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Learning how to find stability in off-platform/bad-body position situations is critical to your ability to put the ball where you want it and move the chains. These guys crushed it… FA QB Dequan Finn Dequan “DQ” Finn FA QB Anthony Guercio Anthony Guercio Robert Morris QB Cooper Panteck Cooper...

14,965 views • 7 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Here is a throwback to Gruden’s QB camp with Patrick Mahomes. Please understand I’m a hardcore Bears fan that has witnessed terrible QB play for over 30 years. Caleb Williams is my QB, and I want nothing but success from his career. I will say outright, Caleb Williams has the most arm talent of any Bears QB ever. He has many traits similar to elite QBs, and that includes Patrick Mahomes. But I see Mahomes as a completely different college prospect based a few unique traits. With that being said, Caleb is still a generational prospect with traits that can be developed into a top 5 franchise QB. He is capable of winning superbowls, but he is still raw in a couple of essential areas. I see him as a mashup of Murray, Rodgers, Hurts, and Mahomes. How he develops under center will determine career path. He holds the ball longer than Mahomes but is adept in playing out of structure. I believe good coaching will lead to him being deadly in structure. I seriously hope our coaches recognize those differences and develop him to be his own player. He may not want to be a rushing QB in the league, but I believe his mobility will be a huge asset in the pros as it is for mobile QBs. Why not use it as he develops to play in structure. Williams-Mahomes similarities: -Arm talent -Off platform throws -Improv ability -Mobility usage (Thrower first mentality) -Pocket presence -Holds ball recklessly when scrambling -Quick release -Gamer mentality Traits specific to Mahomes: -Elite Pocket processing -IQ reading back end of defenses -Stands strong and delivers in pocket despite big hits after throw - Alpha Male, strong leader - Elite Anticipation Traits specific to Williams: - Superior athlete (Similar to Murray) - Can playmaker himself out of tackles (similar to Hurts) -Versatility as passer (velocity, touch, and arm angle) *Unique trait - Instincts (Similar to Rodgers) - Play fakes (Similar to Rodgers) - Can win with erratic footwork (Similar to Rodgers) -Does majority of damage out of structure -Elite Redzone threat with legs (Similar to Hurts) - Wears heart on sleeve. Emotions weigh heavy (Murray has outbursts towards others, Williams holds it to himself) Grows for Williams: -Playing in structure -Footwork -Holds the ball - Fumbles & Turnovers -Balancing highs and lows These grows should sound familiar as it is the same things Fields struggled with. Caleb has quicker arm, better feel, and anticipation on his side. They have two completely different skill sets, but it’s ironic that the Bears drafted a QB that struggles with similar aspects of the game. The upside as a passer makes it worth it but how will coaching get it right this time? Sure hope Waldron coaches better than Getsy because Getsy completely butchered Fields. Do not coach your QB to do the complete opposite of what he does best. Use what he does best to help develop where he needs to grow. #CalebWilliams #PatrickMahomes #AaronRodgers #KylerMurray #ChicagoBears

White Cunningham

102,341 views • 2 years ago

Sometimes I like to look at a player’s “worst game of the year” to see how bad it was (or wasn’t). For WR Caleb Douglas (according to PFF) that was the Arizona State game where he matched up with Keith Abney (R5) all day. This was a good battle between Douglas and Abney. But considering it was supposed to be Douglas’s worst outing, it wasn’t all that bad. Texas Tech lost, despite coming back from a 12 point deficit in the final 6 or 7 minutes to take a 3 point lead, after a successful 2-point conversion made possible by Douglas drawing a hold in the end zone on the first 2-point attempt. Sam Leavitt and Jordyn Tyson worked their magic to go all the way down the field in the final minute and not just kick a tying FG, but actually score the go-ahead TD, leaving Texas Tech attempting a Hail Mary as the clock ran out. Things I noticed during the game: - The backup QB Will Hammond playing in place of Behren Morton had some issues with timing and ball placement. A couple of targets Douglas was open, Hammond missed him. Another one, instead of throwing the vertical Hammond patted the ball an extra beat and it threw off the timing. - I loved Caleb Douglas’s willingness to try and make a difference as a blocker. He got nasty with it. - Caleb had a bad drop. Abney got in there and contacted him and Douglas failed to put the ball away. But it’s interesting because Caleb also had one of the most impressive one-handed stabs you’ll see, on a play nobody noticed or cared about because it was a screen that didn’t break open. - On a lot of plays, if there wasn’t safety help, there was an egregious amount of cushion. This is something you see in a lot of Tech’s games. People had been trying, and frankly failing, to triangulate Douglas’s long speed, to where his 4.39 came as a surprise to some. And then when they’re wrong, the same tired excuse comes out, “He doesn’t play to his timed speed.” But the signs were always there. You had safeties stashed way out in the middle of nowhere to protect corners. You had corners giving 10-12 yards of cushion. - There was a lull where either the ball wasn’t coming Douglas’s way or it was inaccurate when it did, and it lasted nearly half the game. So I was looking for signs of Douglas checking out with his route running. That didn’t happen. He ran his routes hard the entire game. - Douglas dialed it up a notch during the comeback attempt at the end, particularly after the drop. He got wide open on a 3rd down vertical vs. physical coverage with no safety help over top (surviving an unflagged face mask in the process). Then he got open in the end zone twice, one of which forced a hold by Abney that did get flagged. I think the takeaway from me was, you’re playing against a good corner, you have a backup QB in, things don’t go well for you nor the offense for most of the game, but you stay locked in and make a difference at the end, mounting an unlikely comeback. I can see why Jon-Eric Sullivan would like his demeanor.

Chris Kouffman

38,519 views • 3 months ago

Long post alert. A few thank you's as well. ❤️ I feel bad I've really just got into the TTV game for the season 3 weeks in. As you know, Gridiron always takes priority for me at launch as I am nose to grindstone on covering as much about the game as I can. I truly appreciate you all rocking with me when it's a bit more sporadic. There are lots of elite players grinding TTV right now and it inspires me genuinely when I see you all growing and locking in on your craft. It's also amazing that so many of you choose to hang out given the choices! Over on the Gridiron side I also owe thank you's. All this coverage work and feedback is paying off. Big time. It's collaborative. #Madden26 If you want to shut down every formation, WE WILL TELL YOU (not just me) what front, stunt, coverage call, and who your user/switch stick rules are. The Discord has kicked it up so much this year and there's basically coverage residents in there giving advice at most hours of the day. That way you can get perspectives other than yours/my own on topics. They are great and answering things I am not (MUT sets, upcoming content, etc...) Here's a montage of just some clips of just today's stream. Some of these guys had seriously competent route combinations. Others were your average online player. Either way, we faced everything. Bunch. Trips TE. 4 Strong. Empty. 2x2 Tight. Doubles Flex Meta. And now with the Miami defense out for stunts/pressure/QB containment, two of my most thorough defensive game plans are fusing together and becoming really good together. Perfect complimentary rush + coverage rules. The YouTube channel WILL WIN YOU MORE GAMES (no strings attached) but it only scratches the surface. There's so much more. Maybe the best in coverage I've ever felt, all things considered. Yeah, aggs suck and CIT rates are super high. But the point is that we are prepared for when the game normalizes and still playing tight coverage in spite of that. Just keep generating turnover-worthy plays and usually (but not always) the player who wins that category wins the game. I also want to give a shout-out to the Gridiron Discord again, this time for the quality lab session questions and focus this yea. This group of dudes (and a couple gals too) is locked in as I've seen it in a bit. The questions and feedback in there has driven the Vault content more than ever. People have been labbing their tails off to memorize coverage rules and help one another. It's inspiring to see the growth and people graduating from days of just starting out and winning less than 50% of games online become stronger because we are applying football teaching together with a focus on learning what is reproducible inside a game's code. That's not easy, honestly. I'll have a film breakdown tomorrow out on talking about the most recent coverage updates I've installed from today's Twitch stream. I want to bring you more game tape/film study of tips in action with telestration. Again, thanks to everyone who's grinding this game. It's motivating.

ZAN

11,953 views • 11 months ago

What really happened to Anne Heche during her bizarre death? Ellen is one of numerous celebrities alleged to be on the Epstəin client list that's due to drop any day and might be facing some more problems than others in the very near future. Especially her association to Anne Heche and her very strange and untimely death that revolves around exposing elites in Hollywood and child trafficking. First of all, Ellen's set has an uncanny resemblance to Epstəin's temple on Little St. James Island that can't be denied. The colors, down to the building, and even the palm trees. We know Ellen also loves her symbolism as well, from her odd pictures that resemble spirit cooking spells, to always mentioning and passing out PIZZA, to other artwork that she has on her white hoodie, representing a satanic ritual, glamorizing one allegedly performed by Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin on Anthony Weiner's laptop under the file name "insurance file," which is alleged to be the mutilation of a child that was named "FrazzleDrip." That's a whole other story. What makes Anne Heche's death interesting is what she might of known or experienced while being in the inner circles of Hollywood and also being rap*d by non other than Harvey Weinstein himself who has sexually abused multiple woman. Being around Ellen and having ties to Hollywood put her in a bad position after her and Ellen broke up. She became a liability. Anne made numerous conspiracy movies, and at the time, she was working on a movie exposing child trafficking called "The Girl in Room 13." The day Anne died, her car can be seen on numerous videos, speeding uncontrollably down roads at high speeds with her attempting to stop as you can hear the breaks trying to stop the car. We know for a fact that newer cars, basically any car that is "fly by wire," is able to be taken control of. Hacked, you can say. "Fly by wire" means the throttle, steering, and brakes are controlled electronically, not hydraulically or cable driven. This is well known and was released by Wikileaks about how the CIA, the NSA, and others can hack your vehicle and take complete control of it. Her car ended up crashing into a building where you can see that when the fire department got there, they put her in a body bag and zippered it shut, which is extremely odd. Then, as they are carting her to the ambulance, she pops up, out of the body bag, and then is shoved in the ambulance. The whole situation is bizarre and extremely concerning. She was fine in the hospital and in stable condition, as the media reported, and then all of a sudden, the media flipped. All of a sudden, she is in a coma and brain dead and on life support. Somebody or multiple people wanted her dead, and there are plenty of people whom she could have had information on, including the court case with Harvey Weinstein and Ellen, Diddy, Hanks, Oprah, the list is long. No further investigation was done or opened. They just closed the case, and that was it, which was also odd. You think they would try to see if the car was hacked or if there was a possible motive from someone. They most likely were told not to investigate from the higher ups because of the people involved and the power that they have, or they were involved themselves and were helping cover it up like they did for Epstəin for so many decades. Maybe soon, we will find out more about Anne because she isn't the first and definitely won't be the last who has mysteriously died that was connected to these elites and child trafficking. Anne and the others who spoke out about the elites and child trafficking were all silenced. It's all connected. There are no coincidences.

