Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.” 

He recently interviewed Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the Pentagon UFO investigation office, AARO. 

We chat about UFOs, National Security, Self-licking ice cream cones, and aliens.

Alex Dietrich served a 20-year career as a Naval officer and fighter pilot with two combat deployments. She was also deployed to Afghanistan as an Infrastructure reconstruction engineer. 

She then transitioned to academia, serving as a Naval Science Instructor and then a Military professor, teaching, among other things, Critical Thinking, Leadership, and Ethics. 

Alex is best known to the public as one of the pilots who witnessed the famous Tic-Tac UFO when flying off the USS Nimitz in 2004. She’s appeared on 60-Minutes, CNN, and other shows to discuss her experience and its implication for flight safety and national security. 

Robert Bartholomew has a PhD in Medical Sociology, and is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He’s an expert in Mass Psychogenic Illness and the co-author with Rober Baloh of the book “Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria”

Havana syndrome is a loose set of fairly generic symptoms that are being blamed on some kind of attack. It started with personnel at the US embassy in Havana, but has since spread around the world. Dr Bartholomew thinks it’s an example of Mass Psychogenic Illness – people are being asked to look for odd health events and strange sounds, and so of course they find them. But there really no good evidence of any kind of attack. Bartholomew thinks the intelligence community is largely aware of this, but an unbiased examination is being avoided for political reason.

Dr Bartholomew’s website – https://rebartholomew.com/

What is a University professor doing investigating UFOs?  Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University heads the Galileo Project, which seeks (in part) to identify the nature of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena by establishing a network of telescopes and instruments with the goal of obtaining the first unambiguous clear photos of UFOs.

We talk about the demarcation between science and pseudoscience, the rationale for the project, the challenges it will face, and how it all fits into Professor Loeb’s personal philosophy.

The Galileo Project: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo

Transcript https://otter.ai/u/abtJtNRU8RbBdUeUu50j9pb7m7Q

Mia Bloom is Professor of Communication at Georgia State University with a PhD in political science from Columbia University. Sophia Moskalenko is a research fellow at Georgia State University and a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.  Together they wrote the book Pastels and Pedophiles – Inside the Mind of QAnon. 

We discuss how the book came about, the historic roots of the QAnon conspiracy theory, how QAnon has changed with the “Save the Children” narrative to attract more women, and what tangible steps can be taken to help individuals and to help improve the overall situation.

Jason Colavito is an author and journalist with a focus on “alternative archeology” and, more recently, the UFO cultural phenomenon. In May 2021, he wrote the article: “How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers” in the New Republic, describing how “a collection of well-funded UFO obsessives are using their Capitol Hill connections to launder some outré, and potentially dangerous, ideas.”

Jason’s historical research into the underpinnings of the current UFO/UAP flap is a vital component in understanding what is going on, and how we find ourselves in this situation. Going back to the 1960s and 70s, he traces a path from Jacque Vallée’s extradimensional hypothesis and Hal Puthoff’s paranormal research, through Robert Bigelow’s wide-ranging involvement via Harry Reid, to the current efforts of Luis Elizondo and Chris Mellon.

How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers – https://newrepublic.com/article/162457/government-embrace-ufos-bad-science

Luis Elizondo is a former senior intelligence official, a disclosure advocate,  a national security expert, and the former director of the Pentagon’s UFO/UAP Program (AATIP). We talk about his work in those capacities and also discuss the history and analysis of the three US Navy “UAP” videos.

Interview conducted on March 11, 2021

Michael is a “follower” of Q, in what is commonly known as the QAnon conspiracy theory. I first talked to him one year ago, February 2020. We met on Twitter discussing UFOs, but had a long discussion about QAnon. Michael thought for sure that Trump would win the election, and was quite hopeful about the prospects of a massive wave of arrests of the supposed child-abducting elites.

Since he made some predictions, we agreed to meet again, which we did on Feb 22, 2021. We discussed what did an did not happen, and Micahel good-naturedly tried to convince me (at some length) that there was actually something to Q. We also very briefly discuss UFOs.

Youtube version here

Alex was raised by conspiracy theorists. This makes him different from most people who end up down the rabbit hole in that assuming nefarious plots were going on was never a surprise to him. Indeed, it was the default.

We talk about growing up in a conspiracy theory family, how his perceptions shifted when he went out into the real world, and how he ended up going even deeper down the rabbit hole before he finally found his way out.

Alex also read my book, Escaping the Rabbit Hole, and his reaction to my 9/11 debunking was rather surprising.

QAnon is a very American conspiracy theory, focussing upon a supposed plan by a mysterious entity named ‘Q’ who was working with Donald Trump to rid the US of a corrupt elite.  But despite this American focus, it has adherents around the world. One of those adherents is a friend of this episode’s guest, Georgina.

Georgina and her friend were both fans of documentaries about cults, but despite what you right think of as inoculation against mind control, Georgina’s friend still fell deep down the QAnon rabbit hole.

This episode was recorded on Jan 5th, the day before the storming of the Capitol.