⚠️ The following transcript was AI-generated and this initial version is primarily intended to be useful to robotic readers and for SEO. It Definitely Contains ERRORS. (This is our first experiment with this and Blake is working on a much more human-friendly approach.)

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Thank you, everyone.
It takes such great courage to come forward, and we acknowledge that, and I hope that you see that we are taking that seriously.
And so very thankful for what you’re doing today.
I’m also very thankful for previous witnesses that have come forward.
I see Matthew Brown in the audience.
He courageously stepped forward and was as a witness.
I encourage everybody to look and seek his testimony.
I want to thank the people that came in our first hearing, Ryan Graves, David Grush,
David Fravor, and in our second hearing, Admiral Gallaudet, Lou Elizondo, and Mr. Gold, and the many others that have come forward.
We hear you, and it’s time that we, you know, enough is enough.
It’s time that we take action.
Look, I’m not jumped to the conclusion that I believe that there are, you know, aliens coming from another planet, but I’m open to that.
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 Stoltzner.
Hey there, Monster Talkers.
So I wasn’t feeling very well when we recorded this episode, and I appreciate Matt bringing the topic to us, but usually I’m better prepared for our episodes.
And when I was editing, I kept wanting to drop in comments of stuff that I didn’t think could say when we were talking at the time.
But instead, I’ve decided to only interrupt as little as I can get by with and then make a few comments now and then again at the end of our chat.
Because in this episode, we’re discussing the recent congressional hearing Missouri Congressman Eric Burleson arranged about some drone footage alleged to show a UFO being intercepted by an American missile.
What you’ll hear in our conversation is Karen and I doing a sort of reaction video, but as you know, we’re usually just an audio show.
And when it came time to edit this episode, again, I’m still not feeling well.
Well, I’ve read up subsequently on the particulars of the video in question, and I do have a few comments about that that mostly I’ll stick in the outro.
So…
My intense skepticism from the get-go on this topic is not because I’m blatantly dismissive of the idea of mysterious high-tech craft of unknown origin.
I think that would be really cool.
It just requires a lot of very special evidence.
But what really was going on here is I was upset because these things are almost never what they appear to be when they’re actually investigated properly.
The sort of golly gee whiz factor tends to disappear when we have skilled video analysis by people able to understand video artifacts, parallax illusions, and other common but well-understood effects common to military-grade video.
when they’re seen by civilians not in the know about the provenance, the particulars, or the circumstances of the recording.
I’m also very negatively inclined to believe any, I’m air-quoting here, evidence being presented by George Knapp, Jeremy Corbell, anyone associated with NIDS, anyone tied to Skinwalker Ranch, anyone tied to Robert Bigelow, and so on, because these people are not uninterested observers.
These are folks with a very specific agenda to promote the idea that there are non-human intelligences that work in our world and that these alleged entities can operate without fear of consequences from our puny technical powers and that this is all somehow tied into human consciousness and the paranormal.
And no matter what’s on the label, if these folks were involved, that’s what’s in the tin.
And we’ve discussed this previously when we had on Toby Ball to talk about his work on the Betty and Barney Hill case, and when we had on Sarah Scholes to talk about her book, They’re Already Here, a book that touched heavily on the 2017 New York Times article that made UAP the new term for UFO in the public arena.
But, you know, you can pour Big K Cola into a Coca-Cola tumbler, but it’s still just Big K Cola.
And apologies to all the Big K fans out there.
I’m just trying to make an analogy.
Alrighty.
I’m still recovering from this stomach bug or whatever’s going on with me, but I’m going to try and power through and let this episode mostly stand as it was recorded.
I do have a few comments about the video and the outro, but for now, let’s join Matt Baxter and Karen Stolzno for some Monster Talk.
Should I say, welcome, Matthew, for joining us again.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
And boy, I hope you’ve got something exciting for us.
Yeah.
Yeah, Matt, do you want to tell us a little bit about kind of what we’re going to be talking about and how this came about to you becoming aware of the topic?
