Whistleblowers 'fear being murdered': Ross Coulthart with David Burkett, author of Lies Above (NewsNation Reality Check, 2026)

0:00 G'day and welcome to Reality Check. I'm your host, Ross Coulthart, and today I'm very happy to be welcoming a person called David Burkett, who has written a fascinating new book about the mystery of UAPs, UFOs, that I suspect will become something of a definitive text. David has written Lies Above, How the Pentagon Misled Congress and Cost America Its Skies, a provocative title. Dave's a cloud security researcher at Corlite Labs, a cyber security company. He counts as his mentors, three former NSA tailored access operations members. He was part of an aerospace defence team that earned the Cogswell Award from the Defence Counter-Internet, Intelligence and Security Agency, which is

1:00 the highest honour the agency can give to cleared industry. He's handled casework, ranging from large-scale digital forensics cases to building threat intel programs. He builds systems that expose anomalies and detect deception, which are very helpful skills with UAPs. In Lies Above, David Burkett has brought that analytical expertise to the mystery of UAPs. Welcome, David. Now, I read in your book, you were, I think, a sceptic, weren't you? Are you still? Yeah. So I think I'll always be a sceptic to my core, and I think that's going to be something that's healthy. But my opinion on the topic has definitely changed. So, you know, I kind of joke, there's a great episode of It's Always Sunny, where, you know, you can't be sceptical of everything all of the time. And then basically, they get into a debate about evolution, yada, yada.

2:00 Long story short, Mac presses Dennis to say, you know, we've, I've never actually read the text or delve through the numbers myself. And that's a great example of how I think a lot of people operate when it comes to this topic. The first thing that I did whenever I, you know, watched that 60 minutes video is I just went to YouTube and was like, what's the, you know, the debunk for the tic-tac incident? And honestly, I was really disappointed for what I found. I found a debunk of a video, but not of the incident itself. It just was a video in isolation. There's a lot of context left out. A lot of things that just knowing about how different sensor systems work. So my day job, I build anomaly detection systems. I work with something called signal detection theory. And every one of those sensors that overlaps, that's a different detection modality, really raises that fidelity that something was actually there. And anyways, that just sent me down my own rabbit hole into looking into the topic. And there's just more than I ever

3:02 really knew about. We all have aha moments, David. What was your moment when you went, crikey, this is real? You know, it was something that was gradual. There was actually an old case. It was the Chicago, Illinois case, or maybe not Chicago, but it was in Illinois. And basically, these police officers tracked the case across the state. And, you know, you can hear the original dispatcher, you know, dispatch amount, people laughing in the background. The cops say, you know, what am I supposed to do if I see it? And then ultimately, what you end up finding is that the cops end up seeing something, they get a classic, you know, blurry picture. They say, describe it as huge, low flying and making no sound. And I've been of the opinion that it doesn't really matter whose it is at this point. I think that there's an issue of overclassification and all kinds of real terrestrial issues that this

4:03 topic is a real Trojan horse for. And the problem that, or the fact that we can't identify what that kind of object is even today, in my mind, is a problem regardless of whose it is, even if it is secret tech. So that was the thing that made me go, you know, hey, maybe there really is something to this. It was just really hard to imagine people tracking an object like that across the state and the different comments that they're making live. It was really interesting. I really liked one of the analyses you do in your book, where you basically say that the government's handling of UFOs is a scandal, whatever the hell they are. Why do you say that? Well, so I think there's a couple of provable things. So whenever I talk to reporters or people that are just outside of this topic, I'll recall there's a reporter that tweeted something along the lines of, you know, their blood went cold when they found out someone was lied to in a skiff. And I'm

5:03 like, hey, man, you should pay attention to the UFO topic. That's apparently, you know, pretty common. And I started seeing that dichotomy. And what I ultimately really kind of went into is, as I was looking through all of these declassified, you know, documents, going through and looking at the historical stuff, we have had objects that we can't explain over our bases for 80 years plus. And regardless of what they ended up being at the time, maybe they, some of them or even all of them ended up being, you know, misattributed sightings or secret programs. The fact that over that entire time period, we didn't take this topic serious enough to develop processes and procedures to respond to that kind of a thing, allowed our adversaries potentially or, you know, NHI, whatever you think the New Jersey drones might be to exploit that. And I just feel like that's unacceptable. And it's a perfect example of how this topic can really translate into real world issues,

6:06 even if you're not interested in the whole alien aspect. The thing I find baffling, David, is the number of times a national security official will declare there is no national security threat from unidentified objects hovering over clearly highly sensitive national security facilities. And I don't know for the life of me how they can possibly make such an assertion. And possibly the best example of that is the White House's obvious attempts to play down the significance of the recent New Jersey drones flap in 2024-2025, where you had two, and I was really happy to see you talking about this in your book. You had two very senior, one former, one serving, Pentagon generals, Gregory Gwillow and General Glenn Van Herc, talking about the fact that after months, possibly years of investigations, they still had no explanation for what these objects were that were buzzing Langley Air Force Base. And we still

