
🛸 S05E41 – Government Disclosure
Blake and Karen welcome back paranormal investigator Matthew Baxter to sift through the latest government UAP release – the so-called PURSUE document dump – and work out what, if anything, is actually in it. Baxter took on the job of reading the paperwork so nobody else has to, and he returns with a skeptic’s field report on what the government handed over, and what it quietly left out.
From a Nevada billionaire’s decades-long influence campaign to a $22 million taxpayer-funded hunt for the strange at a remote Utah ranch, the trio traces how fringe belief got bootstrapped into official policy – and asks whether the whole disclosure spectacle is meant to illuminate anything at all, or just to bury the question under an avalanche of unanalyzed data. Along the way: anglerfish, ice cream cones, and an epistemological war we didn’t even know we’d been drafted into.
🎧 What’s Inside
🛸 What “PURSUE” actually stands for – and what the release did and didn’t include
🏛️ AARO decoded: why “all-domain” is more than a rebrand
💰 The billionaire whose private money quietly seeded decades of official UFO research
👻 The “two agendas” baked into disclosure from the start (hint: it was never only about spacecraft)
🍦 A former government UAP chief’s memorable verdict on the whole enterprise
🎣 The anglerfish test: what real extraordinary evidence actually looks like
⚔️ The “epistemological war” – and why skeptics feel like they brought a calculator to a shouting match
🪐 What some disclosure advocates are really hoping to find out there
🕒 Rough Roadmap
Approximate start times – they’ll shift a little with the final edit.
⏱️ ~01:51 – Setting the scene: what is PURSUE?
⏱️ ~03:30 – Breaking down the AARO acronym
⏱️ ~06:30 – The Bigelow origin story and the “two agendas”
⏱️ ~11:31 – The central skeptical finding
⏱️ ~17:05 – “Self-licking ice cream cone”
⏱️ ~19:20 – The anglerfish analogy
⏱️ ~21:03 – The epistemological war
⏱️ ~29:46 – Ultra-terrestrials and hyperdimensional beings
⏱️ ~35:07 – AAWSAP: it already happened
🧑🔬 Who Turns Up
🔍 Matthew Baxter – paranormal investigator and returning guest, on documents duty
💵 Robert Bigelow – the aerospace billionaire behind much of modern UFO research
🛰️ Sean Kirkpatrick – AARO’s founding director
🧰 Mick West – debunker, Metabunk founder, and past MonsterTalk guest
📻 Art Bell – late-night paranormal radio pioneer
🔭 Carl Sagan – patron saint of “extraordinary claims”
🔗 Episode Links
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (Wikipedia)
United States UFO Files (Wikipedia)
National Institute for Discovery Science (Wikipedia)
AARO UAP Records – official imagery and document releases
The PURSUE Portal – Department of War
Metabunk – Mick West’s investigation and debunking forum
🔎 Dig Deeper
🗄️ The Black Vault – the largest civilian repository of FOIA’d government UFO/UAP documents, handy for cross-referencing PURSUE against the historical record
🧰 Metabunk / Sitrec – home of Mick West’s interactive 3D tool for recreating the frame-of-reference artifacts discussed in the episode
📚 National Security Archive (GWU) – academic-grade collections of declassified national-security documents, including UAP-related material
📚 Recommended Reading
📖 UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life – Garrett M. Graff 💵
A comprehensive journalistic account of the government’s decades of UFO/UAP investigations, drawing on declassified documents and interviews.
📖 Skinwalkers at the Pentagon – James T. Lacatski, Colm Kelleher & George Knapp 💵
The insider account of AAWSAP from the DIA official who championed it – best read skeptically alongside AARO’s historical record report.
📖 The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan 💵
The foundational text for science-based skepticism, and the source of the “extraordinary claims” standard the hosts are defending.
📖 Escaping the Rabbit Hole – Mick West 💵
The Metabunk founder goes beyond debunking to examine the psychology of conspiracy belief – directly relevant to this episode’s frame.
📖 Hunt for the Skinwalker – Colm Kelleher & George Knapp 💵
The original popular account of the NIDS investigation at Skinwalker Ranch – useful for understanding what the money was actually studying.
📖 Mirage Men – Mark Pilkington 💵
Argues much of UFO mythology was deliberately seeded as intelligence-service disinformation – a provocative fit with the episode’s “influence campaign” thread.
