UAP Disclosure Fund Presentation with House Oversight Committee, May 2025

[NorCal Dave]

The UAP Disclosure Fund (UAPDF) is an advocacy group pushing for the government to reveal the truth about UAP/UFOs. Founded by political strategist Yuan Fung with Christopher Mellon as the Chairman of the Board, it's basically a lobbying group for UAP (aliens) disclosure as the name implies. I suspect they are the drivers behind the scenes in regard to various hearings and whistle-blowers concerning UAP. To that end, they held a symposium type thing on May 1, in Washington DC with associates of UAPDF and members of Congress:

https://uapdisclosurefund.org/events/understanding-uap-science

At least one aspect of this event went viral immediately in the UFO world when Lue Elizondo, acting as the moderator, introduced a photo supposedly taken by a pilot and described as:

It is a lenticular object, and when you look at the shadow being cast. It is significantly large.

And the object, potentially is anywhere between 600 to 1000 feet in diameter. There's a particular object, and it is silver.

The object was quickly identified as 2 circle crops in Colorado creating an optical illusion, something UAPDF did acknowledge in a vague way:

Please note: A photograph presented by the moderator around 1:31:41 has since been widely identified, with analysis suggesting a conventional origin.

More interesting is the presentations made to members of Congress by the UAPDF team, including the recovery of crashed alien UFOs, the reverse engineering of said craft, the visitation to Earth by various alien cultures and the government cover-up of these things. While many of these claims have circulated for years, it's interesting to hear them directly from the proponents of the claims. Here they are in their own words, live and unedited.

TL,DR: At this presentation to Congress members, Davis recounted a number of stories about crash retrieval programs, including the disputed Wilson memo, but little to no actual evidence. He confirmed that he was one of Grusch's sources for his claims as well as the 2017 NYT article. Davis' level of clearance he may have had is vague, given the spectacular claims he is presenting. His evidence is primarily him telling what he learned, may have known or was told by largely unnamed sources.

It's difficult to narrow down excerpts from this symposium into 1 claim. Rather it's a number of clams being made by a number of people, so I'll let Mick and the moderators decide if we need multiple threads for each claim, or maybe each claimant. Or if it's just one thread that goes over the various speakers and becomes a place to go find their various claims as they currently offer them.

Here is the Q&A panel, including Elizondo at the podium, with (L to R) Loab, Gallaudt, Davis, Luna, Burilson, Burchete, and Begich:

I'll start off with the first video offered on the website concerning the claims of Dr. Eric Davis. For those that don't follow the UFO world, Davis is a PhD (ASU) physicist that seems to often specialize in possible futuristic applications. He has worked for various DoD contractors over the years. More importantly, he is a long time associate of Dr. Hal Puthoff and currently works for Puthoff's EarthTech. He was involved in Robert Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) as well as writing DIRD papers for EarthTech, the contractor to Bigelow's Bigelow Advanced Aero Space Services (BAASS) the prime contractor to the DoD program called AAWSAP which morphed into AATIP, which was led by Elizondo. The moderator. It's all very inner-connected.

Iv'e edited the transcript and time stamps for brevity. I've used ( ) to show words that I've corrected from auto-transcript by YouTube and ... to show where I've removed repetitive words. Dr. Davis skips around a bit, but here are some of the salient points he was offering to members of congress. Right from the beginning, I think there is a clue about how this entire presentation may have played out. In introducing Davis, Elizondo mentions what is know as the "Wilson-Davis memo" and how it was entered into the congressional record and is an important piece of evidence for a UFO crash retrieval program. Note also the reference to Davis knowing classified things that he has to be careful talking about:

1:03
...it was submitted into...the matter of record for Congress a couple years ago the Wilson

Davis (memo) uh it was alleged that he was the author of and if you don't know

what that is I encourage you to look it up it has been entered as a matter of public record in the congressional

record and it is extremely significant

this is the man I won't say he did or
1:29
he didn't I'll let him tell you um who authored that potentially and

furthermore I nevertheless had involvement in the (UAP) program specifically from a crash retrieval

perspective

Now we be mindful here Uh Dr Davis please be careful of security classification but do you mind sharing

to the degree you're comfortable with their involvement with information related crash retrievals and
1:53
uh adversaries sure Want me to come up
2:00
thank you Lou I've been uh I'm an astrophysicist and also a what we what

Just in this first minute we have a lesson in how UAP Disclosure works. Elizondo says the Wilson-Davis memo has been entered in the congressional record and is "extremely significant", but this is immediately followed up with being vague about where it came from. He notes Davis MAY have written it or he may not have. The memo, which was supposedly discovered in the papers of former astronaut Edgar Mitchel and purports to be notes or a record of a conversation between Davis or maybe not Davis, and General Wilson while sitting in a car in Las Vegas. Wilson supposedly talks about UFOs and a crash retrieval program and how he was told to stop looking into it, thus evidence of a crash retrieval program.

At best the memo would be a 2nd hand, but at least we could question Davis about it for clarity. Unfortunately, Davis has always remained ambiguous about where the memo came from, if he wrote it or if it was even him in the car with Wilson. For his part Wilson has maintained that he doesn't know Davis, never said anything about UFOs and retrieval programs to anyone and wasn't anywhere near Las Vegas when the supposed conversation took place. In addition there are a number of questionable aspects to the physical memo. I'll link below to more in-depth discussion of the problematic memo.

Again, the first suggestion of evidence for a crash retrieval program, presented in the first minute of the session is a 2nd recollection of dubious origin. Davis continues with how he works on FTL propulsion systems, (including a paper on teleportation linked below):

2:17
(what) Mark Melts at NASA and I call breakthrough propulsion physicist worked on breaking propulsion yonder from 1996

to 2002 and then we continued after that to develop a book that we published in the AIAA press in 2009 uh for (years) of

propulsion science So my background is in uh advanced deep space and interstellar space flight mostly fast(er)
2:27
(than) light propulsion through the use of germanium theory and quantum field theory as well as advanced nuclear

propulsion like nuclear fusion and nuclear fusion and u energy propulsion

which I worked on as a principal investigator for the air force research lab at air force base So I've got quite

a broad background and I began my work in uh UFOs uh or UAP starting in 1996

This is, in my mind a bit misleading. He states he was a "principal investigator" for an air force research lab AND began his work in UFOs in 1996. It makes it sound like he's looking into UFOs while an investigator for the air force. He goes on, that in 1996 he was hired by Bigelow for his NIDS program:

2:50
when Robert Bigalow hired me and worked for him as his director of aerospace physics and astrophysics at the National

Institute for Discovery Science and that was a um that was a pretty transformative job for him because as a

physical scientist I'm seeing for the first time Mad (phenomenon) I'm investigating using forensic uh science techniques in
3:10
the field interviewing witness collecting data here and I have a team of uh uh colleagues on the staff

So, it's while at NIDS he sees "mad phenomenon" and begins his Investigations. Note, NIDS had nothing to do with the US government or DoD. It was a completely private endeavor funded by Bigelow, much of which took place at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah after he purchased it. While the ranch has generated books, articles, TV shows and conventions and lots of stories, in 20 years no one associated with it has never produce any tangible testable bit of evidence for UFOs or any of the other paranormal activities reported.

Davis goes on to talk about Carl Sagen changing his mind on UFOs and then brings up the Strawman argument of military pilots having bad eyesight before Elizondo steers him back to crash retrieval programs, which still elicits some rambling:

6:30
program and the two Voyager missions to the outer planets So it's pertaining to the topic that Lou wants me to talk

about I'm not trying to sensitive subject

Um so uh it's due to astronaut Ed Mitchell ....Because of him and I won't go into the long story but it's because of him that I got on the trail of looking

for the so-called uh legend within the UFO community uh uh the retrieval of

crashed or landed UAP craft or UFO craft ...
So um so I followed this trail and
7:17
I ended up over the course of the following two and a half decades working for Bigalow working for

the Air Force Research Lab working for Hal (Puthoff EarthTech) international incorporated...

working at the aerospace corporation (he doesn't specify what company) So we're we're working in a combination of industry and classified programs that we

were contracted to do on behalf of the uh for the Defense Intelligence Agency and for the Pentagon (AWWSAP) agencies that Lou

worked at and uh the UAP task force that Jay Stratton led uh at the Office of Naval Intelligence And so uh a long story short is that I came into contact

with industry leaders technical scientists uh both active duty and later retired as
8:05
well as intelligence officers generals admirals colonels uh people who directed
8:10
intelligence or human intelligence collection analysis directorates at the DIA and the Central Intelligence Agency

who uh reached out to me to have me do some foreign UAP uh intelligence analysis and

All of that to say:

8:23
assessment and so uh I have been exposed to so much in the classified real world that I can tell you definitively that
...the human race basically the world's biggest
governments uh like the United States our adversaries China and Russia at least as far as I know have had the uh
8:45
occasion to recover craft that have either landed or crashed or both uh in
their territory or even outside of their territories and have taken those back to they're...

If we unpack the above statements a bit, we get that after doing work on some satellite missions, Astronaut Mitchel got him on the trail of UFO legends, like a crash retrieval program. In the ensuing 25 years he worked for the Air Force Research Lab, EarthTech, Robert Bigelow and maybe some other people in government.

It's important to remember that EarthTech and Bigelow are interconnected, so there is a lot of overlap. While working for Bigelow's NIDS (~1996-2003) there was no government involvement and no clearance needed.

When he talks about working for the DIA, it's likely a reference to the AWWSAP program, a tax payer funded version of NIDS. In a nutshell, Davis wrote papers on FTL propulsion for Puthoff's EarthTech. EarthTech then gave these papers to Bigelow'e BAASS and BAASS gave them to AWWSAP at the DIA. AWWSAP was never secret or classified.

Then he did some work with Jay Stratton, Elizondo's former partner in ATTIP and the UAP Task Force, again, not secret or classified, as well as some work with TTSA, a private company. The reference to CIA people reaching out to him, may be referring to his long association with Dr. Kit Green, a former CIA employee.

It's unclear exactly what he did for the Air Force Research Lab, but there is at least one paper on teleportation (link below), but again how much was classified and what clearances did he have.

One has to ask, given the unclassified nature of NIDS, EarthTech, BAASS, where exactly did Davis learn all this information to confirm the existence of crash retrieval programs? Especially given his claim that these programs are very highly classified and hidden from congress:

8:50
…the most sensitive of their
programs that they've ever had These programs are uh even more sensitive and more well hidden than uh the Manhattan project was or or the modern nuclear weapons industry and and the um US military and the department of energy
9:10
programs to uh maintain and and upgrade and modernize our nuclear weapons arsenal And so…this is one of the most well-hidden programs It is hidden from congressional oversight and always has been and it was
hidden by the action of the President Eisenhower who instituted presidential emergency action directives during his administration These directives are not shared with Congress

And, these programs are hidden from FOIA requests:

9:30
They were classified They and when the freedom of
information act was instituted in the 70s It is now subject those are not subjected to the freedom of information
act uh request Um this these directives provide cover for actions that are
associated with the…retrieval of these vehicles…

This brings up the central question I've always had with these claims. If these programs have been hidden away since the '50s and kept hidden by every administration ever since and they are so classified that they've been hidden from congress, how is it Davis knows about them? And can talk about them?

