High Strange - Safety of Flight

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Navy pilots, radar specialists, and other well-respected members of the US military have come forward with stories of still unexplained aerial phenomena. In this episode, Payne speaks with Ryan Graves and Kevin Day about their strange experiences while doing military drills. Want more? Our High Strange music playlist is now available exclusively on Apple Music. Visit the link in our show notes or go to apple.co/highstrangeplaylist  To access our book list, go to apple.co/highstrangebooks  To find us in Apple Maps, go to apple.co/highstrangeguide For ad-free listening and bonus content, subscribe to Tenderfoot+ now! Members get all episodes ad-free plus bonus content throughout the season. Sign up at apple.co/highstrange. For Spotify, Google, and other Android users, visit tenderfootplus.com. Follow along on social and the web: @highstrange on Instagram @highstrange on TikTok highstrange.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For all 10-or-foot-plus subscribers, you'll also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season. For more information, check also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season. For more information, check out the show notes. Enjoy the episode. They came from outer space, lower earth orbit, go to 28,000 feet right off the coast of Catalina. Whatever that object was dropped right down to the surface of the water. These things were breaking the sound barrier barrier but there was no big boom. Freak to sell out. We didn't even know how to respond to it. Came from outer space all the way down to 28,000 feet and stopped. It was so outside of our experience we

didn't know what to do. They look like about a 50-foot long giant tic-tac. Pure white, no doors, no windows, no nothing. Same size of his aircraft, approximately. Whatever that object was, went to fast-eggles-assigned capsition. The exact latitude, longitude, and altitude, and stopped. Howling the hell they didn't know where that cap point was. It was a secret location, only in secret message traffic. They knew where I'm 10.

Welcome to High Strange. I sat down with Senior Radar Operator for the US Navy, Kevin Day. In 2004, he was aboard the USS Princeton, a naval guided missile cruiser, when strange objects began to appear on a screen. Over the course of several days, he continued to see large, tick-tax-shaped objects, running circles around the Navy jets, raising the legitimate concern of a possible mid-air collision. There are zig-zagging all over the sky like a flywood, doing impossible things. Dartin' all over the place.

Creating G-forces, 35 Gs, 40 Gs? That would make us into pancakes. Pilot can survive maybe eight or nine G-forces. I don't think there's anything biological in these things. You all saw it? Yep, we all saw it. It shook me to my core. Truly did.

They watched on radar, these unknown objects, die from over 80,000 feet in the air, to the very near surface of the ocean in a matter of seconds. They were long, 50-foot, cylindrical objects, white in color, no windows, and no doors, and by appearance they were rotorless, with no signs of propulsion. We were concerned about safety of flight. I was at meetings. Hey guys, I got something for you. What's up, Kiff? We have a safety of flight issue off the Southern California coast, and when I went to describe what happened to a Sanofu, I got something for you. What's up, Kiff? We have a safety flight issue off to Southern California coast. And when I went to describe what happened to us in O4, I got laughed at, man.

What do you mean? They laughed. UFOs, ha ha ha. And the people who weren't laughing, they were giving me this kind of look, looking down their nose like, what's he been smoking? It was real.

I mean, pilot side with our eyeballs, it's on every ship's radar, and those radars are really good at what they do, trust me. I was concerned about safety of flight, man, for airliners too! I got so frustrated no one would listen, I quit. Commander David Fraver flew his F-18 super hornet towards the object, and it crossed directly in front of the nose of his jet, then took off on a sight. When the object appeared again, it was at the exact location the jets were supposed to rendezvous at, a secret undisclosed set of coordinates.

Five years after the Tic-Tac incident, Kevin Day resigned from the Navy. In 2017, while volunteering at a country club near his house, he was carrying a plate of fish and chips when he noticed the breaking news on the TV. Unexplained aerial phenomena, this Navy video showing the pilot's reaction to the strange aerial encounter. The Pentagon released three videos of unknown flying objects to the public. I stood there frozen, I dropped the plate of food I was carrying. After over 20 years in the Navy,

being mocked and laughed at by the Department of Defense, he was finally vindicated. He'd be lying to his house in a days. I raised home, probably broke, I reached traffic along this little town to get home. Jump on the computer, call my friends, and deal with it, you know? Cause what else are you gonna do?

