TRANSCRIPT Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Ep. 381: Ross and Carrie Identify Anomalous Phenomena: Congressional UFO Hearing Edition

[00:00:00] Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

[00:00:08] Ross Blocher: Hello and welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, claims of the paranormal, UAP Congressional hearings. No, we take part ourselves.

[00:00:18] Carrie Poppy: Yep. When Congress makes the claims, we show up, so you don’t have to. I’m AOC.

[00:00:26] Ross Blocher: And I’m Jamie Raskin?

[00:00:27] Carrie Poppy: I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t wanna have to play this character the whole time.

[00:00:30] Ross Blocher: Don’t do it.

[00:00:31] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I’m Carrie Poppy.

[00:00:33] Ross Blocher: I’m Ross Blocher.

[00:00:34] Carrie Poppy: And UFOs are real, right?

[00:00:35] Ross Blocher: As far as Congress is concerned, maybe! So, we mentioned last time that we would give you all the news on this UAP Congressional hearing. Okay. Here’s the actual title. This was very recent. This was July 26th, 2023, presented to the Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

[00:00:56] Carrie Poppy: Heard of it.

[00:00:57] Ross Blocher: They have a subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs.

[00:01:02] Carrie Poppy: Okay. I guess that’s where this falls!

[00:01:04] Ross Blocher: And if that’s not enough long titles for you, they held a hearing titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency.”

[00:01:17] Carrie Poppy: Good. Did they use the Oxford comma?

[00:01:19] Ross Blocher: Yes, they did!

[00:01:20] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Very nice.

[00:01:21] Ross Blocher: Alright. Carrie respects that. And, uh, I guess we’re for it! Thumbs up?

[00:01:27] Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) This whole thing’s great!

[00:01:28] Ross Blocher: So, this is a good time to be an alien enthusiast, a UFO enthusiast, a UAP enthusiast.

[00:01:35] Carrie Poppy: Because it is your birthday!

[00:01:39] Ross Blocher: (Chuckling.) Yes, it’s my birthday.

[00:01:40] Carrie Poppy: I was trying to work that in.

[00:01:41] Ross Blocher: Well done.

[00:01:42] Carrie Poppy: Happy birthdaaay!

[00:01:43] Ross Blocher: Thank you. Which is a Raëlian high holiday, as we know.

[00:01:46] Carrie Poppy: Yes. And they’re alien folks. Okay, there we go. We did it. We sewed it back up.

[00:01:50] Ross Blocher: August 6th, which is a Raëlian holiday, because that’s the day that the first atomic bomb was dropped on a population of people. I just saw Oppenheimer yesterday. So, I’m feeling thematic.

[00:02:04] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. But this alien group calls that a high holy day.

[00:02:08] Ross Blocher: Because there’s a common belief—this wasn’t brought up in the Congressional hearing, but there’s this kind of popular level of explanation that aliens became really interested in us after World War II, because they saw (gasps) they’ve unlocked the power of fission. So, we better keep a real close eye on these humans.

[00:02:27] Carrie Poppy:  Oh, that’s an interesting element of the myth.

[00:02:28] Ross Blocher: And that’s why like the term “flying saucer” came after Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting of what he described as skipping saucers.

[00:02:37] Carrie Poppy: Right. I remember that guy.

[00:02:38] Ross Blocher: He was referring to the movement, not the shape. I think those were crescent shaped, that he saw. And then of course, you have Roswell in ’47 as well. So, that’s part of the mythos is that that’s when it took off.

[00:02:50] Carrie Poppy: So, that’s our justification for me exclaiming that it’s Ross’s BIRTHDAAAY! Happy birthday!

[00:02:57] Ross Blocher: Thank you! Thank you.

[00:02:58] Carrie Poppy: Okay. But. Yes, it is a good time to be an alien enthusiast for other reasons besides just your birthday. It is—yeah. It’s a period where a lot of—there’s a lot of media speculation about whether there’s going to be disclosure from the government. Are they gonna finally come forward and say, “I’m so sorry you guys. You’re right. We have been engaging with aliens for decades. We didn’t know how to deal with it. Enough—”

[00:03:27] Ross Blocher: “Some shadowy jerks were keeping it from all of us. You know, we were in the dark just as much as you!”

[00:03:32] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Or you know, “Enough whistleblowers came forward that we had to take this seriously, and we finally went back through the files and discovered it’s all true.” You know, something in that kind of—that’s the kind of picture they like to paint in the UFO community right now.

[00:03:46] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just gonna—it’s gonna happen any day now. And it feels like UFOs have come into and out of the public consciousness over time. I know it was really big in the ’90s, when I was watching X-Files and Sightings and reading all kinds of books on UFOs and stuff. So, I was really into this whole thing, as a teenager for sure. So, it’s always an exciting topic for me, but I know it’s an exciting topic for us. That’s why we keep up on Linda Moulton Howe and (dropping his voice) Jimmy Church, (returning to his natural voice) all of these other folks in the UFO community, many of whom were at Conscious Life Expo. But we’ll be telling you more about Contact in the Desert as well, which feels really tied into this whole Congressional hearing thing.

There’s like—there’s some really close connections between who we saw there and who appeared as witnesses in front of Congress.

(Carrie affirms.)

And we can unpack those more as we tell the Contact in the Desert story.

[00:04:42] Carrie Poppy: Some of our listeners were asking us, “You gonna cover this? We don’t know what to think about this Congressional hearing!”

[00:04:50] Ross Blocher: Yeah! I mean, talk about the appearance of legitimacy. You know, being in front of Congress, whoa! Serious business. So, I should mention there was another Congressional hearing in 2022 on UFOs.

[00:05:02] Carrie Poppy: Okay, I felt like we had done one a second ago. Okay.

[00:05:06] Ross Blocher: Yeah. It wasn’t long ago. We didn’t do like a dedicated episode about it or anything.

[00:05:10] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I meant we, America.

[00:05:11] Ross Blocher: Oh, right. That was for the United States House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism, Counterintelligence and Counter-proliferation!

[00:05:20] Carrie Poppy: I knew it. I knew it was America.

[00:05:21] Ross Blocher: But no Oxford comma in that one.

(Carrie makes a disapproving “hm” and Ross laughs.)

For anybody not intimately familiar with the US governmental system—

[00:05:29] Carrie Poppy: (Playfully.) Loser.

[00:05:30] Ross Blocher: —in our legislative branch, we have the Senate. We’ve got 100 senators, two from each of our states. And then, in the House of Representatives, you have 438 (beat) representatives.

[00:05:43] Carrie Poppy: (Softly.) Did you just count them?

[00:05:44] Ross Blocher: No. I just—

[00:05:45] Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. (Laughs.) You just did a real quick thing with your—

[00:05:47] Ross Blocher: I subtracted a 100 from 538, which is a number I’m more familiar with. (Chuckles.)

[00:05:51] Carrie Poppy: Got it.

[00:05:52] Ross Blocher: That was the really amazing mental math going on.

[00:05:56] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, you should have said yes.

(They giggle.)

[00:05:58] Ross Blocher: There’s 438 representatives who are tied more to the population of your state. So, bigger states get more representatives. Anyways, they will form then committees that deal with certain specific issues. And there’s all these systems governing like who gets to oversee what and, as a representative, which committees you sit on. So, this is one where everybody got really excited, this 2023 one that we’re talking about that just happened.

[00:06:26] Carrie Poppy: And committees are usually made up by people who are like experts in that area, or at least really enthusiastic, passionate about that area. Or maybe they represent a community that’s really impacted by that feature.

[00:06:38] Ross Blocher: Yeah. “My district has Boeing, and so I’m really interested in aviation. You know. Or I have a science degree, instead of coming out of the legal field, and so I wanna sit on this, you know, science committee.”

[00:06:50] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. All checks out.

[00:06:52] Ross Blocher: Yeah. But just to be fair, to put this out there before we get into the details of this—uh, these Congress people can’t be experts in everything. And they’re having these, you know, daily hearings.

[00:07:03] Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know what? I said the word expert, and I should back it up. What I mean is like the best version of this is that those who are knowledgeable and passionate sit in the committee, but you might be one and not the other!

[00:07:17] Ross Blocher: And hopefully they have the skills to recognize expertise and elevate expertise when seeking answers to national problems rather than assuming they are experts in these things. So, I just wanted to throw that little olive branch out before I throw a bunch of representatives under the bus for, you know, not being experts on the UFO community, necessarily.

(Carrie agrees.)

And we described this recently on another episode, but we’ll also keep using the term UAP. That was the term of art—of course, they use both UFO and UAP kind of interchangeably during all this. But as grudging as I am, it is actually a better term to say unidentified anomalous phenomenon. That’s the newer version of UAP. It used to be “aerial”.

[00:07:59] Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. So, now that even gets out of the sky!

[00:08:03] Ross Blocher: Right, exactly. So, now it could be—I mean, ghosts would also be unidentified anomalous phenomenon. So.

[00:08:08] Carrie Poppy: Now, it starts to sound a lot more like the stuff I’m interested in!

[00:08:11] Ross Blocher: Okay. Yeah. Well, like you’re getting generic to the point of not saying much, but you’re also—

[00:08:16] Carrie Poppy: Exactlyyyy. Philosophy major.

[00:08:19] Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Okay. Okay! But also, at the time, you’re not completely assuming with the title that this thing is flying or even aerial.

[00:08:27] Carrie Poppy: Right, yeah. But I like that it’s just locking in on literally our unknowingness. It was an unusual happening, and we haven’t figured it out. That’s all UAP says. And I like that.

[00:08:40] Ross Blocher: Yeah! All for that. Usually, we’re just like trying to remind people that the “U” in UFO stand for “unidentified”! Yeah, it’s a start of an inquiry.

[00:08:47] Carrie Poppy: The “U” stands for you don’t know.

[00:08:50] Ross Blocher: (Chuckling delightedly.) I like it. That’s a good t-shirt.

[00:08:54] Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. Shit, that is a good t-shirt! Shit! We gotta make that. Okay. Okay, about the news.

[00:08:59] Ross Blocher: Okay, I’ll write that down while I’m editing. So, I’ll read from their Oversight.House.gov summary of this.

“The subcommittee hearing will explore firsthand accounts of unidentified anomalous phenomena and assess the federal government’s transparency and accountability regarding UAPs as possible threats to US national security. This hearing will also highlight legislative efforts to bring transparency to UAPs and require the federal government to provide the American people with information about potential risks to public safety and national security.”

[00:09:36] Carrie Poppy: (Heavy sigh.) The writing. My god.

[00:09:39] Ross Blocher: Hey, we wandered into Congressional territory, here. Yeah. There’s gonna be more of this.

[00:09:41] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. We’re gonna have to—we’re gonna have to deal with it.

[00:09:44] Ross Blocher: Okay. So, the two main representatives who brought this and like organized this and did all the—you know, there’s some legwork involved in putting this together—were representatives Tim Burchett, from Tennessee.

[00:09:58] Carrie Poppy: Okay. What up, Tim? Hope you listen.

[00:10:00] Ross Blocher: And here’s a quote from him. “The Pentagon and Washington bureaucrats have kept this information hidden for decades, and we’re finally going to shed some light on it. We’re bringing in credible witnesses who can provide public testimony, because the American people deserve the truth.”

(Carrie affirms.)

“We’re done with the coverups.”

[00:10:15] Carrie Poppy: Okay! Oh, oh, perfect! Okay. That’s the situation I want. Don’t do coverups. Bring in the experts. Show me the documentation. Excellent. Great! Love it. I’m pumped!

[00:10:25] Ross Blocher: And the other—and I don’t know if I mentioned, he’s a Republican from Tennessee. And then, the other major organizer was Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the Republican from Florida.

[00:10:35] Carrie Poppy: Hm! Good name!

[00:10:36] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Good name. And she said, “The status quo on the part of the US government has been to leave the American public in the dark regarding information about UAPs, refuse to answer questions posed by whistleblowers, avoid the concerns Americans have about the possible threats UAPs posed to our national security and public safety, and default to extreme and unnecessary over classification.”

And I’ll summarize here—“This issue matters to Americans, and it’s bad for our transparency. I look forward to bringing this topic to light.”

[00:11:08] Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, she’s raising one of the issues that would be brought up a lot, which is this classification issue—whether the government’s being too secretive about what they know now.

[00:11:17] Ross Blocher: Now, I recognized her name right away, because I was aware that of the eight bills or resolutions that she has introduced in her short tenure in Congress, out of the eight of them, four have been to censure or condemn Adam Schiff.

(Carrie “wow”s and chuckles.)

My local representative, from Burbank, California. Because he led the impeachment against Donald Trump, the first one.

[00:11:41] Carrie Poppy: Presumably that’s why, yeah.

[00:11:42] Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, no, it definitely is. Like, that is named in the bill. Like, they wanted him to pay a $16,000,000 penalty.

[00:11:49] Carrie Poppy: Oh, oh! That’s what she was censuring him for?

(Ross confirms.)

(Laughing.) Wow! Okay. Okay, got it.

[00:11:54] Ross Blocher: That is exactly what it was for. So.

[00:11:56] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I thought you meant, you know, retribution. But, okay. Wow!

[00:11:59] Ross Blocher: So, we’ve got these two folks who are leading this, and then during the introductions we learned that representative Matt Gaetz was also one of the leading lights involved. I think we’ve all heard of him.

[00:12:09] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I’ve heard that name.

[00:12:11] Ross Blocher: Oh, okay. He is a Republican Congress person, part of the Freedom Caucus, as is Lunaa. That’s kind of a rightwing group of people with very, uh—I would say extreme goals. He’s also notable for being, well, very fiery in his public persona and his Congressional presence, but also gotten into a lot of legal trouble over perhaps paying to have underage girls accompany him for vacations.

[00:12:38] Carrie Poppy: Ah, okay. Boy, I’ve been out of touch with this kind of news, but okay.

[00:12:41] Ross Blocher: Oh, he’s not great, Matt Gaetz, that one.

[00:12:44] Carrie Poppy: Okay, great. Good summary.

[00:12:47] Ross Blocher: But then also, a young and upcoming Florida Democrat was involved in this. So, I will say this ended up being a mostly bipartisan effort. You may hear some familiar names, if you’re familiar with US politics. You may hear some unfamiliar names. I counted 16 representatives total who were like kind of involved in the Q&A, and five of them were Democrats. So, there you go.

[00:13:10] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Five out of how many?

[00:13:12] Ross Blocher: 16.

[00:13:13] Carrie Poppy: 16. Okay. So, still very—but yeah, quite dominated.

[00:13:14] Ross Blocher: Still bipartisan, but skews Republican, yeah.

[00:13:17] Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. Interesting. Okay.

[00:13:19] Ross Blocher: Yeah, I feel like there are some political notes to all of this, and maybe some we’ll discuss, and maybe some you can just infer on your own. So, apparently, according to Tim Burchett, one of those organizers, there were originally going to be six witnesses. But last minute, some were scared away or backed out at the end, and he didn’t give any details on that. But in an interview I was watching with him, he mentioned all these roadblocks and like, “The building they gave us to hold this hearing was under construction!” Which just sounds conspiratorial. And he said—

[00:13:51] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Okay. Was it quiet?

[00:13:54] Ross Blocher: I mean, I didn’t hear any drilling in the background. But whatever. And he also mentioned that some of his staff members had been told that one of the lead witnesses, David Grusch, was not reliable. And he said, “See? That’s the swamp right there.” Because people were warning him that there was an unreliable witness in his hearing.

[00:14:13] Carrie Poppy: He took—so, he’s not saying, “Oh no, my witness is part of the swamp.” He’s assuming the person saying that is the swamp.

(Ross confirms.)