Davis bring up the usual claim that these programs are also hidden via contractors and shell companies:

9:55
scientific and engineering stand with them And that takes place within the industry and what happens is the
department of defense offices CIA offices they create shell companies They
give a salt source contract to the shell company who passes the money to a selected group of uh defense industry firms and those firms will take that contract money and turn them around…
It's called internal research and development funds which they give to their own
people inside their company their own employees to do the reverse engineering and um uh analysis and studying of these
recovered vehicles And so this avoids all congressional oversight It avoids the gang of eight and um it's one of the most clever techniques used to hide it

This does raise the question of President Eisinhower's aforementioned "emergancy action directives" not being needed if the CIA can just play this shell game with companies like Lockheed. I suppose the argument is that the shell games are the way the emergency action directives are cared out.

Again, I'm going to be a broken record here, but how does Davis know about this CIA/contractor shell game?

Next we get yet another vailed and vague reference to the Davis-Wilson memo, with Davis saying "and um and that's about as much as I could say" and proceeding to say what's in the Davis-Wilson memo

10:40
And as far as I know only one four star general uh and one in three star admiral (Wilson)
were able to locate these programs And um and that's about as much as I could say they located the programs uh and
they uncovered them One got a lot of resistance and hostile reception and was
uh told that uh he found who he was looking for….Yes they were a UFO UAP crash retrieval in reverse engineering program The other one uh had
11:13
a lot more political power behind him because of his stature as a four-star general and uh he's able to get into
program and uh use his authority and his access I think they call that a uh um
super user the super user access to all with that super use access programs So
he had his capability available with him into that whole thing

There is no mention of who this General was, what he found, where he found it or what happened after that. He just used his "super user access" to get into the program and must have shared it with Davis? Davis doesn't say, he just pivots to whistleblower David Grusch:

11:31
Uh I was fortunate to meet Dave (Grusch, though YouTube correctly transcribes Davis calling him Drush) at the behest of uh
Jay Stratton Dave was a NRO liaison officer to the UAP task force and Dave
was working for his boss at the NRO which was situated in the second force
11:48
Gifts (SCIF maybe?) uh of the aerospace corporation building in Colorado Springs and I was assigned to work at the aerospace
corporation facility in Huntsville Alabama because I was supporting NASA's space propulsion program office So uh
12:01
Jay put Dave and and Dave's uh boss and I together and I briefed them for two
and a half days just the week before COVID struck And uh Dave took all of my
classified and uh proprietary information of all the investigations I did at NIDS AFRL who working for uh help
12:19
put off at her and he took that data and ran with it

As many suspected, people like Davis are some of Grushc's sources. Note that Davis claims Grush (Dave) took all of his classified and proprietary information from his investigations at NIDS and the Air Force Research Lab. We've already established that there was nothing classified going on at NIDS and Davis' main job at ARFL seemed to be FTL propulsion, so again, what exactly is he passing on to Grusch.

He gives the Strawman argument that Grusch's IG complaint having merit insinuates that the claims Grusch made, and got from Davis, have merit.

He rambles about changing code names for these projects before talking about the 1933 Italian UFO recovery:

12:56
uh the (amount of?) money that's been involved uh either since since the beginning in 1944 with the reverse recovery of Italy
of a US arms recovery of a crap that crashed in Italy back in 1933 The United
States Army when invaded Italy and pushed the third (Riech) out they were able to recover that craft and bring it

Maybe we now know where Grusch got this story. The history of the claim from its origins to its current form is long and convoluted, but the basics are: In the '90s some documents, likely forged, showed up in Italian UFO circles about some possible UFOs, including something that crashed in 1933. The documents said it was taken to a nearby airfield and a group was put together to study it. That's all the documents say.

The notion that the US retrieved it, possibly with the help of the pope according to Grusch and many other details, including aliens, that circulate today were added in the mid '00s by a serial fantasizer and teller of tales. Link below to complete discussion.

This leads to the Italian UFO being brought to Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio, a standard trope and the same place the wreckage from Roswell was brought:

13:15
back to (Wright) airfield and all of the crash retrievals that have taken place generally on land have gone to right
airfield the majority of the crash approvals or recoveries of whatever ….
13:34
I don't know where they're going today though because I've only worked on the legacy uh history of this part of it up
until about uh the early 2010s and ever since the end of the (AWWSAP) and the ATIP I
don't know where that those operations are going are these days So I think
13:53
that's about it (?) um is that it

That's it. That's Eric Davis' evidence for a secret UFO crash retrieval program as presented to members of congress.

He then goes on to talk about being interviewed by Kean and Blumenthal for the '17 NYT piece. I read back through the original article, and his name doesn't appear. Side note: rereading the original, one sees that even then what Elizondo was doing was unfunded and a bit of a side hustle https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html.

Davis told Kean these are alien craft:

13:58
and I'll just say this up really easily Uh (Leslie) (Kean) and Ralph (Blumenthal) asked me this for an interview I gave them um in July of 2020 for the New York Times article that
they published They interviewed Lou and uh Senate uh former Senate Majority Reed leader Harry Reid …Okay So I said basically my interface with
the leadership at the industry uh which were a number of individuals as the
14:28
follower the craft that have been recovered are not of this earth they're not made by he accounts they are not from this planet they are not new they are an (alien) technology whatever the
word alien means are they actually for us we don't know we don't know uh what
motives do they have well we need anthropologists and social psychologists and philosophers to figure that out

Davis' session ends with Elizondo recommending a classified briefing with him:

15:29
Well thank you Dr Davis My recommendation would be at some point here to get you in a classified setting like some of the rest of us and you'd already done that before and have a free conversation with some of the representatives who I think would be um really be interested to hear the other part of that conversation…

Note, this is something Davis has already done as well as talked to ARRO about his claims and nothing seems to have come from those encounters. It seems Davis, along with Puthoff and to a lesser extent Kit Green, have been making these claims for decades to no avail.

Dr. Davis offered plenty of claims, anecdotes and supposed things he was told, but little to no actual evidence for any of it. The one named source, Adrm Wilson, was 2nd hand at best and has categorically denied any of the claims made on his behalf.

IF Davis learned about all these clandestine super secret crash retrieval programs because he had the clearance to be read into them, then how is it he can talk about them publicly, and has been for years?

IF he did NOT have the clearance to be read into these programs, then how does he know about them?

IF he was told about these programs by people that in fact had the clearance to be read into them, how is they could share all this with Davis?

I think this once again supports the idea that a small, though connected, group has created a tautological inner world where they share stories back and forth and ultimately become each other's source, to the point where they end up re-sharing their own stories.

I'm interested in the video with Mike Gold, formerly of NASA and Dr. Anna Brady-Estivas where they talk about alien material.

The Black Vault did an extensive review of the Davis-Wilson memo that can be found here:

https://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-admiral-wilson-leak-an-analysis/

See post #26 in this thread for LilWabbit 's break down of the letter involved in the David-Wilson memo:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/the-congressional-uap-hearings-debrief.13077/#post-296367

The Italian UFO and supposed recovery is discussed here:

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/claim-a-ufo-crashed-in-1933-italy-and-the-us-recovered-it.13282/#post-315299

Eric Davis paper for the AFRL about teleportation:


Source: https://www.scribd.com/doc/218005054/The-Air-Force-Research-Lab-s-August-Teleportation-Physics-Report-2004

 

[MapperGuy]

I look forward to the many generations of scientists and technicians and bureaucrats who have been keeping all of this secret since 1944 (?) having their annual reunion inside... (what's the biggest stadium in the US today?)

Tolkien said "the tale grew in the telling" and this tale also seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. With nothing to show for it.

If NASA has been working on FTL travel for decades where is the Starship Enterprise parked these days. The biggest question is if so much time and money has been spent over so many years why are there no obvious results? Why has no military unveiled their newest flying saucer and promptly wiped out an adversaries entire military industrial complex? Should be easy, right?

 

[elvenwear]

If NASA has been working on FTL travel for decades where is the Starship Enterprise parked these days. The biggest question is if so much time and money has been spent over so many years why are there no obvious results? Why has no military unveiled their newest flying saucer and promptly wiped out an adversaries entire military industrial complex? Should be easy, right?

If NASA has been working on FTL, how do they get around the issues of causality? How do they have craft that travel faster than light? To add to your point, why don't they have weapons that operate at high speeds? I understand they are working on rail guns and there are major engineering challenges with these, but a weapon that operated near the speed of light would not need an explosive payload since the momentum would do far more damage that any warhead. America could scale back on their nuclear arsenal.

The problem with FTL as I understand it is that the faster you go, the slower time operates. If you have a optical clock on a spaceship, where each photon needs to move from point A to point B to trigger a 'tick', you can see the problem. Ordinarily, the journey between atom A and atom B is a fast journey. As the speed of the spaceship increases, the journey time from atom A to atom B increases since the distance between where atom A was and where atom B now is continues to increase. Since the photon can only travel at or near the speed of light, as the ship approaches the speed of light, the amount of time it takes for a photon to get from atom A to atom B becomes infinite, so time stops. Any method of propulsion would also slow down as the reaction would slow down for the same reasons.

Travelling beyond the speed of light really isn't possible for this reason.

 

[jarlrmai]

FTL is impossible because it breaks causality, the practical issues of getting an object to near light speed are more about energy and mass. Local time for the object moving at near light speed is still the same internally, time dilation is an effect of relativity.

 

[JMartJr]

Davis bring up the usual claim that these programs are also hidden via contractors and shell companies:

This does not solve the problems of keeping a secret, it makes them worse by adding more and more people who are "in on the secret." If you want to keep a secret, you restrict knowledge to fewer people, you don't tell more folks each of whom is one more potential leaker.

The whole concept is just a shifting of goalposts:
"The Government is keeping this stuff secret!"
"Now we have positions in the government where we could disclose stuff, and there isn't anything... drat..."
"Well... the secret stuff is all over in those contractors' hands now!!!"

 

[NorCal Dave]

To be a bit more complete, here is a list of DIRD papers generated by Hal Puthoff's EarthTech while under contract to BAASS, the prime contractor to AWWSAP:

Davis was responsible for subjects like "Vacuum Energy Applications", "Antigravity for Aerospace Applications" and "Wormholes in Space Time". Whether these subjects are possible future technologies, fringe science or straight up ScyFy, I'll let others smarter than me argue about. What I can say, is they aren't really about retrieved UFOs and don't seem to rise to the level of security and clearance that would suggest DAvis was read into crash retrieval programs.

In addition, we have at least one paper written by Davis (Warp Drive Metrics was his company) for the AFRL and for which he appears to have been paid $25,000 (from @Mendel in the AWWSAP thread):

To find out, the propulsion research lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio — the same cutting-edge lab that helped bring stealth technology and lasers to the Air Force — commissioned a study.

"We have to be looking well into the future, not just the needs of tomorrow or even next year," says Col. Mike Heil, who directs the laboratory. "We're looking at perhaps 30 years."

The Air Force paid $25,000 to a researcher at a company in Las Vegas called Warp Drive Metrics.

What they got back was 78 pagesof mathematical calculations and diagrams. And after much talk of "wormholes" and "parallel universes," came a conclusion: "We are still very far away from being able to entangle and teleport human beings and bulk inanimate objects," reads page 46 of the report (PDF file).

In other words, says Heil: "The concept of transporting any large amount of matter is highly impractical and looks to be highly impractical well into the future."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna6940417

That works out to $256 per page, for something that's not really useful. More importantly, it indicates Davis was not necessarily employed by the AFRL, rather he did contract work. I know many federal workers are in fact contractors, but contracting to write papers on teleportation doesn't seem to require the levels of clearance Davis would have needed to be read into programs so secret and classified they are hidden from Congress.