📖 How to Think – Alan Jacobs 💵
Explores how people form beliefs and why tribal epistemologies are so durable – close to the episode’s “epistemological war” theme.
📣 Promotions
Pick up Karen’s book, Beyond Words 💵.
More from our guest: Matthew Baxter .
🎙️ Credits
MonsterTalk theme music by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Hey there, Monster Talkers.
I’m just going to get us right into this week’s discussion about the latest tranche of documents related to Disclosure Day.
Not the latest Spielberg movie, but the fantasy concept upon which it’s based.
That our government, and perhaps governments around the world, are hiding their secret awareness of non-earthly intelligences and are going to spring that on us any day now.
I have some things to say about that, but I want to save them until after our discussion within this episode because I don’t want to detract from all the work Matt Baxter did going through the documents.
So stick around for a few minutes after our chat, and I’ll share a few thoughts about this that the discussion inspired.
And thanks again to Matt for going through the documents for us.
And I’ll catch up with you all after our Monster Talk.
So you guys, you looked at that new tranche of UAP documents.
Is that what’s going on?
Well, I looked at them and have some thoughts.
Okay.
Well, who are you?
Who am I?
Where are we?
Who are any of us?
Why are we here?
So welcome to Monster Talk again, I guess.
That’s the question.
I think we should change the name to UFO Talk.
UFO Talk.
Okay.
Talking about UFOs so much.
EBEs.
Yeah, well.
It’s still a monster.
It is.
It is.
And if it turns out, if it’s like Jordan Peele, they turn out to be biological, you know, then obviously they do totally count, right?
Right.
I don’t know if you watched Nope.
Nope.
Oh.
Nope.
So what are we talking about?
Disclosure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So sorry.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Yeah.
And today we’re welcoming back Matthew Baxter.
Yay.
All right.
Cool.
We did it.
I don’t want to make the whole episode about my obsession, but there is this group of people that really, it began in the 90s with Robert Bigelow.
And his nids skin Walker ranch group.
Yeah.
But they’ve, they’ve crossed.
I think maybe like with that New York times article that hit, what was that?
2017.
I think they, they really cross some.
What is the word?
tipping point and now the general public thinks there’s something big going on when in fact it is the same group of influencers continuing to echo chamber their way into our hearts and minds yes but stomachs they they’ve managed coming right after our cattle mutilations talk but i i uh we did just talk about animal mutilations which
in these modern times it really is almost always tied into ufos and aliens so yes yeah yeah we talked about that so what are we talking about math this is about you know there’s been some government disclosure that’s been going on by uh the or the uh the the office is arrow and that’s a a r o
And the name is interesting.
Yes, it is.
Because it stands for all domain is the first A.
And what that means is they’re kind of investigating all domains, not just air.
Because, you know, UFO was a flying object in the air.
But these investigate things in anything anomalous in the air, space, sea.
underwater, on the earth?
Do you think transmedium that goes between these domains?
So that’s what all domain means.
It doesn’t mean that it’s all web domains.
That’s what I was going to say.
When I think of domains, I think of the web.
Or linguistics.
I think about speech domains.
So I guess this is a…
register specific thing for ufos yeah this is operational poisoning um well that’s that’s domain so a little different and then the second a is the second a is anomaly and that’s so they’re not assuming an object is a craft or a physical object they’re talking about anything anomalous in military or intelligence reporting
And then resolution.
They took a leaf out of the book of kind of anomalous phenomena with that.
Probably.
I think it’s a nod and a wink to their secret agenda, which is not that secret, which is because this is all being driven by funding from Bigelow, who in turn is trying to make it government funded.
And in order to do that, he has to make the government believe it’s really going on.
So again, the echo chamber pays off with…
agencies and endorsements because there’s plenty of people in america who think if the government’s researching it that’s an endorsement it’s real right so so but all along going all the way back to when he was supporting art bell before coast to coast preceding program was made possible by a grant from the bigelow foundation
This has been Area 2000, a program that introduces our listeners to the scientific approach for discussion of two particular subjects, UFOs and near-death and after-death experiences.