Okay. That seems arbitrarily applied to your enemy to me. Okay. Got it.

[00:14:24] Ross Blocher: Yes. Correct. So, we had three main witnesses. Ryan Graves—in order that you see them during the hearing, from left to right.

[00:14:35] Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. Let me pull them up. ‘Cause I watched most of this at the time, but I was not—I was doing other stuff at the same time. So, I like had a sense of what was going on, but not really clear. And then, when you came over today, you sent me their actual written statements. And I’ve read those now.

[00:14:49] Ross Blocher: This was on a workday starting at 7AM, so I was watching it, but then like, you know, I’m also preparing for work, and then going to work. ‘Cause this was over two hours long. It was a significant hearing. So, I definitely had to like re-watch it and re-watch it closely.

[00:15:03] Carrie Poppy: Okay. There he is.

[00:15:04] Ross Blocher: So, you have Ryan Graves, and then David Grusch, and then David Fravor.

(Carrie echoes the name.)

That was the flavor of the Fravor for this hearing.

(Carrie chuckles.)

So, yeah, only three folks. And I’ll just say off the bat, like these are known figures. Like, if you’re in the UFO community, it’s not like these people were coming out for the first time. All of them had been in the public light before. They had been sharing UFO stories.

[00:15:28] Carrie Poppy: Okay. I didn’t remember their names. Maybe Dave Grusch sounds familiar.

[00:15:33] Ross Blocher: Yeah, well he’s been getting a lot of attention. And he was kind of the newest, freshest—kind of the center of everyone’s attention in this hearing. And he’s getting a lot of attention right now, for good reason.

[00:15:44] Carrie Poppy: Well, before we dive into it, do you want to give your quick take?

[00:15:48] Ross Blocher: Yeah. It’s funny, I got to—just in the course of work the other day, I got to meet the new director of JPL, and it was that day.

[00:15:56] Carrie Poppy: Oh, cool.

[00:15:57] Ross Blocher: She asked me for a quick take. (Laughs.) Just like, “Oh, um—”

[00:15:59] Carrie Poppy: Okay, oh! The director of JPL! Wow. Okay.

[00:16:01] Ross Blocher: Well! (Laughs.) I was like trying to be—

[00:16:04] Carrie Poppy: Did she have one?!

[00:16:05] Ross Blocher: No, she hadn’t seen it yet. Because this was all like—

[00:16:06] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I see. I thought that like this JPL woman watched it and then was like, “Ross, I don’t know! What do you think?” (Laughs.)

[00:16:13] Ross Blocher: No, no. It was—I was introduced to someone like who’s, “Hey, he’s really into science!”

(Carrie affirms.)

And then I mentioned I’d watched that this morning, and she’s like, “Oh, what’d you think?”

(Carrie laughs.)

I was like, uh oh. How do I be charitable? And so, I told her, “Uh, Congress got taken in by a confidence scam.” That was my quick summary.

[00:16:33] Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting! Okay. I can buy that version. I didn’t pick up on a scam element of it, but when I was reading these things you sent me, I was like, “This is it?! This is it?!”

[00:16:46] Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Yeah. I sent Carrie the three witness statements, which you can find from these witnesses, which they mostly read out there in front of Congress. Yeah. I think Carrie was already getting the flavor of this.

[00:16:57] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. People get so bogged down in the science part of it. The like, “Well, maybe it could be this; maybe it could be that. Oh, what did they say? Meh-meh-meh,” that I think we lose sight of just like, well, hang on, hang on. Are we talking to the guy who saw it or were we talking to a guy who talked to a guy who saw it? There’s one question. And then, okay, did they take a pic? What kind of documentation have we got? Like, all of that stuff just seems so primary here and gets lost in the shuffle.

[00:17:24] Ross Blocher: I wish that was more people’s just gut response, to kind of look at that and be like, “Okay, what’s the ‘there’ there? Oh, is there no ‘there’ there? Oh.” So, yeah. Kind of giving it a way in advance, but yeah. That is my take, that Congress got hornswoggled, and so did the American public. That this was—none of this was new. This was all information that was out there before, and anything that sounded new was not backed up.

[00:17:49] Carrie Poppy: Right. Okay. Yeah. What’s actually there is paper thin.

[00:17:53] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Which is—(sighs) I don’t know, it’s almost disappointing to me. Like, there’s the teenager inside of me that wants some really fun things to dig into! Like, ooh! To get that little sense of chill. Like, “Ooh, what—I don’t know how to explain that. Or what is that thing? That’s crazy.” And that wasn’t here.

[00:18:10] Carrie Poppy: So, for you, the “U” in UFO stands for oooooh!

[00:18:16] Ross Blocher: (Chuckling.)Yeah, that’s right. Shall we get into it?

[00:18:18] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. So, shall we talk about Ryan Graves and his statement?

[00:18:24] Ross Blocher: Okay, sure. Yeah. Let’s talk about these witnesses! Alright, so I looked it up. Ryan Graves is a mere 37 years old.

[00:18:30] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Young looking guy. Yeah.

[00:18:31] Ross Blocher: A former F-18 pilot and like a pilot instructor. And now, he’s executive director of the Americans for Safe Aerospace.

[00:18:41] Carrie Poppy: Yes, that sounds made up.

[00:18:43] Ross Blocher: It’s that group he created with nearly 5,000 members.

[00:18:46] Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s right. That’s right. Okay, yeah.

[00:18:48] Ross Blocher: And he’s got a shaved bald head, sort of chiseled features. Like, he’s got kind of sharp facial features.

(Carrie agrees.)

A guy you’d see at the gym.

[00:18:58] Carrie Poppy: For sure, at least during this hearing, I guess. He was clean shaven. I don’t know. He’s like—he’s wearing the most basic outfit you could wear to Congress. He looks how you expect him.

[00:19:07] Ross Blocher: Yep. Okay. I got the blazer. I got—yeah, you can’t really describe their outfits. ‘Cause, you know, they’re just wearing blazers, and—”I got a blue tie! That’s my one form of expression.”

[00:19:14] Carrie Poppy: Right? Poor men, poor businessmen. Poor businessmen.

[00:19:17] Ross Blocher: (Facetiously.) Poor—yeah! Let’s look out for the poor businessmen!

[00:19:21] Carrie Poppy: Get more pins or something.

[00:19:22] Ross Blocher: And their lack of expression. They try to wear a tan suit; they get shot right down. (Chuckles.)

[00:19:25] Carrie Poppy: Yep. Yep. Plaid, get outta here! So, I read his statement first. Boy, big takeaways. I mean, it was basically like, “A lot of people I know have seen things they don’t know what they are. We write those things up. And then, we don’t really hear much about it later.”

[00:19:48] Ross Blocher: Yeah. He had a couple sightings of his own—or at least one that he detailed. And this was interesting. I wasn’t really familiar with this form of UFO, but he said that he and others had been seeing these UFOs that look like either gray or black cubes inside of a transparent sphere. Interesting.

[00:20:08] Carrie Poppy: Yes. I think it was just one person. So, here’s what it says. “A pivotal incident occurred during an air combat training mission off of Virginia Beach. All traffic into the training area goes through one GPS point, and just at the moment that two different jets crossed the threshold, one of those two pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere. Both jets, 100 feet apart, have to evade each other, ’cause they’re about to crash. They terminate the mission.” Only one of them saw the gray cube, and there’s no mention of what the other pilots saw or why they turned around. It’s like one person saw a thing that they didn’t understand. That’s that story.

[00:20:50] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And I got the sense that he was somehow like very close to that one, but then he later started a group where he just collects other pilot stories. And he’s interested in both commercial and military sightings, wants to make sure that there is no negative consequence. There are no perceived threats if they speak out about these things, which I agree with! Absolutely!

(Carrie agrees.)

Let’s hear about it. Let’s hear about it immediately. Let’s get all the info we can. I’m not sure how much I trust all these stories of like immediate retribution and penalties and threatening and all of that or if it’s just like gentle ribbing or something like that that gets misinterpreted.

[00:21:31] Carrie Poppy: Or like maybe that’s not appropriate. Like, I can understand making the argument that, “Hey, listen, superiors, if people are going to come to you with anomalous experiences that we didn’t give them training for and that might’ve come from their own sensory systems or from a bird or like something that enters their perception, we should prepare them for that. And if we don’t, that’s on us. So, let’s not treat them like they’re nuts for bringing it up. Let’s not treat them like they’re definitely saying it’s aliens. They’re asking.”

(Ross agrees.)

You know? That seems fair.

[00:22:04] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Whatever it is they’re seeing doesn’t fall within their realm of experience. Yeah, let’s hear it. And it kind of tripped a wire for me. ‘Cause as he’s describing his background and his own UAP encounters, he says, “As a pilot, I was trained to be an expert observer.” And then he goes on. But I just think, ugh, that’s kind of like with cops where they do that thing. Like, “We’re trained to observe especially well.”

And I think, “No, you’re not.” You’re still just a human.

[00:22:30] Carrie Poppy: You’re like everybody. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

[00:22:32] Ross Blocher: Don’t try to gimme this thing that like somehow you’re better at observing than other people. You’re not.

[00:22:36] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. My dad, bless his heart, will say that he’s an observer of human nature before he tells you his opinion about someone. It’s like you can just go ahead and tell me your opinion of that person.

(Ross laughs.)

I’ll still weight it as one person’s opinion. You don’t need to also tell me how good your opinion is.

[00:22:50] Ross Blocher: And it’s valid. It doesn’t mean it’s less valid than anybody else’s. But—

[00:22:53] Carrie Poppy: Yep. Just that one guy.

[00:22:54] Ross Blocher: I’ll work out the context on my own.

(Carrie agrees with a laugh.)

Thank you very much.

Though, I gotta say, in Ryan Graves’ testimony, he did a good job of kind of summarizing what it is they’re asking for. Like, why are we here? So, he breaks it down into three points. “As we convene here, UAP are in our airspace, but they’re grossly under-reported.”

And later on, when asked directly, he says that he estimates only 5% of cases are reported.

[00:23:23] Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, does that mean that he has heard 20 times as many as he reported?

[00:23:28] Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) I don’t know how he built that number. And he even admits that—you know, like the way he presents it, it’s like, “I don’t know, spit balling.”

[00:23:34] Carrie Poppy: “If I had to guess.” Okay.

[00:23:36] Ross Blocher: So, I guess just his understanding of the conditions and what—maybe how much pressure he needs to put to get people to talk about it. Maybe he feels like—

[00:23:45] Carrie Poppy: How much reticence he perceives in the people around him. Okay.

[00:23:48] Ross Blocher: Yeah. I feel like it’s just this kind of like, “Well, just judging from the general milieu of discomfort here, I’m guessing if we hit the bushes 20 times harder, we’d get that many more responses.”

[00:23:58] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, my gut feeling. Okay.

[00:24:00] Ross Blocher: So, that’s point one. Point two. “The stigma attached to UAP is real and powerful and challenges national security.”

[00:24:07] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Yeah. It says, “It silences commercial pilots who fear professional repercussions, discourages witnesses, and is only compounded by recent government claims questioning the credibility of eyewitness testimony.”

Uh, I can kind of believe this—yeah, that if you say, “Hey, I saw something I can’t explain,” and your friends immediately go like, (patronizingly) “Oh, did you, Josh?” That, you know, then you start thinking about like, “Oh god, my reputation at work, and la-la-la-la-la.” I could see. That makes sense.

[00:24:34] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Hearing all this, like I’m thinking it would be great to have, in newer planes, like just an observation mode. Like, as soon as you see something that’s weird, like you just kind of hit a button and you like start filming in 360 and like in multiple spectra.

(Carrie agrees.)

You know, just like so you have like, “I’m seeing something weird!” Hit that button, and all of a sudden like we start gathering all of this info and storing it.

[00:24:55] Carrie Poppy: Yeah! The weird button.

[00:24:57] Ross Blocher: The weird button!

[00:24:59] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah, actually, now that you say that I’m like they could all just be wearing recorders on their vests and just delete it that day if you don’t need it.

[00:25:06] Ross Blocher: Right? Yeah. Like, many security systems are just constantly recording. And then, you know, when you say, “Hey, something’s happening!” It’s like, oh, the last 10 seconds I have in the buffer, I’m gonna include that with what’s happening right now.

[00:25:17] Carrie Poppy: That’s what undercover investigators that like factory farms and stuff do. Yeah.

[00:25:22] Ross Blocher: Okay. And point three. “The government knows more about UAP than shared publicly and excessive classification practices keep crucial information hidden.” So, they feel that UAP are under-reported, that their stigma and that the government knows more than it’s letting on.

[00:25:38] Carrie Poppy: Gosh. This is interesting. I’m getting like a more sympathetic understanding of this, as we’re playing this out. But yeah. Okay.

[00:25:47] Ross Blocher: Well, let’s shoot to the other side of the table. Let’s go to David Fravor.

[00:25:52] Carrie Poppy: Okay. David Fravor. Just to be clear, I still don’t think that aliens have visited Earth.

[00:25:57] Ross Blocher: Oh, did you say something that you think might have given people—

[00:26:00] Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Yeah, just in case they thought like I’m becoming so sympathetic that I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe aliens came to Earth.” I don’t think that.

[00:26:07] Ross Blocher: You’re just sympathetic with the positions of these people.

[00:26:09] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I’m sympathetic to the idea that there may actually be an under-reporting issue, a stigma issue, maybe a classification issue. I’m trying to—I’m thinking of different ways that could play out. And in all of these scenarios, I’m like, “Every single person’s trying to do the right thing. But they’re trying to do the right thing with a really weird and complex cultural phenomenon with lots of players.”

[00:26:33] Ross Blocher: Yeah. That hits on a point that I wanted to try to make at some point during this episode, which is that I think most of the people involved in this whole ordeal, everything we’re talking about, are probably well intentioned.

[00:26:45] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. And probably being honest most of the time, like most people.

[00:26:50] Ross Blocher: They’re working with what they’ve been given, in terms of information and sources, and maybe their trust has been taken advantage of. Or maybe it’s just a string of people who are kind of misunderstanding things and building up on each other. So, I feel like this is just kind of a natural outlet for what society has given us in terms of UAPs. Okay. So, Commander David Fravor. He’ll be turning 59 this month. Happy birthday, David Fravor!

[00:27:16] Carrie Poppy: Hey, David!

[00:27:17] Ross Blocher: I don’t know what his birthday is. But he was a former commanding officer. He’s now retired. And—

[00:27:23] Carrie Poppy: Hey, David!

[00:27:24] Ross Blocher: He was also an F-18 pilot.

[00:27:26] Carrie Poppy: (Enthusiastically.) For the world-famous Black Aces!

I’m saying that like that because he has an exclamation point after it in his bio. (Laughs.)

[00:27:33] Ross Blocher: Hey, alright! Sure. Yeah. That’s a reason to be excited. So, he was one of the pilots in this November 2004—so, this is quite a while ago—report that, again, the public knows about. This was one of the videos that was included in the 2017 New York Times article that caught a lot of attention that we talked about.

[00:27:55] Carrie Poppy: This is that tic-tac thing, right?

[00:27:57] Ross Blocher: Yep, exactly. Yeah, he was one of the tic-tac guys.

[00:28:00] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. So, he saw weird, little white tic-tac-like object.

[00:28:05] Ross Blocher: This was off the coast of San Diego. Baja, California.

[00:28:09] Carrie Poppy: And couldn’t make out what it was. And as he was accelerating his vehicle, it seemed like that tic-tac accelerated in an unexpected way. And they were kind of turning and twisting in a way that they were like, “This is impossible! No human technology could do it!”

