- Hello again, this is Richard Thieme,
showing up 25 years after I showed up
to speak here at DEFCON for the first time
to address the topic UFOS:
Misinformation, Disinformation, and the Basic Truth.
A lot has been happening since I made a talk
about this subject eight years ago, which is on YouTube,
and I'll refer to that subsequently,
but I want to say that reality, as Philip K. Dick said,
will not go away just because we refuse to believe in it.
And what is happening right now is real.
In fact, it's been real for a long time.
So given all the hullabaloo about UAPs
as we now call them and UFOs, what is happening?
Well for one thing, those videos are happening.
And I'm not gonna show them to you again,
because you've seen them.
They're widely available on the internet.
You've seen the tic-tacs and you've seen the videos
from the 2004 Nimitz incident.
And you've probably seen that object
going in and out of the water
on its way from US territorial waters toward Cuba.
Those are all very interesting and all over the web.
So those videos and what they're getting people to say
and think about are happening.
And officials commented on them positively in public,
which is a near first, so that's happening too.
They're not making jokes about little green men
or conspiracy theories, eh?
In addition, Luis Elizondo and his narrative is happening,
and he's telling the world that he left the UAP Task Force
so he could bring his knowledge, his concerns,
into public debate.
Now, this is where I would be showing you my second slide,
which is a picture of Luis Elizondo.
And no matter what we did and how many hours we spent,
we could not get slides to insert themselves in this video
using the software we had to use.
So the slides that accompany this will be available
on the DEFCON server as well as at my website,
which is thiemeworks.com,
T-H-I-E-M-E-W-O-R-K-S.com.
And you can go there and see them.
Now I'll also send them to you by email
in PDF, PowerPoint or
Keynote if you like.
Now, what is Luis Elizondo saying?
Well, he said to me a couple of years ago
in a conversation that the conversation about UAPs
used to be at the water cooler, low level,
and now it is happening at the highest levels
of the Pentagon.
Neat.
I can add that a former member of the joint chiefs of staff
confirmed that UFOs are real
and have been observed and documented for a long time.
Okay, so what's happening is UFOs are real.
But those of us who have investigated this
seriously and robustly and diligently and skeptically
have known that that's been true for the last 70 years.
But this time, the authoritative voice, if you will,
60 Minutes, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post,
The New Yorker, several senators, the head of NASA,
they all constitute the quote unquote authoritative voice,
and instead of dismissing or ridiculing the rest of us
for reporting what we know,
they confirmed that they are real.
So this CBS with 60 Minutes saying those things
is not Walter Cronkite's CBS decades ago,
half a century ago, when he debunked UFOs
as not worthy of investigation.
And that did happen to be a time when the CIA and CBS
and many other major media had secret contracts.
So what's happening is that authoritative voice
is confirming that UFOs are real
and are a security threat.
In our book, "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry"
to which I'll refer again,
because it's the gold standard
for historical research into the subject,
and we document that from the 40s to the 80s,
using their own words,
the government considered UFOs a security threat
and investigated what they might be on that basis.
So what else has been observed according to Elizondo?
Well, that there have been many more documented sightings
than the videos you have seen,
and than the 100 and some odd incidents
to which they refer.
Many, many more documented sightings over the past 70 years.
And he also affirmed that they enter
and leave the atmosphere and travel with equal ease
whether in space or in the air or underwater,
and that the propulsion system,
which we really shouldn't call a propulsion system,
because it doesn't seem to propel,
it's a means of translation, as it were,
from one vector of space-time to another,
and the velocities they achieve and their aerodynamics
are still pretty much beyond
our understanding and capabilities.
Although I believe, and that's a belief, not a knowledge,
that we are doing and have been doing everything we can
to learn how to do that.
Well often when you observe UFOs,
there's what we could call a warp snap.
They blur, they don't simply go fast,
they blur and go out of sight
or out of our space-time entirely
or into a different dimensional reality.
Or they could be going so fast from one point to another,
without impacts of gravity,
that they can not be detected in motion
by the eye or sensors.
But our sensors are doing a good job at detecting them
in other ways.
