UFO roundtable with filmmaker Dan Fabian and physicist Hal Puthoff on UAP disclosure and non-human intelligence
Steven Bartlett hosts a roundtable discussion on UAPs, alien life, and the US government's recent declassification efforts.
Summary
Steven Bartlett hosts documentary filmmaker Dan Fabian and quantum physicist and former CIA science adviser Hal Puthoff to discuss the recent Trump administration declassification of UAP-related files and the broader claim of an 80-year government cover-up of non-human intelligent life. Fabian, who produced the documentary The Age of Disclosure over three and a half years with access to senior military, intelligence, and government officials — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — argues that multiple credible witnesses have confirmed on the record that non-human craft and bodies have been recovered by elements of the US government. Puthoff, who worked as a quantum physicist for the NSA, CIA, and other intelligence agencies, and served as chief science adviser to aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, explains the theoretical physics that could account for UAP behaviour, and describes his decades-long involvement in the CIA's classified remote viewing programme, known as Stargate. The conversation covers the legacy programme said to have been concealing UAP evidence since the 1940s, the role of the current Trump administration in attempting to force disclosure, and the implications — scientific, religious, and geopolitical — of confirmed non-human intelligent life.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and background of the guests
Steven Bartlett: Dr. Hal Puthoff and Dan Fabian — I wanted to have a conversation with both of you today because you are two of the most popular voices online on this subject of UAPs, which is unidentified anomalous phenomena. It has been in all the news recently because Trump, a couple of days ago, released 400 classified files containing videos, photos, and different reports on this subject. Now, I don't have an opinion — I honestly haven't gone that far down the rabbit hole on this subject — but I wanted to have the conversation with both of you because you do have opinions. So, starting with you, Dan, what is your background as it relates to this subject of UAPs, and what is it that you believe that most people don't know or understand?
Dan Fabian: My interest in this topic comes from my childhood. Over the years I read every book on the topic, watched every documentary. I always wished someone had made a super serious, credible, sober documentary that only interviews people who have direct knowledge of this topic as a result of working for the US government. So I got into producing. As I was getting access to high-level intelligence officials and government officials — before I even filmed — I very quickly learned how serious and real the situation is, and how seriously it's treated behind the scenes.
I made this movie, The Age of Disclosure, in secrecy over three and a half years. The headlines I learned — that the average person doesn't know — are that there has in fact been an 80-year cover-up of the existence of non-human intelligent life. It has been covered up by elements of the US government since at least the late 1940s. Other nations have also covered this up. And the other major headline is that the people within the US government who have been gatekeeping this have also been involved in a high-stakes secret cold war race with adversarial nations like China and Russia to reverse-engineer technology of non-human origin. The stakes couldn't be higher. Those are the two massive headlines.
When the film came out, it created a national conversation at an unprecedented level, and it led to President Trump issuing a directive in the middle of February — a super unprecedented, historic directive — instructing federal agencies to start declassifying evidence they have of non-human intelligent life and UAPs. That process began this past Friday, when the first tranche of evidence was released to the public.
Steven Bartlett: And during the process of producing this documentary, who did you speak to?
Dan Fabian: I got access to the highest levels of the government, military, and intelligence community. My interview subjects range from Secretary Rubio — who is also our National Security Adviser now — to White House National Security Council members, Navy fighter pilots, admirals, generals, a former Secretary of Defense, and the leadership of all the recent classified US government UAP investigations. Every single person is extremely credible. Hal is one of my interview subjects. He's one of the most senior scientists to work on this topic for the US government in classified projects. All of these people had a lot of information they could legally share over the years, but they were always discouraged from doing so and never really had the opportunity to do it comfortably. No one wanted to be the one person out on a limb saying something extraordinary on CNN or Fox or 60 Minutes and then being subject to the pushback and the ridicule. When I realised that, I started socialising a plan for how to step out of the shadows arm in arm, with safety in numbers.
Steven Bartlett: You mentioned Hal there — he mentioned you. You're part of the documentary. I saw you in the trailer as well. What is your background, and what reference points are you drawing on to speak on the subject of UAPs?
Hal Puthoff: I'm a quantum physicist. I worked for the National Security Agency and for various organisations in the intelligence community, like the CIA and so on. As part of my technical work, I was also a consultant — chief science adviser — to Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace. He's quite a titan. He has two space stations orbiting the Earth. People who are in the space business and moving out into space just can't help wondering what we're going to run into when we get out there. As science adviser to him, it turned out that the Defense Intelligence Agency came forward and said they needed to find out what was really going on in the so-called UAP area.
The origins of the UAP investigation and the legacy programme
Steven Bartlett: So you worked with someone called Robert Bigelow — the person who knows everything about what is possible in terms of aerospace technology. Simply put, what happened?
Dan Fabian: One day, one of his colleagues came into his office, pulled him into a SCIF, and showed him a video that Air Force security guards had taken over a nuclear weapons site. It was a triangle UAP hovering over a nuclear weapon site. The colleague said, "Please tell me this is one of ours — like one of our black projects, some advanced cutting-edge technology that's ours." And Bigelow knew instinctively it was not. That set him down a rabbit hole. He thought there had to be some office somewhere in the intelligence community that handles UFOs. So he and his colleague went all over trying to find one. They couldn't. So they determined they were just going to start a UAP programme. That programme was called AAWSAP. They hired a team — Hal, for example. That programme started in 2008 and got a lot of pushback behind the scenes, because when they looked all over the intelligence community to see if there was another UFO programme and didn't think there was, it turned out there was one — a deeply hidden programme referred to as the legacy programme.
Hal Puthoff: And it had been operating in the shadows since the '40s — outside of congressional oversight, outside of the oversight of the White House. Completely hidden away.
Dan Fabian: As hidden as a programme could be. So they started pushing back behind the scenes against everyone involved in AAWSAP because they didn't want anyone else looking into this. It caused a lot of bureaucratic issues, a lot of red tape, and ultimately AAWSAP lost its funding in 2010, despite the fact that it was looking into very real issues like UAPs over our nuclear weapons sites.
Steven Bartlett: Why do you think it shut down?
Dan Fabian: They were dealt bureaucratic hurdles behind the scenes by people involved in the legacy programme — people who caused problems and prevented funding from coming through. It's a big bureaucracy. People can do things behind the scenes to prevent funding. So ultimately they lost their funding in 2010. Jay Stratton and others involved continued to look into this because they didn't want this serious national security concern to go uninvestigated.
Hal Puthoff: That's how somebody like me gets pulled in. They say, "Okay, these pilots are out there and they suddenly see craft coming out of the ocean and making right-angle turns at 6G or whatever." And they say, "Oh my god, this is way beyond our physics." So I and other physicists dug into what could be responsible for this. We actually found that just like we use Maxwell's equations for everything we do in electromagnetics, and we have Einstein's equations in general relativity for black holes and so on — it turns out that if you could engineer those equations, you would actually get the same effects that people were observing with these UAP craft. So we think we've come up with what the science of it is. It's just that we don't have the engineering to do it.
Do UAPs and non-human life exist?