If it was you, what would you do? I have no idea. Right, exactly. We're just human, right? When he got home, he started calling other sailors aboard the US as Princeton. People who also witnessed the event. Now that the news had broken, he wanted to make sure they could all stick together. And he urged them to come forward and talk about the incident openly.

We can't let Commander Fraver twist in the wind by himself here because we were there and we know what happened. We have to validate what he's saying. So that's how that all started. Both the New York Times and Politico broke the news that the Pentagon had been investigating UAPs for a decade. This UAP task force was officially known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The leader of the operation, Luel Azondo, had just

resigned, claiming he left the program for similar reasons as Kevin Day. His higher ups were simply not taking this seriously. I think what happens from this point forward, the science teams get on the ball around the planet, and we start collecting science data on these things. UAP is noble. We can know what these are. We're worried about paying the rent and making sure the electric bills paid and the kids are around school and time and they're healthy, well dressed.

Who the hell's got time to think about it, you know? We have to live in the data life. What if the entire planet has to change all of a sudden and we're not prepared? That's what the scientists are saying now. Hey, get ready for this societal impacts. Looking back on this, I wouldn't trade a moment what I went through. Because you know what? The things that happen to me are going to a powerful damn message when I go to Congress.

That's how I'm gonna trans me this. I'm gonna turn it into a message that they are gonna have to listen to. I feel so damn lucky. I can't even express how lucky I feel. How blessed I am. What an honor. What an honor. It was all worth it. All of it. To get the message on whether we like it or not, whether we admit to it or not, these things are coming. Except

it. I don't want anything. I don't want money. I don't want fame. I want the world to get ready I want the world to get ready for what's about to happen. That's what Kevin Day wants. It was so cool to see a space shuttle launch or a landing and realize my dad was instrumental in doing that. This is John Greenwald, the founder and creator of the BlackFault.com. And after he retired, I found out he worked on the Mars Lander. I found out he worked on the Space Defense program. So there's a lot about him that I didn't know until after he retired. And my dad, he has really kind of, I think, instilled in me the fascination with space and

stretching the limits of what science can do. I Started way back when I was 15 years old a Incident in 1976 One of the very few UFO documents that you could go and read download and It read very much like a X-Files episode a science fiction movie, it just didn't make sense. One UFO was seen over the city of Taran Iran. A second UFO was seen coming out of that one, a third coming out of the bottom, one of which the F.Fanham pilot saw hover above the ground and cast this large light.

pilot saw hover above the ground and cast this large light. Just like the Tic-Tac in 2004, the Tauron UFO incident involved not only eyewitnesses, but radar pings of something strange in the sky. The pilots began to engage the UFO over Iran's capital city, and as they got closer, both F-4 phantom jets lost controls of their onboard weapon systems. As they turned off from the pursuit and headed back towards their base, magically, all their communication and weapons functions began working again. And this happened to both of the jets. During this whole event, two separate F4 Phantom jets seemingly were strategically shut down, losing controls, communications,

as they were engaging this UFO, whatever that was. One could potentially be a coincidence. Two, however, seem strategic. It seemed like technology. There's really not a feasible explanation for it, even to this day. So the question mark is, well, what was it in Wai? We're talking about 1976 here. With all this time that passed, I mean, maybe we'd see something similar.

Maybe we'd have a viable explanation at this point. We have nothing. We have neither. This was almost 30 years before the Tic Tacs were seen. How could an adversary like Russia or China have such a tight lid on some advanced technology like this? For so damn long. That was the first document that I got when I was 15 and I thought, man, the internet

has to have more. And that's what kind of drove me and motivated me to go back and look. And there really wasn't anything. You just saw more of the, he said, she said stories. There were chat forums, message boards at the time. Nobody really had the full story. And if they were telling the same story,

they were telling it in different ways and it was so frustrating. So that's why I started utilizing the FOIA and then just going after these documents because I figured, hey, if this four-page document exists, there have to be more. And sure enough, there was a lot more. The Freedom of Information Act is essentially a law here in America that allows anyone in the world,