 

[jarlrmai]

All roads lead to Eric Davis again eh

 

[NorCal Dave]

All roads lead to Eric Davis again eh

Not quite, but he is the spokesperson, at this conference, for a group that goes back to the '90s at least. That's when Davis hooks up with Hal Puthoff, Kit Green, Jacques Vallee, George Knapp, John Mack, John Alexander and Robert Bigelow. Davis was 1 of 3 full time employees at NIDS:

Board members learned that three full-time staff members had been hired: biochemist Colm Kelleher, physicist Eric Davis, and microbiologist/veterinarian George Onet—three men whose abilities would later be put to the test at a Utah property that would eventually be known to the rest of the world as Skinwalker Ranch.

pg. 15 Kelleher, Colm A.. Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders' Account of the Secret Government UFO Program. RTMA, LLC. Kindle Edition.

So, when he talks about working for the AFRL at the same time, he's really more of a full timer at NIDS and just doing some side contract work for AFRL it seems.

In this conference setting , he's offering the distillation of what these guys have been discussing for decades. Through AWWSAP/AATIP they influenced a new group including Elizondo, Stratton and Mellon, became involved in TTSA and now have influenced yet another new group with people like Grusch, and unfortunately some members of Congress.

Ultimately, I think most of these roads lead back to Puthoff. He was involved with Project Stargate back in the '70s, has been deeply involved with Bigelow and all his UFO endeavors, believes in Psy, UFOs and crash retrieval programs. He hired Davis on at EarthTech when NIDS folded and Davis credits him in his Teleportation paper for the AFRL (screenshot needed):

 

[Eburacum]

Incidentally, I am not aware that Carl Sagan ever changed his opinion on UFOs, which was always open-minded and evidence-driven, but came to no conclusions. Extraordinary claims still require extraordinary evidence.

 

[FatPhil]

Is no-one gonna mention the laserbeams for eyes?

 

[yoshy]

Is no-one gonna mention the laserbeams for eyes?

What are you referring to lol

 

[MonkeeSage]

Ultimately, I think most of these roads lead back to Puthoff.

Speaking of which...

I'm interested in the video with Mike Gold, formerly of NASA and Dr. Anna Brady-Estivas where they talk about alien material.

"We're fortunate to have as our advisor Hal Puthoff..." -Anna Brady-Estevez

03:12:10

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yFwUdbSpko&t=11531s

 

[FatPhil]

What are you referring to lol

 

[yoshy]

Lmao it's definitely a reflection on his glasses, but I prefer your explanation that he has laser eyes. (Reminds me of the old conspiracy videos where people would take a single frame from a video to claim Reptilian eyes for celebrities or politicians)

 

[JMartJr]

(Reminds me of the old conspiracy videos where people would take a single frame from a video to claim Reptilian eyes for celebrities or politicians)

Captain Disillusion did a very good video on that:

Spoiler: Spoilered to minimize disruption of thread flow, skip if uninterested in side-topic

Captain Disillusion: To make video files smaller and easier to stream, Godless scientists invented 'Compression'.
...
Interframe compression goes further by only using full intra-recorded pictures, called 'I-Frames' once in a while, and filling the rest of the space with a different kind of data called 'Predicted Picture Frames' or 'P-Frames'. P-Frames only carry information on how to move pieces of the last I-Frame, called 'Macroblocks', around to simulate the motion that happens in subsequent frames. Basically, P-Frames wear I-Frames like a skin suit and puppeteer them around until the next proper I-Frame can take over.
...
...normally, this works okay and cuts down on file size, but, sometimes, if I-Frames are really far apart and one of them gets skipped in a badly copied file, or a live stream from pretty boy prison, the P-Frames keep distorting the picture way beyond what looks acceptable. They're working from too old a reference. Like, if someone blinked, and the I-Frame where their eyes opened back up gets skipped, P-Frames go on moving the closed eyelids around like they're eyeballs, and suddenly a bunch of conspiracy theorists need to change their pants.

Ignorant conspiracy theorist: "Please, somebody try to give me a logical explanation for that."

Captain Disillusion: "I just did, ***hole."

(Quoted bit starts around 2:29)

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flBfxNTUIns

 

[NorCal Dave]

Speaking of which...



"We're fortunate to have as our advisor Hal Puthoff..." -Anna Brady-Estevez

03:12:10

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yFwUdbSpko&t=11531s

3+ hours huh? IF you want to take that one my friend, go for it. No seriously go for it .

 

[NorCal Dave]

My apologies. I had figured when Elizondo shifted from Dr. Davis to Dr. Loab in the presentation, Davis was done, at least for that video. However, as it was a Q&A, it turns out Davis had a few more goes at it. At a quick glance, it appears Davis accounts for nearly 25 minutes of the 40 minute session.

Having established that a secret UFO crash retrieval program exists, Davis moves on to some of the implications of these programs, including "exotic materials" and the actual aliens. Elizondo asks Davis about so-called "exotic materials". Sorry, it's a bit of a longer quote and I'm still fooling with the YouTube transcripts to make it more readable, but keep some of the timestamps:

23:12
(Elizondo) the question goes to Dr Davis Eric Davis Um we've had discussions at length in certain
settings um in formal official settings you might have been part of where we talk about exotic material I think it might be very helpful to the degree you can can you please explain um what is
what makes exotic material that has been recovered from the US government exotic
what makes it different from atomically and chemically
23:46
(Davis) it's actually a very simple answer It's the way it's fabricated…That's what makes it exotic It's not a new element that's never been discovered uh and placed on the periodic table of elements No No Uh the materials are in the periodic tables They're either radioactive isotopes that we already go with or they're any of the other non-raactive non-actide elements on the table It's just the combination of the materials is unusual Uh it could
24:15
be that you could say that that's exotic but it's the composition It's how you
built the craft the materials that form the craft and everything inside the craft It's it's quite exotic because uh one of the company's uh leadership was a young material scientist when he
graduated with his doctorate in material science from one of the university uh one of the uh universities in Illinois
24:38
back in 1970 and he was hired by Dan Rich to go to work with him and a team at (Skunk Works) That was the uh advanced projects a development agency I think is what (Lockheed) aircraft company called him back in those days So um so basically this is what he was telling me He's a advanced maternal scientist and he said well we could use the best diagnostic
equipment we had back in those days uh which was 60 70s 80s and 90s and um we
could see the elements through…mass spectroscopy that compose
these structures but when we look at how they're composed and structured uh it's
25:20
it's like nothing we've been able to fabricate on earth we've never been able to produce it on earth And we have no extrapolated engineering or physics technology to tell us or inform us on how we could possibly or not fabricate this iron So they they understood that it's the combination of the elements was very unusual Uh it was counterintuitive but it's the way the materials are fabricated that's what makes it exotic

So, "exotic materials" are "exotic" because of the strange combination of elements that they're made up of. And Davis knows this, because an anonymous materials scientist told him that.

Honestly, I can't really follow what the claim is here. He claims his source was hired by "Dan Rich" at Lockheed's Skunk Works. He probably means Ben Rich, who was the head of the Skunk Works after Kelly Johnson left, so from 1975-1991, but he started at theSkunk Works in 1954. Davis' source could have been hired anytime from the late '50s to the '90s.

This source, at some point from the '60s to the '90s, according to Davis, used Mass Spectroscopy to study some "iron" and concluded it could not be fabricated on earth. That's it.

It's just an unsupported anecdote about what Davis was supposedly told by an anonymous guy at some point. He doesn't even describe the impossible combination that made up the "exotic material", just referring to it as "iron". Iron isn't all that exotic.

After a bit Rep. Burlison asks Davis about UAP propulsion and they discuss relativity. I'm just including the complete answer and let more qualified folks parce out what he's saying:

30:11
Uh we can only speculate Um these things are so far and advanced Uh we can only speculate The best speculation I could come up with is general relativity does a great job predicting something like a (warp) Uh UAP do exhibit the phenomenon of some light or less than light speed warp
bubbles Um however that's becomes a challenge when you talk about UAP that
dived into the ocean and climb down the under the ocean and up into the earth So uh warp
(Burlison)so it's not warping space time
(Davis) It's a warp in space time Yeah That's described Einstein general theory Yeah
And so the problem is you
(Burlison)doesn't gravity warp spaceime
(Davis)That's right Right Yeah
(Burlison)So so the these objects are changing the spaceime around them
(Davis)Yeah they you know the thin shell of energy
31:04
and the type of energy it has to be would have to be negative energy density and it would be consistent with the type of energy density that you can create from the quantum vacuum and examples of that are the casemir cavity that has a little vacuum uh uh region that's bound
by the two plates of the cavity Uh there's also squeeze lights squeeze states of light where that's a laser beam where you're going to take uh uh some part of canonical uh noise
fluctuations for out of that part of the beam you're not interested in and pile it up uh elsewhere in the phase space
31:39
And this is getting really technical So So I'll just kind of keep it this way
You're going to take the quantum vacuum fluctuations that we know is quantum noise shot noise in (laser beam) you're going to pile it up somewhere else uh in an area you're not interested in measuring and you only want to measure the amplitude of that beam At that point when you take the climb back fluctuations out of that amplitude that energy density goes negative and the
energy density is a square the amplitude So that goes negative and um that's an
example of negative energy The um the mass of the earth creates space-time curvature if it was (Burlison starts to ask a question, but Davis carries on) I'm sorry Oh I was
going to say so that space-time curvature which we feel is the poison of gravity on the surface of the earth drags down to vacuum fluctuations of the quantum fields that are out in space near near the earth in the vicinity of the earth And uh that energy density happens to be negative And so this is an example of theoretically predicted astronomical sources of negative energy as well as planetary sources of negative
32:38
energy So that's what you would need to build a (warp?) and that's what you would need to build a uh construct a shell

At this point Loab jumps in and reminds everyone that this is just speculation:

32:45
Just a brief comment of clarification We have two pillars of modern physics Quantum mechanics and Einstein's gear of gravity which is curvature of space time right we don't have a reliable theory that combines the quantum gravity So what we are hearing is speculation We do not have the knowledge to figur out if you can create curvature of space time out of negative energy density because we have never mastered this tech

Davis then carries on and contends, yet again with NO evidence, that the government has crashed UFOs and that the problem is, there are no physicist, like him, working on these crafts (bold by me):

33:46
Yeah So we have good ideas about these things and we can speculate on it uh on what the best approach to take to build a warp bubble or the shell digital energy that would create a jurist swarm which will be a shortcut through space time between two distant points but um we have we have craft in our possession um there are no physicists literally working in this program basically mechanical aerodynamics aerospace thermal control engineers electronic electrical engineers and material scientists and material science This is a part of the engineering offer uh usually kind of overlaps chemistry as well and they've never had a physicist like him or I uh they've never had an applied physicist or an experimental physicist and so they are really lacking in the ability to
understand how these things fly
Again and again, how does Davis know any of this? How does he know who is and who isn't working on these crashed UFOs. He makes a point that he is NOT, so how does he know who is?

Next up, Davis throws out some top of the head energy calculations concerning the TicTak:

35:37
and performances of UAP craft especially tic tac that that encountered in November of 2004 and uh so it's hundreds and hundreds of times with the with the United States producing annual electric and electrical power and so uh that that
compares really well with uh interstellar spacecraft that would travel relativist ultra relativistic ultra relativistic being anywhere from 90 to 99% speed flight The energy just
is astronomically huge

Then we get this little tidbit. While trying to explain the energy in the TicTak and its size, Davis complains he doesn't have the proper clearance:

36:05
So um these craft uh I have not been I don't have the security clearances I need to know to get access to the technical details but I need to understand that the craft are consistent in size with the tic tac uh even double in size of the tic tac Uh

He's pontificating on stuff he's complaining he doesn't have the clearance needed to understand. If he needs the clearance to understand these craft, then how is he saying the TicTak uses more energy than the US?