[00:28:25] Ross Blocher: Yeah. So, the way he describes it, it was like a beautiful, clear day in San Diego, as they always are. And the water was beautiful and blue and undisturbed, except there was this like white patch of waves that kind of caught their attention. And then, they noticed there was this flying tic-tac that was like in that area flying around. So, that got their attention. They flew after it. I think there was four pilots, and he says they all claim to have seen this. People—

[00:28:50] Carrie Poppy: Of course, that’s one person’s account of four people’s account.

[00:28:52] Ross Blocher: Exactly, yeah. It’s always important to remember that, you know, like when you read in the Gospels that 500 people witnessed Jesus after he came back from the dead.

[00:29:01] Carrie Poppy: And we will provide none of their names!

[00:29:03] Ross Blocher: We have one person who wrote that 500 people saw it. Yeah. Important thing to remember. But he says that they saw this white tic-tac shape, and I assume most people remember the candy. This came up jokingly in the hearing, where you had that Burchett chick guy saying, “My daughter was trying to correct me and say, ‘No, no, it’s TikTok.’” He’s like, “No, I’m talking about the candy. So, you can’t call me a boomer for that.”

(Carrie chuckles.)

He said it was like 40 feet long though, which is incredibly large. So, imagine a 40-foot tic-tac, he said, “Or you can think of it as like a giant, white propane tank.”

[00:29:35] Carrie Poppy: But the 40 feet long was still accounting for the distance that it looks like it was away. So, you know, you’re already making a lot of assumptions when you describe it that way.

[00:29:45] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Like Father Ted said to Father Dougal in Father Ted, “No, Dougal. This cow is small. That cow is far away.” And they looked about the same size, but no. They were different sizes. And yeah, it’s hard to tell these things from a moving platform at 20,000 feet or however high you happen to be at the moment.

[00:30:04] Carrie Poppy: And pilots are trained in the things they’re expected to encounter. Everyone encounters things they don’t expect to encounter.

[00:30:10] Ross Blocher: So, what happened was they said they saw this, and it was doing—like you were saying—all this crazy stuff in the air. Like, the thing dropped down from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and like kind of hung out for a few hours and then like went back up and amazed them. These are things that our craft cannot do with human technology. Apparently, like their machinery was malfunctioning on this test flight. So, they went back, and it was the next crew that went out that shot this infamous tic-tac video.

And he seems to agree that that was what he had seen. But Mick West, who has been a guest on our podcast and really is the expert on all this; we should be talking to him, and he should have been on this congressional hearing. He has very credibly analyzed that video of the tic-tac object and shown when it appears to be shooting far away or coming close up, that’s the zoom changing on the camera.

(Carrie snickers.)

It’s changing size, because the camera’s changing its view.

[00:31:04] Carrie Poppy: (Chuckling.) I forgot this. Okay. Oh no. (Laughs.)

[00:31:06] Ross Blocher: And then he analyzed—’cause so often, so often, these videos, including these really high-profile ones, they turn out to be airplanes far away.

[00:31:19] Carrie Poppy: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

[00:31:20] Ross Blocher: And you know, oftentimes you’re looking at an infrared camera, which will kind of present the world in information that’s not intuitive to us. So, like the positive image will be white, ’cause it has a heat signature. But then in this case, they were flipping back and forth between multiple cameras. So, Mick West will just kind of—he’ll look at the info that these cameras capture about the telemetry and which way it’s looking and, you know, the angle and all that. And he’ll be like, “Well, look, when that change happened, the camera was moving.”

[00:31:50] Carrie Poppy: Okay, That’s interesting, ’cause I was thinking all this stuff about the tic-tac zooming away would be in the same sentence as, “I turned and went toward it.” And I’m thinking like well, you’re accelerating then! Like, there’s no—there’s no self-awareness about what you are doing and how that adds to your perception of what’s going on around you. The world’s just happening to you.

[00:32:14] Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) And when you’re just a Joe Q. Public later on seeing this video, you don’t readily have that information available. And so, when you see this thing quickly just—zyoop!—zip off to the left, you don’t think, “Oh, the plane just—zyoop!—zipped to the right, and that’s why we see it moving, not because it was moving at superhuman speeds, pulling crazy Gs.” But that’s where everybody immediately goes to like, well, we calculated based on this displacement that it had to be moving, you know, this fast, and that’s not possible! Okay. Or the camera moved. So, in this case, Mick West, he said, you know, not conclusive, but here’s a plane model. And just using one example, commercial jetliner. Let’s rotate it around. Oh! Look, here. There it is, flying away from us. Matches that exact profile. Add a bit of graininess, add a bit of lack of focus. Voila! It looks almost identical. I think that’s what we have here. And you know, we’re still making hay out of this 19 years later.

[00:33:09] Carrie Poppy: And why do you think then pilots—yeah, pilots though, who are in the air regularly—why do you think they wouldn’t identify a passenger plane like that?

[00:33:16] Ross Blocher: Good question. I guess because it—if it’s far enough away, and I think in this case it was like 80 miles away, it’s essentially a visual infinity. Even if you’re moving in a very fast, you know, jet plane. And if you’re just kind of locking on with a FLIR—forward-looking infrared—video camera of something like that, your only input may just be what you’re seeing on the monitor, versus what you’re seeing with your eyeballs.

[00:33:41] Carrie Poppy: Right. Yeah. I’m starting to wonder if this is like an attention thing, like—let’s not do this, but if you distracted a bunch of pilots while they’re flying planes, what else would they see that they’re not normally focusing on? Because our attention is supposed to block out other stuff. That’s kind of what it’s for. That’s interesting.

[00:33:57] Ross Blocher: And there’s so many variables here. For example, you have to wonder, well, was it picked up by multiple types of equipment? Okay, maybe it shows up on a visual camera. Did it show up on radar? No? Oh, maybe it was something stuck to the window or something like that. And then sometimes you’ll hear people say, “Oh, no, no! It was definitely picked up on radar,” but that data somehow has gone missing. They don’t have that. Sometimes it is there, and you go like, okay! Now, we’re talking about something that’s interesting. Like, if multiple, say, ships in the area latched onto something—all of it is relevant, but you want all that info, and it can often get disentangled, or you start to assume that there’s data there that isn’t.

And so, David Fravor, he insists, “No, we saw it. We saw that white propane tank thing, and then another crew went out and photographed—video grafted this object.” Maybe those were different things. I don’t know. You want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but you also need proof. At the end of the day, it’s still unidentified.

[00:34:54] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Okay. Now, when he comes back and he tells everybody, is he mocked for thinking he saw the tic-tac?

[00:35:01] Ross Blocher: So, he’s not.

(Carrie “oh”s.)

In fact—and this comes up as part of the line of questioning during this hearing—“Did you feel repercussions?” And he’s sitting two seats away from Mr. Graves saying like, “This is just horrible, the way people are treated, and they’re threatened.”

He’s like, “No, I had no problem talking about it. It was just, you know—it was kind of forgotten. People came back years later and asked me if I would be willing to talk about it. I said, okay. Uh, but you know, like the six guys I know who’ve talked about this, you know, they retired just fine. You know, top of their field and good retirements and all that.”

(Carrie affirms with surprise.)

He had a totally different take on that aspect.

[00:35:36] Carrie Poppy: Oh, man. Okay. Interesting! Because his—I mean, we have to take that seriously. You know? Okay. So, huh. So, we’ve got this picture now where there are some people who want to come forward, but they have a perception that they’re going to be thought of as talking about aliens and thus crazy. And both of those might be assumptions, ’cause maybe you haven’t tried yet.

[00:36:04] Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah. Maybe you’re the one intimidating yourself!

[00:36:08] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, but it’s a—but I think it’s still a good argument for like, “Okay, if people are feeling this way, like let’s have some trainings out there that are like, hey, sometimes you see X and Y.”

[00:36:15] Ross Blocher: Absolutely! You know what? Yeah, I’m all for this. I’m all for my little weird button idea.

(Carrie laughs and agrees.)

I’m all for people immediately saying, “Hey, saw something super strange out there! I tried to record it. Let’s take a look at this. This is what I saw and perceived.” Get that as fast as you can too, because these stories change. That’s a problem.

[00:36:35] Carrie Poppy: And before you talk to other people—

[00:36:37] Ross Blocher: Yes. Yes. Separate ’em. That would be the first thing. Like the four pilots some in and they’re like, “Woah! We saw something really weird out there!”

I’d be like, “Cool! You, this room.”

[00:36:42] Carrie Poppy: “SHUT UP!” (Chuckles.)

[00:36:43] Ross Blocher: “You that room. Yeah. Stop talking to each other. We’re gonna get your recollections. You’re not in trouble. We just want to hear it separate.” That was another thing that struck me, because—oh goodness. Uh, like with aliens, early on in the day, you had just a wide variety of descriptions of them. And I think Joe Nickell once made like a really cool chart of just the changing descriptions of aliens over time. That—

[00:37:05] Carrie Poppy: Yeah! Oh, that’s a cool poster. Yeah. I’ve seen that.

[00:37:07] Ross Blocher: Early on, people would be like, “Oh, wow! It’s a moth, you know, with giant eyes and it was eight feet tall!” And then you have the person who says like, “Oh, well, it was gray and small and four feet tall.” And then you have people who are like, “They’re blue! They’re two feet tall.” And some people are like, “They look like owls!” Over time, you get this convergence on kind of like a popular understanding of what the aliens look like. I think very similar for—

[00:37:30] Carrie Poppy: And highly punctuated with the art around us.

[00:37:32] Ross Blocher: Yes. Right. We’re to the point where you can say, “This Outer Limits episode came out right before the Betty and Barney Hill—”

[00:37:40] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Abduction story. Mm-hm.

[00:37:41] Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. And there was another contemporary piece that I’m gonna kick myself for forgetting the name of later. But yeah, usually you can say, “Aha! This is when Whitley Strieber’s book came out. This is where the proliferation of the gray aliens with almond eyes happened.”

Similarly—and this one annoyed me, ’cause I could have sworn I’d heard stories of chupacabra before this, but Ben Radford has identified that the chupacabra mythos and the description of the chupacabra all arose from the movie Species. Which I wanna say was—

[00:38:13] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Chupacabra is the like goat that eats you?

[00:38:14] Ross Blocher: Yeah, the goat sucker. Well, it’s some weird mangey looking creature that looks like kind of vaguely like a starved werewolf that that sucks the blood out of goats and other livestock.

[00:38:26] Carrie Poppy: Oh! It eats goats. Goats don’t eat you. Okay.

[00:38:29] Ross Blocher: And I remember asking my high school Bible/Spanish teacher about it, because she came from the area where those myths were supposed to originate. And she’s like, “Oh yes, I’ve heard of it!” And she spoke of it as if she’d heard of it for many years. So, I remember when I heard about this, like, “It couldn’t have come from this early ’90s movie! ‘Cause Senora Orum had heard about this for a long time!”

[00:38:50] Carrie Poppy: Alright. Which was your own sort of confabulated memory about how she told it.

[00:38:56] Ross Blocher: Right! Of her confabulated memory.

[00:38:57] Carrie Poppy: (Chuckling.) Yeah, perhaps, yeah. Oh, interesting!

[00:38:59] Ross Blocher: So, anyways, that’s—I think—how these things happen, which is why—yeah, you gotta lock it down as fast as possible. But all of that to the underlying point that, yeah, let’s hear these stories and take ’em seriously. By all means! And I’m all for—I was gonna say we’re all for; I think we’re all for even having governmental bodies that collect this information and look into it.

[00:39:20] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, and I think also—the second issue I’m stumbling on this time in this conversation is letting people know, “Hey, it’s not a red flag to us as your employer if you had an anomalous sensory experience. We expect those to some degree. We don’t think that you are nuts because this happened. We don’t expect you to lose your job as a result of this report. Even if we find out this was something in your eyeballs and brain, your job is likely still safe.”

[00:39:50] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And if somebody gives you a hard time about it, let us know. Yeah. And it’s kind of like sensitivity training and other types of training that you give your employees, because it puts that thing in the back of their head. They have (inaudible). Yeah, I’m all for it.

[00:40:03] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Prime them. Prime them for this to happen.

[00:40:07] Ross Blocher: For commercial pilots as well. So, there we go. Look at us all in violent agreement.

[00:40:11] Carrie Poppy: (Giggling.) I’ve never heard that phrase!

[00:40:15] Ross Blocher: Oh, really? It’s fun, right?

[00:40:16] Carrie Poppy: It’s harrowing. (Laughs.) Or fun!

(Ross cackles.)

In violent agreement! Oof!

[00:40:22] Ross Blocher: Well, idea is, you know, you’ve spent a long time like you normally would, hashing out differences. And you’re like, “Oh, we agree we agree with each other in the end.”

[00:40:28] Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. Ooh, I see, I see. Yeah, yeah.

[00:40:30] Ross Blocher: Okay. So, that transitions well into the fact that there are bodies that are tasked with looking into these things. Guess what? The transparency they’re calling for? Already exists! So, in 2020, there was a new group formed called the UAP Task Force. Okay. And now, as of 2022, partway through the year, there was a new group called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Offices, AARO or “arrow”, as it’ll be referred to in this hearing.

[00:41:04] Carrie Poppy: All Domain Anomalous Resolution Offices?

[00:41:09] Ross Blocher: Oh, the office. Yeah. I’m impressed you held onto that.

[00:41:09] Carrie Poppy: Oh, love it! It’s like, it’s so on the nose of like the government as arbiter of our collective reality, you know? Like, that’s what this hearing is, is like, “Let’s figure out what real is. We have two hours. What’s real?”

[00:41:25] Ross Blocher: Guess what? They’ve been asking for this stuff for a long time, and they’ve gotten it. People have asked like, “Can we research these things? Can we pull them all together? Can we query the archives? Can we examine the footage?” And the government has said, “Sure! Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s like spend millions of dollars to do this.” And I’m not even against that. You know, done responsibly, openly, transparently, yeah! Let’s gather that info. And then—

[00:41:47] Carrie Poppy: And we’ll know if they’ve done it by what they discover. Right?

(Ross chuckles.)

If they discover what proves my position, then they have searched far enough.

[00:41:55] Ross Blocher: Oh nooo, this is where it gets hairy.

[00:41:56] Carrie Poppy: But should they not discover what I want, actually the search must continue.

[00:41:59] Ross Blocher: They must be corrupt and—yeah. Okay. So, you have identified the problem here.

(Carrie “oh no”s.)

You’ve identified the problem. So, this is a good time to introduce our third witness, David Grusch.

[00:42:12] Carrie Poppy: Dave Grusch, the bell of the ball, the glue that holds it all together.

[00:42:19] Ross Blocher: Okay, David Grusch. So, he’s a big, newer figure in this space. Those other two gents we’d already heard from in previous hearings and documentaries and New York Times articles and all of that. But David Grusch has become the bell of the ball lately. We’ve already talked about two former pilots, one who’s just like, happy to tell a story if you wanna bring him out of retirement. The other one is forming groups to try to get the truth out of as many other pilots as possible. Alright. What can we say about David Grusch?

[00:42:48] Carrie Poppy: Well, David Charles Grusch was an intelligence officer for 14 years. And by that I mean he was in the Air Force, and he was also in the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency at the civilian level. We looked this up. This appears to still be—this makes sense.

[00:43:06] Ross Blocher: It’s something. Yeah. At first we’re like civilian level? What does it mean?

[00:43:10] Carrie Poppy: Civilian level? Yeah. But you know, he was working for the government, and he says that the US government is operating with secrecy above congressional oversight with regard to aerial phenomena. And he has seen evidence.

[00:43:30] Ross Blocher: He has heard stories.

[00:43:32] Carrie Poppy: He has heard stuff. He has seen stuff. And he has taken steps to corroborate the stuff, though he has not mentioned what those steps are. And he was informed that a multi-decade, UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program has been operated by the US government since possibly the ’30s.