The only alternative explanation in 1948
was that they were extraterrestrial
if they weren't Russian or they weren't ours.
Now we can add multi-dimensional and time-travel,
which if I have time, I'll refer to
so you know what I mean.
So don't think of how things fly in the atmosphere.
They don't fly, they don't action-reaction propel
one way and move another.
They move in inexplicable ways, and often pilots report
they seem to simply vanish.
They are right in front of them in the air
and simply disappear.
So if they're not ours and they're not Russian or Chinese,
or from this planet, the only other explanation,
however you frame it, is they're off world.
Now you can call this report,
that last category other, if you like,
but we know what they mean, right?
Wink, wink.
Other, indeed.
So where are we?
We're back to the Twining memo.
And we are back to what we were saying about this in public
in the early 1950s.
I'm gonna pause this and get a map
that is on one of the slides
and show it to you so you can see what I mean.
Okay, I'm back.
And here is a map that was in Look Magazine in 1952,
when there was a lot of activity going on
capturing everyone's attention.
What you're seeing is a map of the United States
and those circles and names are all of the military bases
where UFOs were reported by the government.
Got it?
You can find this map in more detail on the web
if you look up the article Look Magazine 1952 UFOs
and see the entire article.
It's at a Jan Aldrich's Project 1947 website.
So that's what was happening.
And the Twining memo to which I referred was happening.
The Twining memo, if you do not remember that
from your UFO studies, was written in 1947,
and it was from Lieutenant General Nathan Twining
to Brigadier General George Schulgen
about flying disks.
And he said, "The phenomenon reported is something real.
It is not visionary or fictitious.
The reported operating characteristics,
such as extreme rates of climb,
maneuverability and action,
which must be considered evasive
when sighted by friendly aircraft and radar,
this is all confirmed by multiple witnesses."
That was 1947.
So that's happening too.
That what we said and knew in 1947 is being said again
as if it is new,
because it is the authoritative voice making the statement.
Now, one of our colleagues and researchers,
Barry Greenwood, co-author of "Clear Intent,"
which is the term the CIA used
to characterize UFOs prodding the defenses
at military sites on the northern tier,
he shared my surprise that the glum responses
to the government report,
because there's some real gold there.
The report notes that they're physical objects.
Back in the 1950s, if you tried to look up flying saucer,
which was a phrase that didn't exist yet,
in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature,
which documented all popular articles,
you didn't find flying saucer, UFO.
You found hoaxes and delusions.
Well, things have changed,
because the report disclosed for the first time
that those unusual flight characteristics
to which Twining referred all those years ago
have been documented by multiple sensors,
including radar, infrared, electro-optical,
our weapons-seekers, and of course, visual.
And the report confirmed that they constitute a flight risk.
The report mentioned 11 near misses.
Although one of our colleagues, Richard Haines,
has been gathering accounts of such encounters
from commercial pilots and military pilots,
and has amassed in his catalog of some years ago,
more than 3,000 reports from them.
So the reports said far from getting out of the business
of studying UFOs, which they claim to have done
after the conduct committee report
and the end of Project Blue Book theoretically,
the government has been keenly interested in UFOs,
particularly when they're poking around military bases.
And very soon after the report was released,
Kathleen Hicks, Deputy Secretary of Defense
issued a memo for senior Pentagon leadership commanders
of combat and commands and defense agency
and DOD field activity directors
to institute synchronized collection,
reporting and analysis of UAP
to secure test and training rages,
and essentially to create a new infrastructure
for this activity.
So that's some of what's happening now.
But isn't it interesting that
all these things are being reported,
including these latest videos
without any context at all?
No historical context.
But there is, as I am saying, a historical context
and the researchers to whom I have referred and others
have tirelessly documented for decades
a great deal of what that historical context is,
and we use data that's in the public domain.
Open source intelligence is frequently much more helpful
than trying to ferret out compartmented limited information.
So let's look at what is really happening.
Now, this is where I would show you the slide
of the cover of our book,
"UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry."