Well, I have to admit that I am a little out of the loop when it comes to news and when it comes to government news.
I’ve been trying to avoid it.
By design, yeah.
Yes.
A friend of mine got a hold of me the other day and sent me a video.
Representative Eric Burleson, I think he’s from Missouri, presented a video to Congress of a UAP.
UAP.
And that’s UFO for the rest of us.
But UAP is Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.
Well, Blake, do you want to give us a quick refresher about this kind of shift in labeling, why this has occurred?
In my opinion, and we’ve covered this a little bit on the show before, this shift in UAP is basically to give it, this idea of UFOs, a new label that maybe doesn’t have the baggage that UFOs have of wacky people.
Flying saucers.
This is being promoted by the people from Skinwalker Ranch and Bigelow, the billionaire.
You know, the people who believe, you know, space poltergeist and cosmic Bigfoot are on a ranch in Utah.
They just don’t want that UFO wackiness getting in.
So UAP is way better.
Anyway, I’m a little I find it all ridiculous.
But just by relabeling it and throwing a few million dollars into Congress, they were able to sort of semi legitimize this stuff.
I remember all the hoo-ha in the news here in Colorado about people like Stan Romanek and Jeff Peckman, and they’re kind of, I guess, advocating for disclosure and awareness about UFOs.
And so initially I thought that this was kind of like that, but I guess this follows a representative, right?
So this is a lot more serious.
Yeah, well, as long as you put a little quote around serious, it was political theater is what it was.
But the bottom line is, last month he comes into Congress and he’s done this before from what I understand.
He’s been pushing this whole disclosure idea.
One of the things that happens when a politician storms into Congress and just –
throws this video on everybody and they’re completely unprepared.
They’re at a complete disadvantage with how they’re going to respond to it.
So basically the video kind of, this is what’s claimed, is this…
There’s this metallic orb over the water in Yemen.
And an MQ-9 Reaper drone gets aerial footage of all of this.
And it’s tracking this orb.
And then suddenly this Hellfire missile.
strikes it, and it shatters off into these pieces that kind of become self-sufficient, I guess you’d say, on their own.
And he’s, Eric Burleson, is out there demanding disclosure because he doesn’t want to be in the kind of government that hides this kind of thing from the people, and he’s, you know, kind of a fist-pounding thing.
The other bill, the UAP Disclosure Act, remarkably, it was stripped out by the House last year, and I can’t get it onto the bill leaving the House this year.
Mr. Knapp, how far would that bill go to actually getting the answers that we need?
Pretty far.
I think they’re still going to have roadblocks.
You know, the keepers of the secrets, the private companies that have been doing this job for intelligence agencies for a long time are not going to cough it up.
You’d have to force it out of them.
And Mick West did an analysis of the video.
Now, I looked at the video, and what it looked like to me was…
A cross between something microscopic, like, you know, when you see like a needle piercing, you know, like a bubble and it kind of separates.
And, you know, when you see that under a microscope kind of thing, it looks a little like that in combination with like an ultrasound.
In other words, you can’t tell what’s going on.
That’s quite a description.
Yeah.
You look at it and you’re going, what?
That’s what?
Do we know for a fact that this happened and happened in Yemen?
I mean, this is just all very strange.
It was presented in Congress.
What more do you need?
Yeah.
Bottom line is the Pentagon, I mean, nothing official has validated the video.
There’s no metadata.
In other words, it was like taken, it was videoed off of the screen that was showing it.
Hey, now we got some important cryptids that way.
The Fresno Nightcrawlers.
Would only exist.
So that’s important.
So, you know, videoing a security camera or a screen, like a replay of a VHS that’s been copied is really some of the best ways to get your cryptic video.
So, yeah.
It’s kind of in the same vein as just blurry videos of Bigfoot.
Shh, don’t say that.
I hate to sound dismissive because I haven’t seen the video.