you actually don't even have to be an American citizen to access information. You request information, they have to send it to you. But the fine print allows nine different reasons for them to say no. Those nine different what they call exemptions are those redactions that you see. Freedom of information, we can go after information, government militaries got ascended to us. Problem is, they put in nine reasons for them not to send it. To see things that the American public and the world have never seen before to get documents, to get videos like old film reels, it's such an amazing feeling because you're seeing history that only a select few people that had

clearances or that were involved in the project have seen before. I was, you know, 15, I was stupid. I didn't realize exactly what I was getting myself into, but quickly learned that the government was going to push back. And what I first wanted to achieve was essentially get these documents out and put them out in their raw form. I didn't anticipate the struggle that there was gonna be to get it. Being that 15 year old, curious kid, I didn't know a whole lot about it. I just knew there was something there.

What was this Freedom of Information Act, but hey, they're gonna send me something for free, cool, and that's what I kind of went for. The freedom of information act building a website and just kind of going from there and I take it to kind of the next level for me Where I put it online for everybody Here we are 26 years and 3.2 million pages later. I haven't gone anywhere People can download with the click of a button in seconds. What sometimes took me over a decade to get, literally. For me, that drives some of the motivation to do what I do.

John has been collecting documents, released be a FOIA request since he was 15 years old. I wasn't even remotely productive with anything at that age. I went from that curious 15-year-old kid who was just trying to find some documents to really piecing together pieces of the puzzle that in some cases had never been released to the general public at all. Finding that irrefutable proof that they were still interested in UFOs and even in the CIA files had material of some kind post what they admitted to investigating back in the 40s, 50s and 60s.

I deep down kind of always knew there was a mystery to this. I mean, you just look at the books on bookshelves in a bookstore. And I knew that there was a lot to the topic. It wasn't just kind of like a silly internet rumor. So being again, that young naive kid, I didn't know what I was getting myself into. But I at least was kind of solidified with my beliefs that there was something unknown about this, something that was worthwhile exploring.

From all over the world, they were collecting sightings and that 1976 Iran incident, I'll stress the date, 1976. Seven years after the United States Air Force and in turn, the United States government said, Hey, there's nothing to this. There's nothing that's a threat to national security. We're not interested if you want to report something go to your local law enforcement or a UFO group, but we don't care. Behind the scenes though, they were collecting all these reports. And clearly, if you have a craft of some kind in 1976, they can strategically shut down two separate F4 phantom jets. That's a concern. There was a

United States Air Force pilot that chimed in on one of the documents that I found through the NSA on this very incident. He stated in this once classified document, it was a low-level classification for this one. There's certain things in a pilot's career that just defy logic and explanation. This case is one of them. He says, but this will probably be filed in a drawer somewhere and forgotten. All the way up to 2017, the government maintained that they had zero interest in UFOs. Oh, that's probably left over from Project Blue Book they forgot about at military

as notorious for forgetting things. What I did was proved quite the opposite that it was actually modified through the 2000s. UFOs was never taken out. Now some of your audience might say, well, that doesn't sound surprising. They're looking into UFOs. Prior to 2017, when the UFO program that was reported in the New York Times kind of blew open this whole avalanche of interest and so on. Prior to that, it was a lot different. That's part of my story, that's part of my growth and seeing both eras. Being deeply entrenched and saying, look, there is irrefutable proof the government is lying.

They're interested in UFOs. These phenomena are real, those multiple facets of it. It extended way beyond 1969. They're lying to you about the interest. They have material you can see, photos of it, in the old army files. I mean, there's stories on top of stories, on top of stories. And then you get to 2017, then they start talking about it. And then all of a sudden you have this completely different conversation.

My experience on my other show Radio Rental has shown me that there is more unexplainable in this world than I ever could have imagined. Through decades of in-depth research, John is unearthed mountains of bizarre stories, all by requesting documents from the government. Now they're acknowledging UAP are real, they're looking into it, they're investigating it, and they're talking about it. They're not poking fun at it.