Steven Bartlett: Do you believe in UAPs?
Hal Puthoff: Absolutely. I've been exposed to data about them.
Steven Bartlett: A more specific question: do you believe in aliens?
Dan Fabian: A number of the people I interviewed went on the record stating that they know from their own personal experiences that there have been UAP crashes over the years that have been recovered by elements of the US government. And in some cases, the crashed craft had the bodies of non-humans in them. Numerous people I interviewed went on the record saying that. Keep in mind, everyone I interviewed only shared what they lawfully could — there was a line they couldn't cross. They're all aware of classified information they can't talk about, but they went right up to the line and made it clear that there had been recoveries of non-human bodies. A couple of people actually testified under oath to Congress saying the same thing.
Steven Bartlett: Why wouldn't they be able to talk about it publicly?
Hal Puthoff: When you're involved in certain programmes, you sign certain agreements that prevent you from sharing specific information about highly classified programmes. And of course the big concern is that whatever we might learn about these craft, our adversaries are out there. There have probably been crashes in Russia and crashes in China. If we reveal what we're learning about the subject area publicly, it might help a potential adversary get a step ahead. That's why it's all kept really close in.
Dan Fabian: A saying I heard often from my interview subjects: you can't tell your friends without telling your enemies. Meaning you can't tell the public what we know and don't know without also telling China and Russia what we know and don't know, and giving them that information might give them a competitive advantage.
The obvious question anyone would ask is: so what's shifted? Why is secrecy no longer the leading thought? The answer is because the US is in a really high-stakes race — a technology race against these adversaries — to reverse-engineer technology of non-human origin. And the secrecy around it in the US since the '40s has created a scenario where the scientific community and academia don't even know it's real. They don't even know it's a valid area of inquiry.
Hal Puthoff: The smartest kids graduating at MIT this year are not thinking that this is something they can put their brainpower towards.
Steven Bartlett: Come back to the question — do you believe in aliens?
Dan Fabian: I 100% believe that non-human intelligent life is here and has been here for a long time.
Steven Bartlett: When you say "here," do you mean currently living amongst us?
Dan Fabian: I don't know about the living amongst us part. But I wouldn't rule it out. There is UAP activity being reported on a daily basis — by commercial airline pilots to the FAA, by Navy fighter pilots off the east coast reporting up the military chain of command, and on top of that, regular activity over nuclear weapons sites inside the United States. It's happening on a regular basis at the nuclear sites and on a daily basis in commercial air travel space.
Hal Puthoff: UAPs have come over nuclear missile sites and actually turned off the missiles — actually forced the system to start into a countdown process. Once something like that happens, you just have to take it seriously.
Dan Fabian: And the technology they're displaying is technology that no humans have. And again, there have been some crashes, and in those crashes there have been the bodies of non-humans.
Steven Bartlett: How do we know that? How do we know that in those crashes they've recovered bodies of non-humans?
Dan Fabian: The whistleblowers coming forward.
Steven Bartlett: So the basis of that evidence is that some people have said it.
Dan Fabian: Until previously classified information regarding crashes and recoveries is declassified, the best we could hope for is credible people putting their reputation on the line to tell you this is what's been happening.
Steven Bartlett: Did someone during your process of making the documentary — someone who had seen non-human life — tell you that?
Dan Fabian: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: Who was that?
Dan Fabian: A number of people, but notably Jay Stratton, who we just talked about — who co-created and co-founded AAWSAP and then became the director of the UAP Task Force, the largest whole-of-government investigation of UAPs ever.
Steven Bartlett: What did he say?
Dan Fabian: He went on the record in the film saying that he's seen non-human beings and non-human craft with his own eyes. That was the farthest he could go at that point.
Steven Bartlett: Why did he say he couldn't go further?
Dan Fabian: He had a situation he was involved in that, for a few reasons, he wasn't comfortable talking about yet. And some of it I think he just wanted to make sure he legally could. Going back to credibility — take a guy like Jay. When Jay retired a few years back, he was part of the Senior Executive Service of the federal government. That's a level less than 1% of all federal employees ever reach. It's the equivalent of a two-star admiral or general. Very senior, very trusted, cleared at a very high level. He had worked with naval intelligence in a senior capacity, with the CIA, with the Defense Intelligence Agency as the head of air and space warfare. He's a super serious, credible person. And he's putting his reputation on the line to share this information to the extent that he legally and comfortably could.
Steven Bartlett: And when you asked him why the world doesn't know this stuff, what would he say?
Dan Fabian: There are a lot of reasons. I think it's better to start from the beginning. In 1947, there was a crash at Roswell of non-human origin. Multiple people in my film go on the record saying the Roswell crash really happened — technology of non-human origin and non-human bodies were recovered. If you put yourself in the shoes of the military and government at that point — put yourself in Truman's and Eisenhower's shoes — you're just coming out of World War II. The world was finally starting to settle down. You can't exactly step to the microphone and tell America that there's a new threat you know nothing about and can't protect them from. So secrecy became the plan. They had more questions than answers. Everyone I've talked to who gave me context explained that the plan for secrecy went into motion there. The idea was: let's investigate, let's find out more about what we don't know before we tell the American people.
That was quickly followed by the Cold War era, and they learned that Russia had also retrieved technology of non-human origin. So they knew they were in a technology race, and the idea of "can't tell your friends without telling your enemies" ruled the day. As a security wrapper for this programme, they created a stigma in the late '40s and early '50s — this cultural stigma, this idea that you're crazy if you look into this topic. It was actually a CIA meeting where people got together and said, "In order to stop people from pursuing this area, let's go out of our way to spread disinformation."
Hal Puthoff: Basically the most effective disinformation campaign in the history of the US government, because it got into our culture. Some movies were funded that made aliens seem silly and the idea of life from elsewhere seem ridiculous. That got compounded over the years, and then we got to the point where the average person just thinks it's not real. The average scientist, academia — they think it's conspiracy stuff. Nonsense. Silly.
Dan Fabian: There was no advantage for elected leaders to get in front of this, or for military members to speak up about what they learned or saw — it would be a career ruiner. That started to shift several years back when Jay Stratton and Jim Lacatski put together AAWSAP in 2008 and started going out there to collect data and evidence. They started to actually share it with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, looking at classified data in a classified setting. People like Marco Rubio, who was the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, started to realise there was something here — and not only that, but there was a problem. There was a lot of UAP activity over highly classified sites like nuclear weapons sites. The stigma had created a disadvantage. It's very hard to win a technology race when the majority of your scientists don't know it's a valid area of inquiry.
How many types of non-human life?
Steven Bartlett: Do people think there's one type of non-human intelligence visiting the Earth, or are there many types?
Dan Fabian: People who have been involved in recoveries have said there are at least four types.
Steven Bartlett: Four separate types?
Dan Fabian: Four different types of life, at least. Now, I have not had direct access to that, but I believe the people I talked to. And the people I've talked to through the process of making the documentary — both on camera and off the record — and the people Hal has talked to over the decades, have said that there have been dozens of recoveries of crashed craft in the US alone. Dozens of craft of non-human origin that either crashed organically or were caused to crash and then recovered.