They advertised that the Bigelow’s research was about two things, these mysteries, these aerial mysteries, that sort of thing, and also…
consciousness and they don’t mean how does consciousness form within the human mind or within the brain they talk about consciousness they’re talking about survival of your individuality or your spirit after you die so it’s always been there baked in
Wow, it’s a long boat to draw.
It is indeed.
But I think that using this all domain anomaly thing, it allows them to get the government to pay for research into ghosts and entities that don’t live in our bodies or the survival of consciousness, all that stuff.
That’s my opinion.
Based on strong evidence.
Okay, so.
Well, you know, one of the interesting things about this is that they’re one of the approaches is to create an avalanche of sort of information.
So you can’t take it all in, but there’s so much that you’re going, wow, this is a lot.
So something’s going on.
Yeah, things happening here, but they miss it.
So speaking of which, that also makes show topics like this with with three people like herding cats.
because so far we have gotten through the two A’s in AARO.
That’s just us.
We mean rounding up, not harming, herding cats, right?
Right, right, right.
We don’t want to…
We don’t want to brand them or anything like that.
But I will tell you that every meow is equally important because there’s so much information being piled on.
You have to sort through every meow.
All right.
Next letter, please.
Trench, right?
Oh, yeah.
I forgot.
We’re still working on the acronyms.
Sorry.
So the next letter is R, and that’s resolution.
So the office’s mission is to identify or explain reports whenever possible.
An unresolved case simply means there wasn’t enough information to reach a confident conclusion.
Now, that’s really important to kind of underline that.
If it’s not resolved, it doesn’t mean aliens.
It means they don’t have enough information to reach a confident conclusion.
And then the O…
I was still going to say for resolution, it still makes me think of the internet.
No, true, true.
Yeah.
We’re monitoring the situation.
And the O at the end is for OMG.
No, it’s actually, it’s actually office.
So, and that, so no, the O is for office.
And really that serves two purposes.
It’s a joint department.
Exactly.
It does sound very governmental and very, you know, official.
Yes, yes.
It’s kind of that thing that I can’t remember that we skeptics use all the time.
No.
Appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority.
Yeah, yeah.
I was about to just start rattling off things skeptics use all the time.
Thank you.
So we got the, yep, Blake’s got his toolbox open and he’s ready to go.
My skeptical toolbox.
So it’s a joint Department of Defense office that also works with the intelligence community, which is hilarious to hear those words, FAA, NASA, and other agencies.
So it sounds really official, and there’s a lot of authority here.
But this is what the AAR was actually tasked with.
Its charter says it’s supposed to collect reports of UAPs.
analyze sensor data and witness reports, assess whether sightings pose a national security or flight safety risk, determine whether incidents involve foreign technology, U.S. classified programs, ordinary objects or natural phenomena, sensor errors, or something that remains unexplained.
So they’re determining, trying to determine all these things.
Now, here’s one of the interesting things that I saw with this disclosure that they did.
They did none of these things.
They didn’t do anything, except for the collect reports.
But they didn’t analyze anything.
They just vomited it out with no information.
Now, there was some good things that they did do.
And that is cool, but it’s more for historical stuff.
They did release some stuff that’s not videos.
It’s just declassified paperwork.
So on a lot of these older reports, you get the original observations before decades of retelling.
And that’s useful for the historical aspect because it lets you compare what the witnesses actually said and what later UFO books claim they said.
So you get that contrast and that’s very important.
And then they had more context around unresolved military reports.
So you have reports where pilots or radar operators simply say, I don’t know what that was.
And that’s great.
It’s important, but it’s not extraordinary.
An unresolved report is not evidence of an alien craft.
I’m just wondering at this point, how much credence is the government giving to this group, this organization?
Well, if they do what their charter is, plenty.
You know, their task is to be very critical thinking about it, very methodical about it.
But the disclosure action wasn’t.
You know what I mean?
They released all these videos and still images with very little information.
So it’s basically, I don’t know what that is, but the government sees it and the government says that they think it’s special.
They think that there’s something to this because it’s unresolved.
Why would they want to align themselves to this?
Because it just seems so marginal.
Okay.
It’s popular in the public.
And I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but a lot of the politicians these days are really into trying to appear as though they care about the things that normal people care about.
What, like education and health care?
No, no.
Things that normal people care about that don’t actually have a, there’s no legislation required.
All you have to do is pretend to care.