There is yet more of Dr. Davis in this presentation, including aliens, but this post is long enough and I need a G&T.

 

[Ben Harris]

It's all fluff and wishful thinking. Showbiz in order to keep the $$ rolling in.

 

[FatPhil]

(Elizondo)in formal official settings you might have been part of

They can't have been that formal if it's under question whether he participated or not.

Weasel wording, the classic crust for cow pie.

 

[Mendel]

From the 36:05 snippet, how does he know the size of the tictac?

(These things are actually quite small, there are several in a very small package, any flavor. You don't need a clearance to buy them, either. )

 

[jarlrmai]

Next up, Davis throws out some top of the head energy calculations concerning the TicTak:

35:37
and performances of UAP craft especially tic tac that that encountered in November of 2004 and uh so it's hundreds and hundreds of times with the with the United States producing annual electric and electrical power and so uh that that
compares really well with uh interstellar spacecraft that would travel relativist ultra relativistic ultra relativistic being anywhere from 90 to 99% speed flight The energy just
is astronomically huge

Then we get this little tidbit. While trying to explain the energy in the TicTak and its size, Davis complains he doesn't have the proper clearance:

36:05
So um these craft uh I have not been I don't have the security clearances I need to know to get access to the technical details but I need to understand that the craft are consistent in size with the tic tac uh even double in size of the tic tac Uh

He's pontificating on stuff he's complaining he doesn't have the clearance needed to understand. If he needs the clearance to understand these craft, then how is he saying the TicTak uses more energy than the US?

There is yet more of Dr. Davis in this presentation, including aliens, but this post is long enough and I need a G&T.

Would these be the same energy "calculations" that were extrapolated from Kevin Day's story about what he saw on his RADAR screen during the Nimitz stuff that the SCU published as Kevin Knuths paper, "Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles"?

 

[elvenwear]

So, "exotic materials" are "exotic" because of the strange combination of elements that they're made up of. And Davis knows this, because an anonymous materials scientist told him that.

I suspect many exotic combinations of elements have already been tested in the last few decades in aerospace and academia in general. The term 'exotic materials' becomes less and less exciting the more materials science advances.

 

[MonkeeSage]

3+ hours huh? IF you want to take that one my friend, go for it. No seriously go for it .

Honestly, I lost interest in even watching the panels after seeing clips posted on X showing various folks repeating the same old stuff, and after Elizondo's irrigation circle UAP. So thanks for analyzing the Eric Davis portions!

I only scanned the presentation with Mike Gold and Anna Brady-Estevez because I saw someone mention he had used the Mars "Tic-Tac" rock in his presentation and I wanted to verify if he actually did. Turned out, yes, he did, and he uses it as an example of why he thinks people (I wonder who) should be paid to look at NASA archives to search for UFOs/UAP.

I just watched the whole Mike Gold and Anna Brady-Estevez presentation. Some quotes and thoughts below. I have also attached the transcript of the whole 3 hours 45 minutes with all the panels (including the ones with Eric Davis), generated by whisper AI in srt subtitle format, in case it's useful (it has automatic capitalization and punctuation, which is nice). It's unedited and mostly unreviewed, so standard caveats apply about potential transcription errors.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yFwUdbSpko&t=10206s

View attachment Understanding UAP： Science, National Security & Innovation (House Oversight and Accountability...txt


Sorry this got a bit long, there was a lot of stuff to unpack. Mods feel free to split off to another thread if needed, I was going to do so once it started to get long but didn't want to lose all the image attachments and have to re-upload.

02:50:06

Elizondo: The next discussion is really going to be part of a scientific discussion. So the two panelists you have here are experts in their own fields and recognized as a global leader in their particular expertise.

Elizondo primes the audience to expect discussion about cutting edge innovation and technology, apparently somehow related to UAP.

02:50:23

Elizondo: So what I'd like to do first is introduce Ms. Anna Brady Estevez, founding partner at American Deep Tech, former SBA Innovation Advisor for Kauffman, Kauffman Fellow, and on the UAPDF Advisory Board. But what you may not know is that Ms. Brady Estevez is deeply involved with the National Science Foundation. And that involvement really includes looking at pioneering new ways to invest American talent, scientific talent, into new and emerging areas of science, right? Where do we decide to put our money and our effort in the next 20 years, right Where do we get that return on investment? What does that look like, right? And how do we force ourselves to think outside the box to be creative? Don't invent tomorrow's technology. Don't invent the technology after tomorrow. And it's that type of creative thinking that has traditionally kept this country ahead of everybody else. And I ask you, too, when she speaks, listen to what she has to say. Because this is, in my opinion, this is the future. Not just this topic, but any topic requiring innovation. If you don't innovate, you stagnate. If you don't stagnate, you perish. That's just the bottom line. We live in a competitive world.

02:51:54

Elizondo: The next individual is a colleague and friend of mine, Mr. Mike Gold. Mr. Mike Gold is President of the Civil and International Space at Redwire. Member of the NASA UAP Independent Study Team. Former NASA Associate Administrator for Space Policy and Partnerships. Former Acting Associate Administrator for the Office of International and Interagency Relations and Senior Advisor to the Administrator for International and Legal Affairs. Former Vice President for Civil Space at Maxar Technologies. Former Director of DC Operations and Business Growth at Bigelow Aerospace. You might remember that word from somewhere else. And that involved them.

Mike Gold is (and was at the time of the panel) the Chief Growth Officer at independent aerospace firm Redwire Corporation. He's been on the UFO/UAP bandwagon for a couple of years and he was asking for funding at the HOC hearing in November, 2024. The hearing was discussed in the following thread, but Gold's contribution was only briefly mentioned in a few comments as being unremarkable: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/november-13-2024-congress-hearings.13753 (on pages 2 and 3).

Elizondo doesn't miss the oppertunity to name drop Bigelow to insinuate Gold's involvement with Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Sciences (BAASS), even though Gold worked for Bigelow Aerospace proper, doing space related stuff not BAASS related stuff, according to his own biography provided at the HOC hearing.

Additionally, Mr. Gold spent thirteen years at Bigelow Aerospace, where he established the company's Washington office, oversaw the launches of the Genesis 1 and 2 spacecraft, and was a recipient of a NASA Group Achievement award for the development and deployment of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module onto the International Space Station.

Source: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO12/20241113/117721/HHRG-118-GO12-Bio-GoldM-20241113.pdf

02:52:36

Elizondo: And last but certainly not least, as a member of NASA, am I correct to say a mission manager with the Artemis team? Did I get that right? Because I've got two things wrong so far today. So I want to make sure...

Unfortunately for Elizondo, there was a third thing he got wrong that day: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/fo...vate-plane-at-fl210-irrigation-circles.14173/

02:54:56

Gold: So thank you so much, Lue, not only for today, but for all you have done to push this topic. You are an American hero, as well as the congressman and many others in this room, from the journalists to the scientists to the advocates to the pilots. It's just an honor to be here and appreciate what everyone has done. Also, thank you, Redwire of Board of Directors, for letting me out of the meeting early. That was a wonderful discussion. I think this is going to be a lot more exciting.

He spends the next 5 minutes essentially giving a sales pitch for Redwire. It sounds like he is just requesting funding for their research and only tangentially relates it to UFO/UAP in that they might possibly be using some technology like his company is researching, but first teases an alleged anomalous picture.

02:55:21

Gold: If I could point you to my opening slide, that is actually an image taken by the Blue Ghost Lunar Lander with Redwire Argus cameras. I'm going to get in why that is such an extraordinary image in a moment.

He will get back to this after the sales pitch.

02:55:32

Gold: But before we get there, we were having a discussion about substances and what these new substances were like, new materials, what this UAP technology would be. And I've been given the challenging, if not unenviable task of saying, how could UAP technology impact innovation without knowing quite what that UAP technology is, even fundamentally?

So what I'd like to try and do today is give you an example of how microgravity is impacting innovation in really almost every industrial field and how that could be transformative. I don't know if extraterrestrial civilizations are using this. I think they likely would be. But I think this is an example of how a fundamental shift in technology can change everything.

Our company, Redwire, has been conducting experiments on the International Space Station on the Space Shuttle for literally decades. We have done hundreds of experiments over the past 35 plus years. We have 11 experiments active on the International Space Station right now, more than any other company.

He shows slides and talks about their various innovations in different fields of science and technology that have been / are being developed in space with the help of microgravity.

02:59:54

And by the way, it's not just us who know this. It's China. And the Chinese have their space station. They're going after the same research. So every kind of congressman I would invite, as we look at the international space station, replacing it with a commercial space station.

This revolution with biotech and microgravity is going to happen. Now, the only question is, is it going to happen here, in America, in the free world, or is it going to be happening in China? And I do not want to be buying my next generation of pharmaceuticals and drugs from the Chinese.

So we need to continue to support this, we need to create new developments. But this is just life sciences and biotech. Again, micrograv will impact semiconductors, the same principles. When you form crystals in space, you can create new types of semiconductors that are more powerful, more tolerant of heat. Agriculture, you can create seeds, new types of plants that can flourish in the desert. We have a greenhouse that we're flying in space. Looking at many of that efforts, you see that there. We also have systems of what's called Z-LAN fiber, where it's a new type of fiber optic that can be incredibly more powerful. Again, every aspect of our technological society could be changed by this innovation.

Is this something that UAP are using? Is this new substances that they're using? I don't know. Perhaps.

But you see how this field will revolutionize everything. And I believe in the future that leaders in microgravity will not only be leaders in economics, but in national security as well.

China is the boogy man now instead of the former USSR, but fear of missing out (FOMO) has historically proven to be an effective motivator to get the government to fund nearly anything, including paying for people to try to kill goats using psychic powers. And Gold isn't even asking for anything crazy, just a government funded commercial space station where his company is paid to create their products. Because aliens might be using this technology. And China might be using the alien technology. Or something. FOMO comes up several times in the presentation.

03:01:35

Gold: Now I'd like to talk about-- who wants to see some unclassified data, right? Let's talk about some imagery that we're getting for NASA. As Lue mentioned, I was proud to be a member of NASA's UAP independent study team. We had some very common sense recommendations. One of which that I testified here in the House not too long ago, alongside the great Lue Elizondo and others, was that we need to go into the NASA archives, get the imagery, review it, make it public, and look at what we've got.

Mr. Gold doesn't explain why this needs to be tax-payer funded, and his examples to demonstrate the supposed need range from pareidolia to allegedly unexplained lights in NASA images and are quite weak, as discussed below.

03:02:07

Gold: This is an example that hit the internet not too long ago. Is it a Tic Tac? It's on Mars? I don't know. I'm not qualified to say, but someone should be looking at it, and we should be collecting and collecting the data.

Yes, he really did show an "AI Enhanced Version" of a rock as support for paying someone to look for UFOs in Mars Rover images. The very small rock formation was discussed, and confirmed to be a rock formation by other NASA images showing the feature, in this thread: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/mars-rover-captured-something-interesting-rock.14079/

03:02:21

Gold: Here's one that's even more interesting to me. Lunar horizon glow. This is a phenomenon that we first saw with the Surveyor systems. This is, as its name, a glow that we're seeing on the horizon of the moon. We saw it with the robotic surveyors, and what you see in the other left-hand side are sketches that Apollo astronauts make of this phenomenon. A glowing dome, streaks of light shooting out from the lunar surface. Pretty extraordinary.

03:02:53

Gold: And then, most recently, this was my cover slide, with the Blue Ghost system, which is NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, clips of wonderful public-private partnership to reach the Moon. With Redwire Argus cameras, we took this image of the lunar horizon glow.