Steven Bartlett: Have you spoken to other people who have worked on these crashed craft?
Dan Fabian: I've talked off the record with some people who were involved in recoveries. Special forces people who would not go on camera. One I actually thought was going to do an interview, and then a couple of days before, sent me a message saying that after further consideration and long talks with his wife, he had decided he would be forfeiting his life if he participated in my interview. That was a very unsettling message to get — but also very specific word choice: "forfeiting my life." He was a very senior special forces person who had told me he had been involved in multiple recoveries.
How the documentary became the plan for disclosure
Dan Fabian: Early on in my process, I got connected with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. They had learned the reality of the situation through the work of AAWSAP, then AATIP, then the UAP Task Force, and through their own intelligence channels. Leaders on those committees wanted to educate the public about what they lawfully could, but they didn't really have a way to do it. It's such a complicated situation. It takes a while to explain. You can't do it in a six-minute news segment on Fox or CNN, or even a 15-minute 60 Minutes segment. And no one wanted to be the one person trying to do it alone.
So when I started putting together the film and socialising this safe way for people to step forward, it quickly became those people's plan for disclosure. That's why Secretary Rubio participated. That's why White House National Security Council members participated. It became, amongst the group of people who had learned the truth, the plan for disclosure — the way to bring this information out in a thoughtful way.
Presidents and the cover-up
Steven Bartlett: Do the presidents of the United States know about this stuff?
Dan Fabian: Historically, no. And even Rubio says on camera that historically this has been kept from even sitting presidents.
Steven Bartlett: Who would know, then?
Dan Fabian: A number of the people in my film break down who's involved in the legacy programme. Simply put, it's elements of the CIA, elements of the Air Force, elements of the Department of Energy, and a few major defence contractors. They have the ability to access information from a number of federal agencies and branches of the military. But the primary leaders of this programme are the CIA, the Air Force, the Department of Energy, and major defence contractors.
Rubio breaks down in the film the way our bureaucracy works. You could have career bureaucrats in positions of power at those organisations for decades, and they can just wait out sitting presidents. They can wait out senators. Sitting presidents are just temporary help that are going to come and go. And that's what's been happening up until this point.
The fact that Rubio had learned so much about the reality of the situation and the extent of the cover-up, and then ended up arguably the second most powerful person in the world as our Secretary of State and National Security Adviser at the same time — which has only happened once in US history, Henry Kissinger for two years — the fact that he ended up in that position of power and influence after learning the reality of the situation, right as The Age of Disclosure was coming out and driving this national conversation, really led to President Trump being informed about this in a way that no president has been in a very long time.
Steven Bartlett: Are you saying that elements of the United States government don't think the public are ready to even know that this exists? Because they could tell us that they've recovered UAPs or alien craft without telling us about the technology.
Dan Fabian: They could, and I think we're going to get to that point.
Hal Puthoff: They were trapped in a system that had grown up. And people behind the scenes working in the classified programmes said, "We don't know how the public is going to respond. Let's be safe and keep it in house."
Trump, Obama, and what presidents know
Steven Bartlett: Do you think Trump believes that there are aliens? I was looking at some of his quotes and he said, "I don't know if they're real or not. I don't have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it."
Dan Fabian: Barack Obama said that aliens are real.
Steven Bartlett: He gave classified information — he's not supposed to be doing that.
Dan Fabian: One of the things that came out in The Age of Disclosure is that during Trump's first administration, his cabinet was briefed by the UAP Task Force, by Jay Stratton. When he briefed them, he was told they had asked for this briefing because they needed to be able to evaluate what the repercussions would be if Trump decided to step to the microphone and tell the world we're not alone in the universe. Obviously, he didn't end up deciding to do that then. However, in this new administration, he's got Rubio in the position of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, fully aware of the situation, and that has given him the comfort to put this process in motion. There's certainly a disclosure process unfolding right now.
Steven Bartlett: Obama said in an interview with Brian Tyler Cohen, when asked about aliens, that they're real but he hasn't seen them, they're not being kept at Area 51, there's no underground facility — unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States. That sounded to me like sarcasm when he said "they're real, but" and then explained all the reasons they're not real. It would appear to me that Obama also doesn't know of any aliens.
Dan Fabian: I think Obama is largely kept in the dark. I think he does know the base fact that we're not alone in the universe. And I actually think when he said "they're real," that was his honest, candid, genuine statement. I think when he then said they're not kept at Area 51, I think he's also being honest, because none of my sources say that UAPs and aliens are being kept at Area 51 — they're being kept somewhere else. And I think when he made the comment about "unless there's a giant conspiracy," if you watch the tape, he sips his cup and raises his eyebrow as he says it. I think he knows there's a giant conspiracy. The following day, Trump was asked about that on Air Force One and responded saying Obama revealed classified information and he shouldn't have said that. I think presidents don't know, and they're told not to talk about it.
What's in the declassified files
Steven Bartlett: Trump has started to release a lot of classified information around UAPs and aliens. The first batch was released a couple of days ago. What exactly is inside this report?
Dan Fabian: There were a number of files, reports, video, and still images that were declassified — information that had previously been classified or just never really made public. This was just the first tranche of what will be released. The most notable piece of evidence in there is a still image from the 1972 Apollo mission. It's an image of what appears to be a triangle-shaped craft hovering above the moon and above the astronauts, taken from the lunar module. The UAP Task Force looked into this image years ago and determined it was real. That seems to be the most glaring piece of evidence in this tranche.
But I will say this — Hal and I both have a lot of the same sources of information, and everyone we've talked to at various federal agencies has told us that when the president gave this directive in the middle of February for federal agencies to declassify evidence of non-human intelligent life and UAPs, only a few engaged with it, and they only gave a small percentage of what they have.
Sceptical questions: iPhones, sightings, and the nature of the evidence
Steven Bartlett: One of the things I've always struggled with regarding these kinds of conspiracies is that I don't know why that information would necessarily fall into the hands of government officials, because UAPs would be visible and could land in anyone's back garden. In a world where we have 8 billion smartphones roaming around, if there was a UAP crash in my garden, it would be on TikTok within five minutes. And there was that incident earlier in the year with those drones in New Jersey — that was on social media within minutes. I think in the modern world, because we have so many ways to capture high-quality video, if there was something out there, we would have seen a very clear image of it by now.
Dan Fabian: That's why there's a lot that came out in these files — because over the years, the sensor systems that pilots have in their planes have gotten so much better. They've captured really astounding things.
Steven Bartlett: Does this life want to be seen? Do these aliens want us to know they're there?
Hal Puthoff: Given the level of quality of their technology, if they didn't want to be seen, we wouldn't be seeing them. So it seems like there's evidence that for whatever reason, they're wanting to be seen.
Dan Fabian: My personal opinion is that if someone answers that question, they're answering it through the lens of how humans think. For all we know, we're ants to them. You don't hide from ants. You walk around them. You don't even pay attention to them. Based on their behaviour, from the interviews I've done, I honestly feel like the dynamic is that we are very far below them on the food chain. Hal makes an analogy in the film — he says the ants in your backyard could be there for generations. You never think about them. You walk around them. You're not hiding from them, but they're there and you don't really care. But what happens if they evolve one day and figure out how to get into your house and they've beelined under your door and they're in your living room?