And then you don’t actually have to accomplish it.
This is a really good thing for political action because there’s no law coming out of it.
There’s no legislation.
It’s just sounding to me like the BFRO for UFOs.
Yeah, that’s about right.
This is a great way to distract on what the latest scandal was.
That’s that’s really and it worked great.
It was a great distraction.
I don’t know how many people I heard talking about this and the things that everybody found really interesting.
You know, I went and I looked at it and it’s not like I said, the files that they released.
that they declassified.
There’s some cool stuff in there that actually helps us skeptics do a comparison between what was originally said and what was said later by the UFO books and UFO conferences and things like that.
So that’s really important stuff.
But the images that they released…
There was no recovered craft documentation.
There was no chain of custody records.
There was no authenticated alien biological evidence.
There was no engineering reports.
There were no convincing multi-sensor cases with complete data.
Nothing.
So what were the images like?
What are we talking about?
The exact same things we’ve seen.
These radar images that you can’t tell what they are, satellite imagery, you can’t tell what it is.
Just like one single camera catching something moving isn’t explained.
We’ve talked a lot, and we actually interviewed Mick West from Metabunk.
And, you know, each one of these cases by itself has to be…
examined according to the merits of whatever was captured and a lot of these things what happens is something happens it gets captured as an incident but that’s not what is brought to the public what’s brought to the public is a story and the stories are exciting and they’re coming from people within the government
which gives them a bunch of extra weight because I, again, when we had Jerry Drake on here who works for the government and he was talking about how the government’s not a monolith, you know, but it’s still, it’s like anchoring.
It has like that reality anchoring or plausibility anchoring because it’s coming from a government agency, which is ironic because it’s ironic to me because
The people who are conspiratorial largely don’t trust the government.
Yeah.
Government distrust is one of the reasons this exists.
But when it’s something they want to be true, if the government’s looking into it, that somehow endorses it or strengthens it.
Hypocrisy.
Yeah.
This is really funny.
The first director of AARO was a scientist named Sean Kirkpatrick.
And he’s not in charge anymore, or he’s not the director anymore.
But he called it a circular claims network and referred to it as a self-licking ice cream cone, which strongly, strongly matches my assessment of this being an influence campaign.
I’m like, okay, I would not mind talking to Sean Kirkpatrick.
He sounds like he’s got their number.
I mean, I’m not outraged at the government looking into these things.
I’m outraged that…
they fall in for this influence.
It took it more than 20 years.
I mean, it’s like closer to 30, uh, for this to actually new to come out.
Right.
I mean, and when it does come out, like the whole thing is like, if you go to MetaBunk, you look at the facts, a lot of this stuff emerged when they put in new sensor systems and they haven’t learned how to filter out the noise.
So they’re getting all these false positives or they’re seeing something, you know, again, a lot of the discussion on MetaBunk, um,
lays out very clearly if you take the time to see how that something up close appears to be moving supernaturally fast but it’s not is you know it’s a frame of reference situation perception exactly and there’s a lot of that that happens and and i bet you somewhere in this stuff there’s some genuinely interesting mysteries but but
That doesn’t justify paranormal still.
Right, right.
They don’t, I don’t think they care.
At large, I don’t think they care whether they prove or don’t prove anything.
What they want is for these stories to be perpetually in the people’s minds because it reinforces their agenda.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Which they call it a trench, you know, this body of documents that get released.
I mean, it’s a lot for anybody to go through.
It’s overwhelming.
It’s a dump.
It is a dump.
Yeah.
It’s what they do.
Spread on my mind.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Now, here’s the thing.
So here’s one of the interesting things is the standard of evidence that the UFO community will accept compared to just normal society or scientific community.
So let’s say if someone in the 1700s claimed that there was this fish that
at the bottom of the ocean that had glowing lures, needle-like teeth, and the males permanently fused to the females, that would sound pretty absurd.
But once the explorers recovered specimens and zoologists could examine them, you could see preserved anglerfish in museums, researchers could have sequenced the DNA, observed their anatomy.
We know they’re real.
We don’t have a blurry picture or 500 blurry pictures and say, believe this.
This is real.
We have a higher standard of evidence for everything else.
COVID.
We had people that did not believe COVID was a real thing.
But what did we do?