The main authors are professor Michael Swords,
a professor of history, and the former head
of the chemistry department at AMD, a chip maker,
Robert Powell, who now heads up SCU,
which is a scientific organization
dedicated to really good analysis of these current cases.
Well, our book had nearly 1,000 footnotes
and they all pointed to government documents
and other primary sources
so we could tell the story of those decades
in the government's own words.
I highly recommend it, of course,
as required reading to begin to understand the context
of what is being released now without any context at all
because it was long ago.
For example, J. Edgar Hoover said in 1947,
"The flying saucer situation is not all imaginary.
Something is flying around."
And I've already quoted from the Twining memos.
Well, there's a ton more.
I'm looking over here to see what time it is.
And yup, okay, we're good.
There's a ton more of all that to adduce,
but let's go beyond the fact of UFOs,
the fact that they exist,
the fact that they've been documented
to just name some of the documented impacts of UFOs.
Here are some of the well-documented effects
of which we know within a variety of contexts.
The emanation of microwave energy from UAPs
has been adduced,
and UAPs have shown themselves capable of
stimulating colored halos around themselves,
largely from the noble gases in the atmosphere.
In other words, they ionize nitrogen,
and that causes the colors that are seen
in relationship to the speed they go,
which is determined by the power that they use,
however they manufacture it.
So when they hover, they're red or red-orange,
but as they accelerate, they go through other colors
until they wind up going through yellow-green
and all the way to white and blue-white,
and at the fastest speeds,
they are a very, very intense blue-white.
All of that relates very mathematically,
very directly to the ionization of elements
in the atmosphere around them.
They have been documented to produce
a dazzling white plasma on their surfaces,
which is somewhat similar to ball lightning.
They induce chemical changes in their presence,
and they're detected as odors.
They have turned off numerous times
automobile headlights or engines
by increasing the resistance of tungsten filaments.
In other words, we can do some science
with the effects that they produce.
They have stopped internal combustion engines
by increasing the resistance of the distributor points
and suppressing the current in their primary windings.
They have precipitated numerous times on planes
and on the ground wild gyrations of compasses
and magnetic speedometers,
and rattling metallic roadsides,
which shake just like in the movie,
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
They have heated up automobile batteries
by directly absorbing energy in the acid.
And they have interfered with radio and television
reception and transmission
by inducing extraneous voltages in the coil
and the tuned circuit,
or restricting the emission of electrons
from tungsten cascodes.
They have disrupted transmission of electrical power
by an induced operation of isolation relays.
They have desiccated small ponds and dry grass
and bushes in the ground
by resonant absorption of water molecules.
They have charred or calcined
grassroots, insects, wooden objects at landing sites.
In other words, they leave burnt circles.
They have heated by terminus highways in depth
and igniting volatized gases.
They've heated the human body internally as microwaves do.
They've caused people to feel electric shocks
and they have induced temporary paralysis in witnesses.
Numerous reports all over the world through time
of moving toward a landed UFO or a hovering UFO,
and suddenly being unable to move,
being conscious, volitional, but unable to move.
In addition, medical experiments have shown
that when pulsed at low audio frequency,
the energy they emit was capable
of stimulating the auditory nerve directly
so that people have a sensation
of hearing a humming or buzzing sound.
Okay, that's the end of that list.
Those are the effects and some of the causes of them,
of which we have known for a long time.
That is part of the context.
And then there were incidents long ago,
again, back to 1952.
I'm gonna read this one directly.
"At a distance of a 130 miles
to the northeast of Washington, DC,
three different army radar units
detected an object at 18,000 feet.
The signal was strong.
It remained stationary on radar for 30 minutes
and then began to move.
By the time it reached the edge of the radar scopes,
it was traveling over 1,000 miles per hour.
The report went all the way to the Pentagon
and the order came back that if another one came in,
fire on it.
After that first night,
we loaded our 99 millimeter anti-aircraft guns,
a rather unusual thing to do in a populated area,"
Washington DC, right?
"And we also scrambled F-94 jet fighters
from McGuire Air Force Base.
This was the time when Major General John Sanford,
who was Chief of Air Force Intelligence said,
'Credible people have seen incredible things.'"