There's research organizations or groups within the United States military complex that are looking at this thing. That's all positive. Full stop, period. The bad part is the secrecy. I thought 26, 20, 15 years ago. Sec secrecy was bad enough. It's worse now. It's not a popular take right now because those that want to believe that we are on the road to

some disclosure feel that just because the government is talking about UAP, that this is it. The reality is that even though they are talking about it, they have deeper secrecy now. Procedures specifically targeting the UAP topic to classify it, and they don't want to tell us about it. A lot of people that again really have that belief that we are on to something here. On the road to this disclosure, feel that politicians are going to be the answer. Now look, I've met quite a few politicians over the years, some of them are great people,

some of them their heart is in the right place. But if anybody thinks politicians are going to be the turning point for transparency on UAP, have a real big letdown coming. My proof of that is you look in the last couple of years in these classified briefings that we now know quite a few politicians have had. They are going behind closed doors and hearing what you and I can't. They don't come out and reveal anything, right? I mean, we can all agree to that. They've got their security oaths and nobody has turned around and shouted to the heavens that all of this stuff has to be declassified. Their own procedures are stopping them from doing that.

Politicians cannot circumvent it. So even if those are coming out of the classified briefing screaming to the high heavens, you need to declassify all of this. In the eyes of the military, it doesn't matter. Can they have pressure? Absolutely. Will they be successful? Probably not. And newsflash to some, politicians are kind of selfish like that. They want the information for themselves, and they want to keep part of that information from you and I. Why? Control. Those are all elements to this conversation that a lot of people I don't think

banter about as much as they should. I don't think politicians are the answer. I don't pretend to know what the answer is. I just don't have as high of hopes as some people do. Even though you have politicians on these committees, getting the classified briefings and may be getting motivated enough to create that legislation, they are not there in perpetuity. They are not there forever. They change. They'll retire. They get voted out. That's why I don't think politicians are going to be that ultimate answer. There's a lot of things that play here.

I think society creates the dream scenario, but it's not necessarily reality. I don't believe disclosure in the sense that we all talk about it is going to happen. I don't see the government coming to some kind of podium president comes out in front of the White House and says, the extraterrestrial presence is here, they're real, we know about this. That's how most people define disclosure.

And I don't think that's going to happen. I think disclosure is going to be with us. That we're going to be able to figure out those answers for ourselves. For some, that threshold is a lot higher or lower, depending on who you talk to. For them to really come to the conclusion, hey, there is a extra terrestrial presence here. For me, that's what it's all about. Bring it all together for yourself, analyze it for yourself, and come to a conclusion. I don't need the government to tell me what I believe. I don't need a researcher to write me a book and tell me what to believe.

I don't need anybody who runs a site called the Black Vault to tell me what to believe, because I don't want to be that person to tell people what to believe. I think we should all just look at all those pieces of the puzzle and try and figure it out, and for me, that's what disclosure ultimately is. What is it? Is it extraterrestrials? Is it aliens? What everybody wants to know? I don't know. Because my thresholds really hide to say that. Everybody thinks the government is this all-knowing entity

that they have the answers and they're just the big, bad, evil guys that are keeping it from us. There is a partial belief that I have that they just have zero answers. That they truly are clueless belief that I have that they just have zero answers. That they truly are clueless, that they have no idea, just like kind of some of us, where we're just trying to figure all this out. I think that's a possibility too, that the government doesn't have all the answers. I mean, you can't, in one breath, say they're completely inept and can't do x, y, and z. And then in the next breath, say they are holding the biggest secret of humanity

and they've been able to cover it up in any ample, undeniable scientific proof that extraterrestrials are here. And it's all because the United States government has done that. Does the government know more than what they're telling? Absolutely. That's undeniable.

We can see that with the secrecy and the redactions and the denied documents and videos and photographs. But does that denial constitute answers? That I don't know, but I would have my doubts that they do. I think that they may be trying to figure it out, just as much as some of us. My name is Ryan Graves, former F18 pilot. Ryan Graves, former Navy fighter pilot and engineer, got a sense of deja vu when he saw the UAP videos released in 2017.