[00:43:59] Ross Blocher: And that involves—wait a second! Retrieved craft? Alien technology?

[00:44:06] Carrie Poppy: Maybe alien bodies was sort of the implication.

[00:44:08] Ross Blocher: And bodies. Yep. Those are all part of his story. And you can see him in real time in Congress trying to intelligently parcel out this info to not sound a little too crazy. But—

[00:44:24] Carrie Poppy: Or a little too credulous, at least.

[00:44:26] Ross Blocher: Mm! There we go. So, he’s talked to lots of people, and I can’t say he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, but I think he’s listened to a lot of people tell stories and he’s like, “Woah! Well, if this is true, this is huge! This has been this big coverup.”

[00:44:39] Carrie Poppy: Huge if true. Huge if true!

[00:44:42] Ross Blocher: Let’s go in front of Congress and share it. But he’s also—he worked in intelligence, and so his whole deal is that he was functioning like a whistleblower. And he even says that in his statement.

[00:44:53] Carrie Poppy: He says he in effect became a whistleblower. Yes.

[00:44:56] Ross Blocher: And here are the—here at the congressional hearing, you know, even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is referring to him.

[00:45:02] Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, that’s me.

[00:45:03] Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Is referring to him as a whistleblower. And so, he gets credit as a whistleblower, because he sees something really bad going on. He’s raised this up to the next level and talked about it.

[00:45:14] Carrie Poppy: Uh, fair enough. If we wanna use these terms without them—if we want everyone to be able to use them when they want to, we can’t withhold ’em.

[00:45:22] Ross Blocher: But just to confuse things, why is he able to talk about this then, if it’s all secret? You know, he’s being the whistleblower. So, he had to get permission for all of his talking points from the DOPSR.

[00:45:35] Carrie Poppy: The DOPSR?!

[00:45:36] Ross Blocher: The Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review. So, essentially, if you’re going to write something publicly, they wanna look at it first and be like, “Okay, are you releasing anything that’s dangerous security-wise.”

(Carrie affirms.)

“No? Okay. You can talk about this.” So, apparently he’s internalized this catalog of things he can talk about and things he can’t. And boy, does he drop acronyms like nobody’s business. So, DOPSR is just the beginning. The way he describes it, he was his agency’s co-lead in unidentified anomalous phenomena and trans-medium object analysis, as well as reporting to UAP task force. We talked about them; they were that 2020 to 2021 group that had this job to look at this stuff critically. And eventually the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the AARO, that we talked about. Now, that comes up later, that the director of AARO says, “He didn’t work for us.”

[00:46:33] Carrie Poppy: Oh shit.

[00:46:34] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And Grusch has to say, “Well, I mean, okay. Not directly, yes, but like—you know, some of my work went to that group.”

[00:46:42] Carrie Poppy: I see. I’m also interested in the word “co-lead”. Do you know who the other lead was?

[00:46:46] Ross Blocher: Oh, good question. I do not.

[00:46:47] Carrie Poppy: Okay. If you were the other lead, please get in touch! Would love to hear your impressions.

[00:46:55] Ross Blocher: But yeah, Grusch speaks very quickly in acronym language and will refer to many different kinds of like acts and—

[00:47:03] Carrie Poppy: Jargon.

[00:47:04] Ross Blocher: Yeah. A lot of jargon, a lot of it both legal and intelligence jargon and ranking military jargon, stuff like that.

[00:47:12] Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. So many of these people love that. Linda Moulton Howe does that!

[00:47:14] Ross Blocher: Right. To a point where I just assume, okay, well it seems to be checking with these Congress people, so.

[00:47:19] Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting. I wonder if that’s the function. Yeah. I go like—my brain, I can’t parse this anymore.

[00:47:26] Ross Blocher: Oh, I would have to like stop and replay them six times. Like, what was that word? What, what? Oh god, that was so fast!

[00:47:31] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I did not understand this until I read these statements, and now I feel I fully understand it. So, just go to the statements, you guys, if you couldn’t follow this.

[00:47:39] Ross Blocher: So, I’ve been mentioning ages. Our friend here, David Grusch, is all of 36. So, you know, pretty young.

[00:47:48] Carrie Poppy: 36. 37 for the other guy, right? Okay.

[00:47:51] Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. And does he have, himself, any personal sightings of any of this?

[00:47:56] Carrie Poppy: David Grusch? No, he’s been informed.

[00:47:59] Ross Blocher: That’s right. He’s talked to people, he’s heard stories.

[00:48:02] Carrie Poppy: That is it. I highlighted in red on this PDF the one time he gave me an actual source, and it is the term “I was informed”. That’s it. That’s it, you guys! That’s all he’s reporting here! I heard some stuff!

[00:48:15] Ross Blocher: Yes. “People have told me these stories and they seem very, very certain about it.”

[00:48:20] Carrie Poppy: Oh my goodness.

[00:48:22] Ross Blocher: And he’s in front of Congress.

[00:48:23] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. This will not do!

[00:48:25] Ross Blocher: Blowing the whistle on things he’s heard.

[00:48:27] Carrie Poppy: This will not do! This is not anything!

[00:48:30] Ross Blocher: And the more you dig into it, you find that his sources and the people he is been talking to are figures such as one of the authors on that New York Times article in 2017, and other people in the UFO community that we’ve met at Contact in the Desert and other places, that it’s all just this like community that talks to each other and shares their stories. And he’s just essentially gotten pulled into this.

[00:48:54] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Deftly avoiding the word incestuous.

(They laugh.)

[00:48:58] Ross Blocher: And the phrase circle jerk.

[00:49:02] Carrie Poppy: But whichever sex metaphor you want, it doesn’t sound like a good way to get information.

[00:49:09] Ross Blocher: Uh, Leslie Keene is the author I’m thinking of. And there’s a guy named George Knapp who’s very much involved in this as well, but she was one of the ones responsible for the New York Times article in 2017 that caused a lot of trouble, ’cause it just treated this as so legitimate.

[00:49:23] Carrie Poppy: Mm. And I mean, it says in one of the statements, “We are here today because of that article in the New York Times.”

[00:49:29] Ross Blocher: Right! These things have effects. And this just came up recently when you had responded to an article in the New York Times about Marie Geller that was way too credulous, just essentially did his publicist’s work for him.

[00:49:43] Carrie Poppy: Oh my god. I actually feel—I feel the anger in my legs.

(They chuckle.)

Oh yeah, let’s talk about it on another episode.

[00:49:50] Ross Blocher: It’s coming from the legs! Okay.

[00:49:51] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my god. ‘Cause I feel like I’ll go off on a long tangent here, but yeah, no, that was terrible! Sometimes we think we see these things like art and journalism as solely reporting on the world, commenting on the world, social media commenting on the world. No! You are also part of the world! You are affecting things. You are putting stories out there that land in people’s minds and then direct how they interpret their lives!

[00:50:14] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And so, having a source that is held credible, like the New York Times, report favorably on something like this makes people go, “Oh, okay! New York Times takes it seriously! Oh, wow! AOC takes this seriously! You know, here it is in Congress.” So, yeah, this whole thing is a big win for the UFO community. But when you drill down to it, (whispering) there’s not much there.

[00:50:34] Carrie Poppy: (Ramping into shouting.) Oh my god, there’s nothing there!

I was informed—okay so, listen. Anonymous sources. People deal with them all the time. You got an anonymous source here. Okay, fine. When someone’s like your very first anonymous source, you might actually need them to stay anonymous. If this were the very first person to ever be like, “Hey, I’ve got something crazy. I think there was a visitor from another planet that the United States government is covering up, and I have the proof. Protect me.” You’d probably protect that person!

(Ross agrees.)

Very first time. Don’t know what’s going on here. There’s no reason for him to make it up. He wouldn’t get this story from elsewhere in his culture, so there’s no throughline there. When it’s like the millionth person, you’re like, “John, listen. If we’re gonna go to Congress with this, I need you on the record!”

[00:51:17] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And constantly, constantly throughout this, I had to make my own little acronym for it. He would make these phrases that I called CSMIP: Could Say More in Private. So, I counted 20 of these where someone would ask him a question and he would say, “Well, if we can talk securely in private, I can give you those names. I can give you that information. I can tell you who to look into this with.”

(Carrie affirms skeptically.)

And already, representative Burchett, who started all of this with Representative Luna was really upset—as was Matt Gaetz—that they had requested before this hearing apparently to sit in a skiff—a controlled environment with security clearance, so that he could speak freely to them. Grusch could tell them all of these extra stories, and they were denied! It was refused to them! Which I can only assume there was more story to that, why that that was restricted or turned down. But they were using that as like a constant refrain. “Well, okay, we need to—we’re demanding!” That was one of the main thrusts of the congressional hearing is that we’re demanding that later on we get the chance to sit down with him and ask him all these important things that he can’t say in public.

But that’s where all like the data was. Everything that was information about who has this story, what the government did to cover things up, whether we have craft or not or whether we have alien bodies or not—it was always just coyly hidden behind, “Well, I could tell you more if we could be speaking confidentially.”

[00:53:46] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I see, I see. Right.

[00:53:48] Ross Blocher: And that’s where I feel like this felt like a confidence scam to me. Like, he had already bit off the confidence of other people, and now he in turn was playing a confidence game, telling them, “Okay, well if you can—if we can talk securely, I can give you all the goods.”

[00:53:03] Carrie Poppy: And so, what do you think he wants out of that? Just to pass the buck? Get a few more minutes?

[00:53:08] Ross Blocher: I mean, he could just legitimately believe that all these stories are true. How could all these people be lying about this? Because you get your numbers game like, “Well, how could this many people be making up stories like this?” And then you get the confidence thing of like, “Well, what would be that person’s motivation to lie about this?” And maybe not think about stories corrupting over time and other motives that aren’t necessarily nefarious. It’s a second order confidence scheme.

[00:53:34] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I see, I see. Possibly unintentional.

(Ross confirms.)

Oh, you’re really focusing on the word confidence—like the effect of his certainty on the rest of the room.

(Ross confirms.)

I see. Oh, okay! That’s an—I don’t think of, of that when I hear conman. Okay! Yeah.

[00:53:50] Ross Blocher: And that’s why I feel like I can say like most of the people involved here are probably well intentioned.

(Carrie agrees.)

[00:53:58] Promo:

Music: Chiming synth.

Jarrett Hill: Hey there, beautiful people. I’m Jarrett Hill.

Tre’vell Anderson: And I’m Tre’vell Anderson. And we wanna know: have you ever had mixed feelings about the things that you looove?

Jarrett: Ooh, maybe about the things that you hate?

Tre’vell: Then FANTI is the show for you. FANTI is the podcast for all those complex and complicado conversations about the grey areas in our lives.

Jarrett: You might have conflicting feelings about Kamala Harris or copaganda or interracial friending.

Tre’vell: Mm-hm, mm-hm. That’s alright, ‘cause we do too. And we get into it every single Thursday. Catch this slay-worthy audio at MaximumFun.org, that’s MaximumFun.org/fanti. That’s F-A-N-T-I. Come get all this good-good.

Jarrett: Or this great-great.

(Music ends.)

[00:54:38] Ross Blocher: So, we’ve covered a lot of kind of what went on, and I’m just going to go a bit through my notes of the hearing itself and bring up additional things that happened.

Representative Grothman—I don’t recall how they pronounced his name—he was the chairman of this, so he was kind of running it. Older gentleman. And he mentioned a bunch of people that weren’t on this committee that they had invited to come participate for the day just ’cause they seemed to be interested in the conversation. Overall, like I said, we had like 16 people asking questions from the House of Representatives. So, Grothman said that he himself had read the 1976 book, Flying Saucers: Serious Business. And that’s what had like inspired him as a teenager to take all this seriously.

[00:55:23] Carrie Poppy: Mmm! Okay, “serious business” suggested to me like it’s about the industry around it. But no?

[00:55:29] Ross Blocher: I think it even had—from his brief description of it—that it had overtones of “we need governmental openness on this topic”.

[00:55:38] Carrie Poppy: Gotcha. Okay. Do you wanna hear the description?

(Ross confirms.)

Flying Saucers: Serious Business by Frank Edwards. “In Flying Saucers: Serious Business, America’s most popular paranormal spokesperson, Frank Edwards, collates the latest information on UFOs and theorizes about the shocking possible conclusions, including what the next UFO phase might be and its implications for the future of the human race.”

[00:56:01] Ross Blocher: Fascinating. I know the power of a good conspiracy theory-adjacent book, you know, on a young adult mind. ‘Cause it sure worked on me. He also mentioned that Gerald Ford had had a UFO sighting in 1966.

[00:56:17] Carrie Poppy: Hmm! I didn’t know that!

[00:56:18] Ross Blocher: I wasn’t aware of that. And apparently that had started a previous round of congressional action on UFOs, and it’s been like a 50-year gap since then, essentially. And then, as most of us know, in 1969, Jimmy Carter had a UFO sighting. So, there were—

[00:56:35] Carrie Poppy: Right. My favorite president.

[00:56:36] Ross Blocher: Ah, yeah! Good choice.

[00:56:38] Carrie Poppy: Thank you. Fuck you Guinea worm! If Guinea worm is listening to this show, just turn it off. I don’t even like you.

[00:56:43] Ross Blocher: Oh, we hate you, Guinea worm!

[00:56:47] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, you fucking suuuck. Jimmy Carter’s gonna kick your ass.

[00:56:47] Ross Blocher: And that was a regular refrain that other presidents have drawn attention to this. You know, Trump had been pro-transparency on this. Even Biden—though, a few representatives had some negative things to say about like Biden’s handling of the Chinese balloon and the other objects that were shot down. Representative Burchett—again, one of the organizers of this whole thing—he highlighted this 2012 report that he wanted everyone to read, called “Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum, Space-Time Metric Engineering”.

(Carrie “oh no”s.)

It turns out it was, you know, like a credible talk just about how we might use the vacuum of space as an energy source.

[00:57:26] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I see. I said, oh no, ’cause my brain couldn’t even follow the sentence. Okay.

[00:57:31] Ross Blocher: Yeah. No, that was one of those ones I had him—“Say that again? Say that again? Okay. Now, I’ve got all the words.” And I looked it up and you know, sure enough, yeah, okay. This is just a science thing, but he was just trying to make the point like, “Hey, this technology is out there, and maybe the aliens are using something like this.”

[00:57:46] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I see. Okay. Maybe! You never know!

[00:57:49] Ross Blocher: He mentioned that other Congress people have told him that they’ve seen UFOs, but even some of them were reluctant to talk about it.

[00:57:58] Carrie Poppy: Sorry, who’s speaking right now?

[00:58:00] Ross Blocher: Burchett. Tim Burchett.

[00:58:01] Carrie Poppy: Burchett. So, some, oh—other Congress—got it. The leader of this whole thing.

[00:58:04] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Republican from Tennessee.

[00:58:07] Carrie Poppy: Other congressmen who aren’t here today have also told him that they’ve seen—okay, alright.

[00:58:11] Ross Blocher: Yeah but didn’t wanna like attach their names to it. But like famously, Harry Reed, who used to be like the Democratic majority leader, he was a believer in UFOs. And he talked about it and, you know, gave money towards investigating them. So, it’s not like the government’s been derelict in this topic.

[00:58:29] Carrie Poppy: Also, you can never discount the possibility that someone told this guy a story that they didn’t even feel they were reporting as a UFO, and he was like, “Oooh, I know exactly what you’re saying.”

[00:58:38] Ross Blocher: “But I’m adding that to my list of people.” Yeah. And that can be two people, or it can be 16 people. Yeah. And then what are they gonna do? Like, come out publicly and be like, I told him something that sounded like that.