7:08 don't. Yeah. And I, again, see that as a major problem. In my book, in chapter three, I actually go over some of the the unclassified sensor systems that we have. And once you learn about the unclassified capabilities, many of these deployed for 10, 20 plus years, no telling what we have, you know, that's classified. It makes it extremely hard to believe that there is no data or that there is a lack of data when it comes to this topic. And I find it really difficult to accept that we would not be able to tell where they, you know, are coming from or, you know, going to with the type of sensors that we have. It's just, it seems just so improbable. I just think it's a blatant lie. I mean, they clearly know. I think there's a full awareness. I mean, I think the most obvious deceit was when the White House spokeswoman put out a statement asserting these were FAA, Federal Aviation Administration, authorized research drones,

8:11 which was complete poppycock. It was a blatant lie. The FAA denied that privately to me and other journalists. Yeah. I believe Senator Cory Booker specifically said he was told by FAA officials that that wasn't the case as well. And this goes back to, regardless of what you think the topic is, it's a great overlap for the real terrestrial issues, whether you think they're UAP, drones, whatever. And that's the kind of comparison that I try to draw in my book when it comes to this topic. Now, because you're a computer data brainiac, the thing I love about your book, and I wish I'd thought of this when I was doing my own book, was you put QR codes into the text of the book that people can actually look at, scan, and then see the exact source for the quotes, the quotations that you're citing so that people can actually assure themselves there is often first-person evidence, witness evidence to support what you say. I

9:11 don't think that's ever been done in a book before. Is it the first time you're aware of it being done? I think so. So my biggest frustration when it came to this topic is how nuanced it is. And I felt like I always had to, like, you can't make certain claims with all of this historical context and yada, yada. And I felt like I was having to tell people to watch this podcast, read this book, and it was just all spread out. And I needed a way to give it structure. And I was listening to Tom DeLonge talk about To The Stars and how he wanted to use books, music, and video to tell the story. And something just clicked where I could use QR codes. And then I realized if I made an app, I could basically control where those URLs point so I don't ever have to reprint the book. If something changes, I could just update the URL. And I actually went one level deeper. Any of the citation, if you just type in the URL format for the footnotes, you can go straight to it to make it everything easier to check. Because I don't feel like I have

10:11 anything to hide. I don't try to show anything out of context. And I think it still makes a compelling case. No, it's fabulous. It's much better than footnotes. I mean, when I was writing my own book in plain sight, I was annoyed because so much of the source material was online. And obviously, a lot of those links have since been lost. Because frankly, you know, those links often fall back on newspapers, and they often close and privatize the links that you're using. In your case, I think you actually created a GitHub link or something, didn't you, that essentially links all this data permanently. Will you be adding new material as new source material comes up to mind? Uh, potentially. Right now, I've just got, if you go to liesabove.app, that'll take you to the GitHub pages, if for the nerds out there, they should know what that is, page. And you can see all of the references and search through them even. There's no download or anything required. I made sure of that. I don't want to have to deal with data. So,

11:12 but, you know, I'm not sure. I'm probably going to keep doing something along those lines. I've found that I want to really keep pushing for whistleblower protections very specifically, just based on some of the people that I've interacted with. And I'm hoping that I can use my website as an avenue to keep following that, and hopefully potentially keep some of these. So, David, let's give our audience a history lesson. You've done what I think is one of the best comprehensive histories of the cover-up I've seen for a long time. What's the best evidence you've seen for the fact of a clear, conscious, intelligently controlled cover-up by people within both the national security establishment, the administrations over the years, and probably also people in private aerospace? What's the smoking gun for you? Yeah. So, I tried to do two things. I tried to show what the perspective was behind the

12:14 scenes versus what they were showing publicly, and then also draw parallels later in the book to show how that's still being done today, so that you can see that it's really just a continuation of the same playbook that's been used for 70, 80 years now. In my opinion, the best example is the Condon Committee. And the reason that I say that is because we are in a very similar situation that we were in in the past. If you think about Blue Book, it had a poor reputation. That's why they spun up the Condon Committee to get an independent review. And then if you think about where we're at today, Arrow has a poor reputation. There's now the Avi Loaves Review Board. And there was in writing, you don't have to take someone's word for it. The people that had the meetings basically said, we should give a view that should try and appear to be objective, but ultimately having no real intention of finding a saucer. And what I found fascinating, and this is something

13:14 that I used to actually wonder as well, is in that report, there's two things that are really wrong with it. One, the Malmstrom incident occurred while that report was taking place. The whole purpose of the Condon Committee was to see if there was a national security aspect or potential related issues when it came to this topic. That would have been an excellent example. Of course, though, you know, nuclear weaponry is so secret. Okay, so let's just quickly give our audience a bit of a backgrounder. So let's explain the Malmstrom incident for our audience so they know what we're talking about. Yeah, so the Malmstrom incident is where in 1967, 10 nuclear missiles went offline. And basically, there's been, I think, half a dozen or more people throughout the years that have talked about how, you know, they thought it was UFOs. If you look at the actual base historical report, they mentioned that UFOs were rumored to be the cause, but were ruled out. And they didn't say why. But Robert Salas actually tracked down the base historian,