The SCIF

872,003 views • 1 year ago

Alright, here's the epic towel rant from tonight; And so that's what kind of tipped me off in real time. I was like: wait a minute. Is Judge Doolin ruling from the bench right now? And then I was like: wait a minute. He's ruling from the bench and ordering them to appoint a new prosecutor and potentially the Attorney General. Oh my word. How—what is this? I—this wasn't on my bingo card. Even now I'm just like: Oh my God, I can't believe he did that. Judge Doolin—in a good way. I'm just like: Oh my God, there is hope. And then to follow it up with: "Oh yeah, I'm thinking about a hearing on the contempt." Oh my God—you're telegraphing. You're going to have a contempt hearing after the Attorney General is potentially on the case. The other witnesses, however, are left in this position where they have this kind of not really well-funded—like kind of spastic prosecution, like the special prosecutors on the Kearney cases. Then you got the December 23rd, 2023 criminal charges against Aidan that were charged in Dedham District Court, 23rd or 26th or so. And that was for illegally—allegedly—recording Lindsey Gaetani and then submitting an edited version of the recording into court for some reason. I don't know why Aidan did that, especially apparently when there's an original version of the recording pursuant to some of the statements in court. And then also for intimidating Lindsey—for allegedly going over there on December 23rd, 2023—against Karen Read's advice and against his lawyers' advice, apparently, according to a leaked group chat message from Facebook in 2024—in May of 2024—going over to Lindsey's apartment. And then according to the affidavit from the search warrant for Karen Read's cell phone—allegedly telling Lindsey that she shouldn't cooperate with the grand jury. She should—she could remove information from her phone or something—that Aidan would get her a lawyer, but only if she agreed to meet with a lawyer only with him present, because she had, quote, "broken his trust." It just like—wild stuff. And that new grand jury, by the way, was apparently—it did go forward. And then in time it came out that it—that was about Karen and Aidan and witness intimidation and conspiracy, because Aidan Kearney—between October and November—really August and November of 2023—it started telling Lindsey Gaetani about his communications with Karen Read that included—in writing—Exhibit O to Karen Read search warrant affidavit, which says that Karen Read told Aidan Kearney that in November of 2023—November 28, 2023, to be specific—that Karen Read told Aidan Kearney that Karen Read and her team at ex parte conversations with former U.S. Attorney Josh Levy—which was right in the window of time that Jessica Leslie, the grand juror leaker, was leaking information. Leslie started leaking in August of 2022—which is the same month that Alan Jackson joined Karen Read's legal team. And Josh Levy—who was one of the U.S. Attorneys in charge of that grand jury—Leslie was leaking about four different cases: probably the Birchmore case, definitely the Read and O'Keefe case, definitely the CDL case. One more case. We can't really—the group of us journalists involved in this—can't really figure out. So right in the middle of that—November of 2023—Josh Levy is leaking ex parte grand jury information to Karen Read, which she's putting—she's telling Aidan Kearney about; he's putting it in writing. He just was trying to just show off for Lindsey, but you don't like—come on—like what is it? First day in the IC, bro? I'm not in the IC. I'm not part of the government. I'm a towel. But anyway—so Aidan's bragging to Lindsey, and I don't think that was a very good idea. I mean, she's brilliant and stuff, but like—why would you ever say that to her? Don't say that stuff. But anyway—like, why would you say—even if it's your significant other—unless they are read-in on the intel that you are sharing—why would you ever, ever, ever share that with someone? It exposes them to an incredible liability—which, if you love them, don't do it. It also exposes your own credibility to an incredible risk of liability. You will never be trusted by the intelligence community again. Pillow talk and honeypots are how they trap operatives. If you chase sex, they will compromise you. How can you not understand that? So if you get compromised by someone who's not an agent—just someone who's your partner and you're just telling them stuff about protected federal investigations—what do you think your reputation is going to be like among the intelligence community when you're doing that and they haven't even honeypotted you? You just voluntarily started putting this shit in writing. They're going to look at you like you are out of your mind. So anyway—Karen Read apparently is telling Aidan Kearney that she's having ex parte conversations with Josh Levy. Now, the grand jury that Leslie was leaking from was impaneled in May of 2022 when Rachael Rollins used to be U.S. Attorney in Boston. Now think about this. In 2020, Rachael Rollins and Aidan Kearney—Rachael Rollins, a hyper-liberal known for her soft-on-crime stance. We'll also hear Rollins hated Michael Morrissey. Anyway, Rollins worked with Turtle Boy to send a Republican operative named Rayla Campbell to Joe Kennedy Jr.'s events in the Senate race against Ed Markey so that Ed Markey could win the Senate seat. Now, interestingly enough, Rachael Rollins then got appointed to the position of U.S. Attorney right after that. And you might say: well, Grant, that's a stretch. No, no—because then within a few months, Rachael Rollins—part of the reason she gets thrown out of office by the DOJ OIG—is because she attends an event in Andover with—guess who?—Dr. Jill Biden, the wife of the then-president who appointed her. Now, what does that mean? Well, if you really think about the geopolitical implications of the 2020 Senate race between Ed Markey in Massachusetts and Joe Kennedy Jr.—well, one of the things you're going to realize is that—think about 2020. The leadership around Biden did not know that the chaos of 2024 was going to happen with Kamala and Biden not really being up to it. You're thinking ahead to 2024. Why? Who's your biggest target if you are a sitting Democrat and you're worried about a primary challenge four years from now? Well, what if JFK's—what is it—nephew or whatever it is—is in the House of Representatives? And what if JFK started his career in the House of Representatives? And what if that new young Kennedy with red hair and sort of a photogenic face? What if he is running for JFK's old Senate seat? What if he's on the same exact trajectory as JFK? Oh, we can't have that. We—as the Biden White House—cannot have Joe Kennedy Jr. beating Ed Markey for Senate. And how it got to the point that somebody talked to Rachael Rollins and she came up with the brilliant idea to reach out to Turtle Boy so that Turtle Boy would talk to Rayla Campbell to send her to Joe Kennedy Jr.'s events to help Markey—I don't know. But that's why I think Rachael Rollins became U.S. Attorney—someone who, in my opinion, was uniquely unqualified and fundamentally unethically un-predisposed to being able to run that office. Who then in turn immediately tried to interfere in the 2022 Suffolk DA primary between Kevin Hayden and Ricardo O'Rourke—because Rollins wanted to see her progressive vision continue through O'Rourke—so she worked with Daniel Medwed—the same professor who was involved with advocating the media on behalf of Karen Read's team. She worked with Daniel Medwed to get a story leaked about how a non-existent federal probe into Kevin Hayden—to increase Ricardo O'Rourke's chances in the Suffolk DA primary. Sound familiar? Oh, hell yeah. So anyway—between November of 2022 and May of 2023—you got this weird situation where Rollins knows she's getting forced out; Levy's going to take over the office. The people who take Rollins out are Josh Levy, Bill Abley, and still head of the criminal division—Dustin Chao, I think—still head of the public integrity unit, and then executive officer who is also the press secretary or the communications director of the office. Those four people—without being named; they're named by title—were the people who cooperated with the DOJ to take Rollins out—DOJ-OIG to take Rollins out. Now, why is that interesting? Well, one—because it shows that people in that office knew that Rachael Rollins had a proclivity for weaponizing leaks about non-existent federal probes to interfere in particular district attorney races and matters. Second—Rachael Rollins and Michael Morrissey had a bifurcated history of ten years. One: Rachael Rollins had this list of 25 crimes she wouldn't prosecute, and other DAs critiqued her—not just Michael Morrissey but others. Rollins—I'm pretty sure—was the one who first called Morrissey a "meatball," in fact, because of his criticism of Rollins over that issue. Rachael Rollins—I think—has a proclivity, in my opinion, to hold a bit of a grudge. When she became U.S. Attorney and she realized she was on the way out—well, maybe the Sandra Birchmore probe started back in May of 2022 because former chief of the Canton police—Ken Berkowitz—went to the FBI and told them that the FBI covered up—the MSP unit detailed to the Norfolk DA covered up Sandra Birchmore's murder—potentially because Yuri Bukhenik and John Fanning used to work in Stoughton with Matt Farwell and Robert Devine and Billy Farwell—I think they all worked there. And furthermore—that Brian Tully, the unit commander, was partners with John Fanning for 20 years. All right, and in that regard—it is very interesting, I think—that Chief Berkowitz—who may have been very offended that his unit... So Sandra Birchmore was murdered on February 1st, 2021, at 9:23 p.m. in her apartment in Canton. Okay—on February 4th, Monday in the morning—the Canton police do a wellness check after they get a call from her—Sandra's—colleagues at the school where she worked as an administrative assistant. Now the Canton police respond—on Monday, February 4th—by Wednesday, February 6th. The Canton police have collected the following evidence in order. And if you don't believe me, you can read pages—I think 97 through 101—of the Canton Police Department audit report released in April of 2025. Point by point. Number one: the Canton police confirm—via a witness who was the maintenance worker at Sandra's apartment building—that Matt Farwell was the man on camera outside Sandra's apartment in the elevator at 9:23 p.m. on February 1st—which is exactly when Sandra died. Two: that the man was Matt Farwell, and he was the same man who helped Sandra move into her apartment. Three: that when the Canton PD went to Sandra's school, they got information that Farwell was telling people that Sandra was pregnant with his child—that he had abused her since she was a child—and that he was going to quote "take care of the problem himself" if Sandra decided to carry the baby to term. All right. All of that information—by February 6th of 2021—was passed over to the MSP. John Fanning and this whole unit—I think—really then facilitate a report sometime over the next six to 12 months that exonerates Farwell and says Sandra dies from self-harm. Well, I think that's why Ken Berkowitz blew the whistle before he died of cancer—and that's why there was a grand jury impaneled in May of 2022—and it was really about the cover-up of Sandra Birchmore's murder. Well—one—it was about Sandra Birchmore's murder. Why does that make everything so interesting? Because I think that the investigation wasn't just about who killed Sandra and why—but how was it ruled a—the result of self-harm—instead of the very obvious murder that it was. Well—that starts—2022, I think—May of 2022—the grand jury. Jessica Leslie was on the grand jury—leaker—who's going to be sentenced on October 4th of 2025. I think Jessica Leslie—ladies and gentlemen—in August of 2022 somehow leaked to Karen Read—Alan Jackson—that the Norfolk DA was dirty because they covered up—and that MSP unit—because they covered up Sandra Birchmore's murder. All right—so therefore, Alan Jackson—that's the skeleton in the closet. It wasn't what the people in the house were doing. I'm still a little suspect of who they know—but I don't think that's the big deal. I don't think Jen McCabe's social life is the big deal. Nobody cares—nobody fucking cares. Sorry for cussing. The big issue is that Jen was friends with Tully. Tully's unit knew literally where the bodies were buried. And they—I think—they brought on the PI—Marty Kraft—and Kate Peter—to insulate their exposure from the coming publicity that they knew was going to be brought upon them by Alan Jackson. And so they were worried. And who would you bring in if you had covered up a murder? If you were a MSP unit—you'd bring in someone like Kate Peter. Because you can read her in on that. She's hardened. She doesn't give a fuck. She lost two of her kids—and I don't think she even fucking cared. So who the fuck's the perfect person be like: "Bruh, if that shit gets national attention, we're fucked. So you better control that fucking narrative and handle all these like different people that get too close to this—or we're going to be exposed for Birchmore." But let me bring it back to the point here—which is in 2022, the feds clearly were starting to poke around. And come 2023—I think Brian Tully's unit was desperate. Who was going to find out because of the coverage of the Read case? Could they make sure that Kate Peter got close enough to Netflix and Gretchen Voss so that they couldn't find out what was actually going on? And could the Birchmore cover-up be kept up—even in light of the national spotlight? When you think about the fact that some people may not have been loyal to the Justice for John O'Keefe movement—but were instead primarily loyal to Brian Tully's unit. And when you think about the fact that maybe Tully's unit didn't run the best investigation of Karen Read—maybe there were some flaws. But if you think about the fact that they did get her—but if you think about it in the context of: Karen knew from the jump that the MSP were dirty over Birchmore—then you understand: Karen—that's why it was going to become an incident. Everyone knew—everyone around Tully, his friends, all of them—the unit—they knew they covered up Birchmore's murder. And they knew Karen had it in her hands if she could just figure out the PR. And that's exactly what she did—to put enough pressure on them. They took her to trial anyway—and it destroyed the fucking Norfolk DA—destroyed Brian Tully's unit. It cost them dearly—and she's a tactical fucking genius. I think Brian Tully thought he was slicker than he was by using the prosecution of Aidan Kearney—not to get a genuinely—in my opinion—bad guy who was deserving of the indictment handed up by a grand jury of his peers. But because Tully wanted to know what the real target of the federal probe is. If you don't know what a backhand is, folks—a backhand is where you investigate one thing on the surface because you're dealing with a very high-level operation like the state police—who are a paramilitary intelligence-gathering operation. So you trick them. You make them think they're under investigation for John's death and the investigation of that death. But really—you're investigating them for the cover-up of Sandra Birchmore's murder. And that's exactly what I think happened to this unit. That's what I think Brian Tully was trying to figure out—from August of 2023 until about December. I think they eventually put it together—and by August of 2024, Matthew Farwell got indicted. Now—it's a question of all this as a result of today. I want to be very clear: this is what was called for. There needed to be an independent voice with power and who takes no nonsense—who came into this and said: Nope—it's out of your hands. And that's what Judge Doolin did today. Someone just needed to not either be involved with Karen Read, Aidan Kearney, or the Norfolk DA—or Kate Peter or Marty Kraft—and prosecute this. Now, all those other witnesses—I have no idea what the hell is going to happen there. But at least for Lindsey—Judge Doolin was like: enough of this nonsense. And that's why today was such a big deal in light of that historical context—because just tracing that very insidious pattern of events over the past 18 months—you can see this became a proxy war. It was Michael Morrissey on one side with his marching soldiers: Brian Tully, Kate Peter, Marty Kraft. And then it was Karen Read and the DOJ on the other side. Okay. And their soldiers were like the Free Karen Read movement and Turtle Boy and Natalie and all these other people. This was an intelligence community proxy war. And that's why I've been trying to tell people for so long: Lindsey Gaetani was not involved. She was an unwitting pawn. These two factions both took advantage of her—including Brian Tully—who was more interested in preserving his unit's reputation than actually defending the interest of the vulnerable. In my opinion, I think Brian Tully is a terrible person. Does that mean that he's a bad person for trying to hold Karen Read accountable for John O'Keefe's death? No, of course not. He's a bad person because in what fucking world do you—as a fucking state police officer—who you—you are entrusted—not just to get the bad guys—but to protect the most fucking vulnerable? One: how do you justify what happened with Sandra Birchmore? Two: how the fuck do you get it in your fucking mind that you're going to take a 15-year unredacted extraction of a fucking vulnerable victim's cell phone and release it to a fucking defendant known for promulgating exactly that material? What fucking headspace? What satanic fucking chamber do you and Kate Peter have to be drinking blood from fucking cups in to think that that's fucking okay? Fuck you. How do you even get in the headspace where doing something like that to a fucking victim becomes acceptable. The rot in that unit—whether enabled by Morrissey or whether he didn't know about it—I don't fucking know. But the point is: the rot in that unit was so deep that they lost their fucking souls. They didn't think of victims as victims. They re-victimized victims because it was a political fucking war—and these people are so hardened, I guess, that they don't understand what it means to be vulnerable. And these were police officers—detectives—people entrusted to uphold and protect the dignity of the most vulnerable—and they fucking used victims to advance some political agenda—to deal with the fact that they covered up a fucking murder. I'm done being gentle about this. Fuck these people. And I'm not saying that it was wrong for them to investigate Karen Read. I am pleased someone tried to prosecute her. I'm pissed at them because they were thinking about it from the perspective of their own liability for an unrelated case—and they fucked everything up—and introducing Kate Peter to this shit. Oh my God. It's a disgrace. It's a disgrace to the people who were hurt. It's a disgrace to the vulnerable. I frankly do not understand how Jen McCabe, Brian Tully, and Kate Peter go to bed each night. I don't get it. I don't know. Maybe there's something that shuts off the GABA-1 receptor or something and just makes you go to bed. I don't know. Never heard of such a thing. But I'm just saying: I don't know how you do it. How do you do it? But anyway—Judge Doolin—without giving a... extemporaneous, uh, bloviating cuss-based rant like I just did—instead, in my opinion, is like: fuck all of you! You're not being involved in this prosecution anymore. Someone's gonna protect this fucking woman—Lindsey Gaetani. I'm making you appoint someone! I love that man. Good for Judge Doolin. But still—we never should have gone to this point. This is incredible. With the... the... the MSP. The fact that they had a unit operating like this for so long. This is worse than what John Connolly and Whitey Bulger did. This is institutional rot that is so pervasive that it requires fundamental reform of the MSP. They're not incapable of—um, uh—solving crimes. I'm sure most of the MSP are wonderful. Anyway—my point is: I don't think the state police officers that I generally run into—or troopers—are bad people. I think most of them are wonderful. They've never been really mean to me. They do good work. They're out there protecting our roads. They stop people from speeding. They—what else do they do? They go after commercial truck violations. They investigate homicides—like, on the whole. And this is why I think we have to be careful about how we talk about this. I am not saying that the entire MSP is just rotten. I'm saying that when you have factions or sections within the institution that understand its machinations and are able to thus manipulate the bureaucratic structure and avoid accountability—you lose the confidence of everyone. And how do you think some of those good troopers feel when they have to go out there? Yes—people like me are going to smile at them and bless them and whatever—because I know they're not part of the problem. But most people look at them and they think that they're fucking hated. They don't deserve that. They literally put their lives on the line for us every day. And if we're going to give them the respect they deserve—if we're going to make the profession have the respect that it deserves—then this kind of institutional rot can't be looked at as just an embarrassment. And it can't be looked at as something that—oh, we just wish didn't happen. Maybe some guys are going to go away. No—you point at it. You scream it from the rooftops and you say: if this happens even once—then we have so failed as an institution; we must fundamentally reform from the ground up. And this wasn't just once. It was Birchmore. It was the phone extraction. It was the SA report leak over and over and over and over again. They knew the law. They were an old boys' club. They abused it. They had cover—and it was systemically enabled. And that's why I think—to save the profession of policing in Massachusetts—there needs to be a full-on unbridled discussion about how this happened—how the personalities involved were able to do what they did. And we can't be so tribalistic that because someone we support as to their views on one case, right? We cannot be so tribalistic that we just block out everything bad that they do. Or this rot will continue. And it is pernicious. It is insidious. It is invidious. It undermines the faith that citizens completely removed from this situation have in our system of government. It undermines victims' confidence in the ability to seek redress in the face of serious fucking harm—because they think the system doesn't actually care about them. It's just using them to get someone bigger. We cannot allow this to perpetuate. And the only way to fix it is to hold up situations like what happened to Birchmore—Sandra Birchmore—and what happened to Lindsey Gaetani—hold them up in the national spotlight—and say: we—the MSP—have failed you. Brian Tully failed these people. John Fanning failed these people. Nick Guarino failed these people. Yuri Bukhenik failed these people. We need to say that. We need to highlight it. We need to say: this happened even once. Therefore, we are not good enough. Not only are we not good enough—the very fact that either of these things were able to happen—the Birchmore cover-up, the phone extraction leak—is such a pervasive, systemic degradation of the faith that victims and the public have in the justice system—that our only option is to talk about this—congressional hearings. We need the State House to have congressional hearings. We need these people to answer for what they did. And we need to make sure it never happens again. And the only way you do that is by finding out what aspects of the bureaucratic structure allowed this to happen. And it's not going to be comfortable. I don't think it's going to be comfortable for anyone to talk about the fallout of any of this—but that's exactly what happened at the CCC on a smaller scale. And if this country matters—if this form of government matters—if this republic matters—then we will fix this. We will fix it together. We will address the hard questions. We will address the uncomfortable questions. We will shed our prejudices and polemical biases at the door. We will engage in no fear, no favoritism—and we will look only for the truth and nothing but it. And if you are incapable of doing that—you're contributing—either consciously or subconsciously—to the problem. It's our only option. And you can't just say: because they prosecuted Karen Read, we can't talk about anything bad that they did. That's tribalism. That's polemical. That's what drove us to this point.