What if there's a UAP? He recognized the voices. He'd already seen this video before, during a classified briefing aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. In 2014, they upgraded all their radar systems. Once we had upgraded our radar to the newest version, we were seeing things that just weren't there on the other radar. We would go out in the morning with one aircraft with one radar and not see anything, and then we'd get an upgraded radar on our next flight, and then we'd see a lot of these objects. We actually didn't think it was anything, we thought it was a radar malfunction of some type,

until we got close enough with some of the cameras we have on board to see that they were physical objects. During an air-to-air training mission, as pilots were returning to the aircraft carrier, they noticed on radar an object that looked to be a disc or gimbal shape, with five other objects flying in formation nearby it. There was energy emitting from those spots. This was now potentially some kind of drone or junk or something. Once we got them on the flea, which is our camera system, we'd want to fly by to see

them with our eyes, but we couldn't see them. Far radar is looking at something. Everything is looking there, and all that information is pumped into my visor on my helmet. As I'm flying right at this object, there's a square in my visor showing me where to look. Look there, look there. I can see my wingman and the circles on them, but for these particular objects, we'd come by him and there would be nothing in the square we couldn't see them.

We're an F18 radar system, isn't the best tool to help us figure out what these are. There's a refresh rate. If something was to accelerate so fast that it just darts off on a radar, that might not look like a super fast acceleration. That might just look like something disappearing off my radar.

One of the days we were going out on a flight together to the aircraft, to people in each aircraft. And just a standard day going out to do some training out in the working areas. We enter the working areas at a very specific location, at a very specific altitude. As aircraft are departing, they essentially depart lower at the exact same spot. That's kind of the entry and exit point. They call it.

They were flying through that point and right at the point, they flew right by one of these objects. Oh, yeah! Woohoo! That's a good idea. Right between the leader craft and his wingman, this object went right between them. Flute through it, almost hit the thing. To my knowledge, this is the first visual of the object.

They ended up knocking off the flight after that, essentially canceling the flight. He came back, he had to look a shock on his face. I was hit with those damn things. You know, I was like, well, what do I look like? He was like, it was a dark dark black cube inside a clear sphere. The corners of the cube were essentially touching the inside of that sphere, no gas, no propulsion, no propellers. We shouldn't have objects operating near our fighter jets that we

don't know what they are. That's a serious issue. The fact that one of these could take out our aircraft and agree with it is a major safety issue. United States security perspective, it's a major lapse to just assume that this is something that's not going to be a problem. As time progressed, more people saw them. I know at least ten or so that saw the objects themselves and described it the same way.

It kind of broke our brain. What we do with things that are strange, we try to make it not strange anymore by relating it to something else. Laying in bed at the end of the day, that lingering question, that kind of uncertainty. For a while, that's where it sat for me until I left on deployment to Mississippi, where I was in a flight instructor.

It gave me more time to kind of think and reflect on it, and that's when I realized I felt the need to talk about it. New release video shows an encounter between US Navy pilots and some kind of unidentified flying object. It wasn't an overly hard choice. We've been stigmatized around this topic. I hate to use this word, but programmed in a sense with certain assumptions about what ET is

through our media and our culture and all those things, right? We like that. It's something that fascinates us as human beings to think that there's something else out there. And so we've built up stories about it, but those stories have been created with our own imaginations. I had some assumptions that I didn't realize

we're so fundamentally baked into my core, right? Being able to examine those assumptions in a logical way helped me understand that there's actually a lot of meat on this bone. We are truly perhaps talking about something alien, and that word I think has more depth to it than we commonly think it does. If something is truly alien, it might be very difficult for us to really imagine its makeup. We have to assume if there's hyper-intelligent aliens out there, that there's a lot of knowledge that we don't have, right? That we're just at the very beginning of our scientific understanding, if that's true. If that logic is true, then almost by definition anything we're going to see is almost magical.

Beyond our comprehension and understanding, because we just simply haven't connected those dots yet. And that is understanding. When you look at the behavior overall, there's no consideration for energy here. To have something that can go as fast as a jet, and then go as low as a helicopter, to do those things back and forth, it takes an incredible amount of energy.