14:16 who said that that was the only thing that he was told to change outside of other just morale issues. And besides outside of editorial changes, and there's just all the stuff to it, the strategic air command said that they had no idea what caused it, and that it was extremely alarming. It's also a great example of a continuation of the disinformation campaign. Sean Kirkpatrick-Rivero, acting as one of the primary sources for the Wall Street Journal article, tried to attribute it to an EMP device called the TEMP system. Now, I love this story, and I'm not going to let you blow this one away, because it's so deliciously stupid. So obviously, Malmstrom, as you've correctly observed, and Bob Salas has told us this story before on Reality Check. He obviously described the shutting down of 10 nuclear missiles in a way that, frankly, was deeply, deeply disturbing to those who've convinced themselves that our nuclear deterrence

15:17 is completely invulnerable from any kind of external remote control. Clearly, something demonstrated an ability to remotely manipulate the technology that we use to defend the country. What's interesting, though, is years later, when the Malmstrom incident bobs up, you've got Sean Kirkpatrick, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, at the time the head of RO, the Pentagon's UAP office, asserting that this was an electromagnetic pulse test. Now, just explain to our audience what would have had to have been built, presumably with or without the knowledge of the people at the base, because nobody seems to have known about it, certainly not Bob Salas, in order to do this kind of electromagnetic pulse test. It's a huge array, isn't it? Yeah, it's a huge array. Basically, you read the article and you come away thinking it's something that could maybe be stood up secretly without any kind of infrastructure or

16:18 whatever, but it's transportable in the sense that it can be moved by a military. And it requires, I think it was something like tons of concrete, thousand foot towers, just all kinds of craziness. It's not something that you could sneak in. I believe it was like two or three days of work to even just put together. And it also just, it doesn't make sense that Strategic Air Command wouldn't have known about that, or that they would have been out of the loop on a test on a live nuclear missile. But regardless, it just doesn't make sense for the fact that the temp system that they attributed it to, the RFP didn't even go out for it for four years after the incident. But it was such an absurd explanation by Dr. Kirkpatrick that everybody laughed. But frankly, I suspect there are a lot of people out there in the public domain who aren't doing the kind of analysis that people like yourself and myself are doing, who probably bought that explanation, just as in the past they

17:20 bought birds or swamp gas or whatever else the explanations were at the time. This has been a perennial issue throughout the whole subject. The national security state that's wanted to divert the public from looking at this issue has been able to very effectively tell the public to look in the other direction because there's nothing to see here, haven't they? Yeah, exactly. That is a great example. The writers, I believe, won an award from the National Press Club for that article, despite having really easily disprovable errors like the ones we just talked about. And then going back to the Condon Committee, you know, I was always in the skeptic field, you know, we have cameras, why don't we ever have a picture of one that's clear? If you actually read the Condon report, they had at the time, the McMinnville photograph, it was the official opinion of the Condon Committee that it was a genuine picture of a flying saucer. And to me, that

18:21 showed that the government could be in possession of something they thought is a perfectly clear photograph of a flying saucer and still say that there's nothing to the topic, no reason to look at it, nothing here. And that'd be what people come away with, despite, you know, right in the report itself saying, hey, here's something we consider a real flying saucer. So, yeah. I'm really interested in this self delusion by a lot of the legacy media that I think has actually hindered proper journalistic investigation. And it's not just the media, it's also establishment science. And in your book, you quote a guy, I think his name is Brian Gillis, Dr. Brian Gillis, an astrophysicist who appeared on a podcast to comment on the Nimitz video. And he actually admitted he hadn't even seen the video. I didn't realize this. He hadn't even seen the video, but he was quoted extensively saying, quote, it's not f***ing aliens. And

19:22 how on earth could anybody who calls themselves a scientist make such a sweeping assertion? And what's going on there? Why is there that kind of cavalier, almost arrogant, hubristic dismissiveness towards the subject? Yeah. So just to be clear, it was actually the other podcast host that said the it's not f***ing aliens part. Oh, so it was the podcast host that said that. Okay. My apologies. Yeah. That said, they both mentioned to not having watched the congressional hearings that, you know, Grush had spoken about and then went on to have two podcast episodes about the topic. Now, I also want to be clear, I actually really enjoy that podcast still and still listen to it. No, me too. I mean, I like a good science podcast. But what shocked me about it was the willful desire to not even engage by even properly considering the evidence. How could you make any kind of measured assessment unless you actually looked at the evidence?

20:24 Yeah, I agree. It's something that I kind of opened with where even as skeptics, you will have your own opinion. You can't be skeptical of everything all the time. You go see something that confirms your own opinion. Don't really give it much thought. And then, you know, you just never really think there's something into it. Not everybody's gonna spend a couple years digging through everything. So I, on the one hand, I kind of get it because I unfortunately was probably there myself, but I actually completely agree. I was really surprised to see that. And they aren't actually alone. I actually try to point that out in a couple of other examples. But for example, I think Dr. Seth Shostak repeats the McWest debunk, which, again, just doesn't really make too much sense, given the facts that we know about the incident. And as a skeptic, we often tell people, you should listen to the experts. But whenever it comes to this topic, we're deferring to those that don't have the nuance understanding of, you know, what this data