Grant Smith Ellis

41,546 views • 10 months ago

If you want to understand the Joe FlipperHead, Olivia Lamb, Karen Read and Aidan TurtleBoy Kearney chaos; FlipperHead (a guy named Nick from Philly) got confirmation Aidan recorded Karen Read. Then the recordings leaked. Basically, Olivia works for Aidan as a paralegal, now, but Olivia used to be close to Karen in the past (and Olivia and FlipperHead used to be close, as well, on a personal level). FlipperHead, for his part, is loyal to Olivia and Karen but FlipperHead doesn't like Aidan (much like other people close to Karen). Aidan, in turn, seems to be using Olivia to discredit Flipperhead (potentially without Olivia's permission). VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: [Opening remarks on social media and focus] Grant: [Lindsey Gaetani's] been talking about on social media, but let's get to that second. What I wanna start with—let me find the tab—I wanna start with the developments related to Aidan Kearney and Karen Read, okay? So we're gonna jump right into that, and what I have here is the actual discussion. Now, if you go on my X, you will be able to see the entire transcript. I'm gonna try to scroll with you as the video plays. It's a lot, okay? And then we're gonna do part two as well. So eventually, we're gonna hit part two of the transcript. I'm gonna pause, and we're gonna go to the second video. Now, this discussion—the reason why I wanna go over this—is I was listening to it, and I was like, "Wait a minute, I speak this language that they're all talking. I understand sort of the subtext of all of this, but they weren't really talking on the surface." It's a conversation between somebody named Chris, who Aidan Kearney calls a "koala," somebody named Joe Flipperhead—who's actually named Nick from Philadelphia, who was apparently close to a woman named Olivia Lamb, who is gonna come up in this as well. Now, Olivia Lamb did a lot of social media posts about the Karen Read and John O'Keefe trial on her profile on Twitter under Olivia. Now, then Olivia started—in a public announcement—saying that she started working for Aidan Kearney. And what you're gonna hear in this conversation is there's also a woman named—who else? There's a woman who's Australian that Aidan also knows named Lily. She introduces herself in the beginning, and then she's kind of the moderator-mediator. And then there's another woman that pops up in the middle named Erika Walsh. She only speaks two or three times. She's one of Turtle Boy's moderators. She interjects at two random times: one, when someone starts talking about Meredith; and two, when Aidan starts saying how bad the content of the conversation in question—that was allegedly recorded and sent to Karen Read, between Aidan and Karen—is for Karen. And then there's a third unknown voice that pops up at the end, who sounds like—it's a female, she's American. I don't know her voice, but it sounds like she's very close to Joe Flipperhead, this guy Nick. And she uses this phrase about Nick "leaving Olivia's ass" in a way that makes me think maybe this girl is close to Nick, and like, she got close to him after Olivia and Nick separated. Now you might say to yourself, "Oh dear God, why—first of all, Grant, why do you know all this?" These people post a lot; I don't know. Tracking this thing is something I've been doing for a while. So it's not like I went into it because I wanted to know who the hell Joe Flipperhead was, or Olivia Lamb was. They entered into a world that I knew a lot about because they were trying to cover this case. And so inevitably, I just had them on my radar, and when things pop up like this, I just connect the dots. [Background on Olivia Lamb] In terms of Olivia though—so she, I don't know. There was this weird situation, I think, at the end of trial one for Karen Read. So somewhere in—I don't know—late 2024, summer 2024 or so. Weird situation where Olivia kind of then, for a few months, wasn't around as much, or she was, but not as much. And then she came back around for Aidan and said she was working on his team or something. Now, Olivia—I don't think Olivia Lamb's necessarily a bad person. I think whoever she is, and whatever she's doing, is very intelligent. But if you kind of look into that family, her mom is named Christina Lamb, and her mom does boutique consulting for law firms. I think her mom might be a lawyer, but she doesn't really—I think the way that she does consulting is more like tactically how lawyers should think about how a case is presented in the public, et cetera, stuff like that. And you have to tie this into this Elizabeth Dombrowski person out of New York that runs this Good Counsel Legal Services that proclaimed that Jen Altman and whoever else were paralegals for Aidan. You see what I'm saying? And what I think Olivia's role is—I think she just does PR. She does some paralegal work clearly, but I think she's mostly like a PR specialist. But I think why there's so much obfuscation—and I'm giving you all this background, because the conversation you're about to hear makes no sense if you don't know all this background. The context there, I think, is that—I think Olivia is a person. Like, I think she is real. But I think the reason why there's so many smoke and mirrors is that she's a conduit for implausible deniability. In the world of public relations—especially this kind of public relations—is incredibly important. So I think she's like a conduit for more entrenched public relations interests, which—okay, fine. I don't see that as per se evil. I'm a critical theorist. So I study propaganda. So like, if you are doing anything that emerged from Edward Bernays's systemic weaponization of his uncle Sigmund Freud's study of the mass psychology of the mind—if you do any of that—you're inevitably gonna catch my attention. Not because I necessarily per se think it's evil, but because that's my wheelhouse. Like, I reconstruct public relations and then I figure out what's driving that. Okay. So she—Olivia—got on my radar because of that, not necessarily because she's evil. Same, because I never really saw it. Now maybe some of the witnesses in the trial would think differently, but that's not my role here. I am like—I'm an objective observer. And um, Olivia was never really cruel. Like she just does PR. So I wouldn't necessarily say like everything she did was like right. But if you look at her style, it's not polemical. It's not—it's mostly analytical. Okay. So that's not an aphoristic or manipulative or evil person really. That's a PR specialist. And this guy, Nick—very similar, Joe Flipperhead. Okay. If you look at his posts—like, I wouldn't exactly say he's a cruel human being, you know, like he memes and stuff. Okay. He's kind of like Dave Cullinane a little bit, but he's just like a human. And you can hear it in this conversation. Like Joe is the one who's really holding Aidan accountable. Joe Flipperhead—whose name is Nick—he's from Philly. And um, I noticed 'cause I watched the stream of them one time—I don't know—he seems all right. I don't have anything against him or Olivia. In fact, I think they did a damn good job, at least Joe. Because what you'll also see here is there's another subtext. What this conversation is about is an allegation that Aidan Kearney sent a recorded conversation to Karen Read—a conversation with her—and then someone—nobody knows who—sent the recording to Karen's lawyers, David Yannetti and Alan Jackson. Now, what's weird about this is that there's also—and I don't like, whatever, I guess it is what it is—but the host, one of the hosts, Chris, this Australian guy—he might be a New Zealander, I don't know. But anyway, he starts saying directly to Aidan, "Listen Aidan, you went to lunch with Meredith—this Turtle Boy's former girlfriend—but her name is Meredith O'Neill (Meredith O). She's a person; she has an existence outside of Aidan Kearney and whether—a lot of people, I think, rightfully so, will take issue with some of the things Meredith has posted. But that's for her soul to deal with. She has to reckon with it, reflect on it, whatever the fuck, okay? That's separate from; she exists outside of the fact that she used to date Aidan Kearney." And I just wanna make that as a blanket point that like Aidan Kearney does not own someone's soul because they had some connection to him at any point in time. These people are independent people who have their own lives. So Meredith O'Neill is her name. And Meredith—like, clearly something happened between Aidan and Meredith because over the past few weeks—like, first of all, there's some more subtext to this, which is Aidan's paralegal team before Olivia Lamb came on was Courtney Healy and this woman named Tina Murray. Tina Murray —I didn't even know THE NAME until two weeks ago—but I had seen her before because she had silver hair when she was in court one time. I had no idea who it was, but she was sitting next to Courtney Healy. Now, way back when Aidan Kearney was incarcerated in late 2023, early 2024—apparently these two women, Courtney Healy and Tina Murray, were very close to Aidan Kearney. Someone had his logins, allegedly. They were helping like post for him while he was in jail, et cetera. Now, there's time back to that as well. Jen Altman is a key figure in all of this. And the reason why is that Jen Altman was the reason that Aidan Kearney and Karen Read got hooked up initially through Natalie Wiweke-Bershneider or whatever her name is. Jen Altman was also among this weird group of people. It was Tina Murray, Courtney Healy, Jen Altman, I think, and maybe just them three, who had access to Aidan in jail on a paralegal list. And at one point, Tim Bradl, Aidan's lawyer, wrote down that Jen Altman was a lawyer. She got so mad that she messaged Bradl, and then those messages got leaked. So there's all this discontent brewing within Aidan Kearney's kind of like organization, if you wanna call it. I'd call it more like a—yeah, it's like a hierarchy. And like he's at the—it's like a politician almost, but he's not a politician. You have like a top person at the top, and then you have all these staffers, and you have to manage the staffers. That's what he's dealing with. And he's gotta keep everybody like in line because like at one person breaks—especially a key—all right, two things. One, there's a reason you compartmentalize information, and you're not gonna be able to get in these type of operations because nobody needs to know everything. If you did that, then everyone would be a weak link. The problem is though, in order to compartmentalize in a bureaucracy or a schema like this, you have to have some people who actually know what's going on. Those people are liabilities. They're weak links. If you have someone who is too close and they know how you compartmentalized information, they'll see the full picture. They're the weak link. That's Courtney Healy, Tina Murray, Jen Altman, Meredith, Lindsey a little bit. These people are the weak links for Aidan because they see the full picture, whether they are aligned with him, don't like him, etc. etc. It's just they're the biggest weaknesses for him because they see the full picture. That's why he tries to either control them—in my opinion—or destroy them. But Aidan's in a real tough spot here because you can't run that playbook on Karen Read. Clearly, these people are incredibly loyal to her. Flipperhead, Olivia, etc. They may have been helping Aidan, but they're incredibly loyal to Karen. Now, what I've always suspected is that the whole point of charging Aidan Kearney was—one, he did bad things to the witnesses in the retrial, Lindsey Gaetani. He did bad things allegedly. Okay, the grand jury indicted him. But I think Brian Tully and the MSP unit that investigated Aidan—they were more interested in two different goals. Okay, they had parallel objectives beyond just the criminal proceeding. One: get information about who the target of the federal probe was after August of 2023. And it was Tully's unit and Matthew Farwell related to the Sandra Birchmore murder coverup. Number two: I think Tully wanted—and Kate Peter and Marty Keach wanted—Aidan Kearney and Michael Morrissey wanted Aidan Kearney to flip on Karen Read. It was a pressure tactic. It was always just a pressure tactic. That's what I fully believe. Now, I'm not saying he didn't do bad things. I just believe in the mind of the DA—these people were using pressure tactics to get Aidan Kearney in a tactical position where he would flip. Why do I think this? Well, a few things. One: in the fall of 2023, between like August and November, Aidan Kearney didn't need an intermediary with Karen Read. Natalie was out of the picture, although I'm suspect, because there's this new text from Natalie from August saying that like she was still loyal to Karen Read—although ostensibly they had a falling out in June of 2023 because Natalie called Karen late at night and she was upset about it. I always thought that was BS. Now I know why it was BS because there's also a March 24 message about like Joe Warren and Natalie wanting to go to court. I just have this suspicion that Natalie was never really like against Karen. What Natalie was doing was using Turtle Boy as leverage with Karen's permission—using it's called a limited hangout. Limited information about Turtle Boy's culpability for witness intimidation to the MSP so that the MSP would trust Natalie—so that Natalie could relay information back to Karen about the ongoing investigation of Karen and Aidan for conspiracy under 2747 and witness intimidation under 26813B. Now they did try to eventually indict Karen on that in March of 2024 at No True Bill, but they can do it again. They got more evidence—the state in May of 2024 about Aidan saying in Facebook messages that one Karen told him not to go to Lindsey Gaetani's apartment on December 23rd, 2023, and then some other stuff—basically where Aidan was implying that someone told him to run Jen McCabe's license plates. Who would that be? Karen Read. He didn't say it but he implied it to Jenna Rocco and Amy D'Angelis and whoever else was in that internal chat that got leaked. So I really believe that the reason why Aidan Kearney was such a liability to Karen Read—and why she was saying it out loud—is that Karen Read always saw Aidan Kearney as vulnerable to flip. Why? Because Brian Tully did his homework—whatever his motives were—and he found a few things. And I think that him and Kate Peter profiled Aidan Kearney. That's why Kate Peter had some role in this—because they thought Kate Peter should really like Aidan in a lot of ways because he used to be colleagues. Two: I think the state police thought she saw his psyche—Aidan's psyche—and could help them profile him. Three: I think Kate Peter is very hard into the world, and Tully and those other people in the unit could say like, "Yeah, we're worried about Birchmore; we got to do damage control here. Nothing's really wrong with the O'Keefe death investigation," and just—they're going to find out about Birchmore—and Kate would go along with it. That's my opinion. But Tully gets this video of Aidan that he had sent to Lindsey—and it's out there on the internet. I don't want to play the content; it's sad. But this is why I think this is what was in the prosecutor's mind when they were going—and the MSP's mind—when they were going after Kearney. Yes, he did bad things—especially to people that knew the DA and Tully like McCabe, Jen McCabe, etc. But also Aidan was an Achilles heel for Karen. Think about MSP, right? And the way we're analyzing Aidan's weaknesses via weak links in the compartmentalization chain. Okay, flip it around and think about MSP thinking about Karen. What's a weak link in her compartmentalization chain? Aidan Kearney. Now, in that regard, Aidan Kearney—if he flips on Karen Read—guarantees a conviction for Karen Read for the state, even if they can't get her on John's death. It was a backup plan. Second to that, I think though—it's a dynamic situation—and that something must have fucking happened recently. Okay, and I've long thought—and we'll read Lindsey's post on this later because she was talking about it on Twitter overnight, and I was reading it this morning, and it made me think about this—I've long suspected that Kate Peter made a deal with Aidan Kearney in the past like 6-8 months. And the deal was involving the Norfolk DA and the people prosecuting Kearney, and the goal was to get Kearney to flip. And I also think Kate wants Kearney in the Netflix documentary that she's working on with Gretchen and Sandpaper—which, they don't really understand. Like, bro, you think you're getting my footage and me if you're going to enable Kate Peter and try to portray her as the Charlotte of the internet? What planet are you on? No. No, the answer is no. But anyway, I really believe that this deal was made because why else—and I think Karen found out about it—because why else would Karen—[we're going to—the conversation is going to clarify all this]—why else would Karen on Friday authorize Joe Flipperhead to release information that confirms that Aidan recorded Karen. Now, why Karen is not going to do this if she didn't hear the fucking recording? She's not a moron. She's a tactical genius. I'm telling you—I don't necessarily agree with all the things she's done. I personally think she's responsible for John's death, but like—she's a fucking tactical genius. And you have to understand in some sense—like she wouldn't do this unless it's real. Like someone sent her that recording, and I don't believe Aidan Kearney sent it to intermediaries because if Meredith is the closest person to him—or was—in the world, and he's going to lunch with her and will only play it for her allegedly—okay, there's no way in hell that he would just send it to people. I believe—whether through a fake account or otherwise—Aidan Kearney sent that to Karen's lawyers. That's just my opinion. I think there's strong reason for him to do it. It's a message. Okay. As a result, I think Karen Read doing this had to sense that this was the moment—like this was the moment where the decision was going to be made about whether or not he cooperated. And now is Aidan's kind of like signal flare that I'm thinking—from Karen Read's perspective—Aidan sending that recording to Jackson and Yannetti is a signal flare that if she doesn't act now, he's making the choice to flip on her. Okay, well, what did she just do? She in essence just put him in the worst position possible because he had to be able to—him and Kate Peter—had to sell the narrative in public that—and this is why I was on Lindsey's profile earlier. Let me see if I can bring that up—him and Kate Peter had to sell the narrative in public that Karen was worse than Aidan Kearney. All right, so let's take a look at Lindsey Gaetani's post here. Let's read this first and then let's look at the post from Kate Peter. So Kate Peter post last night: "Karen Read has killed a man before and to my knowledge, Aidan Kearney has yet to do anything like that. Take that as you will. Regardless, they're both giant DBAGs, but you can decide who is worse. My vote is Karen Read." That's Kate Peter—one of the closest people in the world right now to Brian Tully, Michael Morrissey, and the decision makers who were initially prosecuting Kearney—telling you in plain sight what's going on. So let's read Lindsey's post: "Yes, we already know a deal was made a long time ago. How cute of Kate trying to win over the turtle riders after she pretended she was still trying to put him in jail the past several months. Does anyone of the turtle riders know who Christine Gagne is? I have no idea who that is. Does anyone know who that is? That's the woman Kate Peter blamed for wiretapping charges with TB and the person she blamed when I asked her where her deleted Google Drive went with the state's evidence. Why would Kate blame this woman for deleting evidence when this woman's name was never mentioned during the grand jury or in a single email or police report? Interesting." Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. So we know Kate Peter was providing evidence to the grand jury. We know that from the recently released court documents and discovery in the Kearney criminal case. Why was—why is Kate Peter blaming someone? Who is Christine Gagne, who—why is Kate blaming her when Kate was the one who was—there's evidence that Kate was directly providing this material to Tully, who was taking it to the grand jury. And by the way, I want people to understand: my anger here is not because Aidan Kearney was prosecuted. I think he should be held accountable. My anger here is because the people prosecuting him had ulterior motives. Lindsey Gaetani didn't have an ulterior motive. She was victimized. She was an unwitting pawn in this proxy war between Karen and the DOJ—Karen and the DOJ and Aidan on one side, and the Norfolk DA and the MSP unit on the other. But instead of trying to prosecute Aidan, it was all tactical. And nobody was told—that's the worst part. And that's why I'm so upset about all of this, because it was a disgrace. It was a disgrace to the process. If you're going to hold someone accountable, do it. You don't use it as leverage to get someone else. And if you're going to do that, be open with the people who are victimized. Otherwise, you are going to build resentment. Why would you ever want to be in a situation where you have to handle a victim? Because if they were made aware of what was actually going on, they would be upset. That is a very prime example—on its face example—that something is very wrong. Not because Aidan Kearney is absolved of liability or because I think he did nothing wrong. Absolutely not. No. Other way around. But because that kind of behavior—given impunity basically, because there's a larger fish—it's an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, not because the prosecution exists. In my opinion, a grand jury indicted him; he should be prosecuted. That's what happens when indictments get handed up. But because the aim of the prosecution was not to seek justice—it was to get—it was to pressure Kearney to flip on Karen Read. [Transition to the conversation] Now, to bring this all back—because we got to go—I want to look at this conversation here. I want to actually listen to this chat a minute. I'm going to explicate; I'm going to try to tell you what happens. "Hi, Bunny Towel. Hi, Christina. No haircut. But guess if you want to send donations—today's a good day for that. We got to get Towel to the end of the month. Towel's not going to be able to move very much for the next few days. So I could use some food if you want to send me some gift cards. I just need some help. All right. I'm a little towel. I got a lot going on. And anyway, so I'll—I'm sitting in my chair. That's as much as I can do right now. I can talk; my brain works. I can sit in my chair. I'm not doing anything else, but I should eat at some point. Anyway, so we're going to listen to this conversation because you have to think of all that background when you're analyzing. Why right now? Okay, why would Karen Read tactically right now burn Aidan Kearney? Aidan Kearney supporters are very loyal, but a lot of Aidan Kearney's base are becoming alienated because either they care more about Karen Read than Aidan Kearney or because Aidan Kearney's been on this weird tear recently where he like been attacking middle-aged women who are most of his fans. All right. Most of his fans are middle-aged women. And he goes after people's looks like whatever. So there's already this alienation happening. I believe the only reason Karen Read does this right now is because what it did—and what it's doing to Aidan Kearney—is it's decimating his support. Okay. Well, why are you decimating his support? Why are you forcing people to pick sides? Why would you do that right now? Either [he] cooperated or he's about to. All right. Now Karen Read—if she was—here's my read of this—if Karen Read was just going to cooperate, she wouldn't have done this this way. Okay. I'm sorry. It would have been completely different. I don't believe that she would have done it this way. I believe she would have done it a completely different way. And the reason why I believe that—we're going to read the text from Karen before we start listening to this. By the way, you can see I have the video here for you. What happened? By the way, just to give you a little more context. So this X Spaces that we're going to listen to—I have the full 37-minute X Space. This X Space, okay—it was before the text messages from Karen to Joe Flipperhead got released. So what you have to realize is these texts you're seeing on the screen got released because of this conversation. You're going to hear Joe Flipperhead say it.