But when we would look at these objects on the flier, it just looked like a single source of IR energy coming out from the objects. No propellers, there's no heat, there's no plume of gas keeping it in place. When a Navy fighter pilot says they saw something unexplained in the sky, with no signs of propulsion, and openly claims that the technology is not from anything we have here on Earth, it's hard not to listen, and to actually believe their story. One of the things that I'm doing within my work at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics is building a state of technology manual, if you will, for UAP sensing.

Something that would be updated yearly, that we could put out to help inform engineering community on different methodologies that have been tested and what works and what doesn't. Really looking to move the engineering conversation forward. This is the beginning of a scientific peer review process that's going to allow a standardized and repeatable way of discovery. Where we can have experts come in from across the aerospace scientific regime

and provide peer review to papers that get published and no kidding move the science forward. You can see how artificial intelligence is moving itself into science more. It would make sense to utilize machine learning to perhaps understand certain areas or functions that maybe are obvious to our understanding of science. I think that we will radically have redefined how we think about intelligence. We're going to share this earth in a sense

with another non-human intelligence. We have to really leverage our interaction with AI to be competitive and successful. That's going to be an interesting change. I think the concept in our understanding of consciousness and intelligence will be much greater in 50 years. How do we try to kind of unwind and understand how those vehicles could operate that way? Because if that's a bad guy who has that technology, we're in big trouble. They're basically rendering defenseless all of this stuff that we've developed over many decades to protect and

They're talking with us. Is there any way we could understand how those things could be doing that? Maybe get a little further down the road of explaining where they're coming from? Who owns them? Is somebody in them? Or is it a drone? them is somebody in them or is it a drone? One of the studies they did which I found fascinating was on multi-dimensional travel. In other words, maybe these things are not so far away. They're from here. You think of strange things. They're from the upside down. And that sounds crazy. The more you think about it, we know there are things that exist in this natural world that we can't see.

When you set me a text on your phone to mine, something went from you to me. And we don't see it, we don't feel it, we don't taste it. The concept of not knowing what it is is alarming. They were all explained, we wouldn't be talking about this. Whole nature of the phenomenon is that we don't know what it is it's always been that way. I wish they would get to the point where they would be willing to say, I don't know what it is but I know it's not from planet Earth or I know it's not made by human hands that really distinguishes it. Closes that, which we've always left open about, well, maybe it's Russian or Chinese or something. The government said this publicly a year ago that some of these UAPs,

as they call them, are not ours. They're not our aircraft. Maybe it's possibly secret technology from America, which they sort of said it isn't, but there's always that little bit of question about that. If that were true, it would be an amazingly good story. It would basically be evidence of a government within a government. I think it's very remote that that is the case.

These things have been seen at least since the beginning of the technological age, the age of aviation. What country developed this stuff when? I mean, how could we have missed that all these years later? Gradual dissemination is probably the safest and best way to do it, and then they can gauge people's reactions and see how it affects people and not create this huge shock. If they can work gradually up to the moment where they might cross that line, where they acknowledge that there's something here that's non-human. I think it's an exciting time to be around. We obviously have a lot of problems as a planet. A lot of people who doubt we're going to make this thing work much longer, unless we get our shit together.

We also live at a time where technology and the ability to understand not just our own world, but what else is out there is much sharper than it's ever been. Massive changes in the world, just in the last 100 years. More change than in the previous thousand years. 100 years from now, we may know a lot of things if we don't kill ourselves first.

There's no doubt the Overton window has moved. There's a window of what's acceptable public debate. If things don't fit into that window, you can't really talk about it because your scene is being on the fringe. UFOs clearly, the fact that Congress openly talks about it, demands more investigation. The Overton window has moved. We think of ourselves as being the top of the food chain, right?

We're it. To imagine that that's actually not the case. You have to kind of reconsieve a lot of our own narrative here on the planet. Keep an open mind, open to the idea that some of these sightings really are not earthly. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office.

I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. Iered, then went to my office.