21:26 shows. And to be clear, pilots, actually, I think Blue Book said pilots had some of the worst ability to recognize objects or something along those lines. Who knows if that was a real statistic. But the way that the systems work and the understanding of, you know, some of the processes and procedures, that's not something that you can have as a video game developer, that's not going to get lost in translation as much. And I think that's context that people are really missing. And it's disappointing. And my hope is to really start pushing this as a reframing it more essentially as look at the data and not try to basically force your own opinion on it, whatever it might be. You know, I don't have very strong opinions one way or the other. One of the questions in my mind is why? I mean, we know there's a cover-up. Why is there a cover-up? Why is it being

22:29 kept even from, as has been alleged, presidents? Yeah, I think it's a combination of a lot of boring reasons. Karl Null in his first SOUL conference presentation had an excellent slide that gave a whole list of reasons for like why keeping the secret. And the one that really rung the most with me was the fact that it's such a big announcement that it's outside of the purview of any one agency. Like it's handling what it could do to the markets, you know, religion, just society at large. That's out of the, you know, mission of the intel agency or the military. And I think that there's just a lot of other boring reasons. Like it's been a secret. So it's, you know, the keeping the secret. There's potential crimes that have been committed that people are wanting to keep under wraps. And then whenever it comes to international issues, I think it's a little bit complex. I write in my book, Jacques Vallée talks about there

23:30 was a Stolyarov committee right around the time that the Condon committee was going on. The New York Times drew a comparison to the Condon committee. And he writes that he believes Russia was the opinion that the Condon committee had that predetermined conclusion. And we're worried about being embarrassed on the world stage, ultimately kind of shaping what they would, you know, come to speak about on the topic to some degree. So I think it's just honestly a combination of a lot of boring terrestrial reasons and just no real incentive to disclose. Have you come to a conclusion yourself as to what the phenomenon is? Yeah. So after digging into it, I still don't have a real firm grasp because one, I think it's going to be a combination of things. You know, there's definitely, as I show in my book, disinformation both for and against the topic that is government created. So there is some level of a psyop and there seems to be a great deal of evidence showing that there's

24:32 something that has super advanced technology, regardless of whose it is. My personal opinion after speaking with academics outside of this topic is we seem to have a lot of evidence. And even those in Arrow saying that there's evidence of and videos of objects doing things that, you know, we can't describe. And I think John Kosovsky says, you know, even with his background in physics, you know, he doesn't know how they work. It doesn't know anyone that does. I feel like there has to be something there. And the technology seems much too advanced for it to be human, in my opinion. And if it is, in my mind, that only opens the door for NHI having visited because, again, in Dr. Newstock at the first Seoul conference, he goes into the implications of the Tic Tac and its performance capabilities and how you could potentially reach another star system in something like two or three days of ship time, whereas it would take us

25:32 70 something thousand years now. And I think that if we have the ability to do something like that, that means we can leave the system. If we can do it, anybody can do it. So, you know, and then I'm also kind of of the opinion, and again, I'm definitely a layman, if it's using any kind of gravity to, you know, or manipulation to forge propulsion of some kind. From my understanding, that means there's also some kind of time, you know, manipulation of some degree. It's totally possible in my mind that maybe it forks off into a different branch of reality or another, you know, universe, whatever it may be. And maybe it's a combination of time traveling, interdimensional, NHI, you know, all at once. So open to anything. I don't personally think it's us, but, you know, I'd be open to it. So let's help me, let's help our viewers reconcile the two contradictions. Firstly,

26:33 you've got the Pentagon through Arrow making a definitive statement that there is no evidence of extraterrestrial engagement with planet Earth, that there's been no recovered NHI technology. That's the definitive, if you like, Pentagon defense department position. Although I notice it's always carefully phrased in the name of Arrow, not the entire Pentagon. Contrast that then with what even people like Jay Stratton, the former head of the UAP task force, David Grush, who worked with Jay, Lua Lizondo, Chris Mellon, James Lekatsky. All of these people are talking about an obvious legacy UAP technology retrieval program. How can you have such an obvious contradiction? Somebody's lying. Why? Yeah. You know, I, it doesn't make sense to me. The, um, so one, uh, it's a problem that we can't

27:33 figure out that, you know, who is lying in that, that just points to an over-classification issue, uh, and potential oversight issue of, you know, some programs that are putting out disinformation that's now starting to, uh, impact our own, uh, policy. Um, you know, I, it's one of those things that I, it just doesn't make sense. Someone's definitely, um, gotta be wrong and they're too different. Like they're, both of those claims can't exist, uh, in parallel. And, um, it seems that we're at a point now where, uh, we have arrow on one side, a bunch of whistleblowers, Congress, the FBI, and the, uh, intelligence community inspector general, uh, on the other, basically saying, you know, that there is something to all this, that there is, you know, evidence, um, that, you know, there's video and photographic evidence, you know, a lot of brush's claims, uh, on Rogan's podcast were really hard to accept. And I don't know that I could really, uh, accept them without ever seeing that kind of evidence. I want to

28:35 see a reptilian. Yeah. Agreed. I want to see anything, man. Even if it's, uh, some cool us tech, but, uh, basically though, if you got to remember, he has supplied documentary evidence that includes photos, uh, videos, uh, reports, all of this kind of stuff. And I have no doubt that, uh, he actually believes what he said and has actually seen some of that, uh, videos. And I am of the opinion that there is at least, um, some sort of non-public pictures, videos, that kind of thing, uh, that's being circulated at least privately to try and convince people of the topic that it could be real or not. Um, but regardless, uh, if there's nothing to those videos, if they really are fake, uh, or, um, the stuff that Grush showed the, uh, the inspector general, uh, let them release it. You know, if it's a video. I agree. I mean, one of the things I wrestle with is if, if as James Lekatsky has told our friends, George Knapp and