[00:58:50] Carrie Poppy: Right. Like, I just told you a story about something I saw on the beach where I was—yeah, I didn’t know what it was, but—

[00:58:52] Ross Blocher: That’s true! I’m not gonna say who, (conspiratorially) but other co-hosts of this podcast have seen things that they could not describe in the nighttime sky.

[00:59:00] Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) No, that’s—yeah, but makes it sound different! (In a high-pitched voice.) That makes it sound different!

Yeah, exactly.

[00:59:06] Ross Blocher: But technically true. Right, Gary?!

[00:59:07] Carrie Poppy: It’s technically true! In fact, I would say most things around me are unidentified. I have basic categories for them. I don’t know whose house that is over there. I don’t know what kind of tree this is here. Something just flew by. I don’t know what it was.

[00:59:24] Ross Blocher: Uh-oh, Carrie is wallowing and philosophical, now.

[00:59:29] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) I mean, it’s all unidentified.

[00:59:29] Ross Blocher: And Burchett himself even—well, joked—that, “Well, we we’re not bringing any little green men or flying saucers to this hearing. Sorry!”

But I’m thinking, well, why not?! Because you’re making the claim that they’re real. But there weren’t even photos or videos, like they had at the last Congressional hearing in 2022.

[00:59:49] Carrie Poppy: Yeah! Bring a little alien flesh.

[00:59:51] Ross Blocher: Representative Luna—again, the chief prosecutor of Adam Schiff and 2014 fourteen’s Maxim Hometown Hottie.

(Carrie congratulates Luna.)

She was citing statistics about how people believe the government is doing a bad job. So, she had some numbers of like, “A lot of Americans are really unhappy with how we’re handling this!”

[01:00:11] Carrie Poppy: “And then, now I’m telling other Americans who can add to those numbers.”

[01:00:14] Ross Blocher: And she said that there’s thousands of eyewitness testimonies and videos taken on phones. And I’m thinking, (murmuring) where are these videos?

[01:00:22] Carrie Poppy: Hm. Well, okay. One of their claims though is that all of these things get classified too easily. So, what do you think? Could that be right?

[01:00:32] Ross Blocher: Possibly. Yeah. It could be that videos that should be made more public aren’t. That’s why I’d have a hard time—’cause I’m sure there’s various considerations about location and military movements and equipment.

[01:00:43] Carrie Poppy: And it seems like the problem.

[01:00:44] Ross Blocher: I’m sure there’s gotta be some happy balance, and maybe we’re not there.

[01:00:49] Carrie Poppy: Well, I’m also thinking your supervisor might be like, “Okay, I can tell that you are in a tizzy about this. You’re worried about stigma, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t want this open to investigation from a bunch of other people where they see your name on it. And maybe it’s best for you, my employee, that we like keep this internal.” Like, they might be thinking something as simple as that. It’s tough.

[01:01:09] Ross Blocher: Mm-hmm. And she has—yeah, totally. It is. But I mean, in principle, I think we agree. Let’s make this stuff available. I would call for better analysis. Like, if Mick West can—I mean, he’s a good investigator, but if he can untangle this all, why didn’t you, military?

(Carrie agrees.)

Like, let’s do a little better on our video analysis. Maybe like, uh, hire some of those folks who can actually understand a lot about photography and the equipment that we’re using and replicate things! That’s one of the great things that Mick West will do is like, “Oh, I got this same type of camera. And look, it has a triangular aperture, and I can point at the stars, and I get the same triangle green objects that you saw in your UFO video. Oh, and look! The ones in your video match the location of these stars. So, ta-da! We figured it out.”

[01:01:58] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I mean, it’s the James Randi move, right? If the magic trick is identical to the magic, maybe both are tricks.

[01:02:04] Ross Blocher: Right. Yeah. At least introduce that as a very strong possibility. She was saying that over 20% of Americans have seen UFOs or UAPs, which totally makes sense to me. I’ve certainly seen things in the sky where I’m like, “Whoa!”

[01:02:19] Carrie Poppy: Or yeah, “What is that?”

[01:02:20] Ross Blocher: And then maybe I figure it out a few moments later. Maybe I don’t. But like, yeah, it’s still cool.

[01:02:25] Carrie Poppy: Oh my god. I mean, it’d be like—who’s saying no to this?! It’s like someone calls you on the phone is like, “Hi, um, uh, I’m taking a population survey. Have you ever seen a person you didn’t know?”

(Ross laughs.)

Have I what?! Yes!

[01:02:39] Ross Blocher: “Do you think that could be a shadow person?”

[01:02:43] Carrie Poppy: (Stammering.) Yeah, I guess! Have I ever seen like a shadowy figure? Yes?! I—who is this?!

(Ross laughs.)

Like, who is saying no to this?!

[01:02:52] Ross Blocher: “Just a shadowy voice on the phone.” Click.

(Carrie laughs.)

[01:02:56] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I wonder how it’s phrased.

[01:02:58] Ross Blocher: Like, just at summer camp, at Camp Quest West, just a couple weeks ago, we were out at game night. And all of a sudden like there was this uproar, and I had to step back from the lodge a bit so I could see over the roof of it, but there was this object that looked like it was coming at us. It looked like a comet. It looked catastrophic like, “Oh no! We’re all gonna die!”

[01:03:20] Carrie Poppy: Woah. Woah! And it was a duck.

[01:03:22] Ross Blocher: There was that moment of panic.

No, it was a rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was a—

(Carrie “woah”s.)

It was yet another Falcon rocket for SpaceX that was gonna launch more of these Starlink satellites.

[01:03:35] Carrie Poppy: Oh, wow! Okay! Oh, genuine UFO sighting the way they usually happen, just like some other human made aerial rocket.

[01:03:42] Ross Blocher: Yeah, let me—I mean, let me show it to you.

[01:03:45] Carrie Poppy: You’re gonna think I’m nuts or making this up.

[01:03:47] Ross Blocher: I think you’re nuts.

[01:03:48] Carrie Poppy: I don’t think I’d notice that.

[01:03:50] Ross Blocher: Rrreally?!

(Carrie confirms.)

Oh, it was bright.

[01:03:52] Carrie Poppy: I mean, I see that even now and I’m like, “Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I guess that is interesting.”

(They laugh.)

No, I don’t know! My brain just doesn’t do that. I’m not trying to be interesting! But like, really it’s—I don’t know, I just filter it as like, yeah, you don’t know what everything is. Oh, well. (Laughs.) I don’t know! Alright.

[01:04:13] Ross Blocher: Okay. Alright. I feel like that is not the normal response.

[01:04:15] Carrie Poppy: Really?! Okay. Okay. Alright.

[01:04:18] Ross Blocher: Then we get to Representative Garcia; he’s a Democrat from California and a ranking member on the committee. He mentioned the 2017 New York Times report, and I groaned. Because—yeah, like these things have an impact. It becomes like a steppingstone to a congressional hearing.

[01:04:34] Carrie Poppy: Clearly! Where it’s named in the hearing documents, (chuckles) in the statements. Yeah.

[01:04:39] Ross Blocher: And he kept referring to his training as a teacher and a researcher, which told him that we should never rule anything out.

(Carrie agrees.)

Which, okay, yeah. I kind of sign on to that. But you have to then say up to which point? Like, how much energy do you spend on one topic if you feel like you’ve kind of addressed it?

[01:04:58] Carrie Poppy: Right. And when do you rule that in as the winning theory?

[01:05:01] Ross Blocher: Yeah. At some point you do have to like taper off. You can’t just keep investigating endlessly forever. At some point, you do have to say like, “Okay, I think we understand this well enough.”

[01:05:09] Carrie Poppy: At least we get what the “probably” is here.

[01:05:11] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And if you’ve got something new and interesting, we’ll take a look at it. So, this was interesting. They kept quoting. Sean Kirkpatrick, who we were talking about earlier. He’s the head of that AARO program that’s tasked with doing exactly what we’re talking about, looking at all of this evidence. They’ve got a budget for it. They’ve got a director, Sean Kirkpatrick. And he had appeared before them not long before, and told them, “So far, we found no evidence of Extraterrestrial life or alien technology.” And so, they’re like—

[01:05:43] Carrie Poppy: Okay! Wrap it up, boys!

[01:05:44] Ross Blocher: Yeah. He’s like, “Yeah, how do we—how do we deal with that?”

[01:05:46] Carrie Poppy: Oh, man. Okay. Yeah. This is like Ken Lanning at with the FBI being like, “Okay, I looked. There are no satanic cults.”

(Ross laughs and agrees.)

Wrap it up! Checked every single one!

[01:05:56] Ross Blocher: But like you were saying earlier, if you have this kind of assumption in advance of what you’re expecting the answer to be, well then whoever doesn’t give you the answer you wanted was just not a good researcher. So, more study needed.

[01:06:09] Carrie Poppy: Right. It’s like diagnosis shopping.

[01:06:11] Ross Blocher: So, that was kind of thrown at the witnesses multiple times. And Grusch did most of the talking, and he would often respond to that with just like, “Well, I think he’s wrong.”

[01:06:18] Carrie Poppy: Mm! Okay. So, now I’m getting this picture of this like sort of higher up government insider who’s actually tasked with this, who has more peer review built into his day, more system support. And he’s saying, “No, I really looked. I couldn’t find anything. And if I could, I would wanna tell you.”

[01:06:36] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And I’ve got a lot of people who work for me, and they agree. And actually, he has a statement that he released after this hearing that we’ll read at the end.

[01:06:44] Carrie Poppy: Okay. And then we have this sort of rogue outsider, former insider saying either that guy’s lying, or he doesn’t get it. Okay.

[01:06:53] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Representative Moscowitz who’s—

[01:06:58] Carrie Poppy: Judy?

[01:06:59] Ross Blocher: No, no, no.

(They laugh.)

He’s a democrat from Florida, I believe. He quotes Chuck Schumer, saying that the American public has a right to know about these issues. He asks, “Why do we have all these great pictures of foreign jets, but none of these UAPs?” And I’m thinking, yeah, that’s a good question!

[01:07:18] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Why, buddy?

[01:07:19] Ross Blocher: Yeah, let’s think about that. Why? But he also then drops the analogy to saying like, “We didn’t know there were stealth helicopters. They were only rumored until they got used in Osama Bin Laden’s capture. So, you know, there could be stuff that we’re just not aware of, ’cause the left hand is not talking to the right.”

[01:07:37] Carrie Poppy: Sure. But that’s like still humans. The helicopter didn’t come from Mars.

[01:07:41] Ross Blocher: And he references—I’m not sure if this was from AARO or from that UAP task force, but he references like a previous body determining that there were 171 quote/unquote “uncharacterized” instances of cited objects, meaning “Eh, we don’t have a clear answer for what it was.” All of this is to argue more info needed.

[01:08:04] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. There’s still stuff in the miscellaneous file we must deal with.

[01:08:08] Ross Blocher: Also, a lot of discussion of satellite imagery. We should have more access to that, and you know, we should—as Congress people—be able to access Wright-Patterson or Groom Lake, you know—Area 51.

So, it was at that point in the hearings that they actually introduced these witnesses. So, they each read their opening statements that we’ve kind of characterized already. They stood. They raised their right hands. They swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them God, and again read through their statements.

So, then we get to the actual Q&A.

[01:08:42] Carrie Poppy: This is where the actual Congress people are like, “Okay, I heard what you have to say. I heard your little book report. Yeah, now we have questions for you.”

[01:08:47] Ross Blocher: Yeah. “Here’s our questions. We’ve made our opening statements. You’ve talked. Yeah, let’s have this out.” So, he starts with Mr. Graves. That’s the former pilot who founded the group of nearly 5,000 people. You’re okay with that?

[01:09:00] Carrie Poppy: Oh, yes. Thank you for asking. Nearly 5,000 will do. That’s a very large number.

[01:09:05] Ross Blocher: Okay. (Chuckles.) So, he asks him, “Do you feel that you and other pilots were actually trained on how to report and respond?” And Grave says no.

[01:09:14] Carrie Poppy: Fair! I mean that—I’m picking up on that. I’m willing to sign off on this seeming to be a little bit of a problem.

[01:09:19] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Let’s work on this training, and let’s get the reports to be high level—meaning like we’ve already asked and answered some of the obvious questions by the time you’re reporting. Yeah. I’m all for it.

[01:09:31] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. Let’s standardize the data collection process, so if your employee says they saw such and such, you immediately go for this file with this interview that’s structured and been verified and the best data collecting tool. Sounds great. And maybe you talk to them about different things that could explain it!

[01:09:50] Ross Blocher: And Graves adds that, “We, as pilots, deal with unknowns all the time. We have to be able to quickly tell enemy planes apart. So, yeah. This is useful knowledge just in general, even if there are no visiting aliens.” Grothman—again, the committee chair asks Grusch what kind of information is being hidden from us.

So, essentially he says like, “Well, I could tell you more in a secure setting.” Both in regards to material acquisition activity and baselining UAPs, but not sharing it. Yeah. That was like, “Oh, you just love to talk in jargon, don’t you?”

[01:10:25] Carrie Poppy: What does that mean? Baselining them?

[01:10:26] Ross Blocher: I feel like I understood at the time, and now I’ve forgotten.

(They giggle.)

The material acquisition activity, I get. Like, that they have materials.

[01:10:36] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, like they’re taking samples from it or something. Okay. “Baselining: a method of assessing network performance or behavior by comparing it to a historically derived baseline.” Okay, so I think he’s saying like get basic data on these UAPs, so that like then we can compare them one to another. I think so.

[01:10:56] Ross Blocher: Okay. So, then we have Representative Garcia asking Graves about these 30 pilots that he’s referenced. He tells this crazy story about—I think it was off the coast of Virginia, maybe in reference to this earlier story—but he was saying that there was an upgrade that had gone out to these planes, where the radar had been—I don’t know—point upgraded in their software and all of a sudden, all of them were seeing more blips, and they were having sightings. And the way he was telling it, it made it sound like he didn’t think like, “Oh, this software upgrade just made the equipment more sensitive or report more false positives.”

Instead, he seemed to be saying that like all of a sudden we were noticing all of these actual aerial phenomenon.

(Carrie affirms.)

So, I don’t know. My brain went one way, and his brain went the other. Garcia asked, “To clarify, do you believe that the government has UAPs?”

And Grusch says, “Yes, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses.”

And then they want to know like locations, “Where’s the government holding these things?” Great question!

[01:11:56] Carrie Poppy: Sure. I wanna know about the 40 people first, but okay.

[01:11:59] Ross Blocher: Sure. Yeah, that too. But he says that he already provided those locations to the inspector general. And if we can get behind a secure skiff, (secretively) I’ll tell you more about these locations where we have actual unidentified—again, funny to use that word—recovered alien craft.

[01:12:15] Carrie Poppy: Oh, right. Yeah. While they’re sitting in front of you for hours and hours, you’d think you’d figure it out. (Laughs.)

[01:12:19] Ross Blocher: But this bugs the heck out of me! Okay. This is totally inconsistent. You’re clamoring over pixels and blurry objects, you know, that you think you might have caught on this video. You’ve got an actual spacecraft hidden somewhere?!

[01:12:32] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Snap a pic!

[01:12:34] Ross Blocher: Who cares about any of this video stuff?! You have the fricking craft! Why are we talking about any of this?!

[01:12:40] Carrie Poppy: Right! Yeah, good point. Get a pic! Yeah, totally.

[01:12:44] Ross Blocher: Bring that out. You can get a clear picture of that. Give me a break.

[01:12:48] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Totally. Well, but I guess they’re saying like, “Oh no, it’s so deeply classified, whatever.” But listen, if Snowden can get shit out, you can do it!