It may be very compelling, but what you’re saying sounds awfully familiar.
Yes.
It looks almost identical to the videos that were released a few years ago.
In fact, I did a Ask a Paranormal Investigator YouTube video on those, talking about those, but they look almost identical, really.
I mean, there’s not a lot of difference.
We have such a high-tech military that can’t seem to have high-resolution video
I don’t know what’s going on there.
But anyway, the bottom line is Mick West.
And we’ve had him on the show before.
That’s Mick West of Metabunk.
You can go to Metabunk and you can see his analysis of the video.
Now, he asked some very good questions.
You know, trying to look at this, he stabilizes the video.
He crops and he zooms different segments.
He breaks things down.
And one of the big things is he’s uncertain that it’s a Hellfire missile.
And that’s a great question right there, you know, because, okay, all these things that you’re claiming, Eric Burleson, you claim it’s a Hellfire missile.
You claim that it’s an MQ-9 Reaper drone.
You claim that it’s a Yemen.
You claim that it happened in October 2024.
Those things by themselves aren’t verified.
Not a single word out of his mouth was verified.
Now, I’m thinking it interesting that there might actually be some issues in Missouri that Representative Burleson could actually be addressing.
But instead, he’s addressing this.
Now, if you want to go see Mick West’s analysis, you can go take a look at that.
He does some great work there.
We’ll put a link in the show notes.
I don’t know where you’re going with this, but just to backtrack a little bit, I wanted to ask what is a Hellfire missile?
Sounds like a biker’s club in L.A. or something.
A quick insert to answer Kieran.
The Hellfire missile is a laser-guided missile normally configured for air-to-surface or surface-to-surface strikes.
And this means that an operator paints a target with a laser, and then the missile locks onto that laser and then uses it to navigate to the target.
And these are normally used against heavy targets like tanks and vehicles.
But some famously soft target configurations have been made on these missiles, and I’m not making this up.
They pop out a bunch of blades and are designed to shred flesh instead of exploding.
These are 100-pound missiles flying at high speed and wielding a star array of sword blades.
Yeah.
That configuration is sometimes called the ninja missile or flying ginsu.
But as is clear in this video, if it is indeed a Hellfire being used, they can also be used as surface-to-air weapons in some configurations.
More on that in the outro.
And that’s the thing is, again, that’s something that was not defined.
There were a whole lot of things that were simply not defined.
And yet this is kind of released to the public, you know, with no sort of basis, no baseline, no, you know, help for the average viewer.
And these are good questions.
Where it comes from or who it comes from then?
It comes from a whistleblower.
So you need to be aware of that.
You know, they do need to be protected.
But if I were a whistleblower, I would bring more than a blurry picture of Bigfoot.
And this is, then he has not.
That’s interesting.
The Hellfire is the one, they’re laser guided.
I was just looking up their specs.
So you have to have like a targeting system that spots a laser on the target.
And that’s how it’s guided to its destination.
So that’s interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, I don’t really know what it says, other than that it’s interesting.
But somebody, whatever this unidentified object would be, would have to be painted with a laser.
There you go.
Right, right.
Now, if it wasn’t a hellfire, do we even know if it was actually a missile?
Could it have been something else?
I mean, you know how it seems like artifacts and various things like that appear to be different things all the time.
If you’re a lay person looking at these videos, you really don’t know if it’s an artifact.
You don’t know if it’s ice coming off of something.
You don’t know if it’s, you know.
A lot of experts or seeming experts don’t seem to know either.
Well, and I think a lot of the previous UAP videos, you were seeing things that looked like they were moving really fast, but you couldn’t tell if they were really close to the camera or far away.
So it’s like things that were quite close could appear to be very far away, moving very, very fast.
Say sort of like an orb in a regular ghost photo.
Yeah, true enough.
Right.
Yeah.
Oh, oh, hey, you didn’t mention George Knapp was in Congress to watch this video.
That changes everything.
Well, my apologies.