We may have evolved technologically over the last 80 years since we cracked the atom so quickly that we're now the equivalent of the ants showing up in their living room. All of a sudden, this warring species — humans — progressed so quickly. We went from no real technological progress for a very long time to cracking the atom, then figuring out nuclear technology, and continuing to increase our nuclear technology development. And we have this programme that has been retrieving their crashed craft and trying to reverse-engineer them. So we might be at that point where we're about to do what they do, and all of a sudden we are a problem. That might be the explanation for why they pay so much attention to our nuclear processes. There's a lot of UAP activity not only at nuclear weapons sites all over the world, but at sites involved in the nuclear process, like uranium mines or refineries.
Hal Puthoff: In the Soviet Union, a UAP came over and actually started a launch of the Russian missiles — it actually forced the system to start into a countdown process.
Steven Bartlett: How do we know that?
Hal Puthoff: By the intelligence community's access to information about it. Every person in Beloraviche said they saw a flying saucer on that day. For hours it hovered over the nearby ballistic missile base. No one had touched any buttons. No one had entered any codes. And yet, as the UFO hovered over the base, the control panel showed the missiles were preparing to launch. For 15 agonising seconds, the base lost control of its nuclear weapons.
Steven Bartlett: Logically, I would think that unusual activity would happen around consequential sites. I'd be more surprised if there was really frequent unusual activity happening in my back garden. Around highly consequential sites, one would expect there to be people flying things around there, spying. People want to take photos of anything interesting. They hang around police stations and army barracks. So logically I would assume there would be an increased probability of strange activity in the sky above a nuclear site.
Hal Puthoff: In fact, there was a group of people in the intelligence community who recognised exactly what you're saying. So they decided to make an attractive magnet by getting a whole lot of nuclear assets in one location to see if that would draw them in. My understanding is it was successful. Our nation and other nations have figured out circumstances that can, for lack of a better term, bait UAPs. A certain level of nuclear footprint in a small radius tends to attract them, and our nation figured that out a long time ago, and so did other nations.
The physics of interstellar travel
Steven Bartlett: One of the things I've thought about — I know very little about physics, but I know how big the universe is. The closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is over four light years away, which is about 24 trillion miles. If we travelled at an impossible 10% of the speed of light, it would take a ship 40 years to get there.
Hal Puthoff: Fortunately, what we learned in looking at what might be the underlying physics — using Einstein's theory of general relativity — is that there are ways of modifying the effective speed of light to make it much higher or much lower. When you get into potentially modifying what we call the spacetime metric, you could get to a point where you can make wormholes and warp drives. Those are things that are not off the charts. There are actually textbooks by general relativity experts on the fact that you could re-engineer spacetime. So you could get from here to there. You could arrange for the effective speed of light along a given line to be much higher than normal without breaking the speed of light, and zoom over there very quickly. We can write the equations and see how it doesn't violate our physics, but we don't have the engineering.
Steven Bartlett: What I'm pointing out is that if you travel at that speed across the universe and even hit an object the size of a pebble, it would be like a nuclear explosion.
Hal Puthoff: The thing is, if you're modifying space, it's like making a surfer wave on the seashore — you arrange to have space moving ahead of you like that. So you come up to a rock and it's just going to push it aside. You can engineer that.
Dan Fabian: This is how I've wrapped my head around it. Essentially, they're warping spacetime in a localised area. They're creating an immense amount of energy around the craft, and it creates essentially a bubble around the craft. That bubble separates the craft from the environment around it. The environment has no impact on the craft. That's why we see transmedium travel — a craft going smoothly from space to air to water without even a splash. The environment around the bubble has no bearing on the craft inside it. And the craft inside it is in its own spacetime. Once you wrap your head around that, things like interstellar travel become totally possible.
The paradox of crashes
Steven Bartlett: One of the paradoxes with this is that they appear to be so advanced in their physics and technology, and yet at the same time they seem to be crashing a lot.
Hal Puthoff: Actually, some of them have not crashed but have been simply left in the desert — sort of like a gift or a donation. We're still trying to figure that out. Some of them do crash, and it's possible that some of our electromagnetic pulsing and laser pulsing can interfere with their technology and cause a crash.
Steven Bartlett: Why do you think another country hasn't come forward with similar disclosures and similar evidence?
Dan Fabian: I think there's a really simple answer for that. I think our allies follow the US's lead. And I think our adversaries — primarily China and Russia — have no reason to go public. They don't have the same sort of societies and dynamics. Xi can do what he wants anyway. What's the advantage to him? Same thing with Putin. There is no advantage.
The scale of the universe and the probability of life
Steven Bartlett: They did a study in 2026 and found that 45 planets are likely capable of supporting life — what they called the habitable zone — out of more than 6,000 planets discovered so far by NASA. There are approximately a trillion galaxies in the universe, and within these galaxies, 100,000 planets could potentially host life, according to Oxford University. I believe that if you think about the entire universe, we're not the only life in it.
Hal Puthoff: I think that's a very scientific conclusion. Probabilistically, it would be pretty incredible if we were. It's almost inconceivable.
Steven Bartlett: The question of whether that life has been here is still a big question mark for me. I also think Elon Musk — whatever you think about him — seems to just say what he thinks. He's been asked multiple times if he believes there are aliens in our galaxy, and he has said on multiple occasions that he doesn't believe that to be the case. He said, "If anyone should know, it should be me." Do you think he knows?
Dan Fabian: I think you can't operate in space at the level he does, or operate as a contractor at the level he does, without having clearances that require secrecy. There are all kinds of levels of secrecy. There's classified projects, but there's also black projects — unacknowledged special access programmes — where you are literally by law required to not acknowledge the existence of the programme or anything it does.
Steven Bartlett: So if you're involved in an unacknowledged special access programme and someone asks you about it, you have to say you have no idea what they're talking about.
Dan Fabian: If you are a part of the programme. But just because someone is read into an unacknowledged special access programme doesn't mean all their employees are.
Elon said that they have 9,000 satellites up there — referring to his company Starlink — and not once have they had to manoeuvre around an alien spaceship. He argues that if aliens were constantly visiting Earth, the aerospace experts who watch the skies every day would be the first to know.
Hal Puthoff: Well, NASA also said for decades that they had no evidence of extraterrestrial life or UAPs, and last Friday the federal government released a photo of a triangle craft hovering over the 1972 Apollo space mission. So somebody's not being honest. Which also implies a lot of other people know things they haven't revealed.
Are they living amongst us?
Steven Bartlett: I've heard you say before, Hal, that you think this intelligent life actually exists amongst us.
Hal Puthoff: The quote was: "They are not occasional visitors. They live secretly alongside humans, but with advanced technology." We have so many sightings and so much access to materials. They're all over the place.