Grant Smith Ellis

36,588 views • 10 months ago

"Tell us this isn't true." "They had a live being out [near Area 51]." "There were human experiments that went on." 👽🛸 Roswell: A Non-Human Craft or a Darker Secret? 🤫😶 (Transcript is shorter than clip. I don't have room to type more in this post so I'll just wait for replies.) ~ Lex Fridman: "In your book on 'Area 51,' you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized, at the very end. That this might have been a disinformation campaign from, I guess, Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely-piloted plane with a quote 'grotesque, child-sized aviator.' Just looking back at all that now, years later, what's the probability that it's true? What's the probability it's not?" Annie Jacobsen: (AJ): "So, you know, I've never revealed who that source is." Lex: "Yes." AJ: "You know that? Want me to tell you?" Lex: "Okay, who was the source?" AJ: "So, before I say anything on that, let me speak to the question that you asked, right? So, you asked me, 'What's the probability that that is still standing as an idea, 12, 13, 14 years later,' right? So, I continued to work with that source for years, afterwards. We talked about this. Look, I mean, his whole family knew it was him. And I knew his family because I was an integral part of, you know, I was at his house, met all his kids, grandkids." Lex: "And we should say, the source is the main expert advisor behind the story that it was. Maybe you can explain what the story is that your report in the book, that it was a disinformation campaign created by Stalin to cause mass hysteria in the United States. The very kind that we've been speaking about with the CIA and so on." AJ: "Yes! Predicated on the narrative of the 'War of the Worlds,' right? And the 'War of the Worlds,' when it was a radio program in the United States, made people go crazy. 'Oh, my God, we're being invaded by aliens!' Well, the government was always interested in the story and Joseph Stalin was, too. We know that from declassified documents, right? "And so, the source told me that the reason for this program, and that the real Roswell crash remains, were in fact, it was a black-propaganda hoax infiltrated, you know, or rather, predicated at this idea that you were gonna overwhelm America's early-warning, air-defense system, cause mayhem and maybe be able to attack the United States. That was the plan. And Stalin was also messing with the United States, messing with Truman, who sort of, you know, turned his back on him, right? At Potsdam. "And so, this idea, and the reason that the source is important... And unlike, you know, a lot of people, 'I saw this, I saw that, I learned that.' Was, according to the source, once it was determined that this was a hoax and that Stalin was able to get a craft over the United States, and it crashed. And it had, you know, people inside of it, they were people that were sort of deformed and meant...surgically altered to look like aliens. "The United States government decided that it needed to know what on earth that was all about, and if it was possible for us to have the same program. This, according to this source, right? And so, it sounds preposterous, and if it was just someone saying, 'I...,' you might say, 'Well, it's ridiculous, get them onto another subject.' But, the difference was, is this source, who was very well placed, and friends with all of the other 75 people, you know, told me this as a confession, right? A real, tearful confession, because what he said is he was involved in the American program to do the same thing. And people died, because there were human experiments that went on." "And I write about this in the last 12 pages of 'Area 51.' It was an explosive, you know, revelation, and I felt very confident in writing this because the source wanted it written. Why? Because he said, 'I'm dedicated to my country. I know about being committed to national security, and this kind of thing must never happen. And if you give people too much power, they will take advantage of it.' And he wanted it on the record. "And his wife of 60 years did not know until after the book published. Nor did His children, okay? So, after the book published, I was called to his house and sat there with his family. And they said, 'Tell us this isn't true.' And he said, 'It is true,' right? (We need a tape of this confession or...for his family to confirm they heard this from him.) AJ: "Now that source is Al O'Donnell, who is the nuclear-weapons engineer who armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons, okay? So if you wanna talk about someone..." Lex: "Woooooow." AJ: "You're the first person I've told that on the record, but it's kind of about time." Lex: "Woooooow. Well, you received a lot of criticism over this story, and it confused me why, because it's...given the context of everything you've described with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it is reasonable that such action would be taken. AJ: "And, the source is extraordinarily credible, right? If you wanted to take the position, 'Well, that person isn't very reliable,' then you have to ask yourself, 'Why did they have Top-Secret clearances that are higher than any in the United States whatsoever?' Because he was responsible for arming nuclear bombs. He was called the trigger man. "And by the way, he told me that I could tell the world who he was. There's a lot of details that are really dark, involving that program. And when is it appropriate, right? Well, it feels appropriate now. First of all, because you and I have been talking for several hours. So this is what is truly a long-form conversation and it's the outcome of, you know, a very long time of my reporting, and also being judicious about what, you know, closing the loop on that, right? Because I do think it's important for people to know that sources have revelations." Lex: "And, like you said, the programs, both on the Soviet side, and the American side, conflicting, I think's the term we used previously? Ethically, morally, on all fronts. People have done some horrible things in the name of security. In your book, 'Surprise, Kill Vanish,' you write about the CIA." ~~~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "So, today, I want to focus on a really important story that you once told me, that has never been told all the way [from the] beginning, to all the way to the end. And I just think it's just so cool we get to do this today. So, the question I want to ask is: After you got hooked on the UFO thing, with Bob Lazar, and you as a journalist said, 'I'm gonna start getting sources.' Like, 12 people coming at you, people shut down by the government. You can tell that. But you finally, finally got to a credible individual who had direct, firsthand knowledge about UFOs, exploitation, reverse engineering, and beings. And, oh my God, I want the world to hear this story. Tell us the story." George Knapp: "I've shared some of it in very broad strokes over the years- little bits and pieces of it - without ever actually referencing, in my statements, the guy the source. But this will be the first time I've told it in totality. "And it takes me back to when I first started in this. It's 1989 KLAS-TV, we put together, we spent eight months working on this project called 'UFOs: The Best Evidence.' Nine-part series. It airs on television, it's the biggest thing that's ever been produced for local TV, to this date, and still. "And, along the way, as I'm trying to find...telling the story about Bob Lazar, and his allegations about what was out there at S-4, near Area 51 - recovered discs, alien technology being reverse engineered - I'm looking for people who would support that. And I found about two dozen people, witnesses who had worked out there, who had seen bits and pieces, who could corroborate parts of what Bob had said about these kinds of craft being out there in the Nevada desert. But there wasn't anybody big picture who knew as much as Lazar claimed to have known, so I was still looking for them. "In 1990, I started working on a follow-up series to Best Evidence, looking for new witnesses. And I got a hint from an elected official that I had known, I'd covered him in Nevada politics. He says, 'You know, you should talk to my dad one of these days.' 'Your dad?' 'Yeah.' And he told me what the dad's name was and what he had done, what job he had had. And I said, 'Ah.' So I started stalking the guy. I just started showing up at events where I knew he would be. One of those events was a reunion for employees of EG&G." Corbell (JC): "So I'm assuming that this source was working within EG&G in some capacity, which is, by the way, who Bob [Lazar] said, hired him to go out to Site-4, S-4 at Area 51. So you're like, 'Okay, I can now find out if this is bullshit, or if there's an element of truth to it.' Do I have that right?" Knapp (GK): "Pretty much correct, yeah. So, I'm looking for someone whose credentials are impeccable. Unlike Bob, whose credentials were questioned, and people still attack him on where he went to school and where he worked, and was he at Los Alamos? This guy is documentable. There's a paper trail of where he worked, what he did. There's no question that he was in a position to know. He was the first general manager of EG&G in Nevada. His name was Al O'Donnell, and he has a prominent family. "When I heard that EG&G was having a reunion, I went there. We took a camera [and I figured], 'This is a great chance to get him on camera before I start asking him the questions I really want to ask.'" JC: "And when you say he is a general manager, like, does that give him certain roles and responsibilities that would give him insight? Like, he's not a secretary, so what does that mean?" GK: "He's the boss. He was the boss of the Nevada office. And I'll tell you a little bit about EG&G. So, it was a company that was created in Boston, right around the end of World War Two. Al O'Donnell had been in the Navy, serving during the war. He got out of the Navy while the war was still underway and went to work for a company called Raytheon, which became this massive, gigantic defense contractor that's still around today, still in Nevada in fact." JC: Yeah, they've got a big connection to the UFO topic, right? But, when you say Boston, like, where in Boston was it created?" GK: "Well, MIT is where the company was born. Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier were the three guys, the EG&G in that. They were at MIT. Scientists, engineers, they created this company there. And Al O'Donnell, who had been working for Raytheon, working on the Manhattan Project. He didn't know he was working on the Manhattan Project, but they were building these devices, complex triggers, that allowed them to detonate nuclear weapons. He learned later what he was doing was part of the Manhattan Project. "He goes to MIT, starts working with EG&G. Their company in those days had, I think, 15 employees, Al said. So it was a very small startup. But it suddenly exploded because the American atomic program exploded in those years. In 1950, Harry Truman decides that we need a permanent, nuclear testing site somewhere in the continental U.S., so they looked at a bunch of places, and they settled on Nevada. "Prior to that, Al O'Donnell had been sent out to the Pacific. They had five of these massive, atomic bomb tests out in the Pacific, and they decided to move it into a continental U.S. location and Nevada's Test Site - it was called the Nevada Test Site in those days - was chosen. Al O'Donnell leads the exodus from Boston, out to Nevada. They start hiring engineers and scientists, physicists and other security, spies." JC: "What are they working on at this time when they make that move?" GK: "Atomic bombs. They're building, testing atomic bombs. EG&G was a really precise organization that was created in order to detonate, measure and photograph atomic weapons. If you look in the history of photography, you'll see some of these amazing photos that they took of, you know, water drops dropping in water and...they're pretty famous shots because of these cameras that they developed. And it was perfect for use and testing atomic weapons and documenting what the process was. "So, EG&G comes out to Las Vegas, they are the managers of the Nevada Test Site. They, subsequently, years later, become the managers of Area 51 when it opens in 1955. So Al O'Donnell is the top guy. He oversees the nuclear testing program out there, manages it for EG&G, works with the Atomic Energy Commission. He has a Top-Secret security clearance and he can go anywhere and see anything. There's, basically, no restrictions, nothing that is outside of his ability to find out and see." JC: "So, this is an impeccable resume. This is somebody who was in position to know, and would know if someone like Bob Lazar was telling the truth or not telling the truth. I find it, personally, humorous that EG&G was, its genesis, its seed, came from MIT, right?" GK: "So, late 1990 or early 1991, I'd have to look up the dates. But somewhere in there is this event, this EG&G reunion. I go there, we got a camera, I interview Al O'Donnell, introduce myself, and say, 'Hey, I'm really interested in this, can we continue this conversation?' So he invites me to his home. He says, 'Come on over, we'll arrange to come over on a Saturday or something. We'll sit down, I'll go through my scrapbooks and show you some documents and memorabilia and photos from that era.' I was like, 'Great.' "So I go to his house and meet this wife. And we sit down, he opens up these big scrapbooks, and he starts showing me all the stuff that he had done. Photos that had been taken out in the proximity of these gigantic nuclear tests. They had great stories about the camaraderie that developed among the engineers and scientists. And he's going through all this stuff and showing me all this. And I love it, I loved every bit of it. I've never had a bad day at the Nevada Test Site, by the way. Every time I've gone out there to do a story, it's just a terrific way to spend some time." JC: "Secrets should be kept, secrets are kept, and you are a proponent of keeping secrets when it's that kind of thing." GK: "Sure, absolutely. And I respected the boundaries that they set up for us in doing these kinds of stories. So I did go out to the Nevada Test Site a lot over the next 40 years or so and put together a lot of different stories. And they knew of my interest in that area that's just outside what the Nevada Test Site, a place called Area 51. In 1955, Area 51 was, basically, created and EG&G got the contract to manage Area 51, and had kept it for the next 30, 35 years. So, whatever went on out there, they had an inside knowledge of what was going on." JC: "So, you meet this guy, Al O'Donnell, for the first time when he's at this public thing. You probably say something like, 'Your son told me to talk to you,' or something. Whatever. It ends up, he invites you to his home, and you're going through scrapbooks, and he's showing you all this atomic testing stuff that he was involved in. GK: "Yeah, and I'm telling him, 'Boy, this is really interesting. That's fascinating. I'd love to do a story on it.' And after we're there for maybe two hours, he closes this one big scrapbook and he goes, 'You're not here to talk about this, are ya?' I said, 'Well, not exactly.' He says, 'I know what you're here to talk about. I know what you want to ask about.' And right about that point, his wife walks in and she says, 'Don't start telling them that stuff! Don't even tell him!' And he kind of joked about it.' JC: "What were you there to talk about?" GK: "UFOs, UFOs. Area 51, Bob Lazar, crashed saucers, reverse engineering, to see if he had any knowledge of that, because I'd been led to believe that he did. So he closes that book and he says, 'We'll have we'll get together another time and we'll talk about it in private.' And over the course of the next two years or so, he and I would meet at coffee shops and talk about it. And I would ask him questions, and really, it was like pulling teeth. He wanted to tell me stuff but he made me work at it." (AJ says his family was there for the confession. Knapp has over two years of meetings with him. A bit confusing.) GK: "And the condition was, I couldn't take any notes. I couldn't record it, I couldn't take any notes. So each time I'd meet with him, I'd rush back to my car and start scribbling notes on pieces of paper so I'd remember everything that he said. And the story that he told me, that evolved over those couple of years was pretty fantastic. "He said that they did have a flying saucer that had been recovered from New Mexico. I think he indicated that it had been taken from New Mexico to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is... He never said Roswell, but I think it was the Roswell incident is what he [was] talking about. And it confirmed some of the details about what we know, likely, happened with the Roswell craft." JC: "When he's telling you, 'We have recovered a craft,' did he say it like, this is secret, don't tell anybody?" GK: "Yeah, it was just for my knowledge, my background and information. It wasn't a story I could do then. We were negotiating about how, or when, or if I could ever use that information or make it public. He told me the details about this craft. He said that it had been stored at Indian Springs. Indian Springs is an Air Force Base that's been there for a long time. It's now called Creech. Indian Springs existed before Area 51 was made. "But he says it was there, they kept it there. It might have been in an underground facility, I'm not quite sure. But then when Area 51, after it opened in 1955, they moved it to an adjacent facility. He didn't say it was S-4, he didn't say it was Papoose, but I think that's what he's talking about. Papoose Lake is where Bob Lazar said he worked, and where they had built nine hangars underground, disguised to look like the desert, and where they had other recovered craft. "He says they worked on this recovered craft, reverse engineering, trying to figure out how it worked, who built it. Whether or not they could duplicate the technology because, apparently, they thought this was pretty advanced, and they'd like to be able to build more of 'em. "And he says it was a very closed program, very small. It was only, I think, five of them that were aware of it, at least in the early stages, that were working on this project. And it was very hush hush, and they didn't share it with anybody else in the company, or anybody else in the area, or the military. They just kept it to themselves. "So, after we're having these meetings - and I go back and write down all these notes and stuff, details about what he had shared with me - we have another meeting at a coffee shop, and I said, 'Well gosh, you know, aren't you worried that it would get out, that the word would get out?' "And he says to me, 'We were worried It would get out?' That's right. 'I mean, what...it? What do you mean, it?' It. Meaning a live being, they had a live being out there. I go, 'You had a live being, an alien as well?' [O'Donnell said], 'Tell you the truth, we didn't know what it was.' I said, 'You know, maybe it came from millions of miles away, out in space, and you're keeping it in a cage near Area 51?' He said, 'To tell you the truth, we couldn't communicate with it in the beginning. We didn't know what it was, we didn't know where it was from, and we didn't know what to do with it.'" JC: "When Al O'Donnell says to you, 'We had a live alien, a being,' obviously from another world, what was your feeling?" GK: "Well, I was overwhelmed, because it was, in effect, confirmation of things that I had come to believe, because of the reporting we'd already done. And then the evidence of cover ups and lies that had been told to the public. Here's this guy in a high position, with a high security clearance, telling me that it was true. That they really did have a craft and they had a being. "My second feeling was, one of overwhelming sadness for the being, whatever it was, you know, that was kept out there. I asked him, you know, what had happened to it, what became of it? He says, 'I don't know. I don't know whatever happened to it.' But it was out there for a while, alive, and eventually they figured out a way to communicate with it. "And so I asked him, 'Well, what did it look like?' And he made me guess, as he did with all these questions. He made me guess. He said, 'Well, it kinda looks like a certain political candidate.' I said, 'Well, who? A political candidate? Who?' And at the time, Ross Perot was running for president. He said, 'It looks like Ross Perot. A little skinny guy with a big ears and tiny head.' Not a classic Gray-looking alien, but a very odd-looking creature with really big ears, that looked like Ross Perot. And I laughed. "And so we had these conversations for a while, and I was blown away by the information that he shared. I took all these notes. I was hoping that someday, I might be able to get the information out. And I asked him, 'Look, you're getting up there in age. If I can't record something with you, could you record a statement to the effect of telling me the story on camera, and then when you pass on, I can have the tape?' And he said, 'Yeah,' he would do it." JC: "You know, look, I've heard a lot of wild stories that I can't verify. A guy's telling you something, and you get a sense as a journalist, when you go down a road with somebody, and you take your time and you vet it... Did you feel...I mean, is there any world where he's trying to f*ck with ya? Or is there a world where he's trying to, you know, dissuade...kind of put crazy information into your brain? Like, how did you feel when he was telling you this? Was he like, straight with you?" GK: "Yeah, he was very straightforward. And again, this was not information he was giving up, willingly. I mean, I had to really dig and coax and arm twist to get him to cough things up. And it was very slow-going over about a two-year period, maybe a little bit longer. And I know that this...you always have to be wary of people with different agendas and people that just make stuff up. I didn't get that sense from him because of his standing in the community. He had shared this story with members of his own family." JC: "And that's why they came to you, is because they kind of [gave] you a tip. And these members of his family, they're serious people, too." GK: "Yeah. One of his sons is an FBI agent, or was, he's passed on now. One was an elected official in Nevada. That was the one that gave me the tip." JC: So, I just want to nail this [down] so I understand. You were approached because he had shared this with his family, privately, and then you had to kind of coax to get through to him about the story?" GK: "Right." JC: "I think that's important because look, these things don't happen, like, people [don't] just come to us and say, you know, crazy stuff, and we're like, 'Hh, yeah, cool. Sounds good.' Like, the dynamic of that, socially, as a journalist, like getting in there, taking time. You know, we have to verify if what he said is true, and there are some major bombs coming about that. But it's like, that process is so important. "So here you are, you're sitting with him, he tells you now, they have a live alien. And you felt sad because you're an animal-rights activist, you love animals. I know with your cats at home and you've done horse stories and all the stories about like, the inhumane stuff to animals. So it made you personally sad, makes me sad, too now thinking about it." GK: Yeah. Well, we had these series of meetings, and then the last time we met, after he'd agreed to go ahead and record a tape - and give it to me after making an arrangement so I got it after he passed on - he said that he had been told to not talk to me anymore. He said he had been given a warning [and] it was not a good idea for him to talk to me any more about anything. Not just that topic, but anything." JC: "Well, who knows that you're talking? Who would warn him?" GK: "I don't know. I don't know. But you recall, back in those days, there was surveillance. We had our phones tapped at KLAS-TV. There were guys following us around. Me, Bob Lazar, Gene Huff, maybe Robert Bigelow." JC: "People were also coming to your news station, OSI. And they would come in and try to like, get to you and then they'd show you their card...and take it back. And you know your phones are tapped. So it's like, because of this story, all of a sudden you're on high alert. So, anybody could have called him, been watching you, had meetings with the guy. So what you're saying is one day he just said, 'I can't...I'm not allowed to talk to you any more.'" GK: "Yeah, I've been told not to talk to you anymore. I've been told not to."