[01:12:58] Ross Blocher: Yeah. I just, uh, I don’t believe those stories exist in the same universe of reality—that you can just barely capture something that might be an alien craft, but then you actually have in your possession, in multiple Air Force bases, the real craft?!

[01:13:13] Carrie Poppy: And how many people with that conspiracy actually take? Far more than 40! I mean, we gotta be talking—what?—hundreds of thousands of people who have worked for the government over the last however many decades who are keeping this a secret? (Stammering.) And 40?! Count them, 40!? (Voice rising to a squeak.) And all through one guy?!

(They laugh.)

[01:13:36] Ross Blocher: All on their deathbeds. They haven’t said anything or shared photos. And yeah, what do these crafts you’ve recovered look like? Are they giant propane tanks? Are they black or gray cubes barely contained within a clear sphere? Are they saucers? Are they crescents that skip like saucers? Are they cigarette shaped?

[01:13:57] Carrie Poppy: Are they little threads that come out of open wounds in people’s arms? I mean, people think that!

[01:14:03] Ross Blocher:  (Inaudible), yeah!

[01:14:04] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, but people think that’s aliens. They think that is an alien technology. Yeah.

[01:14:08] Ross Blocher: Amazing. Are they football field sized red floating squares? That comes up later too.

(They laugh.)

Carrie’s looking at me like, “Are they?”

[01:14:20] Carrie Poppy: Yes, yes! Absolutely. Good specifics. Yeah.

[01:14:23] Ross Blocher: I mean, sure, you could have a whole fleet of different craft and objects, but it strains credulity a bit, the more that you get in the mix. And referencing earlier that—he was, I think, trying to sound less crazy here—in other interviews, and he even references this a few times, that he was on News Nation with a fuller interview where he said even wilder things. Like, he was talking about multiple alien races that have visited. That didn’t come up in this testimony, and I feel like that would’ve made the whole thing seem a little more suspicious if we’re talking about like multiple races of aliens! The Congressional hearing never went into that territory. But he did in that News Nation interview. And of course, we’ve seen it ad nauseum at our UFO conferences.

[01:15:08] Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm, mm-hm, mm-hm. You think that that would be too obvious to people?

[01:15:12] Ross Blocher: “Oh, wait a second! What’s going on here? You’re talking about like Grays and Nordics and stuff like that.” That never came up too.

[01:15:18] Carrie Poppy: Too specific, yeah.

[01:15:19] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Never once was like the phrase “Grays” uttered or, you know, anything describing alien races. Though, he might’ve done that sort of shuffle where he says, “Well, talk to me under a secure skiff, and I’ll tell you more.”

[01:15:33] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, this is all sounding a lot like the Satanic ritual abuse crowd.

[01:15:38] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Similar trying to get credit for the presentation of information while really hiding the meat of it. Like, getting credit for the flavor of the information without producing specifics.

[01:15:50] Carrie Poppy: Right, and if you want to actually talk to those people, well, I guess I could sort of do that, but let’s have more conversations and…

[01:15:56] Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Mm-hm. Talk to the intermediary longer.

[01:15:59] Carrie Poppy: Right. For now, this is my 10 minutes of fame. So, give it to me. Yeah. Mm-hm.

[01:16:03] Ross Blocher: Burchett has some more questions for Graves about like how he knew that what he saw wasn’t ours, and so he had more stories about those off the coast of Virginia—I think it was—that like they had been able to remain stationary in hurricane force wind. They were accelerating up to Mach one. So, he had like all these amazing stories. Uh, Fravor was reiterating, “Oh, yeah. What I saw was definitely past our capabilities. That was 2004, but even now, we don’t have plans for planes like that even 10 years out.”

[01:16:34] Carrie Poppy: Uh, okay. I mean, yeah, you don’t even know what you saw, and now you’re deciding exactly what its properties are and how it compares to today’s technology (laughing) and how it’ll compare to tomorrow’s technology. Okay.

[01:16:46] Ross Blocher: And then, you have those questions about like whether you’ve been retaliated against. And that’s where both Graves and Grusch are like, “Oh yeah.” Graves, “I’ve heard about that a lot.”

And Grusch like, “Oh yeah, like I’ve been intimidated all kinds.”

And then you have Fravor over on the side being like, “Nope! Happy go lucky over here! Nobody bothered me. My life is good.”

[01:17:06] Carrie Poppy: “Actually, I’m the guy who tried! It was fine.”

[01:17:09] Ross Blocher: Representative Jamie Raskin was the next one to ask questions. And I don’t know, I like Jamie Raskin. He’s like on the Thomas Payne Society and everything since like—I don’t know what kind of questions I would want the representatives to ask, but they weren’t the questions I would’ve been asking if I were there on that panel.

[01:17:28] Carrie Poppy: Sure. They gotta get us on the panel.

[01:17:30] Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah. Get us in. Or Mick West.

[01:17:33] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. Uh, I got some questions.

(They laugh.)

[01:17:38] Ross Blocher: So, Raskin wanted to know like, “Was this just on the East Coast?” I guess he missed that that one story was off the coast of San Diego.

And Grave said, “No, no. Everywhere there are military operations, all over the world, commercial pilots as well.” He was always trying to remind us commercial pilots are seeing these things too. And AARO has been collecting all of this data.

[01:17:58] Carrie Poppy: I see that in Graves’s statement, “FAA regulations direct pilots to make reports when they see things they can’t explain.” That makes sense.

[01:18:07] Ross Blocher: Yeah, great. Raskin asks him, “Are there common attributes between these sightings?” Which I thought was a great question. And Graves talked—

[01:18:14] Carrie Poppy: Got a baseline.

[01:18:15] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Graves talked about that whole dark gray/black object inside the clear spheres, which I thought, alright, well, that’s not common obviously, because—

[01:18:23] Carrie Poppy: It was just one!

[01:18:24] Ross Blocher: Well, he was referencing there having been multiple sightings like that.

[01:18:28] Carrie Poppy: Oh, for Lord’s sake!

[01:18:30] Ross Blocher: But even within this hearing, we’re hearing about multiple different UFO descriptions.

[01:18:36] Carrie Poppy: Right. But—and the only one for which we have like a description is one, and it has a second person whose point of view we don’t hear! Bad sourcing!

[01:18:45] Ross Blocher: It doesn’t seem like a common attribute. And Raskin underscores a point that like, hey, there would be bipartisan support against any kind of retaliation.

So, points we’ve all agreed to already. Like, yeah, by all means, you should all feel free to share these stories if you have them. Luna gets the mic again, and she asks, “To your knowledge, are NHIs working with adversarial governments or other programs?” And—

[01:19:09] Carrie Poppy: And non-human entities? Is that what—? Non-human intelligence. Okay.

[01:19:10] Ross Blocher: Non-human intelligence. Yeah. And it’s interesting, she didn’t feel the need to unpack that. It wasn’t until much later that someone like spelled out non-human intelligence.

[01:19:19] Carrie Poppy: And she’s like, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry I did that! I guess I’m just like so informed that it just came right out of my mouth! Oh my god!”

[01:19:25] Ross Blocher: “Oh. I just—it happened already—”

[01:19:28] Carrie Poppy: “I didn’t even hear that jargon coming out of me!”

[01:19:30] Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Yeah. I mean, it does say something that she’s tossing off the phrase NHI. It sounds like she’s a true believer. When she’s not going after Adam Schiff, she’s studying UAP literature.

(Carrie affirms.)

And so, Grusch wouldn’t even sign on to that, that like other governments are somehow working with these aliens or what have you. And Grusch was careful. He didn’t wanna say alien. He did prefer—was it even non-human intelligence? Yeah. But he just wanted to at least leave it broadly open in case there were other technologies or, you know, interdimensional beings or something like that involved. She was the one who asked him then what happened at Vandenberg, and that’s when he describes the large 100-yard on each side red square that came from the ocean and hovered over the Vandenberg facilities. It remained there 45 seconds, and then darted over the mountains, but came back later in the day—like a football field sized red object.

[01:20:24] Carrie Poppy: Hm. And the size of a football field, again, is me accounting for distance.

[01:20:30] Ross Blocher: Uh-huh. Atmospheric perspective. Maybe it’s turned a little blue or something like that.

[01:20:35] Carrie Poppy: But what he might have seen might’ve been a couple centimeters. Right? Okay.

[01:20:38] Ross Blocher: Could be! Well, apparently multiple personnel saw it and said that it was moving in a threatening manner towards them. Okay. Representative Luna also mentioned the Gimbal and “Go fast” videos, which came up in the—

[01:20:50] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I’ve heard of these.

[01:20:51] Ross Blocher: —conversation with Mick West, when we had him on show before.

[01:20:54] Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s why I’ve heard of these.

[01:20:55] Ross Blocher: Yeah. She was asking about what had happened at the end of one of the videos. Apparently, it had been cut a little bit earlier, and there was supposed to be extra footage where like it moved very quickly. So, Graves mentioned like some instability either in the camera or the craft, and said that there was more info on radar. So. Okay. And then, Luna wanted to make the point—this was less of a question, just her saying that “It seems like corporations are putting their interests ahead of the needs of the American public.” Supposedly they know more than they’re sharing.

[01:21:24] Carrie Poppy: Oh, corporations too? Wow. Okay.

[01:21:25] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Corporations got put on notice and Graves said it would seem so.

[01:21:31] Carrie Poppy: Oh, well, I wanna know more about that, because they’re not under security clearance!

[01:21:34] Ross Blocher: It’s funny, ‘cause when AOC gets to ask her questions later, she takes up a very similar thread about corporations. Uh, Moscowitz gets the mic again. He asks if this craft made a sonic boom when it approached Mach one. You know, decent question, but Graves says, “Well, when you’re in a jet, it’s pretty loud. You can’t hear stuff like that.” So, I don’t know.

[01:21:55] Carrie Poppy: Oh, wow. (Parodying West Side Story.) When you’re in a jet, you’re in a jet all the way! (Laughs.)

[01:21:57] Ross Blocher: That’s right. From your first cigarette shaped craft to the Milky Way. I dunno.

Uh, he asks Grusch about like whether he has direct knowledge of non-human origin craft, and Grusch says, “Yes. I’ve personally interviewed individuals who have told me that.”

[01:22:13] Carrie Poppy: (Snorts.) Who? What are their names? Tell me about it.

[01:22:15] Ross Blocher: “I will if we get under a secure skiff. But I can’t do that in public.”

[01:22:20] Carrie Poppy: So, is he saying he’s not allowed to give that information? Except—okay.

[01:22:24] Ross Blocher: Yeah, it hasn’t been approved by the—by that review board with the horrible acronym.

[01:22:30] Carrie Poppy: PerfO or whatever. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I guess that could be the situation.

[01:22:32] Ross Blocher: Again, like 20 different times. He would answer with, “Oh, I could tell you all kinds of things about that in private.”

[01:22:40] Carrie Poppy: Well, I hope they have these conversations. (Chuckles.)

[01:22:44] Ross Blocher: There’s a representative—Foxx, a Republican from New York—and she also mentions that Sean Kirkpatrick, director of AARO, previously testified there’s been no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity or off-world technology brought to the attention of the office. “Is that incorrect?”

And Grusch says, “It is not correct, as far as I know. Individuals I’ve talked to also talked to him, so I don’t know where the disconnect is.”

[01:23:08] Carrie Poppy: As far as he knows, because he’s talked to people who claim they have talked to that person.

[01:23:12] Ross Blocher: And so, like, “They told me these stories, and I know they talked to him, so they should have told him those stories as well. So, I don’t know why he’s saying that.” Essentially. And then—

[01:23:19] Carrie Poppy: I guess this guy has his hands tied if this is really the situation.

[01:23:23] Ross Blocher: Right. Which is why I can say like, well, he might just be well intentioned and he’s doing the best he can with the information he has and what he’s allowed to speak about. But he felt that this was worth whistle blowing on.

[01:23:34] Carrie Poppy: But yeah, these people asking these questions better go follow up on this offer to show them in secret. I would follow up!

[01:23:40] Ross Blocher: Which all of them do demand at the end. Like, okay, well we need to get the—whatever security needs to be worked out here, work it out so we can talk to him.

[01:23:48] Carrie Poppy: We should write to whoever plans to meet with them. Right? And see if they actually get to. These Congress people or whatever.

[01:23:55] Ross Blocher: That’d be great to know. Yeah. I mean, shooting forward a little bit, my prediction is—as always happens—nothing will come of this. Maybe they will have a follow-up discussion or something, but then none of the evidence will be that compelling or material. And then, we’ll have another hearing in another two years. And then, there will be calls for a new body to investigate this until they get what it is they’re looking for.

[01:24:22] Carrie Poppy: But see, now I’m excited. This is where my bread and butter is. (With building intensity.) Gimme those documents! Let’s see ’em! Who did you talk to?! Where are they?! Can we find them?!

That’s the goods.

[01:24:33] Ross Blocher: Yeah. But we had this whole show trial without any of that having to exist even.

(Carrie agrees.)

So, um, I’m all with you. But do I think that’ll ever happen? No.

[01:24:45] Carrie Poppy: But listen, Congress people, if you were told to follow up, you follow up!

[01:24:50] Ross Blocher: Yeah! Oh, I can’t wait to hear like if they actually get to talk to this guy and get him to give these answers that he can’t give in public. Uh, I wish I could be there just to see like their reactions when he starts talking about the multiple races of aliens and stuff like that.

(Carrie agrees with laughter.)

Then Representative Foxx, she went off on this like tirade about how the Biden administration has been an embarrassment and flip-flopping and obfuscation about—

[01:25:15] Carrie Poppy: (Sarcastically.) Good, this seems like the time.

[01:25:16] Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Yeah, absolutely. Then we have a young—I think the youngest representative in the House of Representatives. I think he’s the first Gen Z member, Maxwell Frost, Democrat from Florida. And I don’t know, he just had some nice statements to say that was kind of like general support for how this is of interest to the scientific community and how NASA can be involved. Apparently, NASA’s also preparing a report on extraterrestrial life. Everybody’s doing it right now! Like, it’s not like this isn’t getting enough attention. But he mentions that he flies gliders (laughs), and he just can’t imagine if someone told him he couldn’t report on what he saw while gliding! Okay. I think this was just a good excuse for you to mention that you fly gliders. (Laughs.)

[01:25:57] Carrie Poppy: What’s a glider?

[01:25:58] Ross Blocher: Oh, it’s like a hang glider, you know? Like—

[01:26:00] Carrie Poppy: Oh, oh, I see. (Giggles.)

[01:26:01] Ross Blocher: You’re up in the air. But it’s kind of a recreational thing. I’m like why mention that? But okay.

[01:26:05] Carrie Poppy: Oh, yeah, yeah, I see. He’s like, “I like the air, also!”

[01:26:08] Ross Blocher: (Laughing.) Right. “I’ve also been up in the sky! I haven’t seen anything, but wouldn’t it be weird if someone told me not to say anything about it? Anyways!”

[01:26:17] Carrie Poppy: “Call on me! Call on me! I was on a plane.”

(They laugh.)

[01:26:19] Ross Blocher: They were nice sentiments he shared.

You mentioned earlier that Grusch felt that all of this goes back to the 1930s. That came up in a line of questioning with Burchett. Burchett also said, “I’d love to hear where all of these crash retrievals are. But we already know there’s nothing at Area 51 anymore. And geez, if we say we’re gonna go check out one of these other bases, you know that the moving trucks will be there the second we say that.”

So, a little bit of conspiracy theory there, but Grusch couldn’t give any specific answers except, “Well, I can give you all this when we talk privately.”

[01:26:52] Carrie Poppy: Can’t wait.