Steven Bartlett: 65% of Americans believe intelligent life exists on other planets. 40% of people say military-reported UFOs are probably evidence of extraterrestrial life, according to Pew Research. 30% of Americans believe UFOs are probably alien ships. And 47% of Americans believe aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth at some point.
Hal Puthoff: You see the people who came forward in The Age of Disclosure — Clapper, the former head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Senator Rubio, now in his elevated position, and so on. You now have people of real quality saying this is real and we've got to deal with it, and there's a lot we don't know about it.
Steven Bartlett: Could you be wrong?
Dan Fabian: I don't think it's about whether I'm wrong or Hal's wrong. You'd have to believe that senior leadership across the government, the military, and the intelligence community — who have access to classified information and are saying based on that classified information that this is a real situation — you'd have to believe all of those people are lying for some bizarre, unexplained reason. I find that hard to believe.
Steven Bartlett: Could it be the case that all of those people were misinterpreting what they were seeing? Fighter pilots saw something moving in their visors when they're up in the air —
Dan Fabian: In some cases that could be the case, but when you have actual materials — crashed craft, bodies that aren't human — that's a different matter. Also, a lot of these sightings — the White House cabinet members are now in the process of identifying where the evidence exists within federal agencies and the military so they can get access to it themselves and then determine from there what can safely be shared with the public. I think once they get their hands on more evidence, a plan will be put in place for telling the world this conclusion. I think we're very close to that point.
The Tic Tac incident and the transmedium evidence
Steven Bartlett: If we get to that point and you get personally invited in to wherever they're keeping these materials and you get to see every single file, and as you go through those files you realise that a lot of what you've been told is not true because there are other explanations — how would it fundamentally change the way you see the world?
Dan Fabian: Take the famous Tic Tac UFO — the one that Commander Dave Fravor, the Navy fighter pilot, interacted with in 2004. Multiple data collection systems and Commander Dave Fravor — a legend in the Navy, a Top Gun guy, commander of an entire naval strike group — he sees this with his own eyes and a bunch of data collection systems captured data confirming it's real. This UAP went from hovering above the ocean to instantly being at 80,000 feet, which is the entrance to space. And it did that manoeuvre all afternoon. The amount of energy required to do that is so extraordinary. No human beings have the ability to create that much energy in a localised area for an aircraft.
To answer your question — if we find out the unthinkable, that this is not non-human intelligent life, that some humans have figured out how to crack that technology and did it as recently as 2004 when the Tic Tac incident happened — that would be even more mind-blowing than accepting that life from elsewhere is here and has been here a long time. Because that would mean some group of humans leapfrogged the rest of all of humanity technologically by thousands of years and then seemingly did nothing with that.
Steven Bartlett: That's the nature of unusual things — they become great stories. I'm trying to interrogate this from all angles. Could the Tic Tac incident have been something else?
Dan Fabian: Any isolated event like that, you could do the whole "could it be this, could it be that" thing. But you've got to take a step back and look at the collective. It's one report like that after another from credible people since World War II. During World War II, pilots were seeing what they called Foo Fighters — orbs that would move alongside our fighter jets, moving in line with them. And now we have people on ships seeing these things enter the water and then moving at impossible speeds — 50 knots or something — which no human-made vessel can do.
Hal Puthoff: As far as I know, our fastest submarines go about 50 miles an hour. These things are going hundreds of miles an hour under the ocean. These craft are transmedium — seen in space, seen in the air, seen underwater.
Dan Fabian: There's just too much activity to ignore.
Hal Puthoff: And that would be a hard one to explain away as some sonar anomaly. It's seen enough times under enough different conditions that we just have to accept that it's real.
Why isn't there clear iPhone footage?
Steven Bartlett: Is there a reason why this hasn't been captured on an iPhone in 4K?
Dan Fabian: There's been a lot of stuff captured on phones and video cameras. In the scene in The Age of Disclosure where Hal and some of the other people break down how these things are working, they describe that they're creating a warp bubble around the craft. That warp bubble also makes it very hard to get a clear video of something, because you're taking a photo or a video through essentially a spacetime barrier. It's like the equivalent of trying to take video of koi in a pond from above the water — it's going to look all distorted because you're going through the water. If you're trying to video or take a photo through this bubble, it makes it pretty hard, and you end up with the kind of videos we see.
The NASA report
Steven Bartlett: You're probably familiar with the NASA report on UAPs — their independent study team report — where they essentially say that they don't believe these UAPs are aliens. Why would NASA be lying?
Dan Fabian: Like all these big bureaucracies, there are people who are aware of the truth and then there are people who have the truth kept from them. One of the people I interviewed was Mike Gold, who was on the NASA UAP task force, and he talked about how that effort was flawed from the start. They didn't want to have a result that said NASA has all this information that they've kept from the public. They wanted the result that they landed on, which is "there's nothing to see here." And they were really discouraged from, for example, including that image of what clearly appears to be a triangle craft over the moon. They were told not to include that in their report. They were not set up to tell the world the truth.
Is it possible aliens aren't real?
Steven Bartlett: In your view, is it possible that aliens aren't real?
Hal Puthoff: Possible?
Steven Bartlett: So you think it's impossible?
Hal Puthoff: Yeah. Using the term "alien" has a certain connotation about it. But the evidence is absolutely clear that there is some form of life with advanced technology. The specific details of what we can prove — those are still unknowns we're trying to sus out.
Dan Fabian: I got access to a very high level of the government, military, and intelligence community. There were a lot of people who talked to me off the record who wouldn't go on camera. They all made it very clear — not just on camera but off the record — that there is evidence at a classified level that is clear as day. Like some video taken when the bubble is turned off and you can see a craft of non-human origin clear as day. And there is evidence of the technology that's been recovered, and of these bodies. When you have so many senior people across the military, government, and intelligence community telling you this, it's really just impossible to ignore. Especially when most of them aren't even friends — they're not ideologically aligned or politically aligned. They're all just different groups of people.
Steven Bartlett: I'm less compelled by eyewitnesses. This is the problem — I'm such a big true crime fan. You hear about all the cases where eyewitnesses said one thing and then they find out the serial killer wasn't that person or that thing didn't happen. And I also just have my own experiences of thinking I saw things when I was younger.
Dan Fabian: Here's an interesting thing you just made me think of. In the film, Rubio and General Jim Clapper — two people who are completely ideologically and politically opposed to each other — made the same really intelligent point. They both have knowledge at a classified level of this situation. They both said a problem we as humans have is that there's something in the human psyche that says "I cannot wrap my head around or prepare for things I haven't seen or experienced." And time and time again throughout history, that has proven to be a human flaw.
Rubio goes on to say that the greatest intelligence failures in US history come from a lack of imagination. He cites a few examples. He says, "We never would have imagined the Japanese could figure out how to get torpedoes through the straits and hit us at Pearl Harbor — until they did." He says, "We never would have imagined terrorists would fly to the homeland, learn to fly commercial planes, and then use them in a terrorist attack — until they did." Time and time again, not wrapping our heads around a set of circumstances and using our imagination to think about what might be happening has bitten us. He ends his line of thought by saying lack of imagination leads to strategic surprise — like Pearl Harbor, like 9/11. And sometimes strategic surprise changes the course of history.
