandable, right? It’s an understandable predicament. But what if somebody told you, you know, that, forget about your dad, who’s your real dad, treat Xenon and Pericles over here from, from another dimension and let them tell you about who you really are and by the way, you don’t really exist because you’re all just intentional pieces of consciousness. And seriously, when you get down to that, how do people, and I think there’s an arrogance involved people who, who’ve had these experiences and, and they, they talk about how life transforming they are, which is wonderful. I mean, I think that’s, that’s great, but to say that you understand it, I think is, is going a bit far. Yeah. And, but Jim, I just want to, I’m sorry to interject, but I completely understand why those people do that. Right. Cause it’s so real to you and it happened to you and like, there’s this inclination and it’s almost subconscious to assume that you need the truth just because you had the experience. I get, I get that. Yeah.
[21:49] Well, I mean, I believe if people have experiences, I believe them. I absolutely believe. And I think they’re true that they actually did indeed happen. But I think I like to follow the maxim that John Mack said when he was talking about abductions, he said, I think when all of a sudden, and I’m paraphrasing here, he said, I have it written down somewhere here, but in the end, I think the most we can say about all this is that it’s a mystery and that’s about as far as we should be able to go with it. And, and I think his reasoning was, was correct because it’s, it’s, I like to say we live in a blinkered universe. I mean, our brains and our senses are only able to see, we’re only able to see, feel, understand so much. I mean, we only take in so much of reality. Our brains are structured in a way where we can’t absorb everything that’s happening in our own environment, right? You go outside and there’s so much data coming at you. There’s trees and animals and bugs and other people and sky and ground and, and it’s teeming with life, right? And teeming with energy, but you don’t think about that. You can’t absorb it all.
[23:05] I mean, you just superficially you can, but, but it, you, you can’t make sense of it. You can’t get behind the essence of it all because it would just be so overwhelming to you. So you have to sort of know that when you’re looking at it from a humanistic or human point of view or anthropomorphic is probably a better word that it’s limited and that we’re stuck in this, in this limited way. And you end up with, with, with Whitley Strieber likes to call you walking through a forest of hypotheses. You have all these great ideas of what it might be, but you don’t really know in the end. You can’t really be sure. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
[23:49] And our senses filter things out for optimal survival, eat, live, procreate, and so on. Right. And we don’t perceive the radiation around us, the wifi and these different frequencies that are the radio frequencies there. They’re always around us all the time. Right. And so that’s kind of the idea that there’s, could be the shadow biome that Dr. Eric Davis talked about where some of these entities even reside right, right there. Yeah. Which I do want to get into a little later. I’m currently working on a presentation that’s kind of involved in that, but you you’re in a very unique position because of your background and service to the country and working in intelligence, but you’re, you’re also an experiencer. So given that you have this kind of bird’s eye view on kind of both of these worlds, does the secrecy around the subject upset you? Yeah, I’m torn. I’m torn with that question. It’s a question I’ve had discussions with, with other people, Lou and Chris Mellon, myself, and Steve Justice, he used to work for the Skunk Works. When Two to Stars was first formed, all of us sort of agreed that we were going to go, we were going to work on the basis of complete belief in this phenomenon, that the phenomenon was real, but not knowing what it was, but nevertheless, it’s real.
[25:18] So we weren’t even going to entertain the idea, is this real or is this not? Yeah, it is. So let’s move forward from there. Somebody once asked somebody flat out, does this program exist? And the person just said, absolutely not. Well, as it stands under certain restrictions, particularly regarding unacknowledged waived, waived unacknowledged special access programs, that’s the response you’re supposed to give. Nope, doesn’t even exist. You don’t say no comment, you say it doesn’t exist and you’re allowed to lie to anybody about it. I mean, this is part of the government that functions, it’s not a big part of the government, it’s a very, very small part of the government actually. But nevertheless, I’m sure this happened during the Manhattan Project. So did people, were they retaliated against? I’m sure, absolutely. They were retaliated against in some form or fashion.
[26:19] Dave was, I mean, it was against Dave, Dave might have been more of an institutional retaliation. I don’t know. I mean, he, I don’t know all the full details about that, but it’s not, I mean, once you go against the, you know, the, that’s why I’m very careful. It’s like I’m retired and everything like that, but I, but you have to be respectful also of the rules and the regulations to a certain extent. So in David’s case, I think there were extenuating circumstances and he chose the path he chose. And I think, I think he definitely moved the ball forward. No question about it, but you notice what he says and what he doesn’t say.
[27:01] He’s an, he’s an extremely bright guy. I mean, really bright guy. And he, he knows his, he knows the territory and he knows essentially what to say and what not to say. Yeah. I think David alluded to a few incidents that weren’t institutional in the sense where some people had entered his home on two different occasions or something. I don’t know that. Of course, I don’t know the details of that, but I think he made reference to that. So that seems.
[27:30] Oh yeah. I know. I, I, I wouldn’t absolutely that I’m sure that would be part of that. If you are a government employee with a top secret clearance, particularly a top secret clearance and David had all the damn clearances, I mean, and, and you start talking out of school, the first thing they’re going to want to know is, do you have any documents at home on your computer or anything like that? And they’re going to start and, and they will, there’s no hesitation, you know, going into your house, monitoring your phones, what have you interestingly, when, and this happens all the time and it’s not even, it may not even have been the U S government. It could have been another foreign intelligence agency doing this when, when TTS was first started and we, we started talking about this, our computers got compromised and, and, and we sort of have an idea who compromised them and it wasn’t, it wasn’t the U S yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, have my phones been tapped? I wouldn’t put it past them.
[28:43] I could care less, be honest with you. If my home had broken into, I don’t know, could care less. I don’t have any classified data here and I try to, I don’t talk about classified information. I touch the border sometimes of some of this stuff, but I, I always like to make it and I say, look, this is my opinion. I’m not speaking for anybody, but I’m a little bit different. I had an experience, so I don’t want the government telling me I didn’t have it.
[29:09] I don’t want the government telling me to shut up about it. It’s my goddamn business. It’s nobody else’s business. And if I want to talk about it, I’ll talk about it.