We kept bringing more and more evidence that proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Yeah.
And it was different evidence from different, you know, mediums.
So it wasn’t just one.
Here’s a picture of a COVID virus.
You know, we didn’t just do that.
We were able to give so much different evidence to say that this is a real thing.
That sort of stuff drives me nuts on Facebook at the moment.
Just anytime anything comes up about vaccinations and, you know, we’ve eradicated this or just information from science organizations and just people using the laughing emoji.
It’s like, I mean, this stuff is undeniable and yet they’re just laughing at it.
So I’m firmly of the opinion that we’re in an epistemological war.
So it’s not even about the information, because if we were trying to tackle this information using critical thinking and evidence, some of it is still ambiguous, but a lot of it clearly doesn’t have what it takes to pass muster.
But we’re not in that conversation because…
The sides are not pro or con.
The sides are, do you use evidence-based thinking or do you think from your gut?
And that’s a different epistemology.
And it’s very difficult to win an argument with someone who is literally, literally not playing the same game.
And I think that’s what we’re running into.
It is very frustrating for skeptics.
If you think of yourself as a rationalist, you’re using a lot of evidence and critical thinking.
And that’s how you want to approach the world.
We know there’s things that are not going to fall into an easy category.
There’s things that are ambiguous.
But that’s not again, that’s the battle we trained for for years.
And that’s not the battle we’re having.
We’re having the battle of not because I said so.
And that is really hard to win.
Yeah.
Playground logic.
Yeah.
But that’s who’s in charge now.
That’s who’s running things.
I want to make sure that the vaccine is sound and has passed muster and is safe is very different from the, I don’t believe in vaccines and this is all nonsense.
Please take more vitamins.
That’s a different thing.
Drink Clorox.
Anyway, so this is an extraordinarily frustrating time and it’s hard to give advice because I think the general person in the public, if they’re feeling like me, they’re feeling like, well, I guess the best I can do is try to make good decisions on my own because clearly the authorities are no longer using the same playbook, right?
Tricky stuff.
You’re going to have to bleep me here in a moment, but Tim mentioned, I think said it really well when he was talking about people that said the theory of evolution is just a theory.
And he wishes those people would treat the theory of gravity the same way and float the fuck away.
Now that you mention it, I love it.
So, yeah, you know, because when we talk about, like I said, the anglerfish, when we talk about that, we have a situation where the evidence compounds.
And with UFO stuff or…
Bigfoot or ghosts, the pattern’s almost the exact opposite.
They take, it just cycles through kind of eyewitness testimony, ambiguous photographs, blurry videos, radar returns without corroborating data, and official acknowledgements that something was identified.
And that’s all they have.
Now, like you said about ambiguity a moment ago,
You’ve got, say, Carl Sagan.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But the thing is, is you can have one extraordinary claim.
It doesn’t require one piece of extraordinary evidence.
It requires the reduction of ambiguity.
So you need compounding evidence.
You can’t just have one piece of evidence for one claim and say, well, that’s it.
That’s proof.
You need the continuous reduction of ambiguity, and we don’t get that.
So, you know, every scientific discovery from dinosaurs to black holes to giant squids or exoplanets, you know, that’s involved evidence becoming less ambiguous over time.
Like you said, we get better instruments.
We have more observations.
We have independent confirmation, reproducible analysis, and the uncertainty narrows down.
And that’s what the big difference is because the UFO field doesn’t use any of that.
And, you know, I’m in a different room than Karen’s in right now.
And I don’t know if she can see me gesturing like a madman as I’m saying all this.
I can.
I feel like you’re going to hit me.
So I apologize for that.
I feel kind of passionate about it.
But yeah, it is very frustrating because nothing new was given to us.
That’s exactly what I was going to ask.
So there’s nothing new here.
Even though there’s so much to do being made about it, this is just rehashing everything all over again.
Well, the UFO community really likes visual stuff.
And we skeptics like documentation.
And the visual stuff told us nothing.
The documentation gave us good historical records to compare with UFO conferences and UFO books.
And so the documentation has been very valuable, I think, to the skeptical mind.
And the visual stuff is nothing new.
It’s a lack of information.
You know, that’s the big difference.
Documentation brought us information.
The visual stuff brought us the lack of information.