Him and other people I interviewed think it's really important to get ahead of this, as opposed to waiting for something to happen — as opposed to finding out the hard way that China cracked this technology before us and used it in an act of war, or non-human intelligent life does something unpredictable and all of a sudden the US government is on its heels, explaining to the public what they've known for a long time.
Can the public handle the truth?
Steven Bartlett: I've often heard that the reason they don't tell the general public that these things exist is because the general public aren't ready for this information. Is that an argument?
Dan Fabian: Yeah. There are people involved in gatekeeping this information who don't think the public can handle the truth. Hal recently told me that people in the legacy programme are pointing to The Age of Disclosure and saying, "Look, this film reveals a lot and people aren't losing their minds. People aren't jumping out of windows. It's not causing chaos in society. The public can handle the base facts."
The most compelling evidence
Steven Bartlett: Of all the things you've heard, Dan, what was the most compelling story or anecdote that convinced you?
Dan Fabian: It was really just the sheer number of very high-level military, government, and intelligence officials who were telling me in private settings, to my face, that at a classified level they know with absolute certainty this is real. But if you had to pick one thing — it really wasn't one thing for me. It was the overall picture. For example, I interviewed Rubio and Senator Jill Gillibrand on the same day. They both participated in the film and did lengthy interviews with me, and both looked me in the face and told me they thought this was the most important documentary that's ever been made and that it was really important to bring this information out in a thoughtful way to the public. You can't unhear stuff like that.
Steven Bartlett: What about you, Hal? What was the most persuasive thing that tipped you over the edge from being agnostic to believing there is non-human intelligent life?
Hal Puthoff: It's looking at the technology, which is so advanced that I'm essentially certain that neither we nor our adversaries could have made it. So somebody actually made it, and it has to be somebody who knows a lot more about physics than we do. There's nowhere to go but to say, okay, there's somebody who is way beyond humans to develop that kind of technology and display it.
Steven Bartlett: Of all the evidence that's been released, and all the rumours and videos going back to the crop fields we used to hear about many years ago — presumably there's lots of this stuff that you don't believe.
Hal Puthoff: There's definitely tons of reports that, when you look into them, seem like nonsense.
Dan Fabian: One of the things people often say is that alien encounter descriptions perfectly matched the pop culture of that era. People saw flying saucers in the 1950s after sci-fi movies popularised them, and grey aliens in the 1980s after books like Communion popularised them. This suggests that sightings are born from human imagination.
Hal Puthoff: I think that's a reasonable place to come to. A lot of the reports we get, we can generally set aside as being manufactured by humans who get caught up in the give and take on social media. But nonetheless, when you really zero in on actual evidence of technologies and evidence of bodies, you can't just say it's social contagion.
Steven Bartlett: When I watch the Tic Tac video, it's kind of blurry and I don't really know what I'm looking at. There's this thing moving around on the screen that's black and white, but I don't really know what I'm looking at. I think this has always been the struggle — we're so used to consuming content in high definition. So many of these UAP videos are in the distance and kind of blurry and vague. It makes them harder to believe. We're all longing for a solid video. You talked about them going in and out of the water. How come someone hasn't got a solid video of something going in and out of the water? We have CCTV cameras on every high street.
Dan Fabian: Multiple people said on camera that they have seen, with their own eyes, classified videos that are indisputable. Some of them told me specifics — like that story I told you, that the first video Jay Stratton was shown when he went down this rabbit hole was a triangle craft hovering over a nuclear weapons site. Air Force security guards had filmed it on a VHS camera. It was hovering long enough for them to do that. That kind of evidence exists, but it's still classified.
Steven Bartlett: Will it be coming out, do you think?
Dan Fabian: I hope so. I know this process is playing out right now, where people like Jay Stratton are helping the administration find where the evidence exists so they can get their hands on it and then determine whether it can safely be declassified. That process is definitely playing out right now.
Steven Bartlett: Do you trust the Trump administration to release all of the available information?
Dan Fabian: I don't think it's a question of whether we trust the current administration to release it. It's whether all these federal agencies and branches of the military are going to turn over the evidence they have to the administration. That's the question. And the jury's still out on that. They're not doing so right now. They're pushing back, and they're pushing back hard. That's why the administration is working with people like Jay Stratton, who over 16 years has learned where a lot of this evidence is. They're working with people like him to find out where the evidence sits, who's gatekeeping it at each of these different organisations, and how to get to it. They're doing a fact-finding mission right now.
What disclosure would mean for the world
Steven Bartlett: If all the information that you've heard from your witnesses is released — if they release craft, alien craft, and alien bodies and all of these things — how do you imagine the world would be different?
Dan Fabian: I think it will lead to a giant technology boom. Once we're told there's this technology that exists that could revolutionise the way we live — it could lead to anti-gravity technology, new energy sources, solve the energy crisis overnight, lead to interstellar travel.
Hal Puthoff: And I think it would have a great psychological effect, because if you go from the point of saying "maybe we're the only intelligent species in the universe" to suddenly getting the idea that this is a universe full of life — that's transformative.
Steven Bartlett: What does that mean for religion?
Hal Puthoff: I think all dogmas will just apply to it. The Vatican's already gotten ahead of it — they put out a message a couple of years ago that basically said God's universe and God's work is vast, and you couldn't say that He wouldn't have the ability to do that. From a religious standpoint, certainly in the case of the Catholic Church, they've had very positive views about the possibility of life being throughout the universe. There's nothing, at least from the Catholic Church's perspective, that doesn't allow you to wrap your head around the fact that there's other life out there.
Steven Bartlett: Are you guys religious?
Dan Fabian: Not overly religious, but my mom's Irish and I grew up going to Catholic school. I went to CCD — Sunday school, it's called CCD where I grew up.
Steven Bartlett: You believe in God?
Dan Fabian: I do.
Steven Bartlett: Do you believe in God?
Hal Puthoff: I do too. And I'm a practising Catholic. So would that mean that I believe God has made all of these aliens as well? That's my worldview. As a scientist, I can't prove that it is the case, but just on the statistics of it, it's pretty likely.
Whistleblowers and threats
Dan Fabian: An interesting thing happening right now is that the people who have been gatekeeping the truth — a lot of them are afraid to come forward and tell the White House what they know because they think they're going to be villainised. They think the optics are such that if someone's been covering this up, they're the villain of the story. So the White House, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Defence realised this, and in the last couple of weeks they've been messaging out to the military and the intelligence community that this is not a witch hunt. It's not an endeavour to punish anyone. They want to encourage people to come forward and assure them there will be no punishment for having been involved in gatekeeping this. They just want to learn the truth and find out where the real evidence sits. I think if that message gets out there enough, it will lead to more people coming forward with the evidence we all want to see.
Steven Bartlett: Earlier on you talked about how some people feel like their lives are at risk because of what they know. Has there been any instance of anyone being punished for saying anything in this regard?
Dan Fabian: Certainly having their clearances pulled or losing their opportunities for advancement. We've heard stories like that from several people in the intelligence community.