Joe Murgia

53,116 views • 29 days ago

My fellow Kenyans, Many of you have seen my recent posts about the deadly cancer that is corruption in our country. In my last post, I tried to paint a picture of the disconnect between our potential as a country and the economic circumstances we find ourselves in today, and the connection between corruption and the incalculable pain and suffering and cruelty that is meted out every single day to the most vulnerable among us by thieves operating out of public office. And after covering the goings-on in Mandera County, I told you that in my honest opinion, our governments exist to cater for the filthy-rich lifestyles of the vilest and most corrupt among us, at the expense of everyone else. I received tremendous support from all of you, for speaking on behalf of so many struggling Kenyans who don’t have a voice, or the audience necessary to spark the much-needed discussion about where we are heading as a country. But even with all that support, I have received messages asking me to be careful. One compatriot told me: “prepare to be relentlessly pursued, threatened, enticed, guilt-tripped, and gas-lit”. This is from a someone who knows how our government operates, and how it uses violence and its monopoly on power to silence those who question why politicians are stealing so much. I am not naive about the dangers of speaking up and calling out thieves who control state machinery, and who possess the ability to shut me up in a few seconds. But I will tell you why we CAN NOT and MUST NOT keep quiet. In November of 2023, I stumbled upon the story of a young man from Turkana, Calvin Esekon Esewit , who, despite scoring an A-, and getting an acceptance into medical school, spent two years not knowing whether his dreams of becoming a doctor would ever come true. I was moved by that story in a way that I can never adequately explain. I could not understand how it is possible that, in our country, a young man who appears to be every parent’s dream child can spend two years in limbo while we as a country possess the ability to invest in our best and brightest. And so, I spent weeks trying to chase down Calvin to see how I could help him attend college. After a lot of searching, I finally found Calvin, and by this time he had managed to get some help and is now in college. While this story has a great ending, it did not to be this way. And we know that the number of cases that end like this, with some success, are a small fraction of those ones which end tragically, with broken dreams. This is what happens when corruption consumes anything and everything in a country. It destroys lives. See attached video to learn about Calvin's story. I tell you all this story because it provides context to today's topic. For one story like this one that you see on the news, there are millions that never make the news. But they are real situations, nonetheless. There are millions of your compatriots who are devastated by this killer cancer of corruption that is perpetuated by people that you and I have put into public office ostensibly to improve our lives. They go into these offices and abuse the trust you bestowed upon them and deny you and everyone else a decent opportunity in life. You see, Calvin and millions of other victims of this shameless level of corruption and plunder have no voice, and no real ability to look the thieves that are destroying lives and generations of Kenyans in eye and tell them to stop this unbearable pain and the cruelty. This is the reason I embarked on this journey to attempt to expose this shameful situation. Watch the attached video of Calvin’s situation, and I am sure that you will agree that the millions of Calvins in our country need a voice, NO MATTER THE RISK. The thieves that are destroying the futures of millions of children just so they can have beachside homes in Miami, Dubai and other places count on the idea that most people will fear for their lives, and therefore not speak up. They count on the growing apathy in the Kenyan psyche. But we cannot give in to that. We cannot cower to thieves. We must look them straight in the eye and tell them that they MUST STOP. If we don't, our children and their children are guaranteed the same level of cruelty. And so with that, today I want to talk about the utterly insane crime scene that is Turkana County. I don’t know any other way to describe it, other than, it is a “shit-show”. Just follow along, and let me know if you disagree. As I did in my previous commentary, I will ask you to indulge me a little bit, and allow me to use a couple of pictures, because pictures speak louder than a thousand words. The first picture shows the state-of-the art County Government offices, that the County Government of Turkana decided to invest an ungodly amount of money on. Close to a billion shillings. The second picture is a classroom in session. In Turkana County. These two realities are occurring in parallel in the same county, at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, let me just tell you that I do not go out of my way to find bad news. I want stories that would help re-affirm our belief in the fundamental decency of human beings. When I find good news as I review these Counties’ decisions and how they behave with our resources, I will be the first one to report it to you. But I don’t have any good news today. I have bad news. If you read my commentary yesterday and were offended by what you saw, I am afraid you might not make it to the end of this article, because what you will hear will be quite shocking. The cancer of corruption, particularly at the County Government level, is worse than your wildest imagination. And so, as I like to do, I like to start off by putting some numbers on the table for us to use as reference points. Bear in my that all the information I put in this article is publicly available. Nothing came to me through a whistle blower. The first number is KSH 100 Billion. With a B. In the last decade or so, you and I, through the National Government, has sent over KSH 100 billion to Turkana County. To support recurrent expenditure, and development. For example, in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, we sent KSH 12.6 billion. In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, we sent KSH 11.4 billion. And on and on and on. The second number is 1 million. This is the population of Turkana County. The third number is KSH 18.4 billion. This was Turkana County’s budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The fourth number is KSH 190 million. This was the amount of money that Turkana County was able to generate on its own accord within the county, from all its investments and other activities in the period in question. This number is an important proxy, in my view, for the value of the county’s economic prospects for the foreseeable future, and to people that are not driven by greed and corruption, would be an important consideration when they are thinking about how and where to deploy your money as taxpayers. If you are doing the math, Turkana County, for the 2022-2023 fiscal year, was only able to raise 1% of the funds needed to keep the lights on. 99% came from you and I, and a tiny amount from grants. The next number is KSH 129, 040. This is the average ANNUAL [emphasis added] income of a resident of Turkana County ( Keep that number in mind when we are discussing the massive theft of public funds by Turkana County leaders. The next number is 80%. 80% of the residents of Turkana County live below the poverty line. They have a really difficult time putting food on the table. ( The next number is KSH 12 Million. This is the basic salary of the Governor of Turkana County before other benefits that, as I explained yesterday, can often double the salary. Remember the “housing allowance”, the “hardship allowance”, the “commuter allowance”, the “risk allowance”, the “extraneous allowance”, etc.? Remember that? I still cannot figure out, for the life of me, what “extraneous” means in the context of County business, but we don’t time to dwell on this. The next number is 93. The Governor of Turkana County makes 93 times the average Turkana County resident’s annual income. 93 times! The next number is 82%. This was the percentage of people that were illiterate in Turkana County in 2013 ( Could not read or write. A point to note about the above literacy figure. Ten years later, and despite over KSH 100 billion is spent in Turkana County, including many billions for education, that literacy rate HAS NOT CHANGED ONE BIT. Only 20% of the population can read or write today. ( KSH 829 million. This is how much it cost to build the County Government offices. Yes, the ones shown in the first picture. KSH 120 million. The County Government decided that it was prudent to pay a contractor KSH 120 million to construct the Governor’s personal residence. Get this, even after this payment, no construction took place. The money was stolen. All of it. KSH 90 Million. This is the amount that the County Government paid to another contractor, to build the Governor a mansion, having previously lost KSH 120 million. So, the tally for the Governor’s residence now stands at KSH 210 million. Never mind that the limit allowed by law is KSH 45 million. KSH 5 billion. In the last days of his term in office, an outgoing Governor of Turkana, Koli Nanok, EGH. , sought to inflate pending bills by adding KSH 5 billion so that it can be paid to his criminal cartel. KSH 5 billion. We have our key numbers, ladies and gentlemen, so let us discuss. So, we have a county that is dead last in literacy, and in the top 2 of the poorest counties in the republic. Only 20% of the population can read. The Governor earns 92 times the average citizen. The Governor lives in a house that cost over KSH 200 million. When he leaves his house in the morning, he goes to his office that cost KSH 829 million. And this is all happening when 80% of the County residents struggle to put food on the table. Those are the facts, and they are not in dispute. During the same time, the County Government geniuses decide to build the Speaker of the County Assembly a house. And a home office, and a garage. The house was initially estimated to cost KSH 75 million. But due to circumstances that not a soul in the government could explain to auditors, the contract expired before the house was completed, and the County Government found a new contractor to complete the job for an additional KSH 29 million. But this palace in the jungle worth apparently worth over KSH 100 million in Turkana County was not enough. The County proceeded to build the Speaker a guest house for another KSH 19 million, and a few other amenities, and so the whole cost went to KSH 276 million! The legal limit for a Speaker’s house is KSH 35 million, and they spent close to KSH 130 million just for one residence. By this time, I am sure you are getting tired of these obscene numbers. You and I work, and pay taxes. Nobody pays you 92 times the income your average neighbor is making. And for sure nobody will drop KSH 100 million to build you a house. These are the perks of working in government in a poor country. Go figure. And so, as a country, we need to answer for ourselves the question I posed yesterday, which is, what is the point of government? What is its role in our lives. If this level of criminality and pillaging can occur in our country in the midst of so much poverty, questioning the need for government is a totally valid question. I said in my last post that, when the average citizen looks at the thug on the street and the government, and is unable to discern any meaningful difference between them, that society from that point on is on its journey to becoming a failed state. A journey to anarchy. Over the last two months or so, Kenyans have been shouting at the top of their lungs, begging for their government to listen. To hear them out. Kenyans have asked that their government stop this unbelievable level of plunder. Dozens of Kenyans have died, thousands injured, and many more are missing today. To this day, the people that govern us continue to use the power of the gun to subdue Kenyans, until they can take everything in their sight. And so, as a society, we all have to ask whether today there is any difference between the thug on the street and our governments. Every Kenyan will have to answer this question for themselves. And before answering this question, everyone needs to remember the many Calvins in our society. Smart, upright children whose only crime is to be born in an unforgiving, lawless, and corrupt purgatory that is Kenya today. For myself, I have concluded that there is no difference between the thug on the street and our governments, county and national alike. If you can see any meaningful difference, let me know. I am willing to listen. So despite over KSH 100 billion in money sent to Turkana County, there is almost no measurable improvement in people’s life today. None. And it makes sense, when you look at how that money is spent. I want you to forget for a second the obscene obsession by the County Government with spending ungodly amounts of money on themselves. The houses, etc. If you step back and look at how the government is actually spending the hard-earned money on other things, you will be depressed. I am telling you that I wept three times in the middle of the night trying to make sense of this crazy situation in Turkana County. Three times. I have never imagined that human beings can be so greedy and cold-blooded. Think about this: In the couple of years I reviewed, the County spent around KSH 400 million annually in “tourism” initiatives, including marketing, and apparently upgrading certain facilities. KSH 400 million for tourism. In Turkana County. In 1 year. KSH 400 million per year in marketing and other money pits. The government’s own website says that the county gets around 3000 visitors per month. Around 36,000 per year. That’s them saying that, on their website. Are you curious to know the return on that KSH 400 million investment? I have an answer for you. Remember that I told you that the County has never raised more than KSH 200 million in a year within the county, despite its KSH 18.4 billion budget? Let me walk you through the breakdown of the absolutely embarrassing shit-show that is the County Government’s “own source revenue” operations. In 2022-2023, the County Government collected KSH 190 million locally against their KSH 18.4 billion budget. 1% of the budget. Remember, there is absolutely no requirement on the County to cut costs, or achieve certain local revenue targets today. So they raised KSH 45 million in single business permits, KSH 72 million in CESS, KSH 8 million in market fee, KSH 9 million in “slaughter fees”. And then finally, there is the return on the tourism investment that you were looking for. A whopping KSH 209, 000 in “park fees”. KSH 209,000 in fees, after investing KSH 400 million. And so, take this as an example and extrapolate it across the entire budget, and you can see how one can spend KSH 100 billion and get NOTHING in return. You don’t need to be a genius to see the absurdity of this situation. Let me explain using an example that should illustrate the utter dimwittedness of this situation. Remember the KSH 100 billion sent to Turkana by you and me? Part of this amount is supposed to be for “service delivery”, or “recurrent expenditure”. Usually about 70% of the budget. The balance, 30%, is designed to go to development projects. With that in mind, from KSH 100 billion, the County apparently has made KSH 30 billion worth of investments, right? 30% of the KSH 100 billion. Now, if you employed someone to run a business for you, and they asked you to invest KSH 30 billion, which is no small fortune, at some point you would have to start seeing returns, right? That’s common sense, isn’t it? So, when we look at the revenues streams that make up this paltry sum of KSH 190 million, and see things like “slaughter fees’ and “market fees”, what does it tell you? It tells me there is no real “development” happening in that county. Trust me, if you had real development totaling KSH 30 billion, you would have corporate taxes in the hundreds of millions or billions, a booming real estate market, rising wages and standards of living, etc., low unemployment, etc. You would not have 80% of the people living hand-to mouth, and a County Government that can not afford to support itself for 5 days out of the year that has 365 days! We do not have enough time, trust me, to deal with the shit-show that is Turkana County. Dealing with that mess would require a forensic team. I will just highlight a few of other “in your-face” type of theft of public funds, and then conclude my submission. A government that has a budget of KSH 18.4 billion annually, and which has never raised more than 1% of its budget had the wisdom to do the following with your money: · Spend KSH 222 million on a project building something that NOBODY uses. You got that right. They spent KSH 222 million on a facility that NOBODY uses. KSH 222 million gone to waste, in a county that is dead last in pretty much all measures of human progress. · Remember the County Government offices that cost KSH 829 million? The County spent KSH 82 million on “air-conditioning” for that building. · Despite the County Spending hundreds of millions for the top three officers of the County, the Governor and his Deputy, in the 2022-2023 year, illegally charged the county (you and I) KSH 2.2 million in housing allowance! · Built two facilities for KSH 16 million, that were completed, but NOBODY uses them. · Entered into a contract for the construction of a plastic use facility for KSH 13 million in 2021. The contractor gets paid KSH 4.9 million, and has never been seen since. · Paid out KSH 62 million in salaries that were not supportable in just one year. They could not point to anybody and say, that is who we paid. · Paid out KSH 27 million in legal fees that nobody could say what they related to. And the County’s Legal Advisor, who, in 2022-2023, had a budget of KSH 123 million, apparently did not know anything about it! · Had an outstanding bill at Kenya Revenue Authority in the amount of KSH 486 million, that did not show up on the County Government’s financial statements. Think about that. KSH 486 million owned to the Kenya Revenue Authority, and that liability is not on the financial statements! This only means that someone took those funds for themselves, which is why the liability would be missing from the county’s books. · Could not account for KSH 367 million in expenditures for 2022-2023. KSH 367 million, in unexplained expenses. · Awarded a contract worth over KSH 200 million to a bidder with no bank statement, against the law. This contract was entered into and approved before the statutory time after the bidding process lapsed. Someone was in a hurry to get paid. KSH 200 million, illegally awarded to a bidder who did not have a 6-month bank statement. · Apparently purchased KSH 1.5 billion in assets in 2022-2023, but kept no records of the said assets. For this reason, NOBODY can verify where these assets are located. KSH 1.5 billion. Let me just say this. In my last article, the most common critique was that it was too long. Too many words. I did not intend to make another long article. Trust me when I tell you this, we do not have the time to detail half of the problems in Turkana County. For just 1 year! We do not. Now, you recall my point about how societies descend to madness and anarchy. In our country today, our leaders are accusing those of us who are agitating for honest and transparent governance of being traitors to the country. They call us anarchists, criminals, and merchants of chaos. They are questioning our patriotism. You have all seen the government and its horde of propagandists threatening the Ford Foundation and others because they may have helped civil society keep the lights on, and investigative journalists to have the capacity to continue to do the Lord’s work of investigating criminality in government. As though citizens are so dumb and ignorant, that they cannot see what is going on. The reason why millions of Calvins in this country will never graduate from college and earn a decent living is not because of the Ford Foundation. No. It is because of the thieves we have in office today, like the ones in Turkana County. In this post, I copy our leaders, the President and his deputy. I copy them because I want them to help Kenyans understand the following conundrum, about crime and criminals. There is nothing so special or peculiar about criminals or where they pop up. There are criminals in the US, Canada, France, and other places. Just like we have criminals in Kenya. The difference between banana republics and failed states, and civilized societies, is WHAT we do to and about criminals. In civilized societies, criminals are prosecuted and punished heavily. They are shunned. In some places, those charged with serious crimes such as corruption are executed. These are societies that are committed to sending the message that corruption, which robs citizens of their rights, is not acceptable. And they demonstrate this commitment by heavily punishing those who steal from the most vulnerable in society. In Kenya, we see the opposite. Criminals are exalted. They are promoted and embraced in government. It was just last week that the president unveiled his nominees for his Cabinet. Among them, are the likes of Hassan Ali Joho, EGH. , @GovWOparanya , and Davis Chirchir, ALL people who have been accused or charged with massive corruption against Kenyans. And am sure you remember that I mentioned Koli Nanok, EGH. , the man who tried to steal KSH 5 billion in his last days in office. Would you believe it if I told you that he works in government, at State House? He plunded billions of your money, got no measurable improvement in the lives of his subjects, and now has a government job in State House. Let that sink in. And so, the question is, how is it that in a country of 55 million people, with thousands of highly qualified people who have never ever stolen from Kenyans, he ends up with the criminals and thieves in the government, despite the fact that their crimes are in the public domain? How is this possible? Is it possible that these thieves possess a certain unique ability to run government, save Kenyans billions, and solve problems in a way that the president performs a cost-benefit analysis, and the benefits outweigh the costs of their theft? If not, what message does it send to Kenyans, when their own president puts into office known thieves? I think that is a fair question, don’t you? Dr. Ekuru Aukot Rigathi Gachagua William Samoei Ruto, PhD Okiya Omtatah Okoiti Citizen TV Kenya Nation Breaking News TI-Kenya CNN County Government of Turkana

