It was a triangle UAP hovering over a nuclear weapons site. This colleague said, “Please tell me this is one of ours, like one of our black projects. Is this some advanced cutting-edge technology that’s ours?” And he knew instinctively it was not.
That set him down a rabbit hole. He’s like, there’s got to be some office somewhere in the intelligence community that handles UFOs. So he went all over trying to find it, him and his colleague. They couldn’t find one. So then they determined they were just going to start a UAP program. That program they started was called OSAP. They hired all the team, for example, Hal, and that program started in 2008.
And got a lot of pushback behind the scenes because it turned out when they looked all over the intelligence community to see if there was another UFO program and didn’t think there was, turns out there was one. And there was a deeply hidden program referred to as the Legacy Program. And it had been operating in the shadows since the ’40s outside of congressional oversight, outside of the oversight of the White House, completely off—
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Completely hidden away. Yeah.
DAN FARAH: As hidden as a program can be. And so they started pushing back behind the scenes against everyone involved in AUSAP because they didn’t want anyone else looking into this, right? It started to cause a lot of bureaucratic issues for them, red tape issues. And ultimately, AUSAP lost its funding in 2010, despite the fact that it was looking into very real issues like UAP over our nuclear weapons sites. It shut down in 2010.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why do you think it shut down?
DAN FARAH: They were dealt these bureaucratic hurdles behind the scenes by people involved in the legacy program. People who just caused problems and prevented funding. Exactly. It’s a big bureaucracy. People can do things behind the scenes to prevent funding from coming through for programs. And so ultimately they lost their funding in 2010. And then Jay Stratton and other people involved, they were continuing to look into this because they didn’t want this serious national security concern to go uninvestigated, right?
The Physics Behind UAP Craft
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: So that’s how somebody like me gets pulled in. They say, okay, these pilots are out there and they suddenly see craft coming out of the ocean and making right-angle turns at 6G or whatever. And they say, oh my God, this is way beyond our physics. So I and other physicists sort of dug into what could be responsible for this.
And we actually found that just like we use so-called Maxwell’s equations and electromagnetic stuff for everything we do in electromagnetics, we have Einstein’s equations in general relativity for black holes and all that kind of stuff. But it turns out if you could engineer those, you would actually get the same effects that people were observing with these UAP crafts. So we think we’ve come up with what it is about the science of it. It’s just that we don’t have the engineering to do it.
Do You Believe in UAPs and Aliens?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you believe in UAPs?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Absolutely believe in UAPs because I’ve been exposed to data about them.
STEVEN BARTLETT: A more specific question would be, do you believe in aliens?
DAN FARAH: Yeah. So a number of the people I interviewed went on the record stating that they know from their own personal experiences that there have been UAP crashes over the years that have been recovered by elements of the US government and in some cases the crashed crafts had the bodies of non-humans in them. And numerous people I interviewed went on the record saying that.
And keep in mind, everyone I interviewed only shared what they lawfully could. There was a line they couldn’t cross. Everyone I interviewed is aware of classified information they can’t talk about, but they went right up to the line and made it clear that there had been recoveries of non-human bodies. A couple people actually testified under oath to Congress saying the same thing.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why wouldn’t they be able to talk about it publicly?
DAN FARAH: Well, when you’re involved in certain programs, you sign certain agreements that prevent you from sharing specific information.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Highly classified programs. And of course, the big concern is, okay, whatever we might learn about these kind of craft and so on, our adversaries are out there. And probably there have been crashes in Russia, crashes in China. And so if we reveal what we’re learning about the subject area and said it publicly, then it might help some potential adversary—
DAN FARAH: Yes, a saying I—
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: —get a step ahead. So that’s why it’s all just kept really close in.
The Race to Reverse Engineer Non-Human Technology
DAN FARAH: So a saying that I heard often from my interview subjects: “You can’t tell your friends without telling your enemies,” meaning you can’t tell the public what we know and don’t know without also telling China and Russia what we know and don’t know. And giving them that information might give them a competitive advantage.
And the obvious question anyone would ask when hearing that is then, well, okay, so what shifted? Why is that no longer the leading thought, secrecy is best? And the answer is because the US is in a really high-stakes race, a technology race against these adversaries to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin. And the secrecy around it in the US since the ’40s has created a scenario where the scientific community and academia don’t even know it’s real. They don’t even know it’s a valid area of inquiry. Don’t even believe it’s real. I mean, the smartest kids graduating at MIT this year, they are not thinking that this is something they can put their brainpower towards.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So coming back to the question, do you believe in aliens?
DAN FARAH: I 100% believe that non-human intelligent life is here and has been here for a long time.
STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say here, do you mean — Earth. Currently living amongst us?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I don’t know about the living amongst us part.
DAN FARAH: Don’t know about that. I don’t know about that, but—
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Wouldn’t rule it out, but don’t know.
DAN FARAH: There is UAP activity being reported on a daily basis by commercial airline pilots to the FAA, by Navy fighter pilots off the East Coast being reported up the military chain of command. And on top of that, regular activity over our nuclear weapons sites inside the United States. It’s happening on a regular basis on the nuclear sites and on a daily basis in commercial air travel space.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: UAP have come over nuclear missile sites and actually turned off the missiles. And so, once something like that happens, you just got to take it seriously.
Evidence of Non-Human Bodies
DAN FARAH: And the technology that they’re displaying is technology that no humans have. And again, there has been some crashes, and in those crashes there have been the bodies of non-humans. How do we know that?
STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we know that in those crashes they’ve recovered bodies of non-humans?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: The whistleblowers basically coming forward from the program.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So the basis of that evidence is that some people have said it.
DAN FARAH: At this point, until previously classified information regarding crashes and recoveries is declassified, until that happens, the best we could hope for is credible people putting their reputation on the line to tell you this is what’s been happening.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Did someone during your process of making the documentary who had seen non-alien, non-human life, non-human intelligence tell you that?
DAN FARAH: Yeah. Who was that? A number of people, but notably Jay Stratton, who we just talked about.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yes, right.
DAN FARAH: Who co-created, co-founded AUSAP and then became the director of the UAP Task Force, the largest whole government investigation of UAP ever. What did he say? He went on the record in the film saying that he’s seen non-human beings and non-human craft with his own eyes. That was the farthest he could go at that point.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did he say he couldn’t go further?
The Credibility of Witnesses
DAN FARAH: He had a situation that he was involved in that, for a few reasons, he just wasn’t comfortable talking about it yet. And some of it, I think he just wanted to make sure he legally could.
Now, going back to credibility, take a guy like Jay saying that. When Jay retired a few years back, he was part of the Senior Executive Services of the federal government. That’s a level less than 1% of all federal employees ever reach. It’s the equivalent of a 2-star admiral or general. Very, very senior, very trusted, cleared at a very high level. He had worked with Naval Intelligence in a senior capacity. He had worked with the CIA. He had worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency as the head of air and space warfare. He’s a super serious, credible guy — and he’s putting his reputation on the line to share this information to the extent that he legally could and comfortably could.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And when you asked him why the world doesn’t know this stuff, in his view, what would he say? There’s a lot of reasons.
The Reasons for Secrecy
DAN FARAH: I mean, certainly the idea that we can’t tell our friends without telling our enemies has been a driver. Just to recap the reasons for secrecy, I actually believe it’s better to kind of start from the beginning.
When in 1947 there was a crash at Roswell of non-human origin. And yeah, RAAF captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region. Yeah. And then this is the image of their cover-up story trying to show a weather balloon. Yeah. So multiple people in my film go on the record saying the Roswell crash really happened. Technology of non-human origin and non-human bodies were recovered.