[01:26:53] Ross Blocher: Matt Gaetz finally gets to talk, and he was very upset that—I just can’t believe you’re not that familiar with Matt Gaetz.

[01:26:59] Carrie Poppy: I’ve definitely heard the name.

[01:27:01] Ross Blocher: Oh, okay. Anyways, he’s this horrible man-child and like a big defender of Trump and just a general troublemaker. Really obnoxious. About as obnoxious as you can imagine.

Anyway, so he was really upset that he and two other of these Congress people had shown up at an Air Force base in Florida, Eglin Air Force Base, and had said like, “Show us what you’ve got.” And they’re like, uh, no. And he’s like, “What!? But I’m a Congress person! You have to show us everything!” So, I don’t know, he probably just went about it the wrong way, and now he’s throwing a big fit. ‘Cause that’s what he likes to do!

I’ll skip a few representatives, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!

[01:27:37] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Yeah, what did she say?

[01:27:38] Ross Blocher: Democrat from New York. So, she said, “First of all, this is a panel for protecting and hearing whistleblowers, so we respect you and thank you for your service. Mr. Grusch, you sat on the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force.” And she said, “You named Boeing contractors involved in football field wide UAP interactions. Is this common for interactions with contractors?”

And Graves said, “Well, I’ve heard that from witnesses.”

And she asked, “Do they engage in reporting?”

And Grusch said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

And she said, “Well, we’ve seen defense contractors abuse their roles. When they say they reported incidents to Congress, do you know how they did that? Like, how did they report it to congress?”

[01:28:20] Carrie Poppy: Great! Great question.

[01:28:21] Ross Blocher: Yeah. So, Grusch had some—I don’t know, used a bit of jargon. Like, “For IRAD, activities they report through SAP!” And okay. I didn’t look all that up. “And it comes through PPR, the periodic review.”

So, AOC says, “So, in your experience, what data should we prioritize? Should we be looking at date? Should we be looking at time?” Another good question.

And Graves says, “Look for kinematics, like how the objects are moving. And especially, we wanna know like where they were first observed and where they ended up.” Alright. Sure. Fine.

[01:28:50] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Yeah. As long as you are actually using what you see with your eyes and not doing funky math where you’re like, “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s 40,000 feet away, so if we start over here, and then you go over here—” No!

[01:28:58] Ross Blocher: Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. Well, here’s what we know and how, from—yeah—which type of equipment. Yeah. Absolutely. So, she asks another good question. “If you were me, where would you look? Would you look at titles, programs, departments, regions? Like, what kind of info should I be digging up to get to the bottom of this?”

And Grusch says, “Well, I’d be happy to give you that in a closed environment.”

[01:29:19] Carrie Poppy: Oh Lord! AOC, give us a call. Let us know if you got that closed environment.

[01:29:22] Ross Blocher: And she kept apologizing, because each of these representatives were given five minutes to have a conversation, essentially. And then, it gets passed off to the next person. So anyway—so, she had to yield her time. But it felt like from both her and Raskin, there was this kind of like, “Okay, wanna know more. How do we get at appropriate information for this?”

[01:29:40] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, great. That’s a good response.

[01:29:41] Ross Blocher: Yep! Fine. Responsible. There was a representative named Biggs, from Arizona, and he mentioned the Phoenix lights case, ’cause that’s a famous one in Arizona. And Grusch said, “Ah, I mean, I wasn’t involved in that one. That was before my time. So, nothing beyond what’s been reported publicly. I know what you’re talking about, but sorry, no extra info.”

I kinda like this guy, Representative Burlison from Missouri. He said, “Hey, I’m from the show-me state. We like to see evidence. So, I’m suspicious of lots of things I hear in this town, but are you saying there are extraterrestrials?”

(They laugh.)

And Grusch said—essentially, he was saying like, yes, but I can’t tell you more right now. So, Burlison asked him, “Well, what about spacecraft?”

And again, “Oh, I could answer that behind closed doors.”

“Well, how about bodies?”

And Grusch says, “Not something I’ve personally witnessed.” Which is weird because you haven’t personally witnessed anything!

(Carrie agrees with frustration.)

You’ve heard stories, right? But you don’t want to talk about it right now, do you? I feel like that was a bit of an artful dodge.

[01:30:40] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, you haven’t witnessed any of this. It seems like, well, I wanna leave room for a body to show up, but I’m not quite claiming that yet.

[01:30:48] Ross Blocher: Yeah. I feel like he knows of stories of bodies, but he wants to downplay that particular piece of data right now.

[01:30:55] Carrie Poppy: Oh! Interesting. Okay.

[01:30:57] Ross Blocher: Because it makes him sound a little less credible.

[01:30:59] Carrie Poppy: Oh, because yeah, you said that bodies do actually come up elsewhere.

[01:31:01] Ross Blocher: Yeah. In his interviews with the News Nation. Okay. Like, there are—he even talked about like this craft that—or at least, one of the lawyers involved for this same citing reference that the interior was incredibly larger than the exterior.

[01:31:17] Carrie Poppy: Oh! Yes, I’ve heard this claim before.

[01:31:19] Ross Blocher: Yeah! (Laughs.) And we’ll encounter him at Contact in the Desert!

[01:31:23] Carrie Poppy: I don’t know what to make of that claim.

[01:31:24] Ross Blocher: Again, Burlison, to his credit—from the show-me state—he said, “So, okay. You’re talking about craft that have arrived here from light years away, and then—what?—what they crash?! That seems a little farfetched to me.”

(Carrie giggles.)

And I was like good on you for at least bringing this up! “And what’s this whole thing about like multidimensionality? Have you been talking about that in other forums? Are these multidimensional beings?”

And so, Grusch says, “Well, you know, crashes happen all the time with our own systems. You know, it could happen to anybody. It happens to the best of us.” (Chuckles.)

[01:31:59] Carrie Poppy: But they have like supposedly incredibly advanced technology and are getting past their world and into ours.

[01:32:06] Ross Blocher: And Grusch, who a few times brags that he’s degreed in physics—I love these little drops of like, “Well, and I’m even trained in this.”

He says, “Well, you know, I can’t speak too much to the multi-dimensionality thing, but I think the general idea is the holographic principle.”

(Carrie “uh oh!”s.)

“That you can have, you know, like 3D objects casting shadows onto a 2D surface, something like that.”

[01:32:28] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I see! Okay. (Laughs.) So, the aliens are 3D? The way I am?!

[01:32:33] Ross Blocher: Multidimensional beings. Maybe they’re 5D.

(They laugh.)

Yeah, they can be 4D, like—

[01:32:38] Carrie Poppy: Like, I do cast a shadow!

[01:32:39] Ross Blocher: Uh, yeah. It’s that whole holographic universe thing. So, the idea is that maybe that’s how they’re traveling so fast is that they’re breaching space-time, because they have some higher dimensional control.

[01:32:51] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, maybe. Or maybe sometimes we don’t know what we’re looking at.

[01:32:55] Ross Blocher: He doesn’t go into details on that, because—again—I think, show-me state guy’s making him a little uncomfortable with these questions.

[01:33:01] Carrie Poppy: This is reminding me of the time that I was with my friend Mike in his apartment. And he goes, “Do you hear that?!”

And I listen, and I hear the sound, and I’m like, “Yeah, is that a shower?”

He’s like, “Yeah, someone’s showering up there!”

And I was like, “Yeah, now that you mentioned it, someone’s showering up there.”

And he’s like, (whispering) “That person goes to work every day and is not home right now. And I think that there is a ghost in that apartment who turns on the shower and uses it.”

And I was like, “Mike, which is more likely: you don’t know your neighbor’s schedule or humans survive their deaths, haunt their apartments, and turn on the shower!”

(They laugh.)

Anyway!

[01:33:47] Ross Blocher: Everybody needs this voice in their life. Oh my goodness.

[01:33:51] Carrie Poppy: He admitted. He admitted option two. Yeah, good on Mike.

(Ross giggles.)

But yeah, I mean this all feels like that. You’re like, “Oh my god, maybe they traveled dimensions, and then they like go through the space-time continuum and then they’re 5D! Da-da-da-da!” Maybe. What if you saw something and you didn’t know what it was?

[01:34:07] Ross Blocher: So, Representative Burlison—the Republican from Missouri—is right there with us, because the next thing out of his mouth is, “So, Occam’s Razor.”

[01:34:14] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Do you have one?!

[01:34:17] Ross Blocher: “These aircraft that have been retrieved—I mean, have they been identified as maybe being created by domestic manufacturers?

(Carrie agrees.)

And Grusch says, “Well, not to my knowledge do we have like these capabilities.”

[01:34:31] Carrie Poppy: Wait, what?

[01:34:32] Ross Blocher: Like, not to my knowledge, like not made by humans. ‘Cause there’s—

[01:34:36] Carrie Poppy: Oh! Have the capabilities to make them.

(Ross confirms.)

I see, I see. Sure. Yeah. It’s just too complicated for man.

[01:34:41] Ross Blocher: And Burlison also throws out, “Well, maybe we retrieved something that was produced by a different program that we’re just not aware of, either domestic or international?” And Grusch says—

[01:34:52] Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh, right. Right! Maybe we don’t know the limits of human intelligence.

[01:34:54] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Maybe! Right. And Grusch says, “Well, not that I’m aware of. That hasn’t happened.” So, I was a big fan of this Burlison guy’s line of questioning. Way to go buddy.

[01:35:02] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, totally. Brass tacks.

[01:35:05] Ross Blocher: Gaetz has another little hissy fit about not being let into the base when and where he wanted to be. There’s a young Representative Mace from South Carolina, Republican woman. She asks, “Do you believe that the government has been in contact with extraterrestrials?”

And Grusch says—what do you think?

[01:35:24] Carrie Poppy: Yes.

[01:35:25] Ross Blocher: “I cannot discuss this in a public setting.”

[01:35:26] Carrie Poppy: Oh, sure, of course. How did I—I forgot that was an option.

[01:35:28] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And he doesn’t want to go there. And she says, “Uh, okay, so I can’t ask you when this occurred then. Uh, well, do we have bodies?” Actually, I was impressed that he actually answered this.

He said, “As I stated in my News Nation interview, biologics came along with the retrievals. So, again, he’s using like the like, (blustering) “I’m very specialized, and I’m gonna use the term ‘biologics’ instead of alien bodies.” But you know, at least that was a little more forthright than he’d been about everything else.

[01:35:56] Carrie Poppy: I guess it could be spit or something. Something that’s like of the body but not the body, if you will. (Chuckles.)

[01:36:01] Ross Blocher: Oh! Yeah. Hair. Fingerprints. Okay. Okay! That’s a fair point. Uh, so she asks, “Do you have evidence like photos?”

And you said, “I’d have to talk to you in a skiff.”

(Carrie snores.)

Oh, he did this 20 times.

[01:36:14] Carrie Poppy: Why even have a Q&A? You have no As.

[01:36:15] Ross Blocher: Right. Right. But you get the impression of legitimacy. That’s all you really need.

[01:36:20] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I mean, I guess this is better than not having it, but boy, I hope these people follow up.

[01:36:25] Ross Blocher: I know. Yeah. And she asked a great question here. “Who do we need to call in to talk to? Like, you’ve talked to all these people. Can we talk to them?”

[01:36:33] Carrie Poppy: Yeah! Can we check your sources?

[01:36:35] Ross Blocher: And he says, “I can give you a specific cooperative and hostile witness list.”

And she says, “When can you send this to me?”

And he says, “I’m happy to provide that after this hearing.” So, presumably they have the info now? Do they?!

[01:36:49] Carrie Poppy: So, who was the name of the person who asked him, and he said he’d send it to her?

[01:36:53] Ross Blocher: Ms. Mace, Republican from South Carolina.

[01:36:56] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Let’s see if we can reach her! Yeah, Ms.—

[01:36:58] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah. Did he give you that list? M-A-S-E

[01:37:01] Carrie Poppy: M-A-S-E. From where?

[01:37:03] Ross Blocher: South Carolina. Nancy Mace. Representative Ogles (awhg-les)? Ogles (oh-gles)? I don’t know. It’s spelled like someone who stares at you, lasciviously. Uh, from Tennessee. He asked a—I don’t know—reasonable line of questions about like, “Do you think that these things you’re seeing that are near our military craft—do you think that they’re doing some kind of reconnaissance on us?”

[01:37:24] Carrie Poppy: Oh, right. Yeah. Why are they here?

[01:37:26] Ross Blocher: All of them were like, “Yeah, reasonable. Could be.”

[01:37:28] Carrie Poppy: Could be!

[01:37:29] Ross Blocher: And he said, “Do you think they’re probing our capabilities, looking for vulnerabilities? Is this an existential threat?”

And they’re all like, “Eh. Could be.” (Laughs.)

[01:37:36] Carrie Poppy: Could be! Could be. I don’t know!

[01:37:39] Ross Blocher: Let’s see if you know the answer to the next one. “Do you think they’re interested in our nuclear capabilities?”

[01:37:43] Carrie Poppy: Could be. Yep!

[01:37:44] Ross Blocher: Yeah, potentially!

[01:37:45] Carrie Poppy: Yep! Absolutely. Could be. Everyone turns to each other. They’re like, “Hey, did your psychology evolve on the savannah? Hey, mine too! Are you really paranoid in groups? Yeah, me too! Wow! I never thought about it like that! That’s great, Jane.” We have no more information!

[01:37:59] Ross Blocher: Totally. “Do you have any indication that the Department of Energy is collecting information on the same phenomena?” Like, they have their own independent sourcing of information.

And Grusch said, “I could not confirm or deny in a public setting.”

(Carrie “could be!”s.)

But could you, in a private setting?

(Carrie “could be!”s)

“Yes.”

So, that was Ogles. And he said that like, “I’m motivated, like I want this info. We need to get access to talk to you in a skiff, and I’m gonna use the Holman rule if I have to against anyone that tries to prevent me from doing this!”

[01:38:30] Carrie Poppy: Ooh, the Holman rule? What’s that?

[01:38:32] Ross Blocher: I have no idea. I didn’t look it up.

[01:38:34] Carrie Poppy: We gotta know! (Chuckling) Did you say I don’t work here?

(Ross denies.)

Oh! (Laughing.) I thought you said said, “I dunno, I don’t work here.”

“The Holman rule is a rule in the United States House of Representatives that allows amendments to appropriations legislation that would reduce the salary of or fire specific federal employees or cut a specific program.”

[01:38:54] Ross Blocher: Oooh. So, like, “I’m gonna get you fired! Or reduce your salary if you get in my way!”

[01:39:02] Carrie Poppy: Who was saying this?

[01:39:04] Ross Blocher: Representative Ogles from Tennessee

[01:39:06] Carrie Poppy: Was saying if I don’t get this information, I’ll use it—

[01:39:08] Ross Blocher: Yeah. If someone tries to get in my way, this is what I’m gonna do to them. Because we need this important info. Because yeah, it’s big if true!

[01:39:17] Carrie Poppy: Huge if true! World changing. Absolutely. A guy heard a thing, but if it’s true, the thing is world changing.

[01:39:24] Ross Blocher: Uh, Burchett got the mic again, and he asked Grusch about whether he was aware of anybody working on reverse engineering technology from non-human sources. Grusch said yes. And then Burchett asked something about like them being injured, and I think this was like a separate News Nation interview find, that he’d mentioned something about people being injured while working with extraterrestrial technology. But that wasn’t—I don’t think that was quite unpacked in the hearing. And he said, “Well, I can’t be specific, but it has to do with accessing something that’s unknown and having unexpected consequences.”

Burchett asked him, “How should we handle these whistleblower complaints in the future?” Good question. And Grusch essentially spoke to like these different committees not talking to each other. You just need to share information better. Okay.