Sorry, it doesn’t change anything.
Sorry, George Knapp is among those people working for Bigelow who’s promoting the UAP narrative.
Is there any great support for this video and these demands?
Well, yes.
And I’ll get into that a little bit on where that support’s coming from and why.
Because this is very politically motivated and not critically thinkingly motivated.
And please don’t use any proper grammar or critical thinking in that sentence that I just said.
So anyway…
Another big question is, OK, if this is over this highly sort of monitored airspace because, you know, military, were there any other witnesses or any other data sources?
Right.
No, there are not.
There’s nothing else.
So this happened in a vacuum.
So there’s no proof it’s a drone.
There’s no proof it’s a hellfire.
All the things that he said, there’s no proof of it at all.
And, you know, you find interesting ideas about what it is.
There’s a lot of people thinking critically, but it seems like not a lot of people are asking all the right questions.
A really simple one is, could this have been AI?
Absolutely.
Yes.
Yeah.
That’s a good question.
Yeah.
Well, you’ve got AI upscaling and frame interpolation.
That totally could help kind of produce the steady pan and atmospheric haze that’s seen in the clip.
Now, the thing is, is you do have the issue with this being low resolution, compressed and reshared and everything else.
And second generation shot from a screen, you’re saying?
Exactly.
So forensic cues.
Which removes all the metadata from the original.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
So you can’t, those same forensic cues aren’t there.
The noise patterns, the compression artifacts, there’s nothing there that can disprove AI generation in the sense.
So it was already challenging enough, right, to trust videos because people could fake stuff.
But now, especially if you’re letting second generation where there’s literally no way to see what the original source material looked like.
It’s taken it to another level.
It makes it, well, like you say, it makes it worth it.
It’s literally worthless.
Like, so we could speculate.
I mean, I think Mick West is speculating that it was a balloon.
But no matter what it was, we don’t even know if it was a real thing at all in the first place.
Exactly.
There’s no reason to ever trust second generation video.
I barely trust first generation video at this point.
And this is why, because of AI.
Go ahead, Karen.
Well, I’m just wondering if Blake and I shouldn’t just hit pause briefly and take a look at it and do a reaction.
I like the circle around it.
That’s useful.
It’s helpful.
So you see a Hellfire missile, what you see is a white blob go by and it bumps into something.
Yeah.
And then some little blobs fall off of it.
That is like the best description I’ve heard.
Well, I think your description of an ultrasound is pretty good.
And then it seems to transfer to just being the ocean.
Right.
But yeah, I’m sorry.
They have George Knapp testifying under oath.
Bless his heart.
Really?
OK, so bless his heart.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
So George Knapp is.
Oh, wow.
And there’s Elizondo here, too.
Yeah.
OK.
It’s the same.
Rogues gallery of nonsense people, you know, who’ve been pushing this UAP agenda for years, trying to, you know, give credibility to their, I’m sure, well-intentioned search for proof of not aliens, but survival of consciousness after death.
Okay, that’s what this is all really about.
Okay, so…
Yeah.
I mean, they say UAPs.
They imply aliens.
But what they’re really trying to prove is that the human soul exists and can survive after death.
This is a very new agey religion group being financed by a billionaire.
So, sorry.
But anything they say, I would find extremely suspicious.
I mean, these are the same people who brought us Bob Lazar.
So, just…
Just no.
Just no.
I mean, it’s great that Congress is falling for something besides the other stuff that they’re always falling for.
But whatever.
I just this is just disheartening.
But, you know, some people will find blobs on video and blobs on photos very compelling.
Some people will see muscles in a.
Well, I like to blob with Steve McQueen, but I don’t like it when people look at a blurry picture, their brain fills in the gaps, and they make it match whatever story they’re wanting to push.
That really annoys me.
Well, what I’m wondering is why they’re being given this important platform.
Yeah.
And that’s the thing is you’ve got Burleson there.
Now, he’s out there.