If you put yourself in the shoes of the military and government at that point, like put yourself in Truman and Eisenhower’s shoes, you’re just coming out of World War II. The world was just chaos for a very long time. It’s finally starting to settle down. You can’t exactly step to the microphone and tell America that there’s a new threat that we know nothing about and we can’t protect you from. They’re far advanced. What’s the advantage of that? So secrecy became the plan at that point. They had more questions than answers.
So everyone I’ve talked to gave me context, explained that the plan for secrecy went in motion there. Let’s investigate. Let’s find out more about what we don’t know before we tell the American people. That was quickly followed by the Cold War era. And we learned that Russia also had retrieved technology of non-human origin. And so we knew we were in a technology race. So then the idea of can’t tell your friend without telling your enemy ruled the day. So now the Cold War mentality led to more secrecy.
And as a security wrapper for this program that it started, they created the stigma in the late ’40s, early ’50s — this cultural stigma, this idea that you’re crazy if you look into this topic, you’re wacky, you’ll have your reputation ruined, you’ll have your career ruined.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: There was actually a CIA meeting where people got together and said, “OK, in order to not have people be pursuing this area, let’s go out of our way to spread what we would call now disinformation about something.”
DAN FARAH: Yeah, basically the most effective disinformation campaign in the history of the U.S. government because it got into our culture. Some movies were funded that made aliens seem silly and the idea of life from elsewhere seemed ridiculous. And that got compounded over the years. And then we got to the point where, just like a few years ago, the average person just thinks it’s not real. The average scientist, academia — they think it’s conspiracy stuff, it’s nonsense, it’s silly. There was no advantage for elected leaders to get in front of this or for military members to speak up about what they learned or saw. It would be a career ruiner.
And that started to shift several years back when Jay Stratton and Jim McCaskey, when they put together OSAP in 2010 and they started to go out there and collect data and get evidence. And they started to actually share it with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. And looking at classified data in a classified setting, people like Marco Rubio, who was the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, started to realize —
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: There’s something here.
DAN FARAH: Not only is there something here, but we’ve got a problem, right? There’s a lot of UAP activity over these highly classified sites like our nuclear weapons sites. There’s a lot at stake. We are in this race with other nations, and the stigma has created a disadvantage for us. It’s very hard to win a technology race when the majority of your scientists don’t know it’s a valid area of inquiry, right?
How Many Types of Non-Human Intelligence?
STEVEN BARTLETT: And do people think that there’s one type of non-human intelligence that’s visiting the Earth, or is there many, many types?
DAN FARAH: People who have been involved in recoveries have said —
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: — said there are at least 4 types, 4 separate types. Now, I have not had direct access to that, but I believe the people who I talk to —
STEVEN BARTLETT: Four different types of life.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Four different types of life, at least.
DAN FARAH: And the people I’ve talked to, through the process of making the documentary, both on camera and off-the-record sources, and the people Hal’s talked to over the decades, have said that there have been dozens of recoveries of crashed craft. In the US alone, dozens of craft of non-human origin that either crashed organically or caused to crash and then recovered.
Witnesses Who Won’t Go on Camera
STEVEN BARTLETT: And have you spoken to people who — you talked about Jay. Have you spoken to other people that have worked on these crashed crafts?
DAN FARAH: I’ve talked off the record with some people who are involved in recoveries. They would not go on camera to do interviews. Special Forces people that would not go on camera and do interviews. One I actually thought — I’ve mentioned this in another interview — but one I thought was going to do an interview and then a couple days before sent me a message saying, “After further consideration and long talks with my wife, I decided I’d be forfeiting my life if I participated in your interview.” And I thought that was a very unsettling message to get, obviously, but also very specific word choice — forfeiting my life.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What did he know? He was a special —
DAN FARAH: — very senior Special Forces guy who had told me he had been involved in multiple recoveries. That’s what he told me. And I met him through some high-level intelligence people.
Early on in my process, I got connected with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, and they had on their own learned the reality of the situation. Through the work of OSAP and then AATIP and then the UAP Task Force and through their own intelligence channels. Leaders on those committees wanted to educate the public about what they could lawfully about this, but they didn’t really have a way to do it. It’s such a complicated situation. It takes a while to explain it. You can’t do it in like a 6-minute news hit on Fox or CNN or even like a 15-minute 60 Minutes segment. You just can’t do it. And no one wanted to be the one guy trying to do it.
So when I started putting together the film and socializing this safe way for people to step forward, it also quickly became those people’s plan for disclosure. That’s why Secretary Rubio participated. That’s why White House National Security Council members participated. It became — amongst the group of people who had learned the truth — it became the plan for disclosure, the way to bring this information out in a thoughtful way.
Do Presidents Know the Truth?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do the presidents of the United States know about this stuff? Are they aware? Historically, no.
DAN FARAH: Historically? Yeah. And even Rubio says on camera that, historically, this has been kept from even sitting presidents.
Who would know then? So a number of the people in my film break down who’s involved in the Legacy Program. To put it simply, it’s elements of the CIA, elements of the Air Force, elements of the Department of Energy, and a few major defense contractors. And they have the ability to access information from a number of federal agencies and branches of the military, but the primary leaders of this program are the CIA, the Air Force, the Department of Energy, and major defense contractors.
And Rubio breaks down in the film the way our bureaucracy works. You could have career bureaucrats in positions of power at those organizations for decades, and they can just wait out sitting presidents. They can wait out sitting senators.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: They can look down at sitting presidents as just temporary help that are going to come and go.
DAN FARAH: And that’s what’s been happening up until this point now. So the fact that Rubio had learned so much about the reality of the situation and the extent of the cover-up, and then ended up arguably the second most powerful guy in the world as our Secretary of State and our National Security Advisor at the same time — which has only happened once in US history, Henry Kissinger for 2 years. No one else has ever had both those jobs at the same time.
The fact that he ended up in that position of power and influence after learning the reality of the situation, and right as the Age of Disclosure is coming out and driving this national conversation, it really led to the current president, Trump, being informed about this in a way that no president has in a very long time.
Is the Public Ready to Know?
STEVEN BARTLETT: So are you saying that the United States don’t think the public are ready to even know that this exists? Because, you know, they could tell us that they have recovered UAPs or aliens, whatever it might be, without telling us about the technology. They could.
DAN FARAH: And I think we’re going to get to that point.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, I think they were trapped in this system that had grown up, and people behind the scenes working in the classified programs said, “Well, you know, we don’t know how the public is going to respond, so let’s be safe and let’s just keep it in-house.”
Do you think Trump believes that there are aliens?
STEVEN BARTLETT: ‘Cause I was looking at some of his quotes and he said, “Well, I don’t know if they’re real or not. I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do.”
DAN FARAH: A lot of people believe it. Barack Obama said that aliens are real.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that. So aliens are real?
DAN FARAH: No, I don’t have an opinion on it.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it. Do you believe it, Peter?
DAN FARAH: Well, the president can declassify anything that he wants to. So if you want to make an announcement —
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.
Trump, Rubio, and the Disclosure Process
DAN FARAH: One of the things that came out in the Age of Disclosure is that during Trump’s first administration, his cabinet was briefed by the UAP Task Force, by Jay Stratton. And when he briefed them, he was told that they had asked for this briefing because they needed to be able to evaluate what the repercussions would be if Trump decided to step to the microphone and tell the world, “We’re not alone in the universe.”
Obviously, he didn’t end up deciding to do that then. However, in this new administration, he’s got Rubio in the position of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and fully aware of the situation, and that has given him the comfort to put this process in motion. There’s certainly a disclosure process unfolding right now.