Well, my slides and a few other details
that you might want to investigate on your own
are the RB-47 case and the Minot URL,
the Minot case as illuminated by Tom Tulane,
another colleague, online.
The RB-47 bomber was paced for hours by a UFO.
Aircraft and ground radar and visual observation
confirmed the event.
You might find the details and how an explorer
like Brad Sparks pursued the reality
behind the reported effects.
He wrote an article for the wonderful "UFO Encyclopedia,"
the latest edition of which by Jerome Clark
is just golden.
And you could see Brad Sparks' article
in the "UFO Encyclopedia,"
or you can go online to www.minotb52ufo.com.
M-I-N-O-T-B-5-2-U-F-O.com
and see how Tom Tulane has provided details
of the Minot intrusion at the Minot Air Force Base,
including detailed interviews with pilots,
what they saw, what they said.
This is a good place to start,
or you can look at the Loring Air Force Base case
from October of 1975.
FOIA listed 24 documents describing
a B-52 bomber crew on the ground,
observing an object 300 feet away
and five feet above the ground
at that military installation.
Or you can look at the document we received from the DIA
by a FOIA request of the incident of Tehran, Iran
in September of 1976,
which details a dog fight between fighters and a UFO.
An Iranian general later spoke publicly
at a press conference, confirming the event,
and the reports from the DIA says the case
is of the highest credibility.
I'm referring you all these cases because
that's where you have to go
if you want to know the context and the depth
and the details of how this phenomenon
has manifested itself over so many years.
Cases, cases, cases.
Read them.
Mike Swords, our lead professor said,
"I believe no one can be a good student of UFOlogy
unless one reads lots of cases.
Cases are all we've got.
Read them, read them, read them.
Some reasonable sense, not all analytical, then follows."
And what he's suggesting is as you peruse dozens,
then hundreds, then thousands of cases
from all over the world, you begin to get a feel,
like reading a tape in the stock market of old,
or following the dots of any dynamic reality,
you get a feel for what is going on
on the basis of not just similarities,
but identical reports, of affects and experiences
from all over the world.
You don't need 10,000 hours of case reading to do that,
but you do need a lot of hours,
because there are so many cases,
and you begin to evaluate which ones
you don't even want to read.
You prefer two witnesses or more,
not single witness cases.
You don't worry about lights in the sky, period,
as if that's all UFOs are.
Read the cases, read them, read them, read them.
Now, one of the things that happens during these encounters
is there's something that we call strangeness,
because we don't know what else to call it.
But people do report missing time,
which can be caused by a number of things
or finding yourself becoming conscious and alert
far from where you had been when the encounter began.
Or you were traveling a busy road,
there was sounds of traffic,
or there were outdoor nature sounds, birds and insects,
and suddenly there's silence.
It's like being in a bell jar.
We don't know what's happening.
Is it a warping of space-time somehow?
Or is it the impact of the phenomena on human consciousness?
Because ultimately the impact of all of this
on human consciousness,
individual as well as societal,
is where we have to go,
because that's how it comes home to us.
That's how it's important.
Are there patterns?
Well, you look for them, but if there are patterns,
they seem designed to confuse us.
You can't say that's clearly the intention,
or certainly the intention,
but they seem to act like deception operations,
because we can't identify an easy pattern.
Except I think there's one that is incontrovertible.
All of the intermittent reinforcement
of UFO encounters over the past years
has resulted in all of us knowing about UFOs.
In other words, they were hoaxes and delusions 70 years ago.
Now they're UAPs.
We all know how to draw a UFO.
Not all the UFOs look the same,
but you know what I mean.
You know what a classic UFO looks like.
A prolonged exposure to intermittent reinforcement
from manifestations in remote places,
unusual places often and impossible to predict places
has sensitized us to the fact
of their existence and presence
and has alerted us to the possibility and expectation
of meaningful contact.
We don't call the men from Mars anymore.
So it's important to look at the cases.
It's important to grasp what you can from them.
But it's important to understand that
if you haven't done some of the homework
and looked at the cases we have amassed,
go to Project 1947 website that Jan Aldrich has done.