What you might hear, if you go on a NASA website, or talk to some in the scientific community, is that this effect is from dust that has been electrostatically charged, and then levitated, to create this impact.

Now, again, I'm not saying one way or the other, but doctor-- and I should go back and give him a credit, [audio indistinct but the slides show Dr. Maaneli Derakhshani]. I'm going to mess up his name, but I apologize. It's in the slides. But a wonderful professor who's been associated with the UAP Disclosure Fund, and doing work on this topic, viably(?) in these slides. And I can tell you, NASA's own research, labbing, other systems, is putting some big question marks as to even if there is enough dust to create this event, which looks unlikely, and that if dust could be electrostatically charged, to cause what looks like a second sunrise. And that's not the sun, by the way. It's below the horizon. I mean, that is an extraordinary image.

And by the way, when I first saw this picture, it was like, "is that algae on the Moon?" And what you're seeing is light refraction occurring due to, I don't know what. So I don't know what this is. Is it a dome? Is it some type of natural phenomenon that we don't understand or aren't aware of? I'll tell you, definitely, it's an unidentified anomalous phenomenon, which bears looking and bears understanding.

And this is a good example, too, of even if it's a natural or prosaic phenomenon. There is something extraordinary occurring here. We should be delving into it. We should be studying it and understanding it. And on the off chance that it does turn out to be something extraordinary, I mean, we need to know what is occurring here.

The lunar horizon glow is a known phenomenon with understood mechanics, as Gold mentions dismissively in passing. Quoting from the wikipedia article:

Dust kicked off from the surface of the Moon will stay in the atmosphere for around 3 hours. Apart from this, electrically charged particles could be levitated by electrostatic fields with a strength of >500 V cm−1​.[5] This cloud of dust, near the lunar terminator line, forward scatters the light, creating a glow near the horizon during lunar sunset. The dust, 10 micrometers in diameter, is thought to be above 10 km from the lunar surface. The levitation mechanism is thought to eject 107​ more particles per unit time into the cloud than those caused by micrometeoroid impacts. The term "Moon fountain" has been used to describe this effect.

During the lunar day, infrared rays and ultraviolet rays from the Sun are strong enough to knock electrons off the dust present on lunar surface. These positively charged particles get repelled from the surface kilometers high. On the night side, the dust is negatively charged by electrons from the solar wind. Particles at the night side achieve greater electrical tension differences than the day side, launching dust particles to even higher altitudes.[6] This dust eventually falls back to the surface, and the cycle repeats.[7]

In celestial bodies without any significant atmosphere, electrostatic transport is believed to be the leading cause of dust transport. Laboratory experiments show that dusty surfaces tend to become smooth as a result of dust mobilization. This phenomenon is thought to explain the process of dust ponds in the asteroids 433 Eros and comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.[8]

[5] Stubbs, Timothy J.; Richard R. Vondrak & William M. Farrell (2005). "A Dynamic Fountain Model for Lunar Dust" (PDF). Lunar and Planetary Science XXXVI. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-02-01. Retrieved 2023-10-15.
[6] "Moon Fountains". NASA. Archived from the original on 19 March 2010.
[7] "The Moon and the Magnetotail". NASA. Archived from the original on 2021-11-14. Retrieved 2023-10-15.
[8] "Dust 'floats' above lunar surface—electrostatic dust transport reshapes surfaces of airless planetary bodies". Phys.org. Archived from the original on 13 July 2023. Retrieved 28 September 2023.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_horizon_glow

The professor Mr. Gold mentions, who is apparently claiming this mechanism cannot work, is Dr. Maaneli Derakhshani. His researchgate biography states the following:

I'm a postdoctoral researcher in theoretical physics and the philosophy of physics. I'm also a Fellow of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics, and a Member of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQxI).From August 2019 - January 2024, I was a postdoc in the Department of Mathematics, Rutgers University--New Brunswick.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maaneli-Derakhshani

His 50 listed publications, as might be expected, appear to focus on theoretical physics topics like quantum gravity. I do not see any publications that deal with any topics related to planetary geology or other topics that would give him expertise on dust fountains on the Moon.

I also found that he is the Senior Science Advisor to the CO2 Coalition:

Maaneli (Max) Derakhshani is a theoretical physicist and philosopher of physics, with a Ph.D in the Foundations of Physics from Utrecht University in 2017. He has previously worked as a postdoc at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Department of Mathematics) and Utrecht University (Department of Mathematics). He is also currently a Fellow of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics and a Member of the Foundational Questions Institute.

Source: https://co2coalition.org/teammember/maaneli-max-derakhshani/

The wikipedia article for CO2 Coalition states they are an anthropogenic climate change denial organization and lists examples of the press referring to it as such:

Its climate change denialist claims[2] conflict with the scientific consensus on climate change.

[2] Climate denial and disinformation:

• Penney, Veronica (2020-07-14). "How Facebook Handles Climate Disinformation". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
• Hirji, Zahra (January 25, 2018). "These Conservative Megadonors Funded Climate Denial In 2016, Tax Filings Show". BuzzFeed News. Archived from the original on June 25, 2024. Retrieved September 16, 2024.
• Boyle, Louise (February 23, 2020). "The troubling spread of climate denial on Facebook". The Independent. Retrieved 2023-02-10.
• Forrester, Nikki (May 5, 2021). "CO2 coalition sponsored article in The Washington Times presents list of false and misleading statements about the impacts of CO2 and climate change". Science Feedback. Climate Feedback. Retrieved September 16, 2024.
• Romero-Vicente, Ana (February 6, 2023). "Don't stop me now: the growing disinformation threat against climate change". EU DisinfoLab. Retrieved 2023-03-26.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_Coalition

I'm going to have to go with the NASA analysis of the phenomenon over this fellow.

It's also quite telling that Mr. Gold says that even if it is just a natural phenomenon, the government still should pay someone to research it, someone other than NASA who have already researched it, apparently. Someone like, say, Redwire maybe?


03:05:10

Gold: Additionally, here's another shot, publicly available, from the NASA archives. You've seen some imagery of the triangular UAPs in the past? What's that? Debris? Satellites? That's from the moon, right? That's Apollo 17. We had that picture. Images from Apollo 17? ([Brady-Estevez interjects] "A few of us saw something like that last Friday. Yeah."). Extraordinary. Satellites, debris, Klingons?

What is it? I don't know. Louis, you know? Congressman? You know what that is? Why are we not investigating this?

And what I would ask of our brave members of Congress here is, again, with relatively little effort and money, we should be leveraging AI and ML to go into the NASA archives, so much of it has been digitized, more every day, and conduct a review of what's publicly available at your agency.

We spend so much time here, justifiably so, talking about classified material, what's being hidden. Yet there is a treasure trove of data that, if not a smoking gun, certainly is fascinating and worth looking at and applying the scientific method to.

The image depicted is frame 22470 from Magazine 147/A (Color) Rev 12, EVA-1, Frames 22451-22606.

AS17-147-22470 (OF300) ( 97k or 867k )

Pre-EVA-1 LM window pan. (West) Family Mountain (left), (Old) Family Mountain (center), Scarp.

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a17/images17.html

The low resolution image linked there (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/a17/AS17-147-22470HR.jpg) appears to be the source used on Derakhshani's slide being presented by Gold.

There is a high resolution archival version available, from which this is a crop with no alteration or enhancement:

Source: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=AS17&roll=147&frame=22470

The frame is captioned in Figure 4-16 in the Apollo 17 Preliminary Science Report, but nothing unusual is noted.

FIGURE 4-16.-A view of the Taurus-Littrow area from the LM window taken just after touchdown on the lunar surface. Tile shadow of the LM is along the lower left margin of the photograph. Family Mountain, on the horizon from the left margin to the center of the photograph, is almost 11 km distant; its crest is approximately 1000 m above the valley floor. The dark-gray basalt fragments on the lunar surface appear to be white in this down-Sun photograph (AS 17-147-22470).

Source: https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/preliminary_science_report_17.pdf (PDF p. 50).

The frame is discussed with regards to the location of "Family Mountain" here, but nothing unusual is noted: https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a17/a17.fam-mtn.html

From googling around a bit, I believe some version of the same image, with heavy processing to make the dots appear as a single UFO/UAP, was discussed in a 2015 Daily Mail article, where prosaic explanations were offered.

Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, told MailOnline: 'I'm always sceptical of space mission images that allegedly show UFOs.

'The objects are either too far away or out-of-focus to make a positive identification, plus there are plenty of mundane reasons why UFOs might appear - such as lens flare, reflections or celestial objects.

'Did the Apollo astronauts see anything unusual at the time when they took these pictures or did they accidentally capture an image of a UFO?

'In either case I wonder if these are pictures are of the Apollo Command Module that stayed in Lunar orbit when the Lunar Excursion Module landed on the Moon.

'To those who believe Nasa is continually hiding evidence that alien vehicles are operating in our Solar System, this is proof of their existence that has slipped through Nasa's censorship process. Otherwise a few blobs of light or vague objects in the distance don't amount to much.'

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...e-expert-says-s-probably-just-space-junk.html

Nigel Watson is a UFO researcher and sometimes contributor to The Skeptic (https://www.skeptic.org.uk/author/nigel-watson/), and his hypotheses (Command Module/debris, lens flare, reflections) seem reasonable. The fact the image is officially described as being taken from inside the Lunar Module, looking out the window prior to EVA, makes the reflection hypothesis very plausible to me.

I give Gold partial credit for at least showing something that is not already explained, but remove all credit for making the argument that it looks like "triangular UAPs" so it's therefore anomalous and that it justifies spending money to analyze the NASA archives.

03:06:29

And these images that you're seeing here, and here's more of another UAP from Apollo

The image on the left is frame AS17-143-21938 showing a hammer thrown by the astronauts from the lunar surface. The image on the right is frame AS17-143-21939 showing the hammer in flight. I was not able to immediately identify the image in the middle, but I suspect it may be the same event shot from another camera.

AS17-143-21938 (OF300) ( 59k or 588k )

170:30:00 This is the first of several shots Gene took to document the Flight of the Geology Hammer. A detail shows the hammer more-or less lengthwise against the black sky. Check out Roberto Beltramini's animated gif made from the 21938, 39, and 40. .See, also, adiscussion> by Jim Scotti.

AS17-143-21939 (OF300) ( 68k or 636k )

170:30:00 This frame shows the hammer end on against the black sky. Kipp Teague writes, "Here is a low-contrast scan of the area of the photo in 21939 where the hammer can be faintly seen as circled. This area is in line with the trajectory derived from the position of the hammer in 21938 and the impact dust plume in 21940. In addition, we know that the hammer was still in flight in 21939, as there is no trace of it on or near the surface where the impact dust plume can be seen in 21940. By the way, 21939 is a much sharper photo than 21938, at least in terms of surface features.

AS17-143-21940 (OF300) ( 68k or 621k )

170:30:00 This shot shows the spray of dust thrown up by the impact of the hammer.

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a17/images17.html

I can only conclude that Mr. Derakhshani is an extremely poor researcher or these images were used with the intent to deceive.

03:06:34

Gold: More of potentially a Stonehenge, strange structures on the Moon, lunar anomalies that look like Buddhist temples. I'm not saying necessarily all of these have extraordinary explanations. Maybe some of them don't, maybe some of them do, but it certainly is worth the effort to investigate, and we're not doing that right now.

Why? Because of the stigma, this pernicious stigma that prevents us from tackling it.