Obama’s Comments on Aliens
STEVEN BARTLETT: Obama said in an interview that he did with Brian Tyler Cohen, when asked about aliens, Obama said, “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them. They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States.”
Now that sounded to me like kind of sarcasm when he said they’re real, but then explained that they’re not real. They’re real but I haven’t seen them and they’re not being kept in Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States. So it would appear to me that Obama also doesn’t know of any aliens.
Do Presidents Know the Truth?
DAN FARAH: I think Obama was largely kept in the dark. I think he does know the base fact that we’re not alone in the universe, and I actually think when he said they’re real, I think he was being— that was just— that was his honest— that was his honest, candid, genuine statement. I think when he then said they’re not kept at Area 51, I think he’s also being honest because none of my sources say that UAP and aliens are being kept at Area 51. They’re being kept somewhere else. So I think he was being honest there.
And I think when he made the comment of, unless there’s a giant conspiracy, if you watch the tape, he like sips his cup and raises his eyebrows. I think he knows there’s a giant conspiracy. That’s the truth. The following day, Trump was asked about that on Air Force One, and he responded saying Obama revealed classified information and he shouldn’t have said that. And I think that’s the truth. Yeah. I think presidents don’t know and they’re told not to talk about it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Trump has started to release a lot of classified information around UAP and aliens. The first batch of that was released a couple of days ago. What exactly is inside this report?
DAN FARAH: There was a number of files, reports, video, and still images that were declassified. This is information that previously had been classified or just never really made public. This was just the first tranche of what has been— what will be released.
The most notable piece of evidence in there is an image, a still image from the 1972 Apollo mission. It’s an image of a triangle, a seemingly triangle-shaped craft hovering above the moon and above the astronauts. And the image was taken from the lunar module. And the UAP Task Force looked into this image years ago and determined it was real. That seems to be the most glaring piece of evidence in this tranche.
But I will say this. Hal and I both have the same, a lot of the same sources of information. And everyone we’ve talked to at various federal agencies has told us that when the president gave this directive in the middle of February for federal agencies to declassify evidence of non-human intelligent life and UAP, only a few engaged with it. They only gave a small percent of what they have. And they only had a couple of weeks to do it.
Why Would Governments Control This Information?
STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things I think I’ve always struggled with, with the idea of these kind of conspiracies, is that I don’t know why that information would necessarily fall into the hands of government officials because, you know, alien life forms or UAPs would be visible and would land in anyone’s back garden. So you could imagine a world, especially in a world where we have 8 billion iPhones roaming around, you can imagine a world where if there was some kind of UAP crash in my garden, it would be on TikTok within 5 minutes. Yeah. Or if there really was—
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: someone got there with an iPhone. You’re right.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, there was that incident earlier in the year with those— were they drones in America? Jersey. Jersey. Jersey. And that was on social media within minutes and everyone was talking about it and looking at what they were. I don’t know. I think in the modern world, because we have so many ways to capture high-quality video, if there was something out there, we would have seen a very clear image of this thing by now.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, there’s a lot. That’s why there’s a lot that came out in these files, because over the years, our sensor systems that the pilots have in their planes have gotten so much better. They’ve captured really astounding—
STEVEN BARTLETT: Does this life want to be seen? Do these aliens want us to know that they’re there?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I’d have to assume that given the level of quality of their technology, if they didn’t want to be seen, we wouldn’t be seeing them. So it seems like— I would say there’s evidence that for whatever reason, they’re wanting to be seen.
DAN FARAH: But also, my personal opinion is that if someone answers that question, they’re answering it through the lens of how humans think, right? For all we know, we’re ants to them. You know, you don’t hide from the ants, you walk around them, you don’t even— but you also don’t pay attention to them, you know?
How Do They View Us?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Based on their behavior from the interviews you’ve done, how do you think they view us?
DAN FARAH: I honestly feel like the dynamic is, we are very, very far below them on the food chain. Hal makes an analogy in the film. He says the ants in your tree line in your backyard, they could be there for generations. You never think about them. You walk around them. You’re not hiding from them, but they’re there and you don’t really care, right?
But what happens if they evolve one day and out of nowhere they figured out how to get into your house and they’ve beelined under your door and they’re in your living room, right? We might have evolved technologically over the last 80 years since we cracked the atom, so quickly that we’re now the equivalent of the ants showing up in their living room. Like all of a sudden— potential danger. All of a sudden this warring species, this violent species, humans, we progressed so quickly. We went from no real technological progress for a very long time to cracking the atom and then figuring out nuclear technology and then continuing to increase our nuclear technology. Development.
And we have this program that has been retrieving their crashed craft and trying to reverse engineer them. So we might be at that point where we’re about to do what they do. And all of a sudden, we are a problem. That might be the explanation of why they pay so much attention to our nuclear process. There’s a lot of UAP activity, not only at the nuclear weapons sites all over the world, but sites involved in the nuclear process, like uranium mines or refineries.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it, you know—
DAN FARAH: It might just be we’ve gotten to the point where all of a sudden they have to—
UAPs and Nuclear Sites
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: In the Soviet Union, the UAP came over and actually started a launch of the Russian missiles. I mean, they actually forced the system to start into a countdown process. How do we know that? By the intelligence community’s access to information about it.
DAN FARAH: Every person we spoke to in Bielokorovitscha said they saw a flying saucer on that day. For hours, it hovered over the nearby ballistic missile base. No one had touched any buttons. No one had entered any codes. And yet, as the UFO hovered over the base, the control panel showed the missiles were preparing to launch. For 15 agonizing seconds, the base lost control of its nuclear weapons.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Logically, I would think that unusual activity would happen around consequential sites. Yes. I’d be more surprised if there was really frequent unusual activity happening in my back garden, for example. But around highly consequential sites, one would expect there to be people flying things around there, spying. You know what people are like with cameras these days. They want to take photos of anything interesting. They hang around police stations and army barracks. So logically, I would assume that there would be an increased probability of strange activity in the sky above a nuclear site.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, in fact, there was a group of people in the intelligence community who recognized exactly what you’re saying. And so they decided to make an attractive magnet by getting a whole lot of nuclear assets in one location to see if that would draw them in. And my understanding— it was successful.
DAN FARAH: So our nation and other nations have figured out circumstances that can, for lack of a better term, bait UAP. Bait, right. A certain level of nuclear footprint in a small radius tends to attract them. And our nation figured that out a long time ago, and so did other nations.
The Physics of Interstellar Travel
STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that I’ve thought about is, I know very little about physics, but I know one thing I know is how big the universe is. Now, I’m quite a big fan of SpaceX. I’m actually an investor in the company. And from my fascination with space, I’ve learned just how big the universe is and how long it would take us to travel from Earth to the nearest galaxy. The closest star system to us, which is called Alpha Centauri, is over 4 light-years away, which is about 24 trillion miles. If we traveled at the impossible 10% of the speed of light, which is impossible, currently impossible, it would take a ship 40 years to get there.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Now fortunately, what we learned in looking at what might be the underlying physics and using Einstein’s theory of general relativity, it turns out that there are ways of modifying the effective speed of light to make it much higher or much lower. So you can do that. So when you get into potentially modifying what we call the spacetime metric, you could get to a point where you can make wormholes and warp drives. And those are things that are not off the charts. I mean, there are actually textbooks by general relativity experts on the fact that you could re-engineer the spacetime. So you’re not saying— so you could do it. You could get from here to there.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But you’re not saying you would travel in a line like you do in a plane, right?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, you could. You could. If you arrange for the effective speed of light in that line to be much higher, then without breaking the speed of light, you can zoom over there very quickly.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So even in a straight line. But no one at the moment knows how to do that on Earth.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I think we can write the equations and see how it doesn’t violate our physics equations, but we don’t have the engineering prowess to do it.