He’s trying to appeal to a cultural narrative.
The government knows about alien storyline.
It has real political currency.
And especially with voters who distrust institutions.
So showing a sensational video that plays right into that narrative and it signals, hey, I’m on your side.
So you really have to think about that.
Like I said, this is political theater, not policy.
So, you know, and anytime you have a UAP hearing, it attracts cameras.
It attracts, you know, news people wanting to have this kind of, you know, anytime you’re presenting shocking footage, verified or not, it creates viral clips and visibility.
Yeah, see where you’re going.
Yeah, that’s attention often equals influence.
So, you know, and like I said, the members of Congress, they didn’t get to do any subject matter vetting on this.
So they were just kind of…
caught off guard.
You know, it’s easy for a lawmaker to misjudge and not know.
I mean, they can be swayed by this.
Yeah, they’re long, well-known credibility leeches.
They used to do this thing where they would like rent the press club in D.C.
And it was like, you know, from the Washington, D.C. Press Club, you know, here’s UFO details.
Right.
OK, so it’s like they just steal the credibility from Congress.
They steal the credibility from institutions, from cities, wherever they can leech it.
They try to get credibility.
It doesn’t make what they’re saying true.
And it just annoys me, especially in this group, because, again.
This group has got a long-running influence campaign, and their goals have nothing to do with protecting America from dangerous technology.
It has everything to do with convincing people that these alien intelligences are somehow tied in with the existence of human consciousness beyond the physical body.
So it’s very non-materialist, secret religion stuff.
Diane Pasolka has been sort of trying to…
or codify how this is turning into a religion.
And I think, I mean, I don’t disagree with her that it is a religion.
I just disagree with her that it’s new.
In my opinion, it’s always been religious from the days of the saucer contactees.
It was always tied into theosophy and the idea that there were these benevolent entities and intelligences out there that were coming to save us.
And it’s like, got some bad news, folks.
nobody’s coming to save us.
You’ve got to stop.
You are just, I don’t know who you think you’re preaching to right now.
Well, this is making me think about Benjamin Creme, and we’ve spoken about him before, and Cher International and his intermingling of religion with UFO theory and space brothers and space sisters and the idea that Jesus, known as Maitreya, is going to…
to come back at some point.
So that goes back to, I think, the 60s and 70s.
But as you say, it goes back even further.
It ties into theosophy.
Yeah, it goes way back.
So let’s, you know, there’s been sort of a…
I guess you would say a theme, recurring theme on Monster Talk lately about, you know, just because a lot of people say it happened doesn’t mean that it happened, whether that be cannibalism or, you know, whatever else, because it’s also a good way to other.
And that’s been a great kind of a recurring theme lately.
Now, I don’t know, I don’t think, Karen, I don’t think you’ve had a chance to read it yet, but Blake, did you see that Ken Fedder, did I pronounce his name right?
Fedder, Fedder?
I think it’s Fedder runs with Darth Vader, I think.
That’s what I thought, Kenny.
He just wrote an article about a Rocky Mountain Martian.
Oh, nice.
No, I didn’t see that.
Yeah, this Martian actually took this sort of discovery of this Martian in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado took place in, I believe, it was 1864.
And come to find out that the only place you could find out about this news was if you were in France reading a French newspaper.
And the reason being is newspapers have never really been any better than the Weekly World News.
Well, that’s true.
Because they do know that – well, the best is the Weekly World News out of all of them.
But they do know that –
there’s a huge amount of currency with these sensational stories.
And it’s only recently that being wrong carries a penalty.
Oh, no, I agree.
It didn’t used to.
And the thing is, is in Congress, there’s no penalty for being wrong.
And that’s a huge problem.
So, you know, like I said, the big question here that it just comes down to is, is the video authentic in terms of whether it’s AI or not?
Because.
AI is really easy.
I had, you know, sent you those Bigfoot vlog videos.
Yeah.
And anybody can do AI.
Anybody can do AI.