And sir, that's where we're going to need your help. I have many friends in NASA that are interested in this topic, fascinated by it, want to delve into it, but they need top cover. And that's why I'm so grateful to maybe offline talk more about what we can do with a new NASA administrator coming in.

And this isn't going to cost a lot of money. This could be done with very little time, very little effort, yet the results could be extraordinary.

To be completely blunt, showing nonsense like this pareidolia as evidence of the anomalous is exactly what creates the stigma. Especially when it is presented as part of an effort to get funding for your company and your friends.


03:08:02

Gold: If we're truly going to explore space, we're going to need some innovative technology. And here we already spent some time discussing the Alcubierre warp drive. This was a Mexican physicist who did the initial work proving that within demonstrated science, and I would defer to Eric Davis here, but this is not extraordinary science that a warp drive could exist.

The challenge with Alcubierre's warp drive is that it would require roughly the mass of Jupiter converted into energy to operate. I mean, I had a Chevy Suburban and if that was not too efficient, this would be even more difficult. But, a scientist at NASA, what was then NASA's EOverse(?), tweaked basically the architecture of the Alcubierre warp drive and perhaps found some ways to get that down to more the mass of the VW, you know, something that we could work with.

I'm not expert here so I will defer to others, but my understanding is that the problems with warp drives are not only related to energy requirements, but requirements on the existence of certain forms of exotic matter (which are currently hypothetical) and the violations of energy conditions implied.

Quoting from a 2024 paper by Fuchs, et al, where they believe they have discovered a potential form of subluminal warp drive that does not violate energy conditions.

Warp drive spacetimes, first introduced by Alcubierre [1] and later by others [19, 14], offer several unique transportation properties for timelike observers. These properties include the possibility of accelerating through geodesic motion, moving superluminally, or being in regions of modified spacetime, all relative to external inertially moving timelike observers. All of these classic warp drive spacetimes violate some if not all of the energy conditions [10, 15], and therefore, their construction has been largely considered to be unfeasible. However, recent papers [13, 4, 9] have suggested that 'physical warp drives' that satisfy some or all of the energy conditions could possibly be constructed, reigniting interest in the subject.
[...]
In summary, the likely key ingredients to a physical warp drive solution can be simply stated as:
(i) The asymptotically flat spacetime should have a positive ADM mass.
(ii) Generally, much larger positive energy density than both pressure and momentum flux in the non-vacuum warp bubble, as measured by Eulerian observers.
(iii) Subluminal speeds

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.02709

While it may be a worthwhile investment of government money to study such potential propulsion technology, there is no evidence to suggest UAP are some kind of warp-drive-equipped alien craft, and there is no reason in my opinion to discuss it at this panel. Except of course as a carrot to dangle in front of Congress to get funding for the UFO/UAP stuff.

03:08:56

Gold: So, these are the kinds of technologies that if there is a gravitic system, some kind of extraordinary technology, we must have it in order to traverse those distances and have America and our international partners lead in space exploration.

Additionally, energy. I mean, if we are sitting on extraordinary technology, zero point energy, the Casimir effect as we discussed, think of the good we could do in terms of saving the environments, improving the economy, creating a post-scarcity society. It would be extraordinary and it would be wonderful.

And let me just end by saying, the reverse of that is we do not want to fall behind China relative to leveraging extraordinary technology. I don't know if there's alien tech out there. There may be, there might not be, but can we risk falling behind the Chinese in reverse engineering if there is such technology?

And this is, again, where the stigma is so pernicious.

But I'm sure China has its top officials working on this 24-7, coordinated, whereas us, it's separated, it's compartmentalized, it's MIT working on it, it's Caltec working on it.

No. We cannot risk losing to communist China because we can't take this issue seriously. We must not let a lack of vision turn into a lack of freedom.

This is the most blatant appeal to FOMO I have ever seen. And it's riding on the back of hypothetical propulsion technology we don't even know is possible to exist, free-energy pseudoscience nonsense, and theoretical alien craft being reverse engineered by China. Once again, these are exactly the kind of things that create the stigma.

03:10:56 - 03:28:47
Brady-Estevez presents. I don't mean to neglect her presentation, but she really doesn't add much and this comment is already too long. She talks up her American Deep Tech firm, and all the cool stuff they are working on, and how much money investors are pouring into "UAP adjacent" and "UAP inspired" technology (whatever that means) and how so many people have seen anomalous stuff.

Q & A

03:28:49

Elizondo: So my first question actually is to you, Anna. So there was a recent statement by a government official and it kind of went unnoticed, I think it was a few weeks ago, where they said, we are now manipulating space-time. We have the ability to manipulate space-time. So I'll let that sink in for a moment. That was an official statement by a U.S. government representative. You can elaborate on that.

Brady-Estevez: Well, there's certainly been publicly visible funding that has gone into that. And I'll say a couple things before I would say there's a much better expert in the audience, Dr. Julia Mossbridge, in terms of space-time work. Also, that's something that Dr. Hal Putoff with space-time metric engineering has been very active in. So there's been plenty of work on that. And there's a lot that's going on.

Elizondo: So the backdrop of that, the National Science Foundation has been a fundamental...

Brady-Estevez: Oh, I'm sorry. Just one quick thing to say. But by the way, we also, a few of us were also, maybe several of us in the room about over a year ago, were on the National Mall at the National Academy of Sciences where it was National Space Week. And there were some presenters from around the world. And that also included a representative from the Chinese government, presumably the CCP. And the presentation that they were putting up included requests for, we want to work with people on, I believe it was, space-time metric engineering. It was gravitational control. And it was also alien life on the planet, amongst other things like renewables. So the Chinese are literally coming down to the National Mall and saying, "Hi, come talk to us about this." You know, and so, come on, seriously?

Another thing that they said, by the way, you know, in terms of, many of us have been advocating for much higher levels of capital to go into innovation and also into in-space infrastructure, which does not have access to the terrestrial financial tools like debt. You know, so if you buy a house, most people, they're making a smaller down payment, 20%, 5%, whatever they can do, more of a minimum. In space, it's typically, you've got to fund all of the money up front. Can you-- you're not going to build a hospital for the individual patient. You need to have the financial model.

So anyways, when I was trying to figure out what was the space budget for China, they wouldn't tell me, but the gentleman did look at me in disdain. You know, in talking to all of you. He said, when we look at putting up a space station, we view that, as that cost the same amount of money as putting down a couple of kilometers of metro. Basically, we're going to do that all day, every day. So if we can't figure out how to make the investments to win in these transformational markets for abundance, for societal benefits, and for economic growth and gain, we're going to be left behind.

So this is, so the people that are moving forward are moving forward. We really hope that the U.S. government, Fortune One, you know, is able to share some of the great work that's been done, you know, previously across all these fields, but the private sector is moving forward.

Another blatant appeal to FOMO, this time riding on the back of an expression with a pedigree going back to the 1800's that has nothing to do with space-time metrics or Chinese reverse-engineered alien space stations. The quote Elizondo is referring to is discussed in this thread: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/kr...permit-us-to-manipulate-time-and-space.14151/

03:32:18
Elizondo says they are short on time and ask Brady-Estevez how the National Science Foundation can help on the topic of UAP. Brady-Estevez rambles a bit essentially just saying they are great people at NSF who are always willing to help.

03:34:02

Elizondo: Mike, last question. You were on the NASA UAP independent study team. My question for you is, what were the recommendations of the NASA UAP independent study team, and how those recommendations-- how should those recommendations be implemented?

Gold: For the purpose of time-- thank you for that question-- I'll focus on two of those recommendations. We already discussed going through the NASA archives with an AI-ML system to get the data, just a few examples of which we were able to show today, again, which could be
quite extraordinary. Canidly, I think there are companies who even volunteered to do that work for NASA.

But the second one, and I really appreciate you showing that photo [the irrigation circles photo], which was taken by a commercial pilot. And one of the great disappointments I had when I was on the UAP independent study team was I was asking the FAA, how many reports have you gotten from commercial pilots? Are those reports being archived? How are we keeping track of that? And I got confusion. Confusion and no straight answers.

And here I'd like to give credit to Brian Grazia again for suggesting that we leverage NASA's Aviation Safety Recruiting System, ASRS, which has been operating for decades, has hundreds of thousands of cases. And this is a confidential system where pilots, crew, can call in about safety anomalies that they've experienced. It's worked phenomenally well. We should be leveraging this system for the reporting of the UAP. It can be done quickly, it can be done efficiently, and the amount of data that we will receive would be amazing.

Additionally, the images that I showed you was from the commercial and cable services program. Public-private partnerships have driven all of this. I'm so excited for the democratization of space and the data that we will get from that.

This was just one example today. As SpaceX, Blue Origin, Redwire, other companies move forward, all of their own cameras, all of their own systems, we're going to get a lot more data. But NASA still holds on to a lot of it. So, for example, with what I presented, we need the raw data. We need time stamps. We need data in a format that we can do true academic research.

So, if we were just to do those two things, and again, we support the Congress, I think, to push that, I think NASA will play a tremendously important role, and particularly the aviation community and the ocean/space community. The amount of data we get, I think, will completely shift the level of sophistication on this topic.

Brady-Estevez: And I think there's also probably about 20 or 30 hours of some of that forward interagency content in Space Disruptors(?) Day and the Ecosystemic Futures podcast, which we have Diane in the room here today. So, thank you, Diane, for helping get that information on Broadway.

Gold: I do have to say, though, I'm a little less optimistic than Anna relative to the adoption in government. As I said during my testimony, that particularly academic members of the NASA UAP independent study team were threatened, outright threatened, not for saying UAP are real, but for just having the temerity of even researching the topic. You can't do science in that environment, and part of the reason that I'm calling the Congress to help is there's still a great deal of skepticism, even just at NASA, and careers that get ended just for having, again, the temerity of the researching it.

So, I think it's incumbent of all of us to push for real science, objective science, overcome that stigma. Let's get to the data because our economy and our national security may be depending on it.

Brady-Estevez: And I think you contributed so much. So what I would say is some of the things that you experienced, you know, or that Lue, you know, and Chris and others experienced, there's that body of having been able to point to those leaders. So, we had the advantage of being able to point to your study, you know, into this prior work. [...long ramble snipped...] So, I think something that I got briefed on in an unclassified, just informal, no classification level environment, and both in personal capacity, but then I later brought that person in to brief others in the agency, is there are real and meaningful technologies that have come from these [alleged UAP] programs. And I think with a lot of information, you're going to see that, you know, the story about it has been in the internet for decades perhaps.

So, what I have though on, from a very credible source, was that, yes, there are people who say that this came out of the UAP programs when we talk about lasers and semiconductors. And that was so important, you know, semiconductors, the top 10 companies today, a 6.5 trillion dollar industry that we all benefit from, and underpins our global economy, that is something that it's not just, "oh, maybe we'll get something," it's that there are tremendous people who have built things, you know, both in classified and unclassified environments. And that's been,
you know, put out by so many authors and people in the news, but some of us are in environments that we can say, this is taken seriously, and those people have told the government that, yes, there's been real advantage on some of these most important core technologies from coming from crash retrieval.

Gold: And I think to get the government to take it seriously, we need to engage the public. We've got to get outside the UAP bubble. And Dan Farah did a tremendous movie, Age of Disclosure, it's really Lue's story, in many ways, it's extraordinary. Himself and Jay Stratton. And if we can touch the public, if we can get them engaged, if we can get them the same information that we just saw, I think that would be completely transformative.