DAN FARAH: So we figured out, basically, we figured out how these craft are operating, the theory of it, but we don’t have the material sciences, right? Exactly. To replicate it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What I’m pointing at is if you travel at that speed across the universe, if you even hit an object the size of a pebble, it would be like a nuclear explosion.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, but the thing is, if you’re modifying space, it’s sort of like making a surfer wave on, you know, at the seashore. You arrange to have space moving ahead like that. So you come up to a rock, it’s just going to push it aside. You can engineer that.
DAN FARAH: This is how I’ve wrapped my head around it. Essentially, they’re warping space-time in a localized area. They’re creating an immense amount of energy around the craft, and it creates essentially a bubble around the craft. And that bubble separates the craft from the environment around it. So the environment has no impact on the craft. That’s why we see transmedium travel, like a craft going smooth from space to air to the water without even a splash. The environment around the bubble has no bearing on the craft inside it. And the craft inside it is in its own spacetime. And once you wrap your head around that, then things like interstellar travel become totally possible.
The Paradox of Advanced Technology and Crashes
STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the paradoxes with this is they appear to be such— so advanced in their physics and their technology, if I should call it that, but at the same time they seem to be crashing a lot. Which is a bit of a paradox.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, actually, some of them have not crashed but have been simply left in the desert, sort of like a gift or a donation. Oh, is that right? We’re still trying to figure that out. So, I mean, some of them do crash, and it can have— maybe some of our electromagnetic pulsing and laser pulsing can interfere with their technology and then you might get a crash.
Why Haven’t Other Countries Come Forward?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why do you think another country hasn’t come forward with similar disclosures and similar evidence?
DAN FARAH: I actually think there’s a really simple answer for that. I think our allies follow the US’s lead. Right. And I think our adversaries, primarily China and Russia, have no reason to go public. They don’t have the same sort of societies and dynamics. Xi can do what he wants anyway. What’s the advantage to him? Same thing with Putin. There is no advantage. And when you look at it that way, you really quickly get to the, this is the way it is for that reason.
The Scale of the Universe and the Probability of Life
STEVEN BARTLETT: They did a study in 2026 and found that 45 planets are likely capable of supporting life. They call this the habitable zone out of more than 6,000 planets discovered so far by NASA. There are approximately a trillion galaxies in the universe, and within these galaxies, 100,000 planets could potentially host life according to Oxford University. Now I believe that if you think about the entire universe, I believe that we’re not the only life in the universe. Yes, right. I think that’s—
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I mean, I think that’s a very scientific conclusion.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Probabilistically, it would be pretty incredible if we were. I mean, it’d be just— it’s almost inconceivable that we are. The question of whether that life has been here is a question that for me is still a big question mark. Because I just, you know, I also, I think Elon, you know, whatever you think about Elon, he is someone that seems to just say what he thinks. And this is part of what’s caused his companies a lot of problem is he seems to be pretty unfiltered. He has been asked multiple times as well if he believes that there are aliens in our galaxy. And he has said on multiple occasions that he doesn’t believe that to be the case. And you know, he’s launching rockets all the time. So he said, I heard him say, if anyone should know, it should be me. You do think he knows?
Unacknowledged Special Access Programs
DAN FARAH: I think that you can’t operate in space at the level he does or operate as a contractor at the level he does without having clearances that require secrecy. There’s all kinds of levels of secrecy. Everyone knows the word classified, right? There’s classified projects. But there’s also black projects that are unacknowledged special access programs where you literally, by law, required to not acknowledge the existence of the program or anything it does. That’s literally the—
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Anything it knows. Yeah, that’s literally the whole—
DAN FARAH: They’re literally referred to as unacknowledged special access programs.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That would be Bruce’s team as well, wouldn’t it?
DAN FARAH: So if you’re involved with an unacknowledged special access program and someone asks you about it, you have to say you have no idea what they’re talking about. And all of his team, if they are part of the program. Yeah, but just because someone’s read it on an unacknowledged special access program doesn’t mean all their employees are.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Elon said that we have 9,000 satellites up there. He’s referring to his company Starlink. And not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship. He argues that if aliens were constantly visiting Earth, the aerospace experts who watch the skies every day would be the first to know.
DAN FARAH: Well, look, NASA also has said for decades that they had no evidence of extraterrestrial life or UAPs. And last Friday, the federal government released a photo of a triangle craft hovering over the 1972 Apollo space mission. So somebody’s not being honest, right? Which also implies a lot of other people know things that they haven’t revealed.
Do They Live Among Us?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think I’ve heard you say before, Hal, that you think this intelligent life actually exists amongst us. Yeah, the quote was “They are not occasional visitors. They live secretly alongside humans, but with advanced technology.”
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: We have so many sightings and so many, even access to materials and so on. I mean, they’re all over the place.
STEVEN BARTLETT: 65% of Americans believe intelligent life exists on other planets. 40% of people say military-reported UFOs are probably evidence of extraterrestrial life, according to Pew Research. 30% of Americans believe UFOs, or unidentified flying objects, are probably alien ships of life form. And 47% of Americans believe aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth at some point, according to YouGov. Half of Americans believe that UFOs slash aliens have definitely or probably visited life at some point. Hmm, quite a lot of people.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, you see the Age of Disclosure film and the people that came forward. I mean, you had Clapper, ex-head of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, and Senator Rubio at the time, now in his elevated position, and so on. You now have people of real quality, and you know they’re not lying, and they’re coming forth and saying, “This is real, and we got to deal with it, and there’s a lot we don’t know about it.” Could you be wrong?
DAN FARAH: I don’t think it’s about whether I’m wrong or Hal’s wrong. You’d have to believe that senior leadership across the government, the military, the intelligence community that has access to classified information and is saying based on the classified information they have seen, this is a real situation. You’d have to believe all of those people are lying for some bizarre, unexplained reason. So I find that hard to believe.
Misinterpretation or Reality?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Could it be the case that all of those people were misinterpreting what they were seeing? They saw something, you know, fighter pilots saw something moving in their visors when they’re up in their machines?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Not really, because— I mean, in some cases that could be the case, but then when you have actual materials, crash craft, bodies that aren’t human—
DAN FARAH: Also, a lot of these sightings— they’re now in the process of— the White House cabinet members are in the process of identifying where the evidence exists within federal agencies and the military so they can get access to it themselves and then determine from there what can safely be shared with the public. I think once they get their hands on more evidence, then a plan will be put in place for telling the world this conclusion. I think we’re— it’s like— more close. Fait accompli, basically. Like, it’s going to get to that point relatively soon.
The Tic Tac UFO Incident
STEVEN BARTLETT: If we get to that point and you get personally invited in to wherever they’re keeping these materials and you get to see every single file that exists, and as you go through those files, you realize that a lot of what you’ve been told is not true because there’s other explanations. How would it fundamentally change the way that you see the world?
DAN FARAH: Some of the UAP we’ve seen, like take the famous— everybody knows the Tic Tac UFO, right? That Commander Dave Fravor, the Navy fighter pilot, interacted with in 2004. Right.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll put that on the screen for anyone that hasn’t seen it.
DAN FARAH: Great. And so take that UAP, for example, multiple data collection systems and Commander Dave Fravor, a legend in the Navy, Top Gun guy, commander of an entire naval strike group. Right. Like total badass legend. Legend of a guy. He sees this with his own eyes and a bunch of data collection systems captured data confirming it’s real.