Look at the Project Blue Book website.
Look at all the work that we have done,
over 50 years of gathering documents.
Barry Greenwood, to whom I referred,
I think the last time he counted
he had 250,000 clippings on UFOs.
It does help in this domain as in many others
to be obsessive and compulsive,
because that produces results.
It's a feature, it's not a bug.
Well, are we the only ones concerned?
No, I don't think so.
China created the government-sponsored
China UFO Research Organization, or KIRO,
under their Academy of Social Sciences
to study UFOs or UAPs.
There is a People Liberation Army Task Force
dedicated to unknown objects
that increasingly relies on AI technology
to analyze its data.
Of course we're not the only one interested.
If there's a security implication,
and if whoever susses out the sources of propulsion
and maneuverability gets to it first, they own us.
They own the planet.
As indeed, whatever's behind this phenomena
has made clear as Wernher von Braun said many years ago.
Now we're up against something
that has far superior technology
to what we've thought.
Well, China in effect by creating their own investigations,
as we know Russia has done for a long time and others
as well, they're really kind of saying
what Jenny Randles tells us
Alan Heinick, the astronomer associated with
Project Blue Book in the Air Force
consultant said when he was at the Pentagon
and a general took him aside and said,
"Alan, do you really think we would ignore
something like this?"
Well, no, no.
We don't think they have ignored it.
And that's why we know this report
is just the tip of the iceberg.
It's refers to 100 and some odd events recently.
But knowing all that,
knowing them has had a powerful impact
on people over the years.
And it does impact how you think it's right or best
to report out things that originally were unthinkable.
Well now with the authoritative voice speaking,
so the rest of us who have been speaking for years
can be heard, it's not unthinkable.
It's more than thinkable.
It's knowing.
And some of the effects of knowing
something that can be so impactful, so traumatic,
it can be a major restructuring of how we think.
It can mean a majoring restructuring
of society hierarchically.
So that the pieces that we put together
into how we believe we ought to operate
will fundamentally change knowing we,
let's say it, are not alone,
and are not the top of the food chain.
Belief systems will stretch to accommodate new data.
You know, the Roman Catholic Church said,
no problem if aliens are real, we'll just baptize them.
That's a belief system stretching to accommodate new data.
Or sometimes people double down on their original beliefs.
You know that.
That the more something is shown to be incorrect,
the more people assert it to be true.
The political situation is testimony to that.
And when I've been giving speeches on this
or on intelligence matters,
or things that are a challenge for people,
I often hear someone say,
I don't want to know that.
I don't want to live in your world.
Well, that's a choice people make,
to hunker down in their bubble, play golf,
do whatever they do to distract themselves
from what's a little more important than making par.
And I don't want to know that.
Well, I've heard that enough to know
that I do want to know it,
I'm a need-to-know machine I'm a curiosity machine,
and curiosity is generally considered to be a good,
and a sign of intelligence,
although when I was doing a talk at Los Alamos
and I was asking questions about their supercomputers,
the respondent who didn't say much said,
you know, curiosity is considered a good thing elsewhere.
In here, it's not.
In other words, shut up.
Well, how is this impacting people?
Just ask Bill Nelson who's now the head of NASA.
He said when he was serving in the Senate,
he saw classified UAP data.
Now keep in mind that the report we've seen
is seven pages, and we are told that there were 70 pages
and the rest was all classified.
So we don't know what was in there
other than that there were more details and more reports.
Well, Nelson said when he heard the reports,
quote, "The hair stood up on the back of my neck."
He said he also spoke with some of the pilots
involved in the incidents and he said,
"They know they saw something."
Well, the point of that is when the head of NASA
and a Senator hears a classified briefing
and reports that the hair stood up on the back of his neck,
it makes the hair stand up on the back of our necks,
because it adds to the implications
of what we're discussing,
the unknowns of what he did hear,
and what we do know on top of
what we have been able to fathom.
So why would he say that?
What else is not being said?
How many classified pages of the report
were not put out into the public?
Well, we have hints right from the senators who heard it.