29:37 Jeremy Corbell on their weaponized podcast, you know, he apparently described being either close to, or actually inside a craft, if I'm not mistaken. Uh, he's talking about non-human technology. He's talking about direct firsthand knowledge of a craft. I don't understand why when you have witnesses like that, they're not being deposed in a public setting and asked to explain what it is that they say they know. Yeah. Uh, well, David Grush's PPD 19 actually says he is, uh, has first direct hand, uh, uh, information about the, the UAP coverup itself. Um, there's all kinds of legal requirements when it comes to something being, uh, marked as credible and urgent, uh, has to have, you know, firsthand, uh, witnesses. It can't be anything secondhand. Uh, I think that there are, uh, other, uh, issues of, about the urgency piece that I can't recall at the top of my head that's in my book, uh, that, um, it, it just, when you take

30:39 that into account and combination of Burleson saying that, uh, the ICIG found some of those programs and weren't able to get them to respond to even them, uh, and weren't able to necessarily confirm what they were doing. The fact that those existed goes back to pointing to, again, a real terrestrial issue, even if that is a real, you know, US program, that's a rogue, uh, special access program at this point, you know, people go into maybe there's executive orders to hide some of these at, you know, some level, but I, I personally find that goes against the, the, the faith, I guess you could say of how our oversight is supposed to work. During your four years of investigations into the whole UFO subject, was there a moment where you began to realize just how sinister the cover-up can be? I, you talk in your book about an alleged break-in. What can you tell me about that? Yeah. So that was really early on when I was writing the, uh, my book. Um, and it was

31:43 really, uh, shocking to me because, uh, a couple of things I was able to, uh, see some of the evidence and I, you know, I met with them and, you know, saw a lot of the results myself. Um, I show a picture of a router that was, you know, cut, uh, basically someone, uh, snuck into one of my sources, uh, houses, uh, cut the, uh, power cable to their internet modem and then snuck back out. And if you think for a second where your internet modem is in your house, maybe you're in another room, someone coming into your house, cutting that, and then sneaking out without you knowing about it. Uh, they took that as a threat. They were actually what writing, uh, an op-ed that never got written. And then that wasn't Grush's op-ed. Um, and, uh, that did not make any sense to me at the time. It was, I was still so early on and it, I don't understand why someone would do that over, you know, aliens, so to speak. Uh, so it, it was really hard for me to believe. And, um, I,

32:44 but I've seen so much more, uh, since then, you know, I, I do cybersecurity research. So, um, uh, I've worked with a lot of these nonprofits, a lot of these whistleblowers, helping them with some of their cybersecurity stuff. Uh, I've worked with just a whole bunch of people in the field. You know, I'm really interested in getting my hands on some of that malware, uh, to do a write-up on it. Uh, but, um, I, I've seen so much other stuff outside of that. And it, I, it, all I can say is I know that the whistleblowers are telling the truth and when it comes to the retaliation pieces. And there's actually one thing that I want to bring up. Uh, there was actually a, uh, a 2024, uh, CIA sexual assault bill, uh, that basically had whistleblowers that were being told, uh, that were sexually assaulted, that if they went to the police and tried to go to law enforcement about what happened to them, that they would be breaking their national security oaths and be violating the law. And, uh, that was something that was clearly a crime. Uh, and even to this day, they passed

33:46 reforms, uh, uh, related to it. Uh, they had a, a CNN town hall, I believe where, uh, members of the agency said that they still did not feel necessarily comfortable going to law enforcement. They're supposed to be a whole dedicated FBI office, uh, to handle classified issues like that. Uh, and they re apparently refused to give them the number. The office of legal counsel actually gave the agent the okay to report the incident. And then three days later, the same office, you know, came back and said that they violated the law. Uh, so imagine coming forward about something that no one thinks is going to be real, that you're not sure might even be illegal, uh, or could even be disinformation. Uh, and then the risk associated with that. Like these people actually, whenever I talk to them, really fear being murdered. It's not just, you know, what they're saying for attention. And it's, it doesn't make sense to me. Well, you even have, I think, representative Tim Burchett, the congressman from Tennessee

34:47 on record, saying that he was told by Stephen Miller, who's got very much the UAP brief in his, in his portfolio at the moment, he described to Burchett that he was being frustrated in his efforts to get to the truth. And this is a man, presumably with a stellar top secret compartmentalized clearance. I mean, if the white house can't get to the truth, who the hell is controlling access to this whole issue. Yeah. Uh, well there's actually, you know, it went almost, uh, in the, the mainstream media because it was an age of disclosure, but we had a high level national security, uh, official basically said, uh, that we could make people disappear without due process. And that raised no, you know, attention in the media. You take, again, take the UFO issue out of the topic. It's a great example of how, uh, serious the, uh, the issues are that the topic highlights. And, uh, there's a clear issue of over-classification. There's clearly a lack of oversight. Um, you know,