This UAP went from hovering above the ocean to instantly being at 80,000 feet, which is the entrance to space. Right. And it did that maneuver all afternoon. The amount of energy required to do that is so bonkers. We do not— humans do— no human beings have the ability to create that much energy. Right. In a localized area for an aircraft. Right.
And so to answer your question, if we find out, the unthinkable, that this is not non-human intelligent life, that some humans have figured out how to crack that technology and did it as recent as 2004 when the Tic Tac incident happened, that would be even more mind-blowing than accepting that life from elsewhere is here and has been here a long time. Because that would mean that some group of humans leapfrogged the rest of all of humanity technologically by thousands of years and then seemingly did nothing with that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Or it could be something else. That’s the nature of unusual things. They become great stories. So I think in the case of the Tic Tac incident, again, what I’m trying to do is interrogate this from all angles. Could it have been something else?
DAN FARAH: Look, any isolated event like that, you could do the whole, could it be this, could it be that thing? But you got to take a step back and look at the collective. It’s one report like that after another from credible people since World War II. During World War II, pilots were seeing what they called Foo Fighters, like these orbs that would move alongside our fighter jets, right?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Like, they would move in line with them. And now we have people on ships seeing these things enter the water and then moving at impossible speeds, 450 knots or something, which no human being could move.
DAN FARAH: As far as I know, our fastest submarines go like 50 miles an hour. These things are going hundreds of miles an hour under the ocean. So these craft are transmedium. They’re seen in space. They’re seen in the air. They’re seen underwater. There’s just too much activity to ignore it.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah. And that would be a hard one to say, well, is there some sonar thing that makes you think something is doing that? But it’s seen enough times under enough different conditions that we just have to accept it as real.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a reason why this hasn’t been captured on like an iPhone? When like in 4K?
The Challenge of Capturing UAPs on Camera
DAN FARAH: There’s been a lot of stuff captured on phones and video cameras. In that scene in The Edge of Disclosure that I mentioned where Hal and some of the other people break down how these things are working and they describe that they’re creating a warp bubble around the craft. That warp bubble also makes it very hard to get a clear video of something, because you’re taking a photo or a video through essentially a space-time barrier. Yeah, space-time barrier.
It’s like the equivalent of taking pictures of— trying to take video of like koi fish in a pond from above the water. It’s going to look all distorted because you’re going through the water. If you’re trying to video or take a photo through this bubble, it makes it pretty hard. And then you end up with the kind of videos we see.
NASA’s UAP Report
STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re probably familiar with this NASA report that they produced on UAPs, Independent Study Team report, where they essentially say that they don’t believe that these UAPs are aliens. Why would NASA be lying?
DAN FARAH: Like all these big bureaucracies, there’s people who are aware of the truth and then there’s people who have the truth kept from them. One of the people I interviewed was Mike Gold, who was on the NASA UAP Task Force. And he talked about how that effort was flawed from the start. They didn’t want to have a result that said NASA has all this information that they’ve kept from the public. They wanted the result that they landed on, which is there’s nothing to see here.
And they were really discouraged from, for example, that image of a triangle — what clearly appears to be a triangle craft over the moon — they were told not to include that in their report. They were not set up to tell the world the truth.
Is It Possible Aliens Aren’t Real?
STEVEN BARTLETT: In your view, is it possible that aliens aren’t real? Is it possible? Possible? I think, well, I personally think that’s— so you think it’s impossible?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, using the term alien, you know, has a certain connotation about it. So we can certainly say, I mean, the evidence is absolutely clear that there is some form of life with advanced technology. You know, if you want to say, “Well, what can I prove about it?” Well, those are still unknowns that we’re trying to suss out.
Classified Evidence and Off-the-Record Testimonies
DAN FARAH: I got access at a very high level of the government, the military intelligence community. And there were a lot of people who talked to me off the record that wouldn’t go on camera. There were a lot of people who couldn’t tell me about classified information and wanted no classified information. But they all made it very clear not just on camera, but off the record, that there is evidence at a classified level that is clear as day, like some video taken when the bubble is turned off and you can see a craft of non-human origin clear as day. And there is evidence of the technology that’s been recovered and of these bodies.
And when you have — if you put yourself in my shoes — when you have so many senior people across the military government intelligence community telling you this, it’s really just impossible to ignore it, especially when most of them aren’t even friends. They’re not like ideologically aligned or politically aligned.
STEVEN BARTLETT: They’re all just different groups of people. I’m less compelled by eyewitnesses. This is the problem because, you know, I’m such a big true crime fan. You hear about all the bloody cases where eyewitness said this and then they find out the serial killer wasn’t that person or that thing didn’t happen. So, and I also just have my own experiences of like thinking I saw things when I was younger.
The Failure of Human Imagination
DAN FARAH: Here’s an interesting thing you just made me think of. So in the film, Rubio and General Jim Clapper, two people who are completely ideologically and politically opposed to each other, made the same really intelligent point. And they both have knowledge at a classified level of the situation. They both said a problem we as humans have is that there’s something in the human psyche that says, “I cannot wrap my head around or prepare for things I haven’t seen or experienced,” right? And time and time again throughout history, that has proven to be like a human flaw, right?
Rubio goes on to say that the greatest intelligence failures in US history come from a lack of imagination. And he cites a few examples. He says, “We never would’ve imagined the Japanese could figure out how to get torpedoes through the straits and hit us at Pearl Harbor until they did.” He says, “We never would have imagined terrorists would fly to the homeland, learn to fly commercial planes, and then use them in a terrorist attack until they did,” right? He says some other examples too. But time and time again, not wrapping our head around a set of circumstances and using our imagination to think about what might happen or what might be happening, it’s bit us in the ass.
And he ends his line of thought by saying lack of imagination leads to strategic surprise, like Pearl Harbor, like 9/11. And sometimes strategic surprise changes the course of history. And so, him and other people I interviewed think it’s really important to get ahead of this as opposed to waiting for something to happen, as opposed to waiting for, you know, to find out the hard way that China cracked this technology before us and used it in an act of war, or non-human intelligent life does something unpredictable. And then all of a sudden, the US government’s on its heels, and so are other governments on their heels, explaining to the public what they’ve known for a long time.
Can the Public Handle the Truth?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve often heard that the reason why they don’t tell the general public that these things exist is because the general public aren’t ready for this information. Is that an argument? I’ve not really heard you guys say that.
DAN FARAH: Yeah, no, people — there are people involved in gatekeeping this information that don’t think the public can handle the truth. Hal recently told me that people in the legacy program are pointing to The Age of Discovery and saying, look, this film reveals a lot and people aren’t losing their shit. People aren’t jumping out of windows. It’s not causing chaos in society. The public can handle the base facts.
The Most Compelling Evidence
STEVEN BARTLETT: Of all the things you’ve heard, Dan, what was the most compelling story or anecdote that you heard that convinced you?
DAN FARAH: It was really just the sheer number of very high-level military government intelligence officials who were telling me in private settings to my face that at a classified level, they know with absolute certainty this is real.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But if you had to pick one story?
DAN FARAH: It really wasn’t one thing for me. It was the overall. It’s like, for example, I interviewed Rubio and Senator Gillibrand on the same day. They both participated in the film and did lengthy interviews with me and both looked me in the face and told me they thought this was the most important documentary that’s ever been made and that this was really important to bring this information out in a thoughtful way to the public and make them aware of what’s happening. You can’t, like, unhear stuff like that, you know? And it makes an impact on you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What about you, Hal? What was the most persuasive thing that tipped you over the edge from, you know, maybe being agnostic to believing that there are non-human intelligent life amongst us?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, it’s looking at the technology, which is so advanced that I’m essentially certain that no us or our adversaries could have made it. So somebody actually made it, and it has to be somebody who knows a lot more about physics than we do. I mean, there’s nowhere to go but to say, okay, there’s somebody who is way beyond humans to develop that kind of technology and display it.