Bonnie Mwangi, CPA, LLM, MBA

107,519 views • 2 years ago

"How do you know you can trust what [a non-human intelligence is] saying?" ~Bigelow Bigelow/Knapp 2: If I Was President, I'd Tell the World We Have Non-Human Craft and Bodies "The President that took on the challenge of Disclosure and of confirmation...is gonna go down in history as having really accomplished something." ~Bigelow Do China and Russia also have non-human bodies and craft? "Oh yeah, freaking yes!" ~Bigelow ~ "You've opened up Pandora's box." ~Bigelow ~ 17:44 (I'm using the KLAS YT video for time stamps. As you'll see, I add a lot to these, so they take forever to put together.) George Knapp (GK): "Would you guess - based on what you know about the topic and how it's been handled over the decades - would you guess that [Trump] had been briefed, or that any other presidents have been briefed? You know that Bill Clinton was not, even though he expressed an interest in it. So at some point, the President has to be told, 'No, we can't tell ya.'" Robert Bigelow (RB): "I think Bush Sr. knew quite a bit because he was the head of the CIA." (Dr. Eric Davis says Bush. Sr. told him some interesting things, including that he (Bush) was partially briefed in 1976 about the alleged 1964 Holloman AFB landing and meeting, and more, when he first became the director of the CIA in 1976. Watch Davis explain it, here. ) ~ RB: "I think Nixon did." (We have the Jackie Gleason story, where Nixon allegedly snuck away from his Secret Service detail and took Gleason to see non-human bodies at Homestead Air Force Base. But that was a claim from his ex-wife, and Gleason, who died in 1987, never said anything about it, on the record. The controversial Larry Warren (Rendlesham) claims Gleason told him the same story, but that's it.) Bigelow: "I think Eisenhower did. So, it's kind of hit and miss over historic...over the period of history as to who has and who hasn't." 18:20 Knapp: "Can you tell us what would be in the briefing document that you left behind? Was it cases? Here's a wave of UFOs, here's a case, here was a crash. Anything like that?" Bigelow: "Yeah, I related conversations I have had with General De Brouwer, who was the chief of the Air Force for Belgium. And there was a very interesting flap that was about 18 months long (1989-1990) with triangular craft. And he was in command of all the Air Force, and he really chased the heck out of these. "And he told me, he said, Bob, 'I'm just burning fuel, and it makes no sense.' He said, 'We're gonna stop because we're not getting anywhere. All we're doing is getting closer, you know, photographs and things, but we're not getting anywhere. We're not getting any information that is really valuable for us to understand anything.'" (I wonder if those were OUR triangles? If so, it's still a solid case/flap of anomalous craft. Dick D'Amato was a longtime (18 years) senior staffer for Senate Democratic Leader Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.) "Dick D'Amato has returned from Belgium where he met with Colonel De Brouwer, a 'very interesting fellow.' Dick’s conclusion, again, is that the triangular objects are very plain human craft. ~Jacques Vallée's Forbidden Science Volume 4 - November 1992 And then we have this... Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "We hear about all these people on military bases seeing triangles, and you're doing this study, AAWSAP, to try to figure out the physics of how to do that. Do you think it's already been achieved by the U.S. government, or it hasn't, and that's why AAWSAP had a lot of value." Lacatski: "[three-second pause] It hasn't been achieved to its full extent." Video... ~~~ RB: "And I gave [Trump] other examples of where large amounts of witnesses were involved, and so that he could read about these particular [incidents]. And, of course, the one with Fife Simington in '97 was so interesting. Because there you had a governor who was an actual witness, and he made a joke of it on and brought a guy in an alien suit on stage because he was scared to death." GK: "It's the Phoenix Lights case." (Great case for Bigelow to show Trump.) RB: "The Phoenix Lights, which weren't just lights, it was actually friggin' craft, and it came from northern Arizona. I think it started, actually, in southern Nevada, is where the craft began. In the Henderson area (not far from me. ~Joe), I think, somewhere in there. And, so you see this huge triangular craft, gigantic craft, going slowly, and [Symington] was scared to death. "But finally, fast forward 10 years later, and he confesses that he was an eyewitness, but he didn't know what to do. So he was there at a point in time when the dynamic of disclosure could have been forced, and actually, confirmation could have been from a governor of the state like that. He was a credible guy. "So we've had many [incidents] like that in the early 50s, flying over the White House and the Capitol building. We've had so many of those. So, in my report, I included a lot of very dramatic, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt kind of witnesses of exhibitions." GK: "Did you share with him anything about your knowledge of a classified program?" RB: "No." GK: "You got a Top-Secret security clearance, right?" RB: "Yeah" GK: "It was for the AAWSAP program for BAASS." RB: "Right." GK: "Operated under the DIA." RB: "Yeah." GK: "You learned a lot during that program. It's the largest accumulation of UFO info. of any government-funded UFO program ever." RB: "Yeah." GK: "You didn't tell him about it." RB: "It wasn't credible enough, I felt, for him." (Someone on here watched this interview and told me that Bigelow said the AAWSAP data wasn't credible. That is NOT what he said. Not credible enough for Trump, is what he said. And if you read "Skinwalkers at the Pentagon" or listen any of Lacatki's interviews where he talks about UFOs being under a paranormal umbrella, I think Bigelow made the right decision for an 11-minute briefing for someone (Trump) who seems to be struggling (at least in public comments) with the reality of the basics.) RB: "[The AAWSAP data is] just something pertaining to me. And whereas, these other examples are historic, and they're in a lot of literature, they're very famous. The amount of witnesses were huge. We operated under a private situation with the Skinwalker Ranch, and he wouldn't relate to...well, we all had hitchhikers, we all took things home with us. You know, we all saw a lot of stuff. Whether it was at the ranch or where we lived, it didn't make any difference where in the United States we lived. We saw a lot of things, but that wouldn't be relevant for him to be able to relate to that, right?" GK: "Well." RB: "So, why talk about it?" GK: "Yeah, I mean, you know, you're kind of jumping into the deep end of the pool when you get into hitchhikers and skinwalkers." RB: "Yeah." GK: "Maybe for your first big conversation on this topic, that might not be the place to go." RB: "No, you know. And I couldn't even...if he said, 'Oh, I need a beer (Knapp laughs),' I couldn't even give him something to drink. You know, maybe stronger than that. So, I didn't wanna do any, you know." 22:15 GK: "You used the term non-human intelligence in the sentence you gave him. Hey, try this as you're climbing aboard Air Force One. Say that to media, and then, you know, close the door." RB: "Right." GK: "You said non-human intelligence, not ET. Are they the same, and did you share anything with him about what you think it is?" RB: "Well, there have been reports of humans on board, right? But the non-human are more interesting. I mean, if a human's on board and he or she has free reign of the craft, that's pretty damn interesting, right? And you don't know where those people are when they're not on board." (I wonder what cases he's talking about? Travis Walton reported seeing humans with non-humans and John Keel wrote about humans being seen onboard craft.) ~ Bigelow: "But the other ones are...some are scary, you know? It's not surprising, that, in the Universe, everything is [not] gonna look like us. Every intelligent organism is [not] going to look like us. But you have to have... It's also a matter of respect for any really intelligent animal or creature, whatever it is, right? And the more advanced, the more respect because you don't know what they know, and you don't know the future. And they may know. They may know more than just the now." (In interviews (which I can't find right now), Bigelow has hinted at an unstoppable, not-so-rosy future for mankind. Have people in the Legacy programs told him that the NHI have warned us about our doomed future or some cataclysmic event? Or, has Bigelow encountered these non-humans (or humans) and had them make claims about our future?) ~ 23:34 GK: "If you were to have a second conversation with him, would you explain that ET is one idea, but it's not necessarily the only option for a non-human intelligence that's out there?" RB: "You have to tell me first how much time do I have with the second conversation?" GK: "[laughs] Let's make it an hour. You have an hour with the President. What would you tell them about who they are, who they might be?" RB: "Umm... So, I would try to get into the complexity of the relationship. That once you've had confirmation, you know, you've given that text of that little sentence I wrote and quoted there, and you start to go down the path of disclosure, where it's more than than just FLIR videos, and you're seeing other things that are much more crystal clear, you know, in video. "Or, legitimate people in places that you recognize these people, and they're around something, or with some thing, or somebody that's a holy cow, that's wow, you know. That's a very dramatic kind of disclosure about something landing on the lawn somewhere, you know." (I have no idea what he's talking about. Anybody else able to decipher that? Is he saying that there's evidence (that he's seen?) of people that we know (a President or head of state?) hanging with a non-human or next to a downed or landed craft?) RB: "So I think what I would have spent time doing is talking about, how do you establish: You've been in 80 years of denial as a nation, and the world. We have countries who are very upfront, and others that are also in denial. Now you wanna pivot 180 degrees. How do you start that relationship? How do you do that? "And it's not as though that we've ever been in control. We haven't been in control of anything, ever, for this 80 years of modern history. Nothing. We have no ability to control anything." GK: "That's a tough thing to tell the President, right? I would think that would be a tough thing for a President to accept." RB: "Well, you're giving me an hour to talk to him, you said." GK: "[laughs] Yeah, okay." RB: "So I'm using my hour." GK: "All right." 25:46 RB:" So, yeah! So, that's a really intriguing thing is: How do you do that, where do you start? And into a relationship? And I would say more like, well, I would wanna start with, the biggest question I would ask, I would say, what I wanna get from them is... My first question is: What are the chances we are gonna survive ourselves? That we are not going to annihilate ourselves. "Because they already are familiar with a whole lot of other species on a lot of other worlds or other planets. So, chances are they have a pretty good idea of percentage." (That assumes a lot, since we have no idea how long they've been around, what they've seen, or where they're from. Unless...Mr. Bigelow has seen evidence that relates to those questions or heard it from folks who work in the Legacy programs?) RB: "And it's not that we're a spiritual species. You talk to people that have near-death experiences; they're changed for the rest of their life. They've become a spiritual person of a caliber that they've never been. "Well, we're a long way, as an average, from that category, from that level. There are monsters among us, as human beings, and they're angelic people among us. So we are a danger to another species, we're potentially the Klingons. We have a technological maturity that is not just going on a line, but it's vertical and it's segmented because it's jumping. "And meanwhile, our spiritual maturity just bumps along the bottom, you know? So, we look at the 20th century; 60 million people were killed. Are we ever gonna get beyond that? So, the thing of it is, we know so little about how to have a relationship. I'm not in any position to really advise, except for the few ideas I have as to where to start, and the how is really super important. 27:49 "It's not gonna be like a 'Close Encounter of the Third, Kind,' which was a really cool movie. And it's not gonna be because of SETI. You know, it's gonna be by some other kinds of means that you're embarking on. And I'm interested in that kind of research." 28:06 GK: "We go back to your meeting with the President. You walk into the Oval Office, they clear off the Resolute Desk, you spread out your seven piles of stuff, and you start making a presentation about each one, in particular about ET, non-human intelligence. You can't say what he said to you. Can you say whether he asked questions? Was he curious?" RB: "He was distracted by other things. So, he also asked me... He did ask questions, but he asked questions about other stuff that wasn't necessarily just on what I was talking about." GK: "He's getting your input on other things going on in the world." RB: "Yeah, yeah." 28:49 GK: "If you had to make a guess, would you guess that you got through to him on this issue? I mean, he hasn't stood in the doorway of Air Force One and made those remarks yet, but he has taken some pretty dramatic steps on this topic since you met with him. Do you think you made a dent?" RB: "Don't know. I advised him on something that I can measure, and he hasn't taken my advice so far on what I suggested to him, on a totally different, unrelated subject. But so far, he has not taken my advice." GK: Well, somebody seems to have got through to him, because he's been taking steps that we're seeing real results. I mean, people are either..." RB: "Well, I'm talking about an unrelated subject altogether. So, yes, there there are a couple of different task forces that are involved. So, there is an initiation of an activity in this subject, [but] it remains to be seen, though, that he gives actual presidential confirmation. I don't, I haven't... Maybe you're more aware than I am. Has that been...has he done that?" GK: "Not, not really. Nothing like what I'd call confirmation. But that's really what you're talking about. I remember us having a conversation in 2008, right after you had signed the contract with DIA for BAASS to run [AAWSAP]. And you made the case then that what we need is not Disclosure; it's confirmation." RB: "Yeah." 30:25 GK: "For somebody like the President, I'm not sure if it could be anyone less than the President that steps forward and says this, and it carries the same kind of weight." RB: "Yeah. It's a big appetizer. You know, you're looking for the entree, and where's the dessert in this whole buffet? But the confirmation is a huge appetizer to start with, and that's why I started with that in my conversation with him. Is, pushing him to try and make a confirmation. And maybe he wants to get personally more comfortable?" (I have said that I want the entire enchilada NOW, but I'm also a realist, and would take a simple confirmation that somebody else is on this planet with us. That SHOULD wake up the mainstream media and masses, but no guarantees since Trump is so controversial and people might just ignore it, IF he ever did it. I've also said that I'd surround him with people like Schumer, Rubio, Rounds and Gillibrand in order to show that it's bipartisan. And a few firsthand whistleblowers who say they worked hands on, IN one of these alleged Legacy UFO/UAP programs.) 30:57 Bigelow: "And, you know, he will go down in history for a lot of things, for better or worse, that people are on both sides of the fence about him and so forth. But he's involved in so many different things and has been, that I don't know what his legacy is gonna be, I really don't. "He has an opportunity, in this serious subject, to build a legacy using this as part of the blocks, part of the brick and the structure...the content of a structure that is very unique. So, you can have all the political programs that you want, and so forth, and nobody is gonna really remember those as time goes by, as the decades fade away. "Nobody can remember Benghazi and Afghanistan and Iraq, different kinds of things, and that's just recent history. You know, the world goes so fast. But the President that took on the challenge of Disclosure and of confirmation, and actually built a satisfactory conclusion of a relationship between human beings and that subject is gonna go down in history as having really accomplished something. And if it's handled right, it can be done successfully." (To me, it's a no brainer. His presidency would go down as one that changed the world and our species. Or course, I'm sure he has people in his ear telling him that confirmation would cause societal disruption that we're not prepared to handle, and that THAT would be his legacy.) (32:21) GK: "A lot of Presidents have made comments, often after they're out of office, on this topic. 'Yeah, gosh, I'm real interested in that.' Or, 'Wouldn't that be something?' Or, 'I think aliens could exist.' Something like that. But nothing like what you're talking about, which amounts to confirmation, saying, 'It's real. They're here. We gotta figure it out,' and stopping it there, not disclosing..." RB: "Well, the dialogue, the ability to learn something from them is huge. What can we do for you? I mean, that's where...one of the first things I would ask is, not just, are we going to survive ourselves? Yeah, that's pretty damn important. That's like, probably number one, you know? "But close behind that is: Okay, we've been aware of you for a long time, and the government's never admitted it. But us as a public, we know it, and we're really curious. Is there anything that we can do for you? Not just what can you do... I loved what John Kennedy, what he said famously: Don't ask what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. That huge. So that's giving them a kind of a respect that they deserve." (Do they deserve respect? I'm not so sure. It all depends on if they're upfront with us and tell us their true intentions. Of course, how do we know they're telling us the truth? Why have you (or some of you) been abducting us against our will, and injuring some of us? See Jim Semivan's abduction story with his wife. "I don't think [the phenomenon] cares whether it does harm. I think it may go out of its way not to do harm, but, if it does harm... "I had a hole in the back of my neck, and my wife...unexplained bleeding for 17 days." ~Former CIA Officer, Jim Semivan to Engaging The Phenomenon ~ 33:33 GK: "If you were President, would you announce that yes, we've got crash retrievals, yes, we have reverse engineering programs, and yes, we've got bodies?" RB: "Yeah, because the rest of the world already knows that. The people that count in Russia and China already know." GK: "Because they've got their own." RB: "Oh yeah, freaking yes! Yeah! They've had their missiles shut down, they've had their missiles activated. You know, depending on which country you're talking about." 33:56 GK: "Have you considered the political fallout for a President? Let's say it's Trump, because he might be the guy that would do it and just cast his fate to the winds. But, he makes an announcement: 'Yeah, they're here. Yeah, we've got programs. Yeah, we've got crashes, we've got bodies. That's as far as I'm able to go right now.' What happens to him, politically? Is he able to get anything else done?" RB: "That's more than I would have said, for him to say. What you just said." GK: "That goes too far." RB: "I wouldn't advise him to say, initially, what you just said." GK: "You just say, non-human intelligence, been here a long time, and leave it at that." RB: "Yeah, that one sentence is a starter because it's a huge canon. You've opened up Pandora's box, in terms of, 'Oh my gosh, what's gonna happen?' Okay. So now, you can categorize and segment into topics. And you need time to do that, and it needs to be digestible." ~ “I have met with people who I know are in the know. One of them told me the truth is indigestible.” ~Jim Semivan to James Iandoli ~ RB: "And it needs to be not packaged in a scary kind of way, and it can't be packaged in a way that you're divulging what you shouldn't be divulging. You know, other countries aren't, so there's reasons to have national secrets. There really are. I mean, that's kind of like common sense, right?" (Well, David Grusch claimed that some other countries aren't divulging for a specific reason." Grusch on Yes Theory: "So there are certainly friendly governments, both across the pond and say, local to where we...our landmass, that are for this. And a lot of them know that they got a raw deal with the U.S. because they were, basically, part of the secrecy, through kind of agreements like, bilateral, unilateral agreements. And they're like, you know, they kind of wanna be, 'Release me!' Like, you know, because they they do realize it was a bad deal. "With the ecosystem secrecy, some people, one of their arguments is like, 'Well how would they keep the secret?' I'm, like dude, I was cleared to some of the most nation's most sensitive programs, I used to handle the PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing). You know, I had full access to most DoD activities. And most of the stuff, BROAD programs that were enduring, have NEVER leaked. "So the U.S. and its allies are very good at keeping secrecies, to include programs that are, let's say, global in nature. And really, it's been leaking like a sieve in some weird way for many decades. Now it's been mixed in with some BS in ufology and stuff, but the general gist of it's actually been out there for a long time. It has been leaking in some sense, so." ~ 35:06 GK: "We don't want the Russians and Chinese and maybe other adversaries to know how far along we are, or are not, in configuring this out." RB: "Absolutely. Especially of that. I think that the relationship (with he phenomenon) thing is a mankind relationship. It's not just for America. When you are embarking as a President on trying to initiate a solemn relationship, you're not doing for U.S. of A. only. "And so, the...and then we probably can do a show on communication (with a non-human intelligence), but it's really complex because, who are you going to have initiate it? Are you going to have politicians initiate? Are you going to have military people? Because everybody has kind of their own mindset. Are you gonna have a bunch of lawyers initiate it? Are you gonna have scientists only, initiate it? (And what if we're dealing with more than one non-human intelligence? Who do we communicate with? And what if it's one intelligence pretended to be multiple? How would we even figure that out?) "[Hynek] cited the 'poltergeist' phenomena experienced by some...after a close encounter; the fact that some witnesses develop psychic abilities after an encounter. 'Do we have two aspects of one phenomenon or two different sets of phenomena?'" ~J. Allen Hynek ~ RB: "And how do you know to whom you're talking? You know, how do you know you can trust what they're saying?" (I'm so glad he said that. We don't, and we don't.) RB: "Because it depends on the form of communication, and what are you asking for in the way of proof or demonstrations to establish trust, both ways, in the communication process?" "Because, we haven't had that happen before. It is totally new ground, and frankly, we need The Others' help. We need the help of The Others to help, to guide us." (Firs off, it MAY have happened within these Legacy programs. And, if we don't know who we're talking to, or if we can trust them, why would we enlist the help of The Others? Doesn't seem to make sense to me.)