35:49 Dylan Borland talks about, uh, having, uh, to sit through something where the, uh, the CIA was flashing images at him and then screaming at him if he got it wrong. You know, I, I can't imagine that being, uh, a legitimately ran program. So David, you're the data guy. So your focus is very much on finding the data. And one of the cases, the incidents that you look at very closely is the 2004 Nimitz tic-tac incident. And your point is that there's been a lot of focus on the video itself, but people haven't realized the significance of the associated data. And my question to you though, is didn't a lot of that data go off in a hard drive and basically get disappeared by anonymous men in Navy uniforms? Wasn't it taken off the deck of the Nimitz or the Princeton by people whose identity was never confirmed? Yeah. Uh, I believe Tim Phillips of Arrow, one of the acting deputy directors, uh,

36:50 mentioned that they actually tracked it going back to a Dahlgren, Virginia for exploitation. Uh, and that there was a, a flag plot on board meeting a rear admiral, uh, that realized they had been detecting something anomalous and specifically asked them to, uh, keep track and record that data. Uh, and ultimately, uh, I believe Tim Phillips mentioned that someone at Arrow, uh, found that that data ended up making it to DARPA before disappearing. Uh, I'll note that that DARPA program, uh, didn't show up in the Arrow, uh, annual report, nor did the, uh, James Clapper program mentioned in Age of Disclosure. Where do you think if there is a coverup? And I do think there is, where do you think the coverup is being coordinated from within the defense department? I, I, I have a suspicion as well as the CIA, of course, that the U S air force has been principally responsible. And I, I noticed that, um, in your book, it becomes very clear. The Navy has been quite forthcoming compared to the air

37:50 force. Do you agree with that? Yeah, that's actually, uh, extremely true. Um, I believe, um, Mike Gallagher, one of the former, uh, house intelligent committee members, uh, mentioned that the air force contributed virtually nothing to the, uh, uh, 20, uh, 21 DNI report, uh, on UAP. Uh, Chris Mellon, for example, talked about the Navy training in the same areas as, uh, the air force. Uh, and despite the air force having better sensors, uh, not reporting UAP, uh, that the, uh, Navy reported and which would make sense, you know, if those were secret air force programs or something along the lines, but you know, the UAP task force allegedly checked with the appropriate people, uh, who said that that wasn't the case. Uh, so, you know, it, it raises, uh, an interesting question of where, uh, all of this data is going. And, um, I, I think, uh, it's gonna be something that's very complex with, uh, UAP GURB's, um, kind of, uh,

38:51 layout of it coming out of the white house being probably the most on point. If there was one piece of data that you could get your hands on, what would you ask for? Ooh, uh, that is a really good question. Um, I, you know, I, I, I'm not sure it would probably be, uh, some of the radar data, uh, around the Nimitz incident, especially as it relates to, uh, some of the, uh, what's called, I believe it's S bars, the solid state phase to radar, uh, array system. Um, I can't, you know, that's often left out of the Nimitz, uh, discussion, but that should in theory have also picked it up. Um, I would, you know, I would be also interested in a lot of the, uh, uh, thermal imaging that we have. So, uh, I forget what it, uh, called, but we have, uh, a method of basically looking for, uh, signs of heat plumes to try and detect missiles. Uh, a lot of these objects are described as being white hot on infrared. Uh, I'd be

39:54 interested to see if they ever show up on there. Um, and for example, that could also be used to rule things out. A lot of the, uh, hypotheses, like if, uh, you think that the Nimitz incident may be, uh, plasma, for example, plasma is going to be in most cases, uh, hot and that thermal imaging could maybe even de-conflict a lot of that. I'm wondering with this thesis. So, uh, a lot of people are suggesting to me when we were causing some mischief here on reality check about NASA and whether NASA was being as forthcoming as it should have been about alleged UAP related information. And NASA maintains that it has released all of the information on UAPs. What I'm told is they haven't released anything that doesn't say UAP, but which is obviously anomalous and which may be referred to, for example, as uncorrelated targets or unidentified tracks. Do you think there's a bit of willful self-deception going on

40:54 inside departments to try and avoid releasing information that might help lay the trail to revealing what's going on with UAPs? Yeah. So, uh, I think there's a few layers to that there. Um, so there's someone that's I think fairly well known now, uh, Dr. Timothy Taylor, who was a NASA missile launch controller. I have his book behind me, um, that basically, uh, seems to be in some way connected to this topic in a very deep manner. Uh, and what I keep running into is that the gatekeepers typically aren't these, uh, appointed, uh, people, uh, but more of these mid-level, uh, career kind of, uh, individuals. And I think that a lot of the people that are answering that question are probably answering it with what they know. Uh, but, uh, I think that there is, there's gotta be, I think that there's something more, uh, that I would be interested to hear him, uh, talking about in front of Congress. And