Steven Bartlett: Is there anyone you can name who has said they were threatened or punished in some form?
Dan Fabian: Certainly the number one whistleblower for many people has been David Grusch. He has outlined the various steps taken against him to basically ruin his career significantly enough that he went to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and said, "I'm being punished, shoved aside, losing clearances and so on because I came out with this data." And they said what he provided was serious and worthy of consideration. I think a lot of people have had their lives threatened. I'm not certain if anyone has been killed, but I know people have had their lives threatened.
Steven Bartlett: And who's threatening them?
Dan Fabian: People involved in the programme referred to as the legacy programme, who think the evidence should never come out.
Steven Bartlett: This legacy programme — it's run within the US government?
Dan Fabian: Elements of it, and also defence contractors.
Steven Bartlett: And you think the legacy programme knows the truth?
Dan Fabian: Yes, because they have the firsthand evidence of the crash materials and the bodies. There's 80 years of data that this group has.
Steven Bartlett: And they haven't released or leaked that data for the last 80 years. No one's hacked it.
Dan Fabian: This programme is the epitome of a special access programme. I think it's as off the grid as it could possibly be.
The CIA's remote viewing programme — Stargate
Steven Bartlett: It almost seems like there's nothing that eventually hasn't come to light that the government has done. I've sat here and interviewed a lot of CIA operatives who've told me the history of the CIA. And some of the stuff I've heard you talk about — around remote viewing — that was a CIA project. What is remote viewing?
Hal Puthoff: The CIA suddenly got concerned because they saw that the Soviets were spending millions of dollars at some of their best institutes to investigate the possible use of what they called ESP.
Steven Bartlett: What's ESP?
Hal Puthoff: Psychic ability. Extra sensory perception. As it turns out, I was at Stanford Research Institute, and they saw my background. They came to me and said they'd like me to look into this. Is there anything to it? No scientist in America even believed there was such a thing as ESP.
Steven Bartlett: Who came to you?
Hal Puthoff: The CIA. Back in the '70s. They approached me and asked me to investigate remote viewing. They asked me to set up a small programme — 50 or 60K or whatever. They said, "We hope you'll find this is all nonsense so we can forget about it and not have to worry about it." And it grew into more than a two-decade programme. Millions of dollars. Stargate is the label for it that most people know about, because by now most of the information in the programme has come out.
Basically, we just found that — just like you have artistic ability or athletic ability or musical ability — remote viewing, this ability to sit in a location and pick up information from someplace far away, is a talent that many people could demonstrate. We ended up actually training Army Intelligence officers at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Meade how to do this.
Steven Bartlett: Let me simplify this for the audience. Remote viewing is the idea that I could sit here in London and be trained to see what was going on in another part of the world — to make your mind's eye go to a remote location.
Hal Puthoff: I'll give you a specific example. A Soviet plane that the CIA wanted to get hold of went down somewhere in Africa, and they didn't know where because the pilot had bailed out and it just went on until it ran out of gas. So we got two of our best remote viewers — one who worked for the Air Force and one who worked for my organisation — and said, "Here's a map of Africa. Where's that plane? We've got to go in and get it." And they put an X on the map that was within three miles of where the plane went down, out of hundreds of thousands of square miles. The CIA went in and got the plane.
Steven Bartlett: By the way, there's an audio recording of President Jimmy Carter telling that story.
Hal Puthoff: Post-presidency.
Steven Bartlett: Maybe we should play that.
Jimmy Carter: "One time we had a small plane go down somewhere in Africa. We were not able to find it by surveillance from our satellites. So the director of the CIA — he was also director of all the intelligence agencies — heard about a woman in California that was a medium, and he contacted her and she gave him the latitude and longitude of the plane's whereabouts. And the next time one of our space satellites went over that area, we located the plane where she said it was."
Steven Bartlett: Again, this sounds impossible. It sounds completely bananas. It sounds like something out of an X-Men comic book.
Hal Puthoff: Well, sceptics would say, "If they're so psychic, why aren't they rich? Why aren't they in the stock market?" So we set up a little programme as a challenge to predict silver futures.
Steven Bartlett: To predict what?
Hal Puthoff: Silver futures. The value of silver on a daily basis — was it going to go up or go down? Somebody said, "Okay, if you'll set up a little programme like that for 30 days, I'll bet on what your remote viewers say and I'll put the money in and give you 10% of what I make." Long story short, they made $260,000 in the 30 days. We got our 10%, which is $26,000. So people could actually look into the future a day and generate a description of what they were going to see and handle the following day.
Steven Bartlett: Presumably not everybody. How many people did you have do that experiment?
Hal Puthoff: We had seven in that experiment.
Steven Bartlett: And how many of them were successful?
Hal Puthoff: Six of the seven generated really good data.
Steven Bartlett: So are those six people now rich?
Hal Puthoff: I don't know. Some of them may have followed up.
Steven Bartlett: Why were those six people picked?
Hal Puthoff: Since we had learned that sort of anybody can do this, we were actually raising money for a school that was being put together. So I just went to the board of directors and said, "Okay, I'm going to give you a crash course over the weekend in remote viewing of the type we train intelligence officers to do. You're going to be it."
Steven Bartlett: So it was the board of the school.
Hal Puthoff: Yeah. Board of the school. They all knew what I did for a living. And so this programme — Stargate — got so much actionable intelligence from the remote viewers that I started briefing all the way up to Bill Casey, director of the CIA, on a regular basis.
Steven Bartlett: Does it still exist, this programme, in any capacity?
Hal Puthoff: If it does, you wouldn't hear about it.
Steven Bartlett: Why?
Hal Puthoff: Because it would be a highly classified black programme. We don't want our adversaries to know how we might be getting access to their data.
Steven Bartlett: You just told us.
Hal Puthoff: People can not believe that, and that's fine. As it turns out, the CIA and DIA — the programme finally got declassified at the level it was operating at, and you can go to the CIA reading room and get all of the documents on it.
Steven Bartlett: Your work was originally classified?
Hal Puthoff: Oh, it was originally a top secret special access programme. Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: There's a part of me that goes — if people could do remote viewing and see into other parts of the world or predict things the way you're saying, if it was trainable, life as we know it would be completely flipped on its head. I think it's unreasonable to think that when Stargate became public, the US government stopped remote viewing. If I was the US government and it worked, I wouldn't stop.
Dan Fabian: I think it just went underground. Moved to a different agency.
Hal Puthoff: We had people that we trained. A number of the military intelligence officers that we trained have now left the military and they do have training courses.
Steven Bartlett: Do you believe that, Dan?
Dan Fabian: I do. At first I thought it just sounded too much like something in a comic book. But the more I first read about Stargate and the declassified documents, I started to realise how seriously the government took it. And the more I learned about it through Hal, eventually I got connected with someone who has done remote viewing for the government and they did a demonstration for me that blew my mind. Because you would think if anyone was capable of doing remote viewing, they could go on the internet and make one prediction or do one video that would be proven to be true, and they would literally be considered a superhuman — people would probably think they were a deity or a spiritual leader or something.