Joe Murgia

47,347 views • 8 days ago

💥 LAP Alert 💥 "I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed." ~Knapp Is Lacatski Lying to Us About the Craft and Breaching the Hull? ~ "If not for that [2017 NYT] story about AATIP and the problems that [Lacatski] saw with it, he would never have mentioned [AAWSAP]...I don't think, ever." ~Knapp (So, in other words...thank you from the UFO community, to the NYT, for getting it wrong? 🙂) ~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "Should we listen to Dr. James Lacatski on UFOs, on the fact, or the idea, that our government has at least one, he's admitted, and we breached the hull? Should we listen to him, George?" George Knapp: "I know a lot of people have noticed that he's talked about his role in counterintelligence as part of the AAWSAP program. And because they equate counterintelligence with lies, false info., cover stories, misdirection. Aha! He's putting out a bunch of false info. a decade after he retired from government service." (I saw one person suggest that, and I thought it was a questionable take...) Grant Lavac: "Given that Dr. James Lacatski was the 'counterintelligence coordinator' for AAWSAP, how much confidence can we invest in the veracity of his public statements that 'at least one recovered craft of unknown origin, a flying machine with no wings, no engine, no fuel, and no fuel tanks' is in the possession of the US government and that they had 'breached the hull' of the UFO? In the context of the counterintelligence value of UAP/UFO, his comments in this most recent interview on WEAPONIZED (edited for brevity) only raise more questions for me." ~~~ Knapp: "A, it's not [Lacatski]. He's not out there beating the bushes. He's talked to us, but that's pretty much it. He's telling the full story as much as he can in a series of books. And I was co-author on two of those, not on this one. And, you know, I remember the first time I met him, it was in 2018." ~ (In April of 2019, Knapp shared that story, minus Lacatski's name, at UFO MegaCon. Knapp in 2019: "I thought today I would share with you, sort of the informational foundation that I’ve acquired. So, one year ago, I made this trip to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Senator Harry Reid. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2018 and I already knew a little bit about AATIP and AAWSAP and what they’ve been studying and where the money came from and how the program was created. I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed. And if there was ever actually, anybody following me, they must have thought I looked ridiculous because it was way over the top. "But I ended up having to meet with Senator Reid and some other people who were directly involved in these programs and they gave me a download. And I thought I knew a lot about these programs when I went there and realized that I only knew a little tiny bit. The purpose of this was to learn about these programs. We all know about AATIP, but in reality, there was something before that. "I sat down for a couple of hours with Senator Reid and other people whose names, they don’t want to be known. They brought me up to speed on how AATIP was created. How its predecessor was under way for a number of years. It coexisted for a long time. People in this room. People who investigate this topic may have suspected for a long time that there was some kind of a program that still existed. We’ve all heard that Project Bluebook was the end. 1969 it ended and the government was done with UFOs. They closed up shop. And the reason they closed it down is because there was no evidence that it involved national security. "And we all knew that was baloney because of the stories that we’ve seen that are really well documented. For example, UFOs over nuclear missile bases. UFO encounters with the military installations and atomic facilities. Things of that sort the have been well documented over the years. There are cases that involved national security. So at the end of Blue Book, of course, this memo said, alright, any cases involving national security will continue to be investigated in the regular way. Well, what the heck was the regular way? We didn’t know. Well now we do know. At least a little bit of it." (Project Blue Book was shut down in December of 1969, but a few months earlier, in October, we had the Bolender memo, which noted that "reports of UFOs which could affect national security should continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose." What standard Air Force procedure? The regular way? Where did those cases go? We still don't know what Bolender was referring to in that memo.) ~ Knapp in 2019: "And one of the regular ways was this program called AATIP. So I went on this trip. [and] I learned this stuff about AATIP. I had known a lot about it before but I got this briefing about this alphabet soup of different programs, how they began and what they studied. December 2017, the New York Times breaks this story about AATIP. Now, I had known about it for a long time because I lived in Las Vegas. I knew Bob Bigelow. I knew Harry Reid. We’d talk about UFO stuff and what was going on. "So when I was told the New York Times was gonna break the story, I’m kind ticked off about it. Because hey, I’ve been sitting on this for a long time. Why don’t I get to break the story? And they had to, one after another, gently remind me, 'You know. You’re not the New York Times.' Which I had to admit! It was true. And if I had done the story, the Times had said that they weren’t going to do it if somebody else breaks it. So, if I had done it, it’d be another story from a UFO reporter. "The New York Times did it and they changed everything. Because they did it, wider organizations did it. Some of them took shots at the New York Times because The Times got the story and they didn’t. But that story was accurate, to a degree. But the story that it told was not the full story. AATIP, that we know about…the AATIP that studies nuts and bolts saucers…case of UFOs that have encounters with military units such as the USS Nimitz, that is studied by a group of people, Lue Elizondo was the head of it. "It’s not so much a program as it was a loose network of intelligence officials in different agencies, including the Air Force and the Navy, CIA, DIA, DARPA…there might be a couple of other agencies. But a case would come in from any one of their units [and] it would be shared with this group of people, analysis would be done, evidence would be looked at and then stashed in a draw and nobody ever sees it. It’s not passed up the chain of command. "In 2007, that changed. One of the guys (Lacatski. ~Joe 2025) I met with in this meeting in Washington is the one who changed it. He had been in the same position that Lue Elizondo had been in. And his name is just not out there. He grew frustrated with what was happening with the phenomenon and he suspected that UFOs flying around the sky, buzzing our military units every once in a while, is not the full story. Even if you could solve that part of the mystery it wouldn’t solve the bigger part of the picture. "So he grew interested in Skinwalker Ranch and he had read the (Knapp/Kelleher – 'Hunt For The Skinwalker') book. And after he read it, he called up Bob Bigelow and said…actually, he wrote him a letter and said, 'Hey, can I go to the ranch…go look around? I’m with the DIA.' Bigelow says, 'Come on out to Las Vegas and I’ll take you there.' And that’s what happened. He flew to Las Vegas. They flew on Bigelow’s jet. They went to the ranch. "This guy’s not there fifteen minutes and he has an experience. And I’m not gonna go into detail. I’m hoping that he’s going to maybe come forward at some point and describe his experience. But it was just for him. Of all the people in this room, in the encounter, he was the only one who could see it. He’s the only one who had an angle on this thing that appeared. And he’s pretending that he’s not seeing it but it’s right out of the corner of his eye. And he doesn’t say anything until he leaves the ranch. And he gets off and he asks Bigelow if he had seen it. And he had not. The other people who had been in the room had not seen it. "He flies back to Las Vegas, goes back to Washington, D.C. and looks up Harry Reid and tells him about it. Now Reid had some experience in these matters that I’ll get into in a little bit. But as a result of that conversation, Reid, who had an interest in UFOs and had maintained that interest over many years – and I can attest to that personally – called in a couple of his friends in the Senate – Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens. They had a conversation in a secure room and they decided to provide some funding for a much broader study. Something that looked at…beyond flying saucers, that looked at other paranormal aspects…supernatural aspects that we would not normally associate with aliens or ETs. Assuming that that’s what this is, which I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. And that is how AAWSAP was born. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program." ~~~ Knapp Yesterday: "The only reason [Lacatski] came forward, he was ticked off about how AATIP had been described in major media reports, and no mention had been given to the actual, real program. That one that had a $22 million budget, lasted 27 months, and which put together the biggest UFO data warehouse in history, that had written all these papers that still have not been released." (In the most-recent interview (Part 1) with Weaponized, Lacatski let it fly with his issues related to the 2017 NYT article: "The initial reporting...by the New York Times story in 2017 was totally inaccurate. Contrary to what some people claim, the authors knew my name and position at AAWSAP, yet never attempted to contact me. Likewise, the The Washington Post. POLITICO (laughs) contacted me within hours after the articles were published in the free publications, asking for my opinion. They knew my name, they had my phone number. Why didn't they contact me [beforehand]?" ~Dr. James Lacatski on Weaponized ~ Knapp: "So, Jim was a counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, but in this role. He wasn't putting out cover stories or lies, he didn't put out anything. The world didn't hear that AAWSAP existed until years later, at least by that name. There was one statement made to the press about that program. It was by Robert Bigelow, whose company, BAASS, got the contract. A week after he signed it, he came on with me on Coast to Coast AM and said, 'We got this program dealing with UFOs, we have an unnamed partner, and we're excited to get going.' That was it. "Jim Lacatski wasn't putting out PR releases about AAWSAP. There was nothing. That was the last thing anybody said until the New York Times did the AATIP story, and then Jim Lacatski felt the real story was being covered up. If not for that story about AATIP and the problems that he saw with it, he would never have mentioned this. I don't think ever." (Well, then, thank you to the NYT journalists and editors for pissing off Lacatski!) Knapp: "You'll recall, AAWSAP, at the time that things went downhill, that the funding was moved away, they were trying to make it into a SAP, a Special Access Program. And if it had happened, we probably would never have heard of it. If it had happened, Lue Elizondo would have been the counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, that he had already talked to Lacatski. "But Lacatski is not proclaiming the greatness of the program. He's not out there beating the bushes on podcasts and newscasts, other than with us, and he never put out in counterintelligence. His role, counterintelligence, meant something different for AAWSAP. The thing that DIA had told him was, 'Look, you know, it's not a rogue program. I know it gets weird into some of the phenomena that was at Skinwalker Ranch and other places. We don't care. Here's what we care about: Don't let the secret out. We don't want to see this on the front page of the Washington Post. We want it kept secret.' (John Greenewald was one person questioning whether AAWSAP was actually a prosaic program and Lacatski just decided to go rogue with a foray into UFOs and the paranormal.) Greenewald Tweet: "Did the U.S. government really sanction this, and if so, is this really how it was run? Or was this a rogue operation by a select few on the inside playing with Uncle Sam's coffers?" (Greenewald was quote tweeting a Greenstreet hit-piece video on AAWSAP. In his interview on Weaponized aired over the past few weeks, Lacatski said that former Deputy Director of AARO, Tim Phillips, also used the "rogue" word when describing AAWSAP. Did DIA really not know what AAWSAP was about? Did Lacatski go rogue and turn a program that was supposed to look at prosaic, advanced technology into one that studied UFOs and the paranormal? Here's an exchange from the 2023 interview Knapp and Corbell did with Lacatski and Colm Kelleher.) Kelleher: "The critical part of AAWSAP that we tried to convey in 'Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,' was that there were two fundamental, parallel tracks that AAWSAP ran on. The first one was the examination of UFO performance. And, you know, the UFO performance part was getting all of the data from eyewitnesses, plus deploying sensors into the field, in order to gather data on the performance of UFOs. That was track number one. And track number two was: What effects do UFOs have on humans? That was a parallel track that, from the get go, AAWSAP decided, unambiguously, to run both tracks in parallel. We documented psychological effects, and then we also documented paranormal effects." Lacatski: "Anything can be said on the internet it seems, factual or not. Well, one thing that is not factual is, DIA knew what it was getting into in regard to both aspects that Colm just described to you. And let me end my statement right here. We had no choice but to pursue both aspects." (That was a poor way of him saying: The claim that DIA was unaware of AAWSAP looking into all aspects of UFOs, including the paranormal, is NOT true.) Lacatski: "I want to emphasize something I said on my first and only interview. It was a closed program. It operated very similar to a SAP. The director, the director of analysis, and my office chief...and, of course, division chief, knew about this program. No one else did. Now, I was also protected by the stovepipe nature of that. I did not have to address political-type questions. I was insulated, but they were, too. There was no one else. People in the surrounding cubicles didn't know. Nothing was purposely being hid. It was a closed, stovepipe system, and it needed to be. It needed to be operated that way." ~~~ Knapp: "And so, Jim Lacatski took it on himself, put it in his own hands. He and Colm Kelleher interviewed all these people who applied for the jobs, the 50 full-time positions that they staffed, in a matter of months. They did background checks, they required security clearances for all those people, and they were worried about leaks. They didn't want information to get out. "They also were concerned about espionage by foreign players, by foreign companies, things of that sort. And some of that really did happen. As Jim has shared with us, there were a couple of phones that were transmitters that were found inside Bigelow Aerospace, inside the Bigelow, uh, facilities, and it was very alarming because they weren't sure who was doing it. I think they think it was a foreign government. I'm not going to say which one, uh, they suspected the most." (Lacatski said that the phones in question were made in China.) Knapp: "But, and then they also found weird frequencies emanating from Skinwalker Ranch. That's not strange, and there's a lot of unusual stuff that happens there, but it was some sort of a an espionage program that they believed was was not only looking at the ranch, but also at BAASS. "That was his primary concern. He was worried that the story gets out, because secrecy was of paramount interest to the heads of DIA and he's worried about the information getting out to the public. Because once it happened, then the knives come out in the Pentagon and within the intelligence community, which is kind of what happened. A memo was sent from Harry Reid's office, let other people know that AAWSAP existed, and that's when things started getting problematic." Corbell: "The bugging thing. So, it's not just like Bigelow Aerospace was tapped with something, he said, specifically, AAWSAP, right? So they were looking at that new UFO program. And I don't know how public this is, but he did say it was - not just him, other people have all said - it was multiple nations, multiple, different devices from those phones. And he also said that they worked with FBI, they had FBI liaisons looking at the ranch property, and also at Bigelow Aerospace. "Because, remember, they were supposed to receive a transfer of materials. That's why they reverse, reverse engineered (laughs), you know, they built everything to be able to hold SCIF-capable and material-capable property at that classification level. So, look, I think if we pull it back, the whole idea is, James Lacatski made a statement at some point that he was, you know, head of, or part of, or running the counterintelligence for AAWSAP. But his point was to keep AAWSAP itself secret from foreign nations. So then he has to keep it secret from the U.S. He did it. He did a great job. They actually kept it secret. That doesn't mean he's going out and creating false information to the public like he's been accused of. "So, should we listen to Jim Lacatski? That was like, you know, the main question. Oh, one second. He also identified that there is currently a counter-programming, counterintelligence operation going on to the American public, but not against the American public, by AARO." (In other words, spread misinformation to the American public so they can advance their goal of misinforming and confusing our adversaries who are always listening. National security! IMO, that's only acceptable if we're talking specifics related to propulsion, technology and weapons that can be used to give us a leg up on said adversaries. But everything else should come out and be made public. We shouldn't be told a bunch of lies about information we paid for and that could, potentially, give us some clarity about our species and other lifeforms on this planet.) Corbell: That was so clear in our interview with him that he said that, you know, 'Look, they're acting this way. They are telling you lies about AAWSAP and what happened.' And that's why he said, 'My books, I'm a government employee. This was paid by taxpayers. I'm trying to give you information.' And that's what his books are. "So it's clear from these rounds of interviews that we just had with Dr. Lacatski that he supports a controlled UFO disclosure. He made that very clear. So should we listen to what he has to say? I mean, he was a big dog, right, George?" Knapp: "He was the head of the largest U.S. government-funded UFO investigation in history, that we know of. He worked with Colm Kelleher, who was the boots-on-the-ground guy in Las Vegas. He worked with Jay Stratton. Stratton's role in the development of AAWSAP has not been really fully explored, but he's got a book coming out at some point, once it gets through the DOPSR process. But then we'll get additional information to buttress what Lacatski has said."