It’s just ridiculous what, you know, what you can do with it now.
The simple fact is, is this is really, really, really easily reproducible via AI and can look very convincing.
And then you can pop into Congress and show it and there’s no penalty for being wrong.
And the problem is, is this undermines legitimate inquiry.
You know, this erodes public trust, this diverts resources.
It is a big problem.
You know, we had the great quote of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And if you add in a little bit of Spider-Man, you’ve got and extraordinary responsibility.
Now, if our leaders are going to forget the second part, it is up to us to remember the first part.
We have to pay attention to this kind of thing.
And I mean, just the questions, it took me a long time to come to the question of, well, is this AI?
Because, you know, I was too busy asking all these other questions.
Okay, is this actually a drone?
Is this actually this?
Is this actually that?
You know, a lot of times when, you know, in the skeptical community, when they’re presented with something, they always jump to the idea that it’s a hoax.
And then later they think, well, maybe it’s a misunderstanding.
But they first jump to hoax.
And if I can just prove, you know, that it’s a hoax, then it’s okay.
It was a misunderstanding.
It was actually something that somebody thought they saw.
Well, I think, didn’t Joe Nickel talk about that a lot?
And he said that it rarely is a hoax.
Usually it’s going to be some kind of misconstruing of what’s going on.
Yeah, unless I’m behind it.
Well, I was going to say, but when you’ve got people bringing it who have a history of misrepresenting what they’ve been showing and who have a clear agenda, if anyone wants to bother to look at it.
And let me just add, the other thing that we’re challenged with, and I know we have…
Listeners and friends of the show who are in journalism and journalism is primarily about communication.
And it’s not sort of fact finding, you know, endeavor that a lot of people sort of imagine that it might be.
I think, you know, we at least my generation grew up, you know, after Watergate and this idea that, oh, you know, hard hitting investigative journalists, you know, can go find the real answer.
And that’s simply not what journalism is today.
Journalism, it’s entirely about getting eyeballs.
Right.
And you may recall what’s going to go viral.
Right.
In 2008, there was the whole Bigfoot in a freezer Georgia hoax.
Right.
No.
I remember that.
I mean, zero journalists thought that was real.
Nobody thought that was real.
But it was a front page news.
It was all over CNN because they knew people wanted to look at it.
Right.
Balloon Boy wasn’t real.
Nobody thought Balloon Boy really had a balloon with a kid in it, right?
But it was a sensational story, right?
I think it was just the anniversary for that, too.
Yeah.
So it’s just like you can’t trust the media to be gatekeepers of veracity.
It’s entirely up to us as individuals to learn the critical thinking skills to look through this stuff.
Yeah.
It’s a tough one.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So you’ve got Burleson up there, and he’s demanding disclosure.
And again, that’s another question has to be asked.
What does he mean by disclosure?
Because there’s two kinds.
You’ve got the literal kind, which, you know, he’s asking for the U.S. government to release materials, data, programs related to this unidentified…
aerial phenomenon.
So he’s talking satellite radar data, military encounter reports, contracts, research with defense contractors, any records of crash retrievals, reverse engineering programs, all these kinds of things, photos, videos.
That’s what demanding disclosure should mean.
But in UFO culture, disclosure means
It more refers, well, it’s with a capital D for one.
Yeah, it’s more like the second coming.
It’s a coming revelation.
It is a religious event.
It’s a religious event.
Yes, it’s a momentous government admission that aliens are real and have visited Earth.
And, you know, you have people like Stephen Greer, who’s a perfect example.
Well, he had the Disclosure Project in 2001.
And it’s just that in that mythology, it’s almost apocalyptic.
You know, it’s the day humanity learns the truth.
And what does apocalypse mean?
It’s to reveal, right?
That’s what they want.
It is a revelation, right?
But it is a cosmic revelation, not a physical hardware revelation.
Right, right.
So when politicians say that word to certain audiences, they’re tapping into that emotional charge.