Well, the information drops they’re giving are here’s the data with no contextualization or analysis as well.
That’s it’s this is which almost if I were a conspiratorial, I would say this feels more like a distraction than actually useful data.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this except be distracted.
And I don’t know what again, I wouldn’t want to conjecture too much about.
Is that a verb?
I wouldn’t want to project.
I don’t want to spend too much time imagining why they might want us to be distracted.
I think that the people behind the releases.
want us all to be talking about this stuff and so leaving it as vague as possible and leaving it to the public to do the analysis is is one way to to push conversation it’s about like it’s kind of like me saying uh sound off in the chat room we’d like to hear what you think because we apparently think nothing that’s what we think yeah yeah yep and and it is interesting because
You know, the scientific community likes their evidence in a certain way.
The UFO sort of community likes the lack of evidence because they can then have their distrust of the government come in.
The best evidence is classified.
The crass retrieval program is hidden.
The bodies can’t be examined.
The proof exists, but you can’t see it.
And that doesn’t function as evidence, but it does in their minds.
And so when we get the government that goes here, bleh, oh, see, we knew it.
But it’s a lot like when politicians put out these big proposals that happen to be thousands of pages long.
No one can read it all.
So no one reads it at all.
And that’s kind of how these disclosure dumps are.
Which, by the way, I’ve seen them called PERSU.
I didn’t realize that was an acronym.
And so that stands for, I love this, Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.
so pursue yeah presidential yeah which tells you what you’re being distracted from yeah it kind of does yeah yeah anyway excuse me sorry all right that’s exactly exactly what you said it and i didn’t so yeah we’re all thinking it right yeah i was trying to see what they’ve distracted from but it was so overwhelming i ran away from it i ran away from it exactly exactly
Well, it all sounds pretty mundane.
Much to do about nothing.
As a skeptical listener, assuming you are, even if you’re not, you know what?
You don’t have to label yourself to use these tools of analysis.
Yes, exactly.
Be whatever camp you want to, but try to use critical thinking.
And I think, again, I’m not pushing a conspiracy theory.
I don’t have one.
I just think, except that I think the same individuals pushing for this narrative, and they do absolutely have an agenda beyond trying to prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Because if you go actually see what’s going on out there, these people are not looking for invaders from another planet.
They’re looking for ultra terrestrials, demonic entities, all sorts of things.
Hyperdimensional.
Hyperdimensional from within the earth, whatever, anything except for let’s use physics and what we know about the scientific method to analyze these things and see if there’s a possible answer because they don’t want those answers.
If they did, again, they would lean into the people who do this.
It’s not full time, at least for a serious hobby.
The people in the community likes to analyze this kind of evidence to see if eliminate the possibility that it’s just something normal.
And that’s why, again, I tend to enjoy this stuff over at Metabunk because there’s a lot of discussion about it.
And they use, again, good physics and science to try to figure out what’s really going on.
Yeah, but they’re preaching to the choir, unfortunately.
Well, exactly, right?
And if you go to Reddit, you’ll get different opinions.
But I mean, all of these, without being there and without having firsthand sensory data, we’re limited to what is available from the logs or the videos.
And there’s a very finite amount that can be extracted from that information, especially when no one bothers to actually…
give you more context.
So I feel like volume over quality seems to be the rule here.
And again, that’s because they want to perpetuate their echo chamber or self-licking ice cream cone, whatever.
We’ll be hearing more about that, I’m thinking.
I think so too.
One of the interesting things is I’ve heard just from being in my workplace at work, several people are discussing this disclosure with such excitement because you look and they’ve got like a UFO tattoo on their calf or whatever.
And they’re excited about it.
And I’ve kept myself from saying anything to them.
But in contrast to that, I’ve looked at different news networks that have run stories on this and then put those on YouTube.
And the comment sections are just…
How stupid do they think we are, you know, that they can pass this off as evidence of anything?
And we’re getting sick and tired of this.
And just the comments have been one after another of people being frustrated and fed up with the fact that there is nothing new.
This is all just spinning wheels.
And if there’s nothing there to prove anything, why are they bothering spitting this out?
And I think we’ve covered exactly why they’re bothering.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, if I wanted to prove I was doing work in my IT job, I could produce a lot of logs.
But, you know, if I don’t provide any analysis or filtering, that’s just garbage is what that is.