Joe Murgia

56,558 views • 9 months ago

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician. I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build. Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky. Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that. Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see. The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more. Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule. The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems. Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company. My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition. I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture. In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him. At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay. I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around. His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful. Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals. Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform. Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously. Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun. Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic. I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly. I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days. Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness. I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does. Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed. I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit. Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life. I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride. 🫡

Esther Crawford ✨

5,499,137 views • 3 years ago

"I may be wrong about Elizondo...but I think that the rush to condemn him strikes me as premature [and], potentially, damaging to the community and to the disclosure effort." ~Dolan (This is WAY too long, and I probably should have spent my time on something else. But here it is. The video clips give you a taste of Richard Dolan's excellent 31-minute video.) "The theory that's been put out (by Gerb) contains, at least in my view, substantial problems of evidence, of chronology, and, at times, I just have to say, basic logic." ~Dolan "I am suggesting that Elizondo probably helped to create the opening that allowed Grusch to go even further." ~Dolan ~~~ Gerb in March: "When did Lue Elizondo start talking about crash retrievals? That was after David Grusch went public. You will not find him speaking about it beforehand." (As I've shown before, that's just not true. Did Gerb not do his research on that? I'll share A LOT of quotes from this Richard Dolan (Richard Dolan Intelligent Disclosure) podcast, and from my previous posts detailing the various times Lue has addressed crash retrievals. Plus, my take on various points. Dolan starts out by praising Gerb's research. I agree. Then he moves on to the Lue-was-brought-in-by Clapper claim.) Dolan: "The theory that's been put out (by Gerb) contains, at least in my view, substantial problems of evidence, of chronology, and, at times, I just have to say, basic logic." Dolan: Gerb claims Elizondo had to adapt his public position on crash retrievals because Grusch coming forward changed the game. "Gerb called this, adapt or die. "I think I understand what [Gerb] means by the controlled narrative and what it was intended to reveal and what it was supposed to hide (crash retrievals). What I still do NOT understand is why anyone protecting a retrieval program would initiate this type of a strategy." Dolan: Before 2017, one of the most significant protections for any alleged Legacy program was ridicule, silence and ignoring. "As long as UFOs remained culturally disreputable, any claims of crash retrievals were easily just brushed aside without any bother to investigate. That didn't change until December of 2017," and the two NYT articles. "That kickstarted a major, mainstream, national-security discussion. "So, if this was a controlled-disclosure program, my question simply is: You get the government, eventually admitting, that non-human intelligence seem to be operating advanced craft here, who could not know that the next questions would be inevitable? Like, have any of these crashed? Were any of these recovered? Where did the material go? Who's been studying it? In other words, this would, obviously, increase pressure on the retrieval secret. It would not protect it in any logical way. The most safest option would have to be continued silence. "Maybe this strategy could become plausible if insiders believed that something was about to emerge beyond their control, right? Some kind of trigger. Maybe there would be an imminent whistleblower that we do not know about 'til this day, that they were afraid of and they wanted to get out ahead of the narrative. Or some kind of foreign disclosure. Some other reason, some other cause that would prompt the secret keepers to think, 'Okay, we need to get out a controlled disclosure.' But, there really is no evidence that's presented, in any of Gerb's analysis, for such a triggering event. Why would the custodians of this secret, voluntarily, weaken the whole system that had protected them for decades and decades?" (Agree. I've had this convo with friends over the years about the theory that TTSA was created to get ahead of a disclosure effort that was coming from someone/somewhere else. But it never made sense because we could never find anything (disclosure-wise) that was happening before 2017 that would force the hand of the gatekeepers into starting some type of controlled disclosure such as what TTSA was allegedly doing. Except maybe... Dolan talks about how, when Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2015 and 2016, she mentioned UFOs and UAP in various interviews on the campaign trail. Dolan: That was gradually making UFOs, "slightly, and I would say, very slightly, becoming more acceptable to discuss." Plus, John Podesta (her campaign manager) was pushing for declassification of UFO files. "There were people at that time who really did believe that Hillary Clinton would become the Disclosure president." (I wanted to vote 3rd party in 2016 and didn't want to vote for Hillary, but did so, in part, in the hopes (slim hopes) that she would engage in some sort of disclosure, if she won.) Dolan: "I've always interpreted [Hillary talking UFOs during her campaign] as a much more, just pragmatic, you could almost say, cynical, if you want, treatment of the [UFO] subject, just to win some votes. The most that she ever said as a candidate, I think was, she would try to get to the bottom of this, whatever that means." (Well, she said more than that... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ “I think we may have been (visited already). We don’t know for sure.” ~Hillary Clinton That was covered in the NYT in 2015 My full post on that Hillary quote is here. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ And let's not forget the photo of Hillary from August 1995 where she's with Laurance Rockefeller on his ranch and holding Paul Davies' book, "Are We Alone? Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life." She and President Clinton have an interest in this subject.) ~~~ Dolan: "I just think that the leap from a political opportunity - talking about UFOs during the campaign - to a kind of, James Clapper-managed disclosure operation? I just don't think that's been demonstrated and I don't find it very persuasive." ~~~ Dolan then gets back to this claim by Gerb... Gerb in March: "When did Lue Elizondo start talking about crash retrievals? That was after David Grusch went public (in 2023). You will not find him speaking about it beforehand." Dolan: Gerb said that, "Elizondo, essentially, avoided discussing crash retrievals, except for Roswell, And that is just not accurate." (The Lue-avoided-crash-retrievals-until-Grusch quote from Gerb in March didn't include an exception about Roswell so maybe Gerb saw my posts on that and updated his claim? But it's still wrong. Dolan brought up Lue's comments on Tucker Carlson in May of 2019, but no other comments from Lue. I covered that and much more in various posts, which I'll share here.) Did Lue Avoid Talking About Crash Retrievals Before Grusch Went Public in 2023? From the 12/16/17 NYT article that started it all. "Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, [BAASS] modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena." (Not a direct quote, and not exactly "crash retrievals of vehicles" but the seed had been planted in that first article. We know now (allegedly) that at least one of those buildings was supposed to store exotic materials that Lockheed was going to divest itself from, but the CIA nixed it all. Again, allegedly.) ~May of 2019~ Tucker Carlson: "Do you believe, based on your decade of serving in the U.S. government, on this question, that the U.S. government has in its possession any material from one of these aircrafts?" Lue: "Whoa. Umm…I do, yes." Tucker Carlson: "You think the U.S. government has debris from a UFO in its possession right now?" Lue: "Unfortunately, Tucker, I really have to be careful of my NDA. I really can’t go into a lot of…more detail than that." Tucker Carlson: "Okay." (And that could have been the end of the interview. But Lue decided to add this.) Lue: "But…simply put, yes." ~ NYT article in July of 2020... "Mr. Elizondo is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study." ~ "My personal belief in Roswell? 100%. But I cannot speak officially and I cannot discuss about anything else that may or may not have transcribed." ~Lue on "Disclosure Tonight in Feb. 2021 Source: ~ Lue on Clubhouse in July of 2021 Lue: "Am I aware of the notion that there was some sort of retrieval of biological samples? Yes, I am aware of that notion. Am I aware that there may have been some U.S. government involvement in that? Yes, I am aware of that as well. I am aware that people have talked about it and I have heard it as well...regarding, anecdotally, of biological recovery." Source and longer transcript... ~ Lue on Dossier X in April of 2021 Lue: "You said something...that (Roswell) was the 1st time the U.S. gov't was engaged, and I'll share with you, that may not necessarily be true. There may be anecdotal information that indicates that perhaps the U.S. government was involved even before that, in purported, recovery-type activities." Host: "You mean probably 1942, in Los Angeles or something?" Lue: "I don't wanna elaborate, yet. I think some information's gonna come to light here, probably pretty soon, about some interesting incidents. Again, it's not up to me...there are some people out there are willing to come forward, I think. I'm just providing you the information that was indicated to me. I think we need to be careful jumping to presumptions or assumptions that Roswell was the first event similar to what we're thinking about." Source: ~ "I think people would be surprised to know there's more to Roswell than I think most people are aware of. Some people are aware of it. But, you know, there's more to Roswell and there's other similar incidents that are equally compelling." ~Lue on UFO Garage in 2022 Source: ~~~ March of 2022 - My Interview with Lue Murgia: "You said you believe Roswell was real. Are you as confident in other incidents as you are with Roswell?" Lue: "Yeah." Murgia: "Yes?" Lue: "Yeah." Murgia: "Okay." Lue: "Yeah." Murgia: After you were on Tucker and said you believed the U.S. government had material and debris from a UFO, "Eric Davis came out and said, '100%!' And he said landed craft, too. Did you see that when that came out?" Lue: "I'm aware of that." Murgia: "(laughs) Okay." (Probably an inappropriate laugh by me as Lue was dead serious and probably pushing the limits of what he was allowed to say in public about crash retrievals. He later said this in his November 2024 congressional testimony.) Lue in 2024: "I signed documentation three years ago that restricts my ability to discuss, specifically, crash retrievals." (I wonder what would have happened if he had refused to sign that?) ~~~ Dolan: "Grusch definitely went further (than Lue), much further, yes. That's a lot different from claiming that Elizondo kept retrievals outside the public narrative until Grusch forced his hand. And you really have to ask, if Elizondo's job was NOT to reveal the crash retrieval program, why, in 2019 - again, four years before David Grusch, is he going on and putting it out there? It just seems like there's a chronology problem there." (1000%, Richard! Makes no sense. My June 29th post was entitled... If Elizondo Was Brought in to Control the UFO Narrative Away from Crash Retrievals, He Did a Poor Job 🛸 Nice to see Richard and I on the same page with that. Richard speculates how the disclosure effort would look like right now if Lue hadn't gone public. Would we have several UAP hearings in the books by now? Would David Grusch had come forward? No way to know.) Dolan: "But I will say, or suggest, that it's entirely reasonable to think that Elizondo helped to create the institutional and cultural conditions that made someone like David Grusch possible. Elizondo did not keep retrieval out of the discussion." (In July of 2023, I directed this tweet to Lue.) "None of this would be happening without you." ~Murgia (Over the top and a bit fan-boyish? Probably. But... Knapp talking with Senator Harry Reid about Lazar and UFOs in 1989 - in a limo headed to the airport that would later bear Reid’s name - was a vital part of getting this whole thing started. Lacatski and Stratton launching the more recent effort around 2005, which eventually led to AAWSAP, AATIP and the UAPTF, was also REALLY important. But Lue going public in 2017 was MASSIVE. The media coverage that followed brought a ton of new people into the topic, and I’m not sure where we’d be today without it. Dolan goes on to talk about Clapper and how it's conceivable he would be on top of any alleged Legacy UAP/crash retrieval program. But he failed to note what Grusch said this past January on "The Megyn Kelly Show." Grusch: "General Clapper was well aware of the crash retrieval issue, managed the crash retrieval issue, and...he placed people in critical roles to manage this issue." (Is Lue one of the people Grusch was referring to? Does he have proof of that? From my own information, I have no doubt that Clapper was instrumental in Lue being connected to the UFO topic. But exactly how that went down and what did it entail? I don't know. I hope Clapper speaks to all of this in detail one day soon.) ~ Dolan: "Gerb has stated that Clapper gave cover to AATIP and, basically, directed the National Security Council retrieval activities. And that he selected Elizondo as the front man. Gerb described Clapper as the mob boss of the NSC crash-retrieval portfolio. "Those are very, very powerful allegations. I'm not saying they're NOT true, but that interview with Ross Coulthart, I would say, did not produce anything in the way that anyone would actually call evidence. Like, there was no documents...or firsthand witnesses that were named, or anything like that. "So you have this, basically, a link from Clapper, to the NSC operation, to AATIP, to Elizondo, to controlled disclosure. This could be true, but no one's seen any receipts on this, and I would like to. "And there's more things that I think raise questions about this whole scenario, frankly. I mean, I think of the Pentagon campaign against Lue Elizondo, which lasted for many years. Any theory that has Elizondo as a controlled-disclosure frontman, I think has to account for the documented, institutional effort by the Pentagon to undermine Lue Elizondo." (When the Pentagon spokespeople said that Lue had no assigned responsibilities for AATIP, it's not so clear cut to say they were trying to undermine Lue, since AAWSAP also had the nickname of AATIP, which I'll call AATIP 1. So, if we're talking about AATIP 1 (AAWSAP), Lue did NOT have any assigned responsibilities, except early on when he did some counter-intelligence. And if we're talking AATIP 2, which Stratton said he created in 2015, Knapp explained in 2019 that it was, "not so much a program as it was a loose network of intelligence officials in different agencies." And on April 8th of this year, Lacatski told Knapp that, "they started using AATIP in 2015-16 to describe their uh...what would you describe that as, more lunchtime get togethers? And George Knapp is laughing. I don't know how else to describe it." That tells me Lacatski felt AATIP was REALLY informal, and that could explain why Lue's role wasn't clear cut in the minds of those spokespeople, and why so many of my contacts told me he wasn't the director of AATIP. But those same folks also told me Lue played in an important role in that effort. My guess is that, since AATIP was so informal, there really was NO official director, but that should be clarified when Stratton's book comes out. Semantics? Maybe.) Dolan: Gerb's hypothesis featuring, "the management of an approved public representative (Lue) of a controlled-disclosure narrative...just doesn't make sense to me. What does make sense to me is something like a factional conflict. I think [that's] much more of a logical explanation for everything that we have seen. You have one group that may have supported some kind of opening - not even necessarily a complete opening - while another fought to preserve the secrecy as much as possible. "But that's a bureaucratic struggle. That's not, necessarily, a unified, controlled-disclosure operation. So I think that is a contradiction that was not really adequately discussed in this hypothesis. "I may be wrong about Elizondo, and I'm not here, again, to be his defense attorney. But I think that the rush to condemn him strikes me as premature. It strikes me also as, potentially, damaging to the community and to the disclosure effort, frankly. We can investigate serious allegations without first assigning everyone the role of either hero or villain. "So, I guess I would say that Gerb may have genuinely identified some real relationships and hidden activity. In fact, knowing his excellent research track record, I would be surprised if he didn't. "Elizondo - probably - does have undisclosed elements in his background, and I have no doubt he knows much more than he has said. When I look at the this idea of, like. you look at TTSA coming out at the end of 2016, and you see, basically, a kind of faction that had a very managed narrative indeed. Like, they did not come out and talk about crash retrievals. They did not at all. They talked about these military encounters and sensor readings and this type of thing. And that's a lot less interesting than crash retrievals. "But I try to look at it from, let's say you're a Pentagon insider and you are trying to fight for an opening in the public conversation. You're not gonna start with crash retrievals. First of all, you may not have the receipts on them yourself, to provide to the public. And also you're gonna know, right off the bat, that that's going to be a bigger hill to climb than just trying to get Congress to look at some of the more easily-verifiable reports that you probably have available. So, you're probably going to take it in a very tactical, strategic way. "That's not the same thing as saying that they're lying. It could simply be that was a strategy that was decided upon by these insiders. It's also possible they may not have believed in an uncontrolled, catastrophic disclosure. We can disagree with them on that, or you can agree with them on that. But again, I don't know that that's the same thing as saying that they're actually being dishonest. "If the factional thesis that I believe in is correct, then you'd have to assume that these people have to have their strategies and tactics in this broader struggle. Like, it would be ridiculous not to assume that. "So, I think, you know, it's entirely possible that someone like Elizondo has elements in his background that we would want to know about that are not there. It is very intriguing, and even plausible, perhaps, that someone like Clapper belongs somewhere in this deeper history. I would like to know what that is myself, and I would like to see something, you know, in the way of what we would call genuine evidence for that. Not saying it's not there. "I'm just suggesting that the current theory on Elizondo and controlled disclosure is asking us to accept several unsupported links, and, essentially, I would say a disclosure strategy that appears self-defeating and really illogical. Again, like, why initiate a disclosure program? Especially if you go back to the beginning of the AATIP era, like 2009-ish, 2010. Where was there any perceived need that we have to do disclosure?" (Not sure why Richard is not calling the 2009-ish, 2010-era, AAWSAP. I wonder if he knows that Stratton says he created AATIP in 2015? Could be relevant to this controversy.) Dolan: "Like, I look back at the situation at that time, and again, I was very, very on top of the scene at that time during those years, and I just was not aware of any public pressure, whatsoever, that would cause someone to say, 'We have to initiate a controlled disclosure of this, in order to protect crash retrievals.' "There's no logic there, it seems to me. It's, in fact, the exact opposite. "Also, the the current hypothesis, I think, really understates Elizondo's 2019 acknowledgement of recovered UFO material. That really has got to be understood. And it leaves the whole Pentagon campaign against Elizondo, in my view, anyway, largely unresolved and unexplained, and really not making sense. "And, I would just add, now that I'm thinking of it, this current hypothesis about Lue Elizondo, I think, actually reverses the the genuine historical sequence. In other words, I am suggesting that Elizondo probably helped to create the opening that allowed Grusch to go even further. "So, these are just logical questions that I have. You may have different questions. You may have rebuttals to what I have to say here. By all means, put them in a comment, I will read them. And again, I'm not here to defend Lue Elizondo, I am just questioning an account that does not yet, in my view, explain its own logic, or match the full chronology. "It is entirely possible that some of this story is well-known to researchers, including Gerb. I think, however, what has been presented so far does not show how all the pieces actually fit together, and I would like to see that. "And again, I say this with total respect to UAP Gerb and to Ross Coulthart, and in fairness to Lue Elizondo, who I think, if nothing else, this aspect of the history really needs to be understood by the broader community. So that is my statement. "And that doesn't mean that I'm right here, but I do think from time-to-time, it's okay to take a stand on a topic where I can see many people are going to disagree with this, but certain things I think need to be understood on this, and I hope that we can have a reasoned dialogue and discussion about this as we move forward with it, because it is a topic that we do need to understand. "My hypothesis has, pretty much, from the beginning, always been that what we are seeing and what we have been seeing since 2017 is, essentially, the result of a factional battle." (I believe Lue spoke about factions early on when he first went public.) "You go back through the history of this phenomenon, and if you read the old books going back to the 1950s, you see it then, too. You see that there were always factions within the Pentagon who did actually support some level of openness on the UFO subject. "You read the books of Donald Keyhoe, read the book by Edward Ruppelt from 1956: 'Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.' A lot of this is in there. And I think that's really never gone away. And so to somehow assume that there are no more factions in a massive labyrinthian structure as large as the U.S. military industrial complex, I think that's kind of ridiculous. There's always going to be factions. And I think that what we are seeing has always struck me as the result of a factional war that is taking place. "And that doesn't mean, by the way, that, you know, the two sides are just white hats and black hats. Everyone's got their own angle, everyone's got their own motivations. But I, nevertheless, tend to think that that is what we are looking at."

Joe Murgia

23,884 views • 15 days ago