Separating Fact from Fiction
STEVEN BARTLETT: Of all the evidence that’s been released and all of the rumors and videos and, you know, going back to the crop fields that we used to hear about many years ago, presumably there’s lots of this stuff that you don’t believe, that you think is nonsense.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Oh, there’s definitely—
DAN FARAH: Yeah, there’s tons of reports that are—
STEVEN BARTLETT: —that when you look into them seem like bullshit for sure, because one of the things people often say is that alien encounter descriptions perfectly match the pop culture of that era. So people saw flying saucers in the 1950s after sci-fi movies popularized them, and gray aliens in the 1980s after books like Communion popularized them. And this kind of suggests that sightings are born from human imagination versus—
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, I think that’s a reasonable place to come to. I think a lot of the reports that we get, we can generally set aside as being just manufactured by humans who get caught up in this sort of give and take on social media and so on. But nonetheless, when you really zero in on actual evidence of technologies and evidence of bodies, there you can’t just say it’s just social contagion.
Why UAP Videos Are Always Blurry
STEVEN BARTLETT: When I think about the technologies, when I watched like the Tic Tac video, it’s kind of blurry and I don’t really know what I’m looking at. Like, there’s this thing moving around on the screen that’s like black and white, but I don’t really know what I’m looking at. And I think this has always been the struggle with it, is we’re so used to consuming content in high definition that we can clearly— and it appears to be the case that so many of these UAP videos are like in the distance and kind of blurry and vague, so it makes them harder to believe.
And I think we’re all longing for like a solid video. You talked about them going in and out of the water. How come someone’s not got — if someone like falls over and we capture it all on camera these days, CCTV cameras on every high street, why is there not like a solid video of something going in the water and out the water?
DAN FARAH: Look, multiple people said on camera they have seen with their own eyes classified videos that are indisputable. And some of them told me specifics, like that story I told you — the first video Jay Stratton was shown when he went down this rabbit hole, was a triangle craft hovering over a nuclear weapons site. Air Force security guards had filmed it on a little VHS camera that they had. It was hovering long enough for them to do that. That kind of evidence exists, but it’s just still classified.
Declassification and the Trump Administration
STEVEN BARTLETT: Will it be coming out, do you think?
DAN FARAH: I hope so. I know this process is playing out right now where people like Jay Stratton are helping the administration find where the evidence exists so they can get their hands on it and then determine whether it can safely be declassified. That process is definitely playing out right now.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think — do you trust the Trump administration to release all of the available information?
DAN FARAH: I don’t think it’s a question of do we trust the current administration will release it. It’s do we think all these federal agencies and branches of military are going to turn over the evidence they have to the administration. That’s the question. And the jury’s still out on that. They’re not right now. They’re pushing back, and they’re pushing back hard, and that’s why the administration is working with people like Jay Stratton, who over 16 years has learned where a lot of this evidence is.
They’re working with people like him to find out where the evidence sits, who’s gatekeeping it at each of these different organizations, and how to get to it. So they’re doing a fact-finding mission right now.
The Impact of Disclosure
STEVEN BARTLETT: If it is released, if all the information that you’ve heard from your witnesses is released, if they release craft, alien craft, and they release alien bodies and all of these things, how do you imagine the world would be different?
DAN FARAH: I think it will lead to a giant technology boom. I think once we’re told, hey, there’s this technology that exists that could revolutionize the way we live, it could lead to anti-gravity technology. It could lead to new energy sources, solve the energy crisis overnight, right? It could lead to interstellar travel and going farther out.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: And I think it would have a great psychological effect because, if suddenly you go from the point of saying, well, maybe we’re the only intelligent species in the universe, and then you suddenly get the idea that this is a universe full of life.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean for religion?
DAN FARAH: I think all dogmas will just apply to it, and I think the Vatican has already gotten ahead of it and said, they put out a message a couple of years ago that basically the gist of it was, God’s universe and God’s work is vast and, basically—
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: You couldn’t say that he wouldn’t have the ability to do that. I mean, from a religious standpoint. And certainly in the case of the Catholic Church, they’ve had very positive views about population being throughout the universe.
DAN FARAH: And there’s nothing really, at least from the Catholic Church’s perspective, there’s nothing that counters the, that doesn’t allow you to wrap your head around the fact that there’s other life out there.
Religion and Belief in God
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you guys religious?
DAN FARAH: Not like overly religious, but my mom’s Irish and Catholic. Grew up going to Catholic school. And I went to CCD on Sunday school. It’s called a CCD where I grew up. Do you believe in God? I do.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I do. Do you believe in God?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I do too. Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’m a practicing Catholic. So would that mean that you believe God has made all of these aliens as well?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: That’s what my worldview is. Yeah. I would think that I couldn’t say that’s not the case. But as a scientist, I can’t prove that it is the case. But, just on the statistics of it, it’s pretty likely.
The Legacy Program and Whistleblowers
DAN FARAH: An interesting thing happening right now, Steven, too, is these people who have been gatekeeping the truth, a lot of them are afraid to come forward and tell the White House what they know because they think they’re going to be villainized. They think the optics around this are such that if someone’s been covering this up, they’re the villain of the story, right?
And so the White House and the director of national intelligence and the Department of War realize this. And so in the last couple of weeks, they’ve been messaging out to the military and the intelligence community that this is not a witch hunt. It’s not an endeavor to punish anyone. They want to encourage people to come forward, assure them there will be no punishment for being involved in gatekeeping this. They just want to learn the truth. And find out where the real evidence sits. So that’s another thing that’s playing out right now that I think if it gets out there enough, it will lead to more people coming forward with that evidence we all want to see.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Earlier on, you talked about how some people feel like their lives are at risk because of what they know. Has there been any instance of anyone being punished for saying anything in this regard?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, certainly having their clearances pulled, or losing their opportunities for advancement. We’ve heard stories like that from several people in the intelligence community.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anyone you can name that has said that they were threatened or punished or in some form because of what they said?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, certainly the number one whistleblower for many people has been David Grusch. And so he has outlined the various steps taking against him to basically ruin his career significantly enough that he went to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and said, I’m being punished, shoved aside, losing clearance, and so on, because I came out with this data. And they said, well, what you provided us is serious, worthy of consideration.
DAN FARAH: I think a lot of people have had their lives threatened. I’m not certain if anyone has been killed, but I know people have had their lives threatened. And who’s threatening them? People that are involved in this program referred to as the Legacy Program.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Who think that the evidence should not ever come out.
STEVEN BARTLETT: This Legacy Program. So this is a program run within the US government?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: US government. Elements of it. Elements of it. And also defense contractors.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And you think the Legacy Program knows the truth in this regard?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yes, because they have the firsthand evidence of the crash materials and the bodies.
DAN FARAH: There’s 80 years of data that this group has.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And they haven’t released or leaked that data for the last 80 years? There’d be no advantage.
DAN FARAH: No one’s hacked it? This program is the epitome of a special access program. I think this program is as off the grid as it could possibly be.