[01:40:10] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Something you hear a lot about government.

[01:40:12] Ross Blocher: So, that was it for all the five-minute segments. They gave a few people like an additional three minutes to ask questions. Most of this is stuff we’ve already kind of talked about. It does come back to Burchett at one point, and he loves telling personal stories. Like, at one point he stopped to acknowledge his wife and make some jokes about their relationship, and says like, “It’s our ninth anniversary today. Hi, honey!”

(Carrie “aw”s with a laugh.)

Okay. And then, he is talking to Fravor about his dad being a Marine. “My dad was a Marine. You’re a Marine! Hey! Buddy, oorah.”

[01:40:45] Carrie Poppy: Semper Fi?

[01:40:47] Ross Blocher: Yep.

(Carrie cheers.)

Very good. And my dad was a Marine as well, actually. And he’s got a Semper fi sticker on his truck.

[01:40:53] Carrie Poppy: What if you were in the Marines and you were just okay with it? And so, you say semper fine.

(Ross chuckles.)

You’re not sure how you feel about your service. Not totally sorry, not totally proud. Semper fine.

[01:41:04] Ross Blocher: I don’t know if there’s market for a t-shirt for that.

(They laugh.)

But I thought this was interesting. He had a question for Fravor. And I can’t remember the exact flavor of the question for Fravor, but it was something like, “How do we be great like you?” (Chuckles.)

And Fravor said something like, “My advice is don’t try to make the fish bigger than it was. Write the facts down.” I was like I like that!

(Carrie “woah”s.)

This coming from the guy who saw the 40-foot propane tank.

(Carrie agrees with a laugh.)

But I like the spirit of what he’s saying.

[01:41:35] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. I think—yeah, that could be…

[01:41:37] Ross Blocher: And hey, maybe he saw it. I don’t know, but he’s saying the right thing.

[01:41:39] Carrie Poppy: Who knows? Oh, you’re attracted to him. Okay. Yeah, that’s, maybe he’s hot.

[01:41:43] Ross Blocher: That’s the takeaway.

[01:41:44] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Yeah. That’s so interesting. So, he probably thinks he’s done that. Yeah. He thinks he’s done that. So, he doesn’t even realize that when he says 40-foot whatever that he’s actually making a bunch of calculations to say that. Like, he does those so quickly that he doesn’t—

[01:42:00] Ross Blocher: He might be telling us he caught a 12-foot fish.

[01:42:04] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. He doesn’t even know that. That’s interesting.

[01:42:06] Ross Blocher: So, there were a lot of junior representatives involved in this—like people knew to government—and one of them was Garcia, who’s a ranking member in this committee. He thanked everyone who was a witness and said, “This takes a lot of courage. Thank you for your service to our country.” He thanks all the people who helped put this together and organize it and all the participants and the staff and said, “This is the most bipartisan discussion that I’ve seen in Congress in my seven months here.”

(They laugh.)

[01:42:32] Carrie Poppy: Aw, swing and miss.

[01:42:33] Ross Blocher: But you know, I gotta say they were all in one accord. I didn’t see any partisan sniping.

[01:42:37] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I shouldn’t—seven months is a long time to be in Congress, but it’s cute that you—I’m expecting 15 years (inaudible) seven months. But yeah. Yeah.

[01:42:45] Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) I thought it was cute too. And you know what? That could hold the record for a while. Maybe he won’t see something so bipartisan. So, he underscores that, you know, this is important to put in the public record. “I know we are asking you a lot of questions you’ve already answered in other forums. Thank you though for entering it here.” Even though goodness, there was so much evasion from Grusch.

[01:43:04] Carrie Poppy: Right. Lots of Qs. Very few As.

[01:43:06] Ross Blocher: “But as a longtime teacher and researcher,” he says, again, “I believe in following facts and pursuing science.”

(Carrie agrees.)

“Transparency is important.” And that was it. About two hours and ten minutes after they’d started, they adjourned. And that was the Congressional testimony.

[01:43:22] Carrie Poppy: Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap!

[01:43:25] Ross Blocher: We’ve lived it.

[01:43:26] Carrie Poppy: Well, you three boys did a very good job on your book report. Thank you for coming. Um, one of those reports, by the way—one of those testimonies—has some very bad copy-paste errors in it. Some passages that are basically exactly the same, a few inches apart.

[01:43:42] Ross Blocher: Yeah. You caught some very funny duplications there, and also like a placeholder that Graves had left in it.

(Carrie giggles.)

Yeah, so they made available on the Congressional website their witness statements that they mostly read in person there. But yeah, you found a couple really good snippets.

[01:44:01] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. In Graves’s, it says on page five of five—and this is the full sentence: “Dr. Kirkpatrick has also indicated that eyewitness testimony—SOMETHING.” And “something” is in all caps like he was gonna fill this in later, but he submitted it to Congress.

[01:44:20] Ross Blocher: Yeah, if I write “something” in all caps, I’ll remember later to do a word search for “something”, ’cause that’s what I always do. And then, I replace that with the specific criteria. Wouldn’t you love if one of Grusch’s contacts that he turns over to the Congressional inquiry is Linda Moulton Howe?

[01:44:37] Carrie Poppy: Oh, please let it be so!

[01:44:39] Ross Blocher: It’s not impossible.

[01:44:41] Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Actually, I guess don’t let it be? I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I want anymore.

(Ross laughs.)

And on page three of Graves’s statements, he repeats the same like line and a half text two inches apart from each other.

[01:44:58] Ross Blocher: He barely changes it. Would you say he made some Graves errors?

[01:45:02] Carrie Poppy: Some Graves errors. Yeah. So, I mean, I don’t think this thing was even read over before it was submitted.

[01:45:07] Ross Blocher: Okay. So, I promised that I would read the response from Sean M. Kirkpatrick PhD, director of AARO to this hearing. So, he wrote, “Let me begin by saying that the following are my own personal observations and opinions. Yesterday, the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs held an open hearing on UAP during which a government coverup of extraterrestrials was alleged. I wholeheartedly applaud Congressional efforts to get the truth about what UAP are and the risks to both pilot safety and national security.

“I am also absolutely committed to transparency on both the historical mission and operational mission. As the Director of AARO’s amazingly talented, devoted, and highly motivated team, however, I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and intelligence community who chose to join AARO—many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail—that have been working diligently, tirelessly, and often in the face of harassment and animosity to satisfy their Congressionally mandated mission. They are truth seekers. As am I. But you certainly would not get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.

“AARO was established by law to investigate the allegations and assertions presented in yesterday’s hearing—allegations by its witnesses of retaliation to include physical assault and hints of murder are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is a critical member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action should anyone come forward with such claims. Yet, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO. Furthermore, some information reportedly provided to Congress has not been provided to AARO, raising additional questions about the true commitment to transparency by some Congressional elements. The subcommittee, who—”

[01:47:08] Carrie Poppy: Interesting. You waited to say it in public and didn’t go through the channel we would expect you to. I see. Okay.

[01:47:11] Ross Blocher: Yeah. “The subcommittee whose questions and oversight duties are irreproachable and in genuine need of answers has never asked AARO for an update on the reporting system, the historical review, the operations and the S&T strategy that AARO leads and is undertaking.”

[01:47:28] Carrie Poppy: Never asked!

[01:47:29] Ross Blocher: “A rational person watching the hearing might reasonably assume that both the witnesses and the members had an understanding of the department’s and the IC’s progress, since the establishment of AARO around this time last year, only naturally leading them to conclude that AARO has been ineffective, non-transparent, and delinquent in its legislative mission. AARO briefs the defense in intel communities regularly, and since the last NDAA, the Homeland Defense, S&T, and several other committees as well. I am deeply disappointed at the denigration of AARO’s dedicated men and women hailing from the Department of Defense, intelligence community, and civil partners, who are pouring their hearts out working this issue on the behalf of Congress.

“AARO has the authorities and resources necessary to execute this mission to meet Congressional intent. And as we’ve stated before, AARO welcomes anyone with knowledge of any of these allegations or programs to talk to us in a safe, secure, and appropriately cleared environment.” I feel like that’s a direct like comment to Grusch. Like, hey, talk to us.

“Rest assured, AARO will follow the data wherever it leads. Finally, to be clear, AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology. Also, to be clear, none of the whistleblowers from yesterday’s hearing ever worked for AARO or was ever a representative to AARO, contrary to statements made in testimony and in the media.”

[01:48:56] Carrie Poppy: Did he try to get into the hearing?

[01:48:56] Ross Blocher: Uh, not that I know of. Well, was he even invited? Doesn’t sound like it.

[01:49:02] Carrie Poppy: No, I’m saying did he try to—I would try to get in! Whenever these guys were on the thing, I would try to get in there.

[01:49:07] Ross Blocher: Good point. Yeah. I mean, that says a lot right there. I feel like AARO’s doing its job, the job that should be done, evaluating all of this information and weighing it critically and against knowledge that we have.

[01:49:19] Carrie Poppy: I think though that AARO could take a tip from their opposition here and be like, “Okay. But the human mind wants characters and stories. And I have some, and I’m gonna stop putting it just in terms of numbers and data, and I’m gonna be like, yeah, okay. Listen, Jack came to me with such-and-such a story. We figured it out. It turned out that it was actually a weather balloon. It turned out that it was actually a thing on his windshield or whatever.” I feel like missing out on those sorts of anecdotes is kind of a mistake here.

[01:49:47] Ross Blocher: Though, I mean, AARO’s existed for one year, and maybe they’re still like actively in investigation and data collection mode, and maybe they’re working on a big report or something like that. But yeah, it seems like congress should be talking to them. And I mean, they did reference that they had had him there before and that he’d already testified that they have no evidence of extraterrestrial anything. But yeah, you’re right. Storytelling is important to people, and hopefully that’s the end result is that we get something that’s memorable and factual.

[01:50:16] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, people have asked me a few times whether there’s anything to this hearing, and I only looked at it briefly, so I was like, “I don’t think so. It seems like one guy is just saying he heard some stuff, but I don’t know. I haven’t looked at all of it.” And now, I feel like I’ve looked at it, and I can’t believe everyone had to come to work.

[01:50:38] Ross Blocher: It’s amazing it happened. It shouldn’t have. It’s a great win for the UFO believer crowd.

[01:50:44] Carrie Poppy: But you think it shouldn’t have happened?

[01:50:45] Ross Blocher: Not the way it did.

[01:50:46] Carrie Poppy: Oh, not the way it did. Okay.

[01:50:48] Ross Blocher: I mean, yeah. I’m all for transparency and everything, but it sounds like it was a real end run around proper procedure and that somebody who’s willing to be sensationalists just happened to get the limelight and the time of some important people.

[01:51:03] Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh. I just hear, “I talk to a guy.”

[01:51:06] Ross Blocher: But you know, there’s bodies and there’s technology and—oh, I can tell you so much more in another forum! Not the one that we’re at.

[01:51:10] Carrie Poppy: I’ve heard about it. Yeah. Not even there’s bodies in technology. I’ve heard that there’s bodies. Okay?! So, have I now. You know?

(Ross laughs.)

That’s not anything. Yeah. Alright. Well, cool. I’m gonna stay not being afraid of aliens invading the planet.

[01:51:28] Ross Blocher: No need to lose sleep tonight. I just don’t think anything’s gonna come of it in the end.

[01:51:33] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. But if you got to meet with this guy, please tell us.

(Ross agrees.)

And if you are one of the people who reported your UAP sighting to him, let us know.

[01:51:43] Ross Blocher: Yeah. We don’t report to the DOPSR whatever it is.

[01:51:48] Carrie Poppy: We don’t even know what that means!

(Ross agrees with a laugh.)

Well, that’s it for our show!

[01:51:50] Ross Blocher: Our theme music is by Brian Keith Dalton. Our administrative manager is Ian Kremer.

[01:51:54] Carrie Poppy: You can support this and all our investigations by going to MaximumFun.org/join. And, uh, join a co-op! Well, it’s—you won’t actually own the co-op, but you’ll join.

[01:52:05] Ross Blocher: Yeah. You’ll be directly supporting the co-op, and you’ll be part of the Maximum Fun family. (Sing-song.) MaximumFun.org/join. Oh, and fun side bit of news: transcripts are back!

[01:52:16] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I didn’t even know that!

[01:52:17] Ross Blocher: Our last few episodes have been transcripted. So many thanks to Maximum Fun transcriptionist, Ashe!

[01:52:23] Carrie Poppy: Thank you, Ashe! T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U. Helping them.

[01:52:27] Ross Blocher: Oh, you’re making it easier for them to transcribe.

(Carrie confirms.)

Okay. Yeah. Very helpful. And remember!

[01:52:33] Clip:

Speaker 1: What kind of information do you think was hidden, and do you think it should remain hidden?

Grusch: Yes, I can speak to that very briefly in an unclassified manner. As you know, the preponderance in my complaint was classified to the intelligence communities. (Beep.) I know the exact locations, and those locations were provided to the Inspector General and some of which to the intelligence committees. I actually had the people with the firsthand knowledge provide a protected disclosure to the Inspector General. (Beep.) I have to be careful what I say in detail, because there is an open whistleblower reprisal investigation on my behalf. (Beep.) I have to be careful asking that question. I directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities. (Beep.) And that’s all I’ll say publicly, but I can provide more details in a closed environment. (Beep.) I can’t discuss that in an open session.

(Beep.) I can’t go beyond what I’ve already stated publicly in my News Nation interview. (Beep.) I can’t discuss that publicly, but I did provide that information both to the intel committees and the Inspector General.

Speaker 2: And we could get that in the skiff if we were allowed to get in a skiff with you? Would that be probably what you would think?

Grusch: Sure. If you had the appropriate accesses. Yeah. (Beep.) Uh, I do know the names. Once again, I can’t discuss that publicly and how they’ve evaded oversight. In a closed setting, I can tell you the specific trade craft used. (Beep.) I do know a lot of that information, but that’s something I can’t discuss publicly, ’cause of sensitivities.

Speaker 3: Alright. (Beep.)

Grusch: I can’t go beyond what I’ve already espoused publicly about that. (Beep.) And that’s about as far as I’ll go there.

Speaker 3: I got you.

Grusch: I’d be happy to give you that in an enclosed environment. I can tell you specifically. (Beep.)

Speaker 4: And are you gonna tell me we need to go to a skiff so you can tell us in a skiff?

Grusch: I’d give you a vector enclosed environment, yeah. (Beep.) Uh, I can’t get into the specifics in an open environment. (Beep.) Something I can’t discuss in a public setting. (Beep.) The specific documentation I would have to talk to you in a skiff about. (Beep.) I can’t confirm or deny that in a public setting.

Speaker 5: And could you do it in a secure setting?

Grusch: Yes. (Beep.)

Speaker 6: I see. So, you’re answering any questions that just call upon your knowledge of unclassified questions, but anything that relates to classified matters you’re not commenting on in this context?

Grusch: In an open session, but happy to participate in a closed session at the right level. Yeah.

[01:54:33] Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

[01:54:46] Promo:

Music: Bright, hopeful music.

Cameron Esposito: Hey, Max Fun listeners. This is Cameron Esposito. I’m a standup comic actor, writer, bestselling author, and podcaster. I got a great show, called Queery, where I interview LGBTQ+ luminaries across, oh, a bunch of fields. People in entertainment, astronauts, musicians, rock stars. I am bringing the show to Maximum Fun. You can listen right now. And I am so happy to be on this network. We have new episodes out every Monday. You can listen at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

(Music fades out.)

[01:55:26] Sound Effect: Cheerful ukulele chord.

[01:55:27] Speaker 1: Maximum Fun.

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