41:54 then on the other side of that, Jim Schell, um, the former, uh, Air Force, um, uh, or I think scientist or whatever, um, basically, uh, blew the whistle on an, uh, a program that was filtering, uh, a lot of these objects and, uh, before that they could ever be, uh, seen by some of the NRO or some of the other agencies, um, and basically leading to a blind spot in, uh, the, uh, you know, our, uh, domain awareness basically, uh, in both the air and space domain. Uh, so, uh, it's possible that it's also just being scrubbed before it hits them. I just really don't know. So you think there's people coordinating cover-ups still inside the national security establishment to stop even presidents and presumably presidents, deputy chiefs of staff from being properly advised about what's going on? Yeah, I, I think so. Um, when you look at the videos that are being released, they're almost all

42:54 fuzzy blobs. We, you know, a lot of them are maybe birds or balloons. Um, we know that they have higher resolution video than that. The Mosul orb, for example, was fairly high resolution. Uh, I'd be interested to see that level of video, uh, of an object that is not an orb, but maybe a technical craft of some time. Uh, and I have a hard time believing we don't have that level of video showing something anomalous, uh, that it's all only, uh, are, you know, low quality old sensors. The thing I wrestle with David is if this is true, if there really is a recovery program for non-human alien spacecraft and bodies, biologics so-called, if this really is going on, how in heaven's name have they been able to keep it secret from successive presidents, presidents, administration staff? Um, even if you take the Admiral Tom Wilson document, literally from a person who went on to become the, the head

43:56 of the defense intelligence agency. These are people who ought properly under a constitutional system to be briefed into secrets like this. How could you plausibly keep something like this so secret? Well, it hasn't, uh, it's leaked out over the, the decades. Um, and I try to point that out in my book, but I, I, I think that there has been such a good job at stigmatizing this topic that most people think that especially now in the, or maybe not as much now, but maybe more in the post blue book era. Uh, most people just, I, I feel like probably thought there was nothing to it to even consider. So anytime something did come out, you know, it just gets ignored. Uh, we're, we often hear, um, you know, skeptics like myself saying, uh, people like Dave Grush and others, uh, should release the data if they're going to make a lot of these claims and we need to be fair to them. They came forward using the legal process to do so. At this

44:56 point, it's up to Congress, uh, and everyone else to, um, you know, start sharing some of that information. Uh, we should be holding groups like arrow accountable because they have a legal mandate, uh, to actually share, uh, some of this, um, supposedly, uh, abnormal, uh, flight characteristics. So, so you entertain the possibility that there is secret advanced human technology that, um, may be derived from this non-human technology in conjunction with non-human technology that's been recovered. Why do you say that? I, I, I, I think it's just something in me will not let me rule that out, uh, just down to my core as a belief. My, my own, uh, standards of evidence I found have continually, uh, shifted. Um, you know, uh, I, I just can't not rule that out as a possibility. I, I think that's just

45:58 something I have to see something more to believe it. Uh, and yeah, that's where, where I kind of land on that. Yeah. So Jacques Vallée, and you'd be familiar with his work that very much the father of ufology, he suggests the phenomenon may influence how witnesses interpret or perceive the phenomenon. How can any investigators test that idea without creating an explanation that can accommodate pretty much anything? I mean, essentially, how can we be sure of what we know when our perception is capable of being manipulated? Yeah. I actually love that you bring that up because, uh, I think the, the Jacques Vallée theory is kind of the one that I think aligns with what I most believe that these most likely are. Uh, and I think that whatever it is, is fundamentally deceptive at its core. Uh, he lays out some great examples in his book, Messengers of Deception, uh, of how it seems potential like alien contacts, uh, have tried to convince people

47:01 that they were from maybe outer space or a certain area laying out these elaborate scenes. Uh, something else that I think that we also need to be cognizant of and, um, that I, I think that the scientific community, uh, should be willing to take into account as that if something like this does exist, um, it could be actively deceiving us the same way that we might try to, um, deceive each other, uh, to prevent, you know, uh, us from figuring something out. So for example, um, it could, for example, uh, uh, John Keel gives a great, uh, example in his book of the flying airships. In each of the incidents, they had some inventor, uh, who would go to a lawyer, uh, basically say, Hey, I got these new patents, almost setting the stage to, uh, debunk it as, uh, after the airships were cited only to have a lot of the, those people disappeared, never to be seen again, kind of a thing. Um, you know, we have to be

48:01 prepared that there could be some level of deception and I don't know how that works into the scientific method and how you would handle, uh, your, what you're studying actively trying to deceive you. Uh, so yeah, I, we often, you know, say that, uh, I believe it was Arthur C. Clark who says, you know, uh, the difference between, um, you know, magic and technology or whatever it is, uh, or, you know, sufficiently advanced technology might appear like magic. Um, but we don't expect magic to exist so to speak whenever there could theoretically be a much more advanced, uh, you know, uh, species or something interacting with us. You know, whenever I hear about telepathy, for example, um, that is a great example of something in this topic that as a skeptic, and it's something that I've actually argued against in the past, uh, I've learned about new things such as Andrea Puhar, which is, you know, way to, um, potentially submit

49:01 thoughts into people's ideas. Uh, and there's no reason that, you know, something like that couldn't even be a technology, uh, based thing that is perceived as, you know, telepathic by people that don't understand. So become much more open to different ideas as I've, you know, dug into this more. What do you think of the people? I mean, many of them are evangelical Christians, the so-called Collins elite, as they're generically called, who say that this phenomenon is demonic and, uh, very much contrary to the ideas of Christianity. Um, do you think we should be engaging with the subject matter? Is it dangerous? Um, you know, I don't know. So I I've heard that the Collins elite, uh, I've heard about them privately. And I think that, um, the skeptic in me thinks that if we're not looking at this because we think it's demons and it could be maybe a Chinese drone, that's obnoxious. And that goes again to something that's not acceptable. Uh, but