Remote Viewing: The CIA’s Secret Program
STEVEN BARTLETT: It almost seems like there’s nothing that eventually hasn’t come to light that the government have done. I’ve sat here and interviewed a lot of CIA spies who’ve told me the history of the CIA and this program that lasted for 12 years and then it comes out in this program. And I mean, even some of the stuff that I’ve heard you talk about, Hal, around— what’s it called? Remote viewing. Remote viewing. Was that a CIA project? That was CIA. What is remote viewing?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Remote viewing, well, the CIA suddenly got concerned because they saw that the Soviets were spending millions of dollars at some of their best institutes to investigate the possible use of, quote, ESP. What’s ESP? Psychic abilities. Yeah, psychic abilities, extrasensory perception. And so, as it turns out, I was at Stanford Research Institute, and they saw my background, and they came to me and said, we’d like for you to look into this. Is there anything to this? I mean, no scientist in America even believes there is such a thing as ESP.
DAN FARAH: Who came to you? CIA. This is in the ’70s?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, back in the ’70s.
STEVEN BARTLETT: The CIA approached you in the ’70s? In the ’70s and asked you to investigate remote viewing.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: That’s right. And so they asked me to set up a small program and $50,000 or $60,000 or whatever. They said, we hope you’ll find this is all nonsense. We can forget about it. We don’t have to worry about it. And it grew into more than a two-decade program, millions of dollars. Stargate is the label for it that most people know about because by now most of the information in the program came out.
And basically, we just found that people essentially, just like you have artistic ability or athletic ability or whatever, musical ability, well, we found out that remote viewing, this ability to sit in a location and pick up information from someplace far away, is a talent that many people could demonstrate. And so we ended up actually training Army intelligence officers at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Meade how to do this.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So wait, let me just simplify this for the audience that might not fully understand what we’re talking about. So remote viewing is the idea that I could sit here in London where we are now and I could be trained to see what was going on in another part of the world.
DAN FARAH: To make your mind’s eye go to a remote location.
Remote Viewing in Action: Finding a Downed Soviet Plane
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I’ll give you a specific example. A Soviet plane that CIA wanted to get hold of went down somewhere in Africa. They didn’t know where because the pilot had bailed out and it just went on until it ran out of gas. So we got two of our, quote, best remote viewers, one that worked for the Air Force and one that worked for my organization, to say, okay, here’s a map of Africa, where’s that plane? We’ve got to go in and get it. And they put an X on the map that was within 3 miles of where the plane went down out of the hundreds of thousands of square miles. And so the CIA went in and got the plane. I mean, how do they do that?
DAN FARAH: By the way, there’s an audio recording of President Jimmy Carter telling that story. Yeah. Post-presidency.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Maybe we should play that.
JIMMY CARTER: One time we had a small plane go down somewhere in Africa. We were not able to find it by surveillance from our satellites. So the director of the CIA, he was also director of all the intelligence agencies, heard about a woman in California that was a medium, and he contacted her, and she gave him the latitude and longitude of the plane’s whereabouts. And the next time one of our space satellites went over that area, we located the plane where she said it was.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
STEVEN BARTLETT: Again, this sounds like it’s impossible. Sounds like— it sounds completely bananas.
DAN FARAH: It sounds like something out of an X-Men comic book. It sounds crazy.
Predicting Silver Futures: A Remote Viewing Experiment
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Okay, there’s going to be a really practical example about it. Skeptics would say, well, if they’re so psychic, why aren’t they rich? Why aren’t they in the stock market or whatever? So we set up a little program, a challenge to predict silver futures. To predict what? Silver futures.
DAN FARAH: Just the value of silver?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, the value of silver on a daily basis. Was it going to go up or go down? So we had somebody said, okay, I will. If you’ll set up a little program like that for 30 days, I’ll bet on what your, quote, remote viewers say. And I’ll put the money in and I’ll give you 10% of what I make. He said, okay, fine. Now, long story short, made $260,000 in the 30 days. We got our 10%, which is $26,000. So people could actually, in this case, even look into the future a day and generate a description of what they were going to see and handle the following day.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Presumably not everybody. How many people did you have do that experiment?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: We had 7 in that experiment. And how many of them were successful in generating? 6 of the 7 generated really good data.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So are those 6 people now rich?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, I don’t know. Some of them may have followed up. Why were those 6 people picked? Since we had learned that sort of anybody can do this, we were actually raising money for a school that was being put together, so I just went to the board of directors and said, “Okay, I’m going to give you a crash course over the weekend in remote viewing of the type we train intelligence officers to do, and so you’re going to be it.” So it was the board of the school? Yeah, the board of the school. They all knew what I did for a living, and so—
DAN FARAH: This program, Stargate, got so much actionable intelligence from the remote viewers that Hal started briefing at the time the director of the CIA on a regular basis.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, I briefed all the way up to Bill Casey, the director of the CIA.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So does it still exist, this program, in any capacity? Remote viewing? If it does, you wouldn’t hear about it.
The Possibility of Remote Viewing Still Being Used
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Why? Because it would be a black, highly classified program. Why? Because we don’t want our adversaries to know how we might be getting access to their data. You just told us. But people cannot believe that, and that’s fine.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But aren’t you under some sort of contract?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, as it turns out, the CIA and DIA— it also went to the DIA— that program finally got declassified at the level that it was operating at, and you can go to the CIA reading room and you can get all the documents on it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So your work was originally classified?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Oh, it was originally top secret, special access program, yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a part of me that goes, “Les, if people could do remote viewing and see into other parts of the world or predict the things that you’re saying, I mean, if it was trainable, everything, life as we know it would be completely—” Flipped on its head.
DAN FARAH: I think it’s unreasonable to think that when Stargate became public, the US government stopped remote viewing.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, I wouldn’t stop if I was the US government. If it worked, I wouldn’t stop.
DAN FARAH: I think it just went underground, moved to a different agency.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, went underground.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you were training people to do it though?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, we had people that we trained.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So train me. We can.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah. How do you train? Now, a number of the military intelligence officers that we trained have now left the military, and they do have training courses.
Dan Farah’s Personal Encounter with Remote Viewing
DAN FARAH: Do you believe that? I do. At first I thought it just sounded too much like something in a comic book, right? But the more I first read about Stargate in the declassified documents, started to realize how serious the government took it, and the more I learned about it through Hal. And then eventually, I really don’t want to get into the details of this, but eventually I got connected with someone who has done remote viewing for the government, and they did a demonstration for me that blew my mind.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you would think if anyone was capable of doing remote viewing, they could go on the internet and make one prediction or do one video that would be, you know, proven to be true, and they would literally be considered to be a superhuman. Like they would literally be— I mean, people would probably think they were a deity or a spiritual leader or something. If one person could do it, could you imagine?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Well, what we found was that it seems to be an action that is just part of the human makeup. And so it isn’t like they’re a super deity or a godlike or really off the charts. It’s something that people can learn to do, like they can learn to play the piano. Or whatever, for whatever reason.
DAN FARAH: Maybe it was a skill set.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Now we have new psychiatrists and neurophysiologists beginning to study how does consciousness do its thing in the brain and so on. Are there elements of it, once you get into quantum theory and quantum entanglement, that would say you could have evidence beyond just our physical physical structure.
The Connection Between Remote Viewing and UAP Craft
DAN FARAH: Like it could be rationalized with a quantum connection, basically, the moving your mind’s eye to another location, which also goes to Hal’s life very interestingly. First was the Stargate stuff and then he got into UAP, and the overlap that I find fascinating is some of these craft that have been found or crashes that have happened, the reports from people involved say that a lot of them don’t have any control panels in them. Like they’re basically empty other than seats, which suggests that maybe there’s some sort of mind connection controlling these craft.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I did wonder about the crafts. I thought, you know, if I was an advanced civilization, why would I— and I was that smart— why would I send life to these planets when I could just send the crafts? You know, why am I sending biological life when I could just send the—
DAN FARAH: Maybe they’re manufactured biological life. Maybe it’s— maybe they’re the equivalent of— maybe they’re not Settians. Sensing. Yeah, it’s true. But the remote viewing stuff opens up a lot of possibilities.