Mark Warner,
the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said
he was first briefed on UAPs nearly three years ago,
long before 60 Minutes did their little piece.
And since then he said the frequencies of these incidents
only appears to be increasing.
Today's inconclusive report is the beginning of efforts
to understand and illuminate what is causing
these risks to aviation in many areas around the country
and the world.
Marco Rubio, senator and Vice Chair
of the Intelligence Committee said
for years the men and women we trust to defend our country
reported encounters with unidentified aircraft
that had superior capabilities.
And for years, their concerns were often ignored
and ridiculed.
This report is an important first step
to catalog these incidents, but it is just a first step.
We have endured ridicule from these authoritative voices
for decades.
I've said before, illusion, misdirection, ridicule.
These are the three legs of the stool of covering deception.
And they are used effectively by agencies
which have resources that are so extensive
that the normal human cannot imagine.
Ridicule.
Lawyers have whole seminars in how to ridicule a witness
to completely undermine their credibility
so that nothing they subsequently say,
even though it's the truth, matters.
Those of us who have pursued information about this
for all these years know the effects of ridicule.
Well, what is the way forward?
What are we going to do?
Whether or not the military pursues UFOs in earnest,
there has to be a civilian program.
The military from the first has focused
on the threat to security,
but a civilian program can do science.
Civilians, not just military, do science.
And what UFOs really are, what they constitute,
remains a scientific problem.
It's not just a question of intelligence
or counter-intelligence.
We need a study well-designed to develop a strategy,
to test our hypotheses about what they are
and distinguish among the different UAPs.
This comes from Mark Rodeghier,
who is the head of the CUFOS,
or the Center for UFO Studies.
Mark is a very bright guy,
and he has worked in that area for decades
and has shared the frustrations
of not seeing the science supported
that would enable us to do this.
I mentioned SCU, you can look it up.
Robert Powell, my colleague and coauthor
of "UFOs and Government."
They have done analyses of recent incidents,
including the ones we're talking about here
that are scientific, that use teams of scientists,
and that only report out in up to 200 page reports
of what they can verify as scientifically feasible
and well documented.
They approach it as a scientific problem.
And this is in contrast to how so many of the
cottage industry of UFOites have pursued the problem,
which is by hearsay, their own misinformation,
because they don't know what they don't know,
or what they do know,
and their disinformation sometimes sponsored
and intentionally designed.
So it has to be a scientific problem for us
to address in scientific ways.
UFOs constitute an existential threat.
It could be a threat to security in general.
The technology is something we don't know how to do.
And you know the analogy is you go back 200 years
and describe cities aglow with electric light,
and you'll sound like an idiot.
The history of science is replete
with the resistance humans mount against the truth
when it threatens their belief systems.
And a superior technology like this invites disbelief
and rebuffing it by saying, oh, that can't be true.
But any time I find myself saying that can't be true,
I find it really pays to explore a little more.
Don't forget that Richard Feynman said
"The keystone of advances in science
is a fact that is also anomalous,
because it contradicts the belief system
in which it doesn't fit."
It has to be both.
It has to be a fact.
It can't be a non-fact and it has to be an anomaly.
It has to be something that doesn't fit,
because then it prompts the question,
well, if this is real, if this is true,
if this is a fact, where does it lead us?
What else must be true?
If these reports all these years have been true,
what does it tell us about covering deception operations?
What does it tell us about how different government units
operate as we document in our book?
There's no one government.
There's multiple government sectors,
and they're often at odds with each other,
just as in the intelligence agencies,
the couple of dozen of them,
people are often pursuing a goal,
but also highly or very much at odds
with one another as well.
Now the security question is real,
because if one of our terrestrial adversaries
figures it out first, we're toast, right?
We're toast.
Every major military advance from stirrups, to bullets,
the guns, on and on has given insurmountable advantage
to the one who got to it first.
It's an existential threat too
because it's a challenge to our societal beliefs.
It's a challenge to our cultures.
And it's a challenge to our religions.
Our religions are extraordinarily resilient as we know.
We continue to affirm religions formulated
in the scientific worldview of 2,000 years ago
and successfully compartmentalize what we choose to ignore
and what we choose to try to continue to affirm.