Yeah, it sounded like another pun that you had there.
i don’t even know what you’re talking about well thank you matt for reading this so that we don’t have to indeed so yeah you don’t want to if i let me be blunt again we say it all the time but i believe i speak for all of us when i say we would love for there to be proof that we’re being visited by other intelligences that would be great honestly these days any intelligence be lovely
But yeah, I don’t fear that stuff at all.
I’m not afraid of it.
I wish it were true.
But I need harder evidence.
And I don’t need volume and equality.
You need compounding.
Ice cream that doesn’t lick itself.
That’s right.
Because then I don’t want to lick it.
Anyway.
All right.
Thank you, Matt and Karen, for pulling this together.
And I’ll put links to this data if you want to go look at it yourself or lick at it if it is an ice cream cone.
Right, right.
Yeah.
I’m ready for lunch now.
There’ll be licks.
I mean, links in the show notes.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard Matt Baxter and your regular hosts digging into the latest tranche of UAP documents.
Tranche, by the way, if you’re wondering, is just a fancy word for a batch or a slice, a portion of a bigger stack.
Anyway, this latest tranche, there’s a link to it in the show notes if you want to go through them yourself.
And that right there is why this episode, like every episode where we wade into the topic of UAPs or UFOs, stalls out when it’s time to write and record the intro and outro.
I’m still working through what all this means to me and what can be safely deciphered from the publicly available facts about the people behind these agencies, the legislations, and all these hearings.
Here’s the thing about document drops like this one.
Even the release of information can be timed, filtered, framed, or aimed at a particular outcome.
The motives of the people involved vary.
So do the desires of the constituents who vote for these politicians and fund their campaigns.
And underneath it all, you’ve still got that core group tied to the old Bigelow team.
The people behind NIDS and Skinwalker Ranch.
And then you’ve got a separate crowd tied to TV shows and media companies.
And some of these folks are pandering to an audience that wants disclosure the way certain evangelicals want trumpet blasts and teleporting rapture.
Some want the government to officially endorse alien intelligences and an imprimatur to go investigate poltergeists on the taxpayer’s dime.
And maybe that should stop you cold, because they already did exactly that.
The old Bigelow Link program, AAWSAP, spent around $22 million in taxpayer dollars studying the paranormal happenings at Skinwalker Ranch.
So this isn’t some hypothetical I’m dreaming of.
It’s a rerun, and they’d like to make it official this time.
And some want the whole thing as a distraction.
And some just want it to be true so badly that every hearing and every release video feels like a wink from the secret keepers and a signal that their belief was right all along.
So this was never one thing.
And all these motives and probably plenty more are actively driving the changes.
The new agency names, the shifting adjectives for whatever it is we’re supposedly investigating.
And then there’s the strangest new word in the whole bunch, resolution.
As if you could tie a bow on any of this stuff and call it solved.
My point’s simple.
There was never one answer to these mysteries because there never was one thing going on.
And I’m honestly worried that this decades-long influence campaign from Mr. Bigelow and his network of media and researchers has finally hit a tipping point.
They’ve bootstrapped themselves onto a durable and deeply misleading impression that all of this stuff is real and dangerous and not of this earth, when there is nothing in the materials and reports now or ever…
that would justify that conclusion scientifically.
So yes, critical thinking and evidence analysis are still the best way to evaluate this kind of stuff, as long as it’s being evaluated honestly.
But when the research is steered by an agenda, whether that’s a worldview, or money, or politics, or a little bit from every column, that doesn’t bring us closer to disclosure of a hidden truth, it just sinks us deeper into the fog of mystery.
I’m not claiming to have the answer myself.
I’m just claiming that now more than ever, critical thinking and scientific skepticism are the best tools we have for evaluating and testing the evidence.
But document drops like these don’t make anything clearer.
They hand us one more layer of engagement that needs its own skeptical interrogation.
There’s no victory conditions in this stuff.
It’s a chore.
And the best help I can offer is that chores are easier when you’ve got good tools and lots of practice.
So I hope that we’re helping.
And I hope we can always find some fun and some joy in this work because the thought that it might never end can be overwhelming.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
At least this week we found out how much people needed a new cryptid in their lives.
So way to go, Jimothy!
This has been a Monster House presentation.