The Quantum Shielding Experiment
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, I mean, we, as part of this CIA program, we found that people could affect quantum devices that were totally shielded by superconducting shielding. Tell them that particular story.
Yeah, there is a, quote, “psychic,” so-called, and so I brought him to Stanford. And I was skeptical at the time. And I said, OK, well, we’ve got this super experiment where there’s a tiny quantum chip down inside of this electrical shielding, magnetic shielding, superconducting shielding. We want to see if you can affect it. And he did.
I mean, this is supposed to be totally non-affectable from anything on the outside. In fact, it was developed by the Navy to just look for corks and stuff like that, and so it was supposed to not be influenced from the outside by anything. And he influenced it.
When I say he influenced it, I’m not just saying there’s a little blip that you can kind of read into it. No, it was a system where it ordinarily just had an oscillating signal. Like that, and then when he affected it, it just stopped the oscillation. Then he could also make the oscillation go twice as fast. Of course, poor graduate student whose life depended on this not being affected from the outside, you know, really.
But then that raised a big issue for them. That means, gee, does that mean if we hide our documents inside superconducting safes, the Russians might be able to. So actually, when we had détente, the American remote viewers got together with the Soviet remote viewers and traded war stories, did experiments together.
Remaining Open-Minded
STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, I think I’m naturally skeptical because I’m skeptical with all things, but I’m often proven wrong. So, you know, my fiancée, she believes lots of things I don’t believe. And so frequently she’s been proven right in those things that I remain open-minded to things in life because I’ve learned to.
So I think that’s where I remain. I remain open-minded. And I think on the balance of probability, if you ask me, do I think there’s other life in the universe, I think it would be crazy to say there wasn’t. Right, right. But has there been life that has arrived here that we’ve recovered? I just, I would need more evidence.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: Is there any? I think that’s the right attitude. And we’re hoping that with the release of documents that’s starting to happen now, that you’ll get that evidence. But in the absence of actually getting access to the evidence, it’s very reasonable to be skeptical.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Absolutely.
DAN FARAH: I do think, though, the current administration in the U.S. is so focused on following through with this directive the president gave to get all the evidence within the possession of the federal government, all the different agencies, the military branches, and then figure out what can be declassified. I think they’re taking it so serious that we’re going to get to more tranches of more meaningful evidence. And I think eventually we’ll get to that thing that we’ve— that moment that we’ve all only seen in movies where a sitting president steps to a microphone and tells the world we’re not alone in the universe.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I think we’re going to get there. I think so too.
DAN FARAH: Just a matter of time.
What Disclosure Would Mean for Humanity
STEVEN BARTLETT: Does it change the meaning of life if that becomes the case? Does it mean anything for us as humans? What do you think the meaning of life is, Hal? And do you think we should change our behavior in any way, even if this moment does occur?
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: I think if we found out that there were life throughout the universe, that it can be developed in all kinds of forms, then that makes us take a new look at, well, what does it mean to be human. We ought to think about, if we can, interacting with these other species and seeing what we can learn from them and what might they learn from us. And so it just opens up a whole new sort of view of what the universe is like. I mean, I’ve got 15 grandkids. They should grow up in a universe where it’s teeming with life and they know that, and that’s a very kind of an exciting kind of thing.
DAN FARAH: I think it also could be the one thing that could unify all of humanity. Yes. You know, Reagan gave a great speech during his presidency at the United Nations where he said he often thinks that it might be a threat from outside this universe that makes all of humanity come together and think more about what it has in common than its differences and, you know, moves them past the conflicts of the moment. And that might be wishful thinking and might be naive, but it also might actually be the one thing that could line people up.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Has it changed how you think about the meaning of life?
DAN FARAH: Between what I’ve learned about the reality of the UAP situation and the existence of non-human intelligent life, what I’ve learned about, for example, remote viewing, it’s made me realize that our sort of Western presence modern-day view of reality is not complete. You know, we think we know everything there is, you know, to life and how things work, and we just don’t.
And when you’re honest with yourself and you look back at history, all the times people thought that, they were proven wrong pretty quickly. And so it’s made me open to a lot more possibilities than I would have been just 10 years ago.
DR. HAL PUTHOFF: You think it’d be a renaissance. In our attitudes toward life and everything.
Are They Open to Being Wrong?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you both open to being wrong?
DAN FARAH: Yeah, look, I should have said this early on. When I first started making my documentary, I was totally prepared to have people tell me, “Look, this is all bullshit. It was all cover for our classified projects.” Did they? No, no one did. That was the crazy thing. Not a single person did.
I was trying to pull it out of people. I’d be like, you know, come on, this is really— this is like a black project, an unacknowledged special access program, right? Like, just say nothing if that’s the case. And they were like, no, dude, not even close. Like, it was over and over.
And these weren’t random people. These were like senior people on the Senate Intelligence Committee, on the Senate Armed Services Committee, leaders in the intelligence community, leaders in the military. And so, yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s hard to ignore. Yeah. Well, Trump has released the first round of the UAP reports. So I guess in many respects, this conversation is to be continued. Yeah. Yeah.
DAN FARAH: And we have been told by our friends in government that the next tranche of evidence is likely to come out in the next 30 days or so. And it’s going to be a rolling declassification process. So there’ll be a lot more to talk about in the near future.
Closing Thoughts
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. I feel really curious. Thank you for your interest in this. Very, very curious, and I highly recommend people go check out your documentary. I’m going to link it below. I think one of the great things about the documentary is the diversity of people you’ve spoken to, including Marco Rubio, who is now working alongside President Trump, and many others, including yourself, Hal, and other guests that I’ve— people like Jay, who I hope to speak to sometime soon.
DAN FARAH: Cool. Thank you for having us, and thank you for bringing attention to interesting topics like this. I really do think people like you are helping open people’s minds. You know, in the past you only had— it wasn’t that long ago, there was only 4 TV networks, right? And a small group of legacy media people controlled what people thought about, really. So people like you are opening up everyone’s minds to other possibilities and other information. So thank you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, it’s interesting because, again, sometimes I think I have to remind the audience of like why I do what I do and why I pick the subjects that I pick. But it’s honestly just what I’m curious about. And if something rises in public curiosity and it’s in my curiosity, then I’ll speak about it. It’s not an endorsement of me believing everything. It is just me wanting to learn more. Yeah.
And I, you know, I wish we lived in a society that was more open-minded generally to the people on the other side of the aisle or the subjects that are currently considered to be, I don’t know, controversial or not. Because, you know, it’s not lost on me that my own very existence as a Black businessman is in and of itself something that was once a very controversial idea. And so I’m all for, you know, controversial ideas being— having some kind of space to be expressed.
DAN FARAH: Well, every major breakthrough in the history of humanity came from someone being curious, right? And wanting to learn about something they weren’t aware of. So I think great things will come out of it. And you just touched on something we didn’t mention, which is I found shockingly that this is the UAP issue. Non-human intelligent life is the most bipartisan issue in Washington, DC. At a time when Democrats and Republicans in the United States can’t agree on anything, they’re completely lined up on this being the biggest issue of our time. That’s right. Extremely significant. And like that says a lot too, you know?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. To be continued. To be continued. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It’s different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out, and I bet you, you might love it.
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