All of the examples shared by Mr. Gold showed known prosaic objects and phenomenon, with the exception of one, for which there are also perfectly plausible prosaic hypotheses. This is the evidence that is supposed to be transformative if the public only were aware of it. In reality, claiming known photos, like a hammer being thrown from the lunar surface during Apollo 17, are unexplainable anomalies is just reinforcing the stigma claimed to be plaguing UFO/UAP enthusiasts.

As indicated in the AARO Annual report for 2024, AARO is already receiving reports from the FAA, so it is unclear why the NASA reporting service mentioned by Gold would be needed or would lead to better data or analysis.

AARO received the FAA's civil and commercial aviation UAP reporting logs during this reporting period. These logs contained information on all UAP incidents reported to the FAA since June 2021. AARO consistently receives UAP reports from the FAA on a weekly basis, which is a significant increase from the previous reporting period and reflects the success of AARO's efforts to strengthen relationships with its reporting partners. (p. 6)

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Lincoln Laboratory is building prototype data processing systems that can operate on FAA and National Weather Service radar systems to determine the viability in detecting and tracking objects that are currently filtered out of the data. (p. 12)

https://media.defense.gov/2024/Nov/...Y24-CONSOLIDATED-ANNUAL-REPORT-ON-UAP-508.PDF

Gold talks about the harassment of the NASA UAP independent study team and implies it was because they dared to broach the UFO topic and was carried out by the public or skeptics. But this was not carried out by the public or UFO skeptics. This was done by UFO enthusiasts who were upset that NASA didn't find aliens.

Initially, NASA declined to name the person appointed to that position. Dan Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA's science mission directorate, said their unwillingness to reveal the name was partly to protect that person from being hassled by people with strong feelings about UFOs.

"Some of the threats and the harassment have been beyond the pale, quite frankly, towards some of our panelists," says Evans. "That's in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there."

Source: https://www.kmuw.org/2023-09-14/new-nasa-report-lays-out-roadmap-for-studying-ufos

Brady-Estevez endorses second-hand stories and internet conspiracy theories about breakthrough human technology like lasers and transistors actually being derived from reverse-engineered alien tech. This is not only offensive to the actual human innovators who made the breakthroughs, it also just adds to the stigma that UFO/UAP enthusiasts hold wild, unproven beliefs.

 

[Ann K]

@MonkeeSage
I have seldom seen a more blatant (and more childish) fear-mongering image than this. Cartoon UFOs, "scary" foreign flag, look to be straight out of a McCarthy-era "red menace" speech. Why are grown men not deeply embarrassed by this in what they claim to be a serious presentation? Did someone think this actually added credibility to their beliefs?

 

[MyMatesBrainwashed]

View attachment 80682

The lighting's wrong too, isn't it? Something looks off.

It's being lit from above and below.

AI art?

 

[NorCal Dave]

Brady-Estevez endorses second-hand stories and internet conspiracy theories about breakthrough human technology like lasers and transistors actually being derived from reverse-engineered alien tech. This is not only offensive to the actual human innovators who made the breakthroughs, it also just adds to the stigma that UFO/UAP enthusiasts hold wild, unproven beliefs.

Yeah, I really don't understand how someone gets a PhD in Chemical and Environmental Engineering from Yale, and thinks semi-conductors came from aliens. We should note, this is a modernized update of the alien-technology trope that's been around for decades. In the past, it was often the claim that the Roswell UFO crash occurred in July of 1947 and the first transistor was demonstrated in December of '47, because of course, aliens. Few people today remember vacuum tube TVs or carry around transistor radios, so the claimed alien-tech has been upgraded to something people nowadays can relate to.

This statement really sums it up:

And that's been, you know, put out by so many authors and people in the news, but some of us are in environments that we can say, this is taken seriously, and those people have told the government that, yes, there's been real advantage on some of these most important core technologies from coming from crash retrieval.

These folks have offered ZERO evidence for a crash retrieval programs. ZERO. And yet, they just ramble on as if it's common knowledge and proven beyond a doubt. Her rational is that "so many authors and people in the news" have put this claim out there, it must be true. By that logic, Bigfoot is real, as are ghosts, astrology, tarot cards and any other claim that has "many authors".

We may need a separate thread for Dr. Brady-Estevez, as her Bio on the UAPDF page indicates at one point she was dolling out $250M to various startups and recommending funding for "UAP related and adjacent technologies":

Anna also served as a Program Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), where she led the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) portfolio focused on Space Tech, Energy, Chemical, Environmental, and Distributed Ledger (Blockchain, DAGs) technologies.

During her tenure, Anna invested and managed over $250M in grants to early-stage, high-impact startups. Deep technology companies that Anna has previously recommended and/or managed for funding, investment & grants have achieved over $8.5B in follow-on fianancing and $17B+ in total company valuation.

Such companies include: Ascend Elements, Epirus, Design Therapeutics, Stoke Space Technologies, Fluence, Syzygy Plasmonics, Baseload Renewables (pre-Form Energy), Swarm, Air Company, Meati, Provivi, Nth Cycle, Iontra, Xona, Interlune, Kaleido, Loci, Li Industries, Urban Sky, Astroforge, Avalanche Energy, Ambercycle, Molten Industries, Noon Energy and others.

While at NSF Anna also recommended funding for a number of companies who have shared their publicly visible work on UAP related and adjacent technologies.

https://uapdisclosurefund.org/events/understanding-uap-science/anna-brady-estevez

This sounds like handing out tax payer money to start ups, though it's unclear if any "UAP related" companies got any funding. May be interesting to run down some of the companies she has helped out and see what they are.

 

[Smythe Bacchus]

Having established that a secret UFO crash retrieval program exists, Davis moves on to some of the implications of these programs, including "exotic materials"

Dr Eric Davis:
He's a advanced maternal scientist and he said well we could use the best diagnostic equipment we had back in those days uh which was 60 70s 80s and 90s and um we could see the elements through…mass spectroscopy that compose these structures but when we look at how they're composed and structured uh it's
25:20
it's like nothing we've been able to fabricate on earth we've never been able to produce it on earth And we have no extrapolated engineering or physics technology to tell us or inform us on how we could possibly or not fabricate this iron So they they understood that it's the combination of the elements was very unusual Uh it was counterintuitive but it's the way the materials are fabricated that's what makes it exotic

These exotic materials claims in the Dec 2017 NY Times article were called into question soon after publication.

Article:

In fact, Sachleben said, alloys strike the planet regularly - space-traversing alloys like those found in fairly common nickel-iron meteorites - leaving behind telltale signs.

It's important to point out that while Blumenthal did go on cable news and say the alloys were unidentifiable mysteries, helping to spur speculation, that's not what his article actually stated.

All the Times wrote was that the DOD researchers tasked with finding weird UFO stuff collected some metal, interviewed some people who had claimed startling experiences with it, and decided that it was UFO-related.

In an email to Live Science regarding these metal alloys, Blumenthal said, "We printed as much as we were able to verify. Can't go beyond that."

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-those-alien-alloys-in-the-new-york-times-ufo-story/

There are dozens of materials found within meteorites which are either rare or cannot form in our planetary environment. This includes alloys of iron with unique crystalline structures and special properties - produced by very slow cooling (millions of years) in a vacuum.

This includes Tetrataenite which I've previously posted about in this forum, including an article about a claimed breakthrough in material engineering, recently retracted due to misinterpretation of the materials analysis.

Article:

RETRACTION: Yurii P. Ivanov, Baran Sarac, Sergey V. Ketov, Jürgen Eckert, A. Lindsay Greer "Direct Formation of Hard-Magnetic Tetrataenite in Bulk Alloy Castings," Advanced Science 10, no. 1 (2023): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202204315.
Subsequently, a team of authors at the University of Cambridge, including the original corresponding author, performed additional experiments which eventually confirmed that the findings presented were not correct.

Source: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202416229

The existence of extraterrestrial materials which material scientists struggle to cost-effectively reproduce on Earth does not automatically prove the presence of alien intelligence in our neighborhood.

 

[MapperGuy]

What is the obsession these people have with looking at old photos to find things that were not noticed back when they were first taken? Do they believe nobody actually looked at them at the time?

The cynical answer is that its much easier to shuffle through old pictures, film or digital, than it is to take new pictures. Taking new pictures takes time, and effort. Much easier to hire a few friends or relatives and give them a box of pictures and say "find stuff", or a web-link and say "find stuff".

 

[Mendel]

I just watched the whole Mike Gold and Anna Brady-Estevez presentation. Some quotes and thoughts below.

Thank you for that, and the really nice write-up!

Here's what struck me:

[Gold:] I've been given the challenging, if not unenviable task of saying, how could UAP technology impact innovation without knowing quite what that UAP technology is, even fundamentally?

This needs to be underlined. Despite the later part of his presentation, Gold admits here that we know absolutely nothing about UAP technology.
The reason is that we don't have any UFOs, nor reliable data on them.

a government funded commercial space station

Is that code for "the government pays for it, and the private sector profits off it"? Because "commercial" and "government-funded" are opposites to my mind. Production in space is super expensive, and the examples Gold mentions seem not commercially viable to me.

zero point energy,

This came up in the context of Eric Davis, further upthread:

Davis was responsible for subjects like "Vacuum Energy Applications", "Antigravity for Aerospace Applications" and "Wormholes in Space Time". Whether these subjects are possible future technologies, fringe science or straight up ScyFy, I'll let others smarter than me argue about.

This is crackpot science, and promoting it creates stigma.
Every physicist ought to know that these concepts are fundamentally impossible, though they're interesting hypothetical cases to test theories with.
A grifter would only think, "ah, a field of technology where the competition can never overtake us".
You could just as well say, "if we don't invest in perpetual motion research, China is going to overtake us!" Ain't gonna happen. Every physicist knows why.
So if you're a crackpot physicist, and your colleages tell you "that won't work", your only counter is, "but the aliens do it!" And then you've found your audience.

Gold, on the other hand, is really trying to sell what his company is doing, because much of it is government funded. They couldn't do experiments on the ISS if the USG didn't pay for them. So he has to portray that as useful, and when his audience includes UFO believers, he has to portray it as UFO-related, even if he knows better. If you get invited to Washington, you go.

 

[Mendel]

What is the obsession these people have with looking at old photos to find things that were not noticed back when they were first taken? Do they believe nobody actually looked at them at the time?

The cynical answer is that its much easier to shuffle through old pictures, film or digital, than it is to take new pictures. Taking new pictures takes time, and effort. Much easier to hire a few friends or relatives and give them a box of pictures and say "find stuff", or a web-link and say "find stuff".

And the result is hopefully so ambiguous that your believers will disregard the debunks. It's the "low-information zone" of history.

 

[jarlrmai]

And the result is hopefully so ambiguous that your believers will disregard thd debunks. It's the "low-information zone" of history.

Yeah there's going to be pesky skeptics asking about things like "metadata" and doing cheating things like "geolocation" and "using recent ADS-B data" with modern photos, a good old photo comes with none of that.

 

[Ann K]

It's the "low-information zone" of history.

It is also, in most cases, the "no more information will be forthcoming" zone, if it's just a stand-alone photo, perhaps from an unknown source at an unknown time and date in an unknown direction with an unknown camera.

 

[NorCal Dave]

The existence of extraterrestrial materials which material scientists struggle to cost-effectively reproduce on Earth does not automatically prove the presence of alien intelligence in our neighborhood.

I think there's a couple of things going on here. First of all, "exotic materials" seems to be a newer buzzword, replacing the older "meta-materials" in the UFO world. Meta-materials are a real thing, but in UFO speak the word was co-opted and used to refer to samples, parts or pieces from crashed UFOs. I did a deep dive into some of the more famous samples, and I was 1/2 expecting to hear about some of them here, especially when Davis talked about exotic materials being normal elements found on Earth, but combined in an unusual way. That is a dead on description of the most famous of the so called "meta-materials", a chunk supposedly taken from the hull of the flying saucer that crashed at Roswell.