50:02 I, I personally, I don't think that it's only, uh, demonic. One of the worries that I have with this topic is, um, I think that it can be ripe for abuse to start cults. And, you know, I, I, I personally don't know that I would engage with the topic, but I would be hard pressed to say, uh, I haven't thought about trying something like CE5 myself just to see what happens. Uh, so who knows? Um, I, yeah, I, I don't think that this is necessarily something that's demonic. I don't think that it's something that we need to, uh, be afraid of. I think it's something that's probably existed alongside us for a long time and, uh, is probably more indifferent to us than anything. And even if it is, even if it is evil, frankly, shouldn't we still know about it is my question. I guess my biggest takeaway from your book, David is there is such a danger behind the stigma, the ridicule, the taboo that's been attached to this subject. We literally have

51:04 a situation where pilots and military personnel, it's starting to change of course, but for until very recently, the whole idea of reporting unusual observations, anomalous phenomena, UFOs, UAPs, whatever you call it, it means fundamentally the intelligence community have been losing potentially highly valuable information. And I could never understand this argument that was made right back at the time of the Robertson panel by the CIA that we didn't want people. And this is supposedly the excuse. We didn't want people to report UFOs because if they report unidentified objects in the skies, it's going to flood the people who are responsible for monitoring for the Russian threat, the Soviet threat. Well, surely if there are unidentified objects in our skies, by definition, they're a threat until we know what they are, aren't they? Yeah, I agree. And it's frustrating that this topic has been ignored

52:06 for so long. Because for one, it could be adversarial still. And that could lead to adversarial surprise. But like I mentioned, the fact that we don't have processes and procedures in place after 80 years of seeing these kinds of objects, and having these kinds of intrusions to me is just not acceptable. So one area you get into in your book are the drone incursions, the still unexplained incursions that momentarily flared in the public mind in, I think, from 2023 through to 2025. We still have no explanation for these incursions. And I note at the time we're talking, there's just been reports of more alleged drone incursions over a French naval base in Toulon in southern France. Clearly, something is breaching the secure airspace over some of our most secure military facilities. And the default explanation from officialdom seems to be to say it's the pesky Russians. I'm not persuaded that's the case.

53:09 Do you have a view based on the analysis you've done? I've heard privately different explanations. So one of the things that seems to be the case is we've somehow not downed any of these more advanced ones, which seems suspicious, and that we don't seem to know where they're coming from or going to, which, again, seems suspicious. And the fact that we're still struggling to take these down, it really raises red flags. The whole topic or the whole issue is really odd to me because the having the them having lights, just kind of making themselves known doesn't make sense for someone that's maybe trying to be stealthy. If I was going to have secret drones, I wouldn't put lights on them if I was going to go spy on somebody. It just doesn't make sense. And it goes back to maybe it could be an NHI potentially trying to communicate with us. My brain won't let me,

54:14 I guess, go there. And I personally still think it's drones. I've heard Chinese drones privately. But where's the evidence? Let's see the evidence. Don't you think if the U.S. had the evidence, we'd see it by now? I go back to what President Trump said in that we have the sensors to be able to tell if these came from someone's garage, where garage it came from. And I highlight a lot of those in my book. And the fact that we can't tell is a problem to me. That to me shows that I think we're hiding where they're coming from for maybe the people that need to know. So David, at the end of it, what do you know now that you didn't know four years ago when you first started writing your book? That there is data to this topic and that there is seemingly a lot of data that seems to be behind a classification barrier and that not having access to the

55:15 data is not the same as the data not existing. And that there really does seem to be something crazy out there that if it's ours to me, just it needs civilian oversight that it doesn't have. And if it's not, I think that's just even more incredible. You're a cyber security guy. What do you think the chances are that somebody is going to pull an Edward Snowden and just do a data dump and throw it all on a hard disk and put it out there like the disclosure day scenario in the movie? You know, I don't know. I think that would be fun to see. But you know, I can't in good conscious as a cyber security professional encourage that. So yeah, I'm doubtful at this point. I feel like there's probably so much scrutiny on what, like where that data is that's sensitive, just from people trying to get access to it. And there's probably so many eyes on where, you know, who's touching

56:16 it, that it would probably be difficult to do that at this point. David Burkett: Well, David Burkett, thank you so much for joining us on Reality Check. How can people get hold of your book? David Burkett: Yeah, it's available on Amazon, bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble. You can also check me out on Twitter at liesabovebook or liesabove.com. David Burkett: Thanks very much, David Burkett. David Burkett: Thanks, man. It was great to be here. I had a lot of fun talking with you. David Burkett: And of course, if any of you want to ask us questions, you can send your questions to realitycheck@newsnationnow.com. And of course, you can listen to our shows now on all good audio platforms, including Audible and Spotify, because too much Reality Check is barely enough. Thank you very much. David Burkett: Thank you.