I got a call from this reporter at Newsweek. He wanted to hear my thoughts on the latest Chinese surveillance balloons. The one shot down by the US military. But more specifically, the strange tick-tax-shaped object shot down over Alaska. The one the US government claimed it was unable to recover. That's too bad. I had a few Zoom calls, a quick lunch, did some scrolling on TikTok and Instagram. Algorithms working nicely today. Send a few emails, some listeners sent me some home footage of what they think is a

UFO in their backyard. An email from someone in the military who has a story. Then this really angry message about how my podcast is polluting the minds of kids. And if aliens were real, they'd be in the Bible or something like that. I don't know. Her name was Karen Something. I left my office, went to my local neighborhood bar. It's called Vespror, by the way. I'm getting a Manhattan. I saw a few friends there who were so energized to talk about UFOs. Damn it! I didn't want to

be the UFO guy, but our conversations felt different. They became more philosophical, discussing our beliefs and the real implications of life beyond our planet in the universe. Okay, I'll stay for one more. A phone call, an email, time to eat dinner and go to sleep. But I didn't. I couldn't sleep. My mind was racing with way too many existential thoughts, about life and the future, and not the negative kind either.

This insatiable itch in the back of my brain. This desire to learn more about everything, and just figure it all out. As I sat on the edge of my bed, reflecting back on all the people I talked to, all the personal stories and eyewitness accounts, the mountains of archival documents I'd read, and all the differing opinions from every single person out there, I realized something. I realized, despite all my efforts in this podcast, I myself still did not have a definitive answer. If anything, it felt like I had opened the door to even more questions, but I almost instantly realized something else.

That I think I'm okay with that. Truthfully, had I learned that all this UFO stuff was just fake and closed the book on it? Well, then I wouldn't even have more questions. The conversation would be over. Knowledge and understanding isn't something you attain overnight. It's a process that's so individually unique to all of us. I feel like because we live in a world where information travels the fastest it ever has. Like how quickly we get the breaking news on our phone, can send a message or make a call.

How connected we are to even strangers, all through the internet. It's too easy to fall into the mindset that we need to know everything right now. Everything around us is so instant. The reality is we're all still learning about everything, and we'll never stop learning. Things change, people change, views change. We're all still evolving. It's too easy to look at life in this exact moment and think, this is it.

But if we just stop for a second and really think about it, we all know that's not actually true. Look back in history a thousand years, or even just last week. We know more today than we literally did yesterday. I mean seriously, we used to smoke cigarettes on airplanes like it was nothing. Today's breaking news is tomorrow's old news, and with every minute passed, it all becomes a little bit easier for us to understand. It's okay to not know everything.

In feeling like we have to all the time, tends to make us incredibly divisive. Once upon a time, we were cavemen, just banging rocks and making fires. We've evolved so much in nearly every way imaginable, and we can't forget that we're still evolving. So as I sat there on the edge of my bed, thinking back on everything I learned, I realized that even though I couldn't close the book on UFOs, the fact that I couldn't means to me that there's still so much more to learn. Life can feel like a hamster wheel, doing the things we know until we get too tired and

go to sleep. But our own curiosity of the world around us should be encouraged and celebrated. This desire to reach out and explore is what makes us special as humans. So even though the hamster wheel keeps turning, it's okay to step off every once in a while and contemplate the bigger picture. It'll be right there waiting for you if you ever decide to come back. Till next time, nothing is cool. High Strange is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with Cadence 13, created hosted and edited by myself, Payne Lindsay, Executive Producers or myself, and Donald Albright, editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner and myself.

Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, Sound Design mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner, Additional production by Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nerny, Meredith Stebman, and Sidney Evans. Our cover art is by Polygon. This episode features the song Man on the Moon, performed by REM, courtesy of Concord Records. Visit Concord Music on the web at concordmusicgroup.com.

Special thanks to Orin Rosenbaum, in the whole team at UTA. The Nord Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing, as well as Chris Corcoran in the team at Cadence 13. Check out the show's website at highstrange.com. Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at highstrange. And you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at PayneLinsey. If you have your own UFO story, email us at tipsathighstrange.com. And if you're enjoying the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing the podcast

and share it with your friends. Thanks for listening. you