The piece in question is an admittedly strange layering of bismuth and magnesium. Without going in depth, it has been around since the '90s and was first tested by Travis Taylor, of Ancient Aliens and Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch TV fame, who suggested it could "float" if hit with enough current of something. It made the rounds from Coast to Coast AM who originally received it in the mail, to UFO reporter Linda Multon Howe, to appearances on Ancient Aliens.

My suspicion, is that it was not mentioned, but alluded to, for a few reasons.

TL,DR: The sample has no connections to a UFO, except for a story. Several members of this conference were involved with a company the obtained the sample and entered into a contract with the US Army to research it with the hope of developing valuable technology with it. AARO tested it and determined it was junk. Nobody listening really cares.

1. The only thing connecting the piece to the Roswell crash is the fantastical letters that accompanied it from its anonymous source. More recently, that part seems to get sidelined and it's just described as so weird, it must be from a UFO.

2. This gets convoluted, but Elizondo the moderator, Mellon, Chairman of the board of UAPDF, possibly Davis and if not him, his mentor and employer, Hal Puthoff all had a potential monetary interest in the piece. Mellon seems to have helped orchestrate Elizondo taking to the NYT and the release of the Navy videos along with To The Stars Acadamy (TTSA) back in 2017. TTSA was founded by ex-CIA guy Jim Semivan, Hal Putoff and ex-pop/punk singer Tom DeLong. Mellon was a share holder and member of the board of TTSA. Elizondo went to work for TTSA upon leaving the military. IIRC, Davis also did some work for TTSA.

Sometime later, DeLong personally procured the sample of bismuth/magnesium from Linda Multon Howe then, in a bit of business slight of hand, sold the sample to his own company, TTSA. With the sample now belonging of TTSA, DeLong went on Joe Rogan and repeated Taylor's old claims that this sample would "float if you hit it with a terahertz", while Elizondo arranged for TTSA to enter into a CRADA with the US Army to research the sample. This contract that did NOT include TTSA receiving any money for use of the sample, but may have benefited had the sample actually been useful.

TTSA eventually close up and Mellon and Elizondo moved on, but not before having the sample tested by AARO. The results were unremarkable, it couldn't float. While the common understanding is that it may be a piece of industrial waste from lead smelting, AARO suggested it might have been a bit of failed experimental outer casing for a missile.

3. Given the audience this presentation is being given to, it doesn't really matter. Just claiming there was some "exotic materials" is enough.

It seems, rather than go into all the things about the bismuth/magnesium sample, or any other supposed meta-material, it was easier to just have Davis tell a story about an anonymous scientist be flummoxed by some sample. That appears to count for evidence at this presentation.

The idea that this is misunderstood or misrepresented bit of testing on actual extraterrestrial samples makes way to much sense.

 

[NorCal Dave]

What is the obsession these people have with looking at old photos to find things that were not noticed back when they were first taken? Do they believe nobody actually looked at them at the time?

Besides what @jarlrmai noted above about the potential lack of context with old photos, Gold was suggesting that AI or ML would be used to scan all these old photos and films and videos and whatever else old stuff might have UFOs. Someone, or someone's company, will need to create, deploy and monitor all that AI scanning that needs to happen. Sounds like a government contract.

 

[yoshy]

This gets convoluted

I think this is one of the primary reasons there's still as much attention on UAP as there is. The whole thing is a tangled mess of the same names showing up, stories getting retold, provenance and provenience unknown or falsified. Trying to untangle the convoluted mess ends up making us debunkers look like crazy conspiracy theorists sometimes! And the average person loses interest in the truth pretty quickly because of how convoluted it is.

 

[NorCal Dave]

I think this is one of the primary reasons there's still as much attention on UAP as there is. The whole thing is a tangled mess of the same names showing up, stories getting retold, provenance and provenience unknown or falsified. Trying to untangle the convoluted mess ends up making us debunkers look like crazy conspiracy theorists sometimes! And the average person loses interest in the truth pretty quickly because of how convoluted it is.

Absolutely! I was hanging with some acquaintances in Baja, cooking dinner and no computer handy when one guy brought up the idea that the government has these videos and is looking into UFOs, so there must be something to it. He wasn't a big UFO guy or conspiracy person, he just heard the scuttlebutt on TV and the news and figured there was something to it. I got maybe 5-10 minutes into trying to just layout the scene, before we got distracted and that was that. We literally need one of those "true-crime" boards with pictures and claims pined to it and pieces of string connecting them together. As you say, like real conspiracy theorists, except it's all documented.

Steven Greenstreet did a good video laying out some aspects of the NYT claims, but it was still ~40:00 IIRC, in a TikTok world. And it didn't cover huge amounts of stuff.

There is also the constant shifting of claims and stories. I had my thread on meta-material all opened up in another tab when Davis started to talk about "exotic-materials", all ready to debunk the claims about the bismuth/magnesium sample. Instead he brings up a different claim about a guy at the Skunk Works testing something. It's not even debunkable, as there are no details to work with. Just an anonymous guy doing some tests on some material at some time.

 

[yoshy]

Absolutely! I was hanging with some acquaintances in Baja, cooking dinner and no computer handy when one guy brought up the idea that the government has these videos and is looking into UFOs, so there must be something to it. He wasn't a big UFO guy or conspiracy person, he just heard the scuttlebutt on TV and the news and figured there was something to it. I got maybe 5-10 minutes into trying to just layout the scene, before we got distracted and that was that. We literally need one of those "true-crime" boards with pictures and claims pined to it and pieces of string connecting them together. As you say, like real conspiracy theorists, except it's all documented.

Steven Greenstreet did a good video laying out some aspects of the NYT claims, but it was still ~40:00 IIRC, in a TikTok world. And it didn't cover huge amounts of stuff.

There is also the constant shifting of claims and stories. I had my thread on meta-material all opened up in another tab when Davis started to talk about "exotic-materials", all ready to debunk the claims about the bismuth/magnesium sample. Instead he brings up a different claim about a guy at the Skunk Works testing something. It's not even debunkable, as there are no details to work with. Just an anonymous guy doing some tests on some material at some time.

What we think we sound like when presenting meticulous, factual research

What we actually sound like

 

[Ann K]

What we think we sound like when presenting meticulous, factual research

Don't be silly. If we looked and sounded scholarly, serious, and able to recite the facts in a calm, controlled manner, the UFO gang would be asleep in moments, or else scanning the tabloids in search of a more exciting tale.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Dr. Davis finished up the Q&A session with a number of claims. First up, he recalled a claim about government people, or someone, going inside a potentially captured UFO. This claim is from the 2023 book Inside the US Government Covert UFO Program, Initial Revelations by George Knapp, Colm Kelleher and James Lacatski. This appears to be the follow up by the same authors to Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, the book that outlined how AWWSAP came to be and how it was run. Lacatski (JIm as Davis calls him) conceived of and ran AWWSAP for a couple of years in the mid-'00s. Kelleher ran BAASS, the prime contractor to AWWSAP. Davis wrote the DIRD papers referred to in post #6 for Puthoff's EarthTech, that gave (sold) them to BAASS, who gave (sold) them to AWWSAP with Lacatski dolling out the money. Again, it's all very incestuous:.

37:10
with at (NIDS) and uh George (Knapp) of KGB in Las Vegas And so Jim (Lacatski) mentioned and I Jim was the program manager for the AAS the ASAP the AAS uh uh WAP (he's trying to say AWWSAP) I think it was and um uh and so basically he described in his book somebody I I don't know if it was him because he never I think he said it was him uh went inside one of these craft that he had access to and uh they couldn't recognize any (propulsion) or power devices or systems inside the craft It was completely unusual

Note, Davis isn't sure who actually went into this craft, and as I don't have the book (yet) it's unclear, though the blurb about this claim on the Amazon page for the book makes it sound like something Lacatski was told. Based on what he read I'm guessing, he and the previously mentioned Travis Taylor speculated anyway:

37:45
Travis Taylor and I have speculated that possibly they're teleporting energy from a remote distant location where the energy is produced It's teleported to the craft and that's how the craft can move around without having a carry propellant uh or a rocket engine or or an advanced work drive engine on it

They speculated that the energy was teleported. I guess that's in keeping with Davis' paper on teleportation for the AFRL.Tjis prompts Burlison and Davis to talk chemistry:

38:01
(Burlison) So what you have me thinking is carbon can take multiple forms right and are you saying that that is the same with other material other elements the way which what we found is
different forms of these elements that we have it would be different
(Davis) it' be different combinations of the elements
(Elizondo?) (different) is ratios as well correct
(Davis) yeah so you're you're you're going to have a variety of uh whatever structural part of this that came off of and I don't know that was it but I didn't have
38:37
that's uh way better adult I only had GSSCI So at the SEI (Davis appears to be referring to clearance levels maybe, it's' unclear) level I was informed that there would be combinations of elements from the periodic table combinations of their isotopes So wev have the brightened elements uh as they naturally occur or some isotopes of them mixed together in a certain way and then
they're uh structurally built in a very unusual way that even today we have no equivalent or analog chain So these were these this is about as much as I was given information to that

Note again, Davis is talking about stuff he then says he only heard about or was only giving limited amounts of information about. Then to finish things off, Burlison askea bout the "pilots":

39:09
(Burlison) And then do you have or can you comment on whatever species have been um that have been piloting these craft how are they large in are they are they multiple species are they are they what was their size and how many are usually on a craft
(Davis) they're typically the multiple species People are familiar with the grays the Nordics Uh people have talked about reptilians and insectoids Is not that they're reptilian or insecttoid is that they resemble uh to the (perception) a reptile or insect type humanoid because they have this a head and four limbs and a torso
(Burlison)So large small
(Davis) uh human size human scale
(Burlison)And are there are there how many are a crew
36:56
(Davis) well the well the grays I'm familiar with from uh investigating the crash at (Corona) which is mis misnamed the the crash of (Roswell) It's not the crash of (Roswell) It's the crash of (Corona?) in Mexico (should be New Mexico) Uh those were brazels ( he does seem to say "brazels" instead of aliens or occupants, possibly confusing the Brazel family that originally discovered the wreckage) are 4 foot tall and um the Nordics are typically human size uh probably I five six feet tall Um and same with the people who mis mislabel reptilian and insecttoid they're roughly at that height too I haven't heard anything about anything seven feet or 9 foot tall

So, Greys are around 4' tall and Nordics are normal human sized. It should be noted, that in the case of the Corona (Roswell) UFO crash, none of the primary sources from the time make any mention of occupants. The whole notion that there were aliens recovered was only added to the Roswell crash story in the late '70s early '80s, so nearly 30 years after the fact, and none of the claims have ever been substantiated.

 

[Mendel]

We literally need one of those "true-crime" boards with pictures and claims pined to it and pieces of string connecting them together. As you say, like real conspiracy theorists, except it's all documented.

Steven Greenstreet did a good video laying out some aspects of the NYT claims, but it was still ~40:00 IIRC, in a TikTok world. And it didn't cover huge amounts of stuff.

Make a channel, "3 degrees of Elizondo".
Create short videos, 1 each, of UFO personalities, that a) link them to Elizondo, b) explain who initiated their UFO belief ("recruited" them).
Have one longer feature exposing Elizondo's proven false claims, and the other weird things. Split shorts off of that.

It's possible to be effective. The problem I see is that there's no money in it.