And it doesn’t matter whether they believe it.
It’s just they’re really getting that, you know, that that emotional charge to to to work with in a sense.
And it’s funny because they’re they’re the things that they’re pushing for is a full declassification.
Now, you were in the military.
You know that you cannot just declassify things.
You know, we’re talking about national security in a lot of these situations.
I will withhold all cynical jokes and just agree with you.
Okay.
And they’re talking about, you know, you’ve got to remove all the private contractor NDAs because they’re hiding aerospace research tied to UAP tech.
And then, you know, congressional oversight of alleged special access programs.
And then whistleblower protections.
You know, these are all these things that they’re really working for.
But there’s no evidence that any of these programs exist.
Right.
And one thing that does exist that this video clearly ignores is that there are policies and procedures and regulations and everything about whether or not you just fire a hellfire missile at something unidentified.
You don’t.
You don’t.
Like shooting Bigfoot.
Well, like dropping a bomb on Bigfoot.
Yeah.
But yeah, it’s an absolutely ridiculous idea that they’re going to fire a hellfire missile at this unidentified thing that is not threatening.
I’m cynical, though, and I’m jaded.
But like people from Missouri allegedly are supposed to be, you got to show me.
I would love it if there were these weird, ultra-dimensional entities in the world, you know, interacting with us or scaring us or influencing us.
That’d be a really cool world where you could be afraid of something really mysterious and not just the banality of human selfishness.
I mean, the reality is…
We’re getting constantly duped by just simple greed and malfeasance.
And you don’t have to postulate alien intelligences and, you know, super technology.
It just there’s secrets out there, but they’re about how people are taking your money and denying you basic services.
There’s all kinds of real things going on.
Yeah.
But keep them distracted with the glowing orbs and the grainy videos.
Sure, sure.
I don’t know who’s falling for this besides people in Congress, but it’s scary that any of this is having an effect, honestly, at this point.
And it makes me angry that Burleson knows better.
He knows that he can’t come in with such flimsy evidence and do this, but he’s doing it.
You know, he knows that his state has more important issues that need to be addressed, but he’s going for the virility of it.
Yeah.
Well, you might want to keep an eye on who donates to his campaign.
I’m going to lose the joke now, but when you mentioned that to me, Matt, that he has bigger issues, all I could think about was cheese in Missouri.
I thought you were talking about him having bigger issues.
No.
Provel or whatever it’s called, the cheese that isn’t classified by the FDA as cheese.
That’s the first thing I thought.
A cheese product or an American – Cheese-like product, yeah, something like that.
No, you’re right.
That’s a big issue.
Why are they not there with a block of that in Congress?
And the way they cut their pizzas.
Well, that.
Oh, no.
How do they cut their pizzas?
Deep fried ravioli.
Yeah.
What?
Blake’s like, I’m going to Missouri.
Show me.
Show me.
I’ve got to go.
What are you talking about Missouri pizza cutting?
I don’t know this.
Well, they kind of cut.
It’s a round pizza, right?
And then they kind of slice it.
Cut it in a grid?
Yeah, like a grid.
And so you’ve got these tiny little pieces.
That’s because they play tic-tac-toe with it.
That’s how they… Oh, it’s the St. Louis-style pizza.
It’s a thin, cracker-like pizza crust made without yeast.
Yeah.
Oh, my gosh.
Wow.
Wow.
I’m sure we’ll get complaints about this, but then support from people in Chicago and New York.
Provel cheese instead of mozzarella.
Exactly.
Shocking.
Level out, yeah.
We’re going to blow the lid off this.
But, I mean, the thing is, it could have been a representative from any state.
You know, there are bigger issues in every single state.
It wasn’t from Colorado.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We’re not we’re not missing on Missouri here.
This is absolutely a situation where every state in the union has bigger issues.
And the fact that he represents Missouri and he’s not trying to take care of those issues is a concern.
Constituents.
So think about who you vote for.