Hal Puthoff: What we found was that it seems to be an action that is just part of the human makeup. So it isn't like they're a super deity or godlike or really off the charts. It's something that people can learn to do, like they can learn to play the piano. Maybe now we have new psychiatrists and neurophysiologists beginning to study how consciousness does its thing in the brain. Are there elements of it — once you get into quantum theory and quantum entanglement — that would say you could have evidence beyond just our physical structure?
Dan Fabian: It could be rationalised with a quantum connection. And the overlap that I find fascinating is that some of these craft that have been found or crashed — the reports from people involved say that a lot of them don't have any control panels in them. They're basically empty other than seats, which suggests that maybe there's some sort of mind connection controlling these craft.
Steven Bartlett: I did wonder about the craft. I thought, if I was an advanced civilisation and I was that smart, why would I send life to these planets when I could just send the craft? Why am I sending biological life when I could just send the craft?
Dan Fabian: Maybe they're manufactured biological life. Maybe they're not sentient.
Hal Puthoff: As part of this CIA programme, we found that people could affect quantum devices that were totally shielded by superconducting shielding. I brought a so-called psychic to Stanford. I was sceptical at the time. I said, "Okay, we've got this experiment where there's a tiny quantum chip down inside electrical shielding, magnetic shielding, superconducting shielding. We want to see if you can affect it." And he did. This was supposed to be totally non-affectable from the outside. In fact, it was developed by the Navy to look for flaws and stuff like that — it was supposed to not be influenced from the outside by anything. And he influenced it. And when I say he influenced it, I'm not just saying there's a little blip that you could kind of read into it. No — it was a system where it ordinarily just had an oscillating signal, and then when he affected it, it just stopped the oscillation. And then he also made the oscillation go twice as fast. The poor graduate student whose life depended on this not being affected from the outside was really shaken. That raised a big issue — does that mean if we hide our documents inside superconducting safes, the Russians might be able to access them? Actually, when we had the American remote viewers get together with the Soviet remote viewers and trade war stories and do experiments together —
Steven Bartlett: I think I'm naturally sceptical, but I'm often proven wrong. My fiancée believes lots of things I don't believe, and so frequently she's been proven right. So I remain open-minded to things in life because I've learned to. On the balance of probability, if you ask me, do I think there's other life in the universe — I think it would be crazy to say there wasn't. But has there been life that has arrived here that we've recovered? I would need more evidence.
Hal Puthoff: I think that's the right attitude, and we're hoping that with the release of documents that's starting to happen now, you'll get that evidence. But in the absence of actually getting access to the evidence, it's very reasonable to be sceptical.
What disclosure would mean for humanity
Dan Fabian: I do think the current administration in the US is so focused on following through with this directive the president gave — to get all the evidence within the possession of the federal government, all the different agencies and military branches, and then figure out what can be declassified — that we're going to get to more tranches of more meaningful evidence. And I think eventually we'll get to that moment that we've all only seen in movies, where a sitting president steps to a microphone and tells the world we're not alone in the universe. I think we're going to get there.
Hal Puthoff: I think so too. Just a matter of time.
Steven Bartlett: Does it change the meaning of life if that becomes the case? Does it mean anything for us as humans? What do you think the meaning of life is, Hal? And do you think we should change our behaviour in any way even if this moment does occur?
Hal Puthoff: I think if we found out that there were life throughout the universe that can be developed in all kinds of forms, then that makes us take a new look at what it means to be human. We ought to think about interacting with these other species and seeing what we can learn from them and what they might learn from us. It just opens up a whole new view of what the universe is like. I've got 15 grandkids. They should grow up in a universe where it's teeming with life and they know that. That's a very exciting kind of thing.
Dan Fabian: I think it also could be the one thing that could unify all of humanity. Reagan gave a great speech during his presidency at the United Nations where he said he often thinks it might be a threat from outside this universe that makes all of humanity come together and think more about what it has in common than its differences, and moves them past the conflicts of the moment. That might be wishful thinking and might be naive, but it also might actually be the one thing that could line people up.
Steven Bartlett: Has it changed how you think about the meaning of life?
Dan Fabian: Between what I've learned about the reality of the UAP situation and the existence of non-human life, and what I've learned about remote viewing, it's made me realise that our western, present-day view of reality is not complete. We think we know everything there is to life and how things work, and we just don't. And when you're honest with yourself and look back at history, all the times people thought they knew everything, they were proven wrong pretty quickly. It's made me open to a lot more possibilities than I would have been just 10 years ago.
Hal Puthoff: I think it'd be a renaissance in our attitudes toward life and everything.
Are they open to being wrong?
Steven Bartlett: Are you both open to being wrong?
Dan Fabian: Yeah. When I first started making my documentary, I was totally prepared to have people tell me, "Look, this is all nonsense. It was all cover for our classified projects."
Steven Bartlett: Did they?
Dan Fabian: No. Not a single person did. That was the crazy thing. I was trying to pull it out of people. I'd be like, "Come on. This is really a black project, an unacknowledged special access programme, right? Just say nothing if that's the case." And they're like, "No, dude. Not even close." Over and over. And these weren't random people. These were senior people on the Senate Intelligence Committee, on the Senate Armed Services Committee, leaders in the intelligence community, leaders in the military. So yeah, it's hard to ignore.
Steven Bartlett: Well, Trump has released the first round of the UAP reports. So in many respects, this conversation is to be continued.
Dan Fabian: Yeah. We have been told by our friends in government that the next tranche of evidence is likely to come out in the next 30 days or so, and it's going to be a rolling declassification process. So there'll be a lot more to talk about in the near future.
Steven Bartlett: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I feel very curious, and I highly recommend people go check out your documentary. One of the great things about it is the diversity of people you've spoken to, including Marco Rubio, who is now working alongside President Trump, and many others including yourself, Hal, and guests like Jay, who I hope to speak to sometime soon.
Hal Puthoff: Thank you for having us and thank you for bringing attention to interesting topics like this. People like you are helping open people's minds. In the past, there were only four TV networks, and a small group of legacy media people controlled what people thought about. People here are opening up everyone's minds to other possibilities and other information.
Steven Bartlett: It's interesting because sometimes I think I have to remind the audience of why I do what I do and why I pick the subjects that I pick. But it's honestly just what I'm curious about. If something rises in public curiosity and it's in my own curiosity, then I'll speak about it. It's not an endorsement of me believing everything. It is just me wanting to learn more. I wish we lived in a society that was more open-minded generally — to the people on the other side of the aisle, or to subjects that are currently considered controversial. It's not lost on me that my own very existence as a Black businessman is in itself something that was once a very controversial idea. So I'm all for controversial ideas having some kind of space to be.
Dan Fabian: Every major breakthrough in the history of humanity came from someone being curious and wanting to learn about something they weren't aware of. Great things will come out of it. And you just touched on something we didn't mention — I found, shockingly, that the UAP issue and non-human life is the most bipartisan issue in Washington DC at a time when Democrats and Republicans in the United States can't agree on anything. They're completely lined up on this being the biggest issue of our time. That says a lot.
Steven Bartlett: To be continued.
Dan Fabian: To be continued.