But there does come a tilt.
There does come a turning point,
which is why church attendance is so far down in America
where people listen to nonsense
and just can't stand it any longer.
I'm not saying that religions are nonsensical.
I'm saying they become the excuse to say things
which in the rest of your life you know you don't believe,
and you don't act on those things you say
you act on your true beliefs.
Well, a challenge to those beliefs
and the challenge to those beliefs
all the way up to the level of cultural linchpins
is a serious existential threat.
And then of course, there's the unknown.
How, how do we deal with the vast unknown
and realizing how tiny we are?
Our galactic cluster, billions of galaxies
with billions of planets in them.
We know the universe is teeming with life.
Easy to dismiss.
Oh, where are they then?
As if they should all be clamoring for our attention, right?
Like I want my ant farm to pay attention
when I walk into the room.
It's not happening that way for good reason.
We're not the top of the food chain,
and if we're the apple of God's eye,
we're discovering that there are millions of apples
on those very big trees,
and if there's a God that loves all his apples,
we're just one apple.
It's always a challenge when we have siblings
and we find out our parents love them too, right?
Or as much as they love us.
So what did make the hair on the back of his neck stand up?
We want to know.
For him, it was a challenge and a shock.
I went through that myself years ago
when I first got into this domain
and began hearing credible reports
from fighter pilots, people in intelligence,
people in the military, and just plain people
who wanted to talk about what they'd experienced,
but which the authoritative voice had prevented
from speaking aloud lest they be told they were drunk
or crazy or ridiculed in other ways.
The time for that kind of nonsensical ridicule is over.
This domain has had debunkers, not skeptics.
Those of us who pursued the truth of this
have been skeptical in the extreme.
It's valuable in a scientific consciousness.
Debunkers are people who, like committed atheists
say no, no, no
the way committed believers say yes, yes, yes.
They're just as committed to no as a believer is to yes,
and just as foolishly wedded to their commitment,
which is based on emotional grounds,
not on the rational grounds they put forth
as the reasons they believe what they believe.
Where are the debunkers now,
when it's not us, investigators on our own,
who are advocating for the reality of the phenomena,
but the authoritative voices at all levels?
Well, they're pretty quiet, aren't they?
Where are the city people like Shostak,
who's been debunking us with superior smirking for years?
He's flailing about in the weeds
because he would have an awful lot more to attack
than the strong men and women said he has invented
in the pretense that their approach
to discovering extraterrestrial life makes any sense at all.
Well, I guess I'm gonna wind it up here
by making a pitch for intelligence,
clarity, passion, commitment,
and a radical willingness to open yourself
to wherever the facts and the truth may lead.
And today that's a difficult thing.
The last slide has a picture of my latest book.
I got to pitch it, right?
"Mobius: A Memoir."
25 years of my experience
working with security and intelligence professionals
has finally poured in to a single narrative,
and it's a novel, because as I often say,
a deputy director at the National Security Agency said,
you can't talk about what we talk about with you.
You have to write fiction.
Fiction is the only way you can now tell the truth.
He was right.
Well, 37 published short stories and now two novels later,
"Mobius: A Memoir" is the most truth I can tell
in a narrative that's coherent, artful,
and includes that quarter century
of deep listening to my colleagues.
I encourage you to take a look at it,
and it will soon if it's not there now
be at the Internet Archive as a borrowable download
in digital form one at a time as the rules go,
but you can of course buy it in Kindle
or print at a very reasonable price.
Check out my website for it.
I'm gonna repeat that, https://,
which we don't have to say anymore.
Thiemeworks, T-H-I-E-M-E-W-O-R-K-S.com
Once more, it has been a terrific privilege
and a pleasure to be part of DEFCON
25 years after I first spoke here,
because this has been my home conference,
a place where I'd never had to explain who I was
because we all get it.
We get who each other is straight up
and that's why we come back.
So thank you for the invitation.
Thank you for listening,
and thank you for being committed to exploring the system
in all its complexity and intricacy
so that you can take it apart
and put it back together again in a way that works better.
Thank you.