You just lost me at Provel.
Blake is hungry.
No, I’m just, no, I’m kind of shocked.
According to Wikipedia is rarely used or sold outside of St. Louis.
That’s very specific.
I did try many, many years ago and it tasted like cheese.
It looked like cheese.
It smelled like cheese, but I don’t eat cheese anymore.
It was a lie.
Oh, cheese.
Much like their UFO videos.
Wow.
Well, Matt, thank you for bringing this to my attention.
You’re right.
Sometimes there’s a penalty for not watching the news and it’s like missing out on breaking stories like this.
Yeah.
Well, lucky we got good contacts, eh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good friends help.
Contactees.
Good Lord.
Well, I had actually sort of vaguely wondered, what are those guys from Neds up to?
Blake, you just rolled your eyes at a pun.
Is that what I heard?
I heard you roll your eyes at a pun.
Well, I can’t see him.
I’ve just seen that little picture of him.
So I don’t know.
If I did, it was an accident.
Don’t worry.
Don’t worry.
He’s still thinking about Provel.
I am.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
I know him.
It looks like a giant block of butter, but apparently it’s pasteurized processed cheese product.
He will travel there now and try it, won’t you?
I will.
I’ll be heading right to St. Louis right after this call, right?
Nice.
Well, the next time I’m in St. Louis, for real, I’ll check it out.
Yeah.
There’s another investigation.
It’s like when in Cincinnati, I’ll have to have the chili and spaghetti.
So, yeah, we’re learning all about America here.
Yeah.
Well, from what I understand, it never goes bad, so you can ship us some, and it’ll still be good when it gets here.
Yeah.
Well, it’s a new conspiracy theory.
It’s got prove right in the name.
Well, probe.
Anyway.
Well, Matt, thank you so much for catching us up on the UAP fiasco.
I mean, controversy.
Yeah.
I really should apologize to the listeners for how cynical I am about this stuff, but I can’t help it.
I don’t think they’re surprised.
I try to be open-minded, but they keep bringing the same quality junk to the table.
It’s like, you know, it’s just, it’s ridiculous.
Anyway.
Well, at least you can say your heart’s in the right place.
I guess it is.
And at least so far, it’s not full of Provel-based cholesterol.
So that’s something, right?
Till next week.
Till next week.
I’ll see if I can get some delivered here.
Like you say, I don’t think it’ll spoil.
That’s fantastic.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stoltzner.
You just heard Matt Baxter telling Karen and me about a congressional hearing on UAPs and drones.
I put some links in the show notes for some deeper dives into the topic, but after reviewing the footage myself and reading some of the very good online analysis, I support the following conclusions.
First, this does appear to be a missile strike on a balloon.
The alleged speed’s clearly coming from parallax effects.
And UAP enthusiasts ought to know better after the GoFast video, since this is essentially the same well-understood effect.
Second, this video probably shouldn’t have been released to the public, not because it’s revealing our inability to fight alien technology, but because it shares capabilities about how the U.S. is using missiles in unusual ways to combat enemy aircraft.
So third, it is likely the thing being hit was a balloon or similar soft target.
The mysterious pieces falling off might make you recall some of the unusual UFO stories of the 90s.
But in this case, we’re not seeing a vehicle turning into blobs that can rejoin together.
We’re just seeing shredded remnants of a falling, lighter-than-air aircraft following the expected laws of physics after being struck by a missile.
And finally, I’d still find a lot of entertainment listening to shows like Coast to Coast AM, and I don’t begrudge folks for such thing.
But if a breaking story is being brought to you by George Knapp, get out your skeptic hat and put it firmly on your head.
He’s part of that Bigelow UAP influence campaign to make Americans believe we’re being visited by non-human intelligences with vastly superior technology, and it simply is not true.
Speaking of Knapp, I need to take a nap until I get to feeling better.
Monster Talk’s theme music continues to be by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
Thanks for listening.
This has been a Monster House presentation.