Trump, UFOs, and the Alien Files

0:00 On February 19, 2026, the President of the United States got on his phone, not a secure military line, not a press podium, and posted on True Social that he would direct the government to release files connected to, and I'm quoting directly here, alien and extraterrestrial life, Unidentified aerial phenomena, unidentified flying objects, and any and all other information connected to these highly complex but extremely interesting and important matters. Highly complex, extremely interesting, important matters.

0:38 That's the man with the nuclear codes talking about aliens, Russia. Charlie, we're ready to rock. This was all after a reporter asked him a question that started because Barack Obama, in a podcast lightning round, casually mentioned that he thinks aliens are real, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. I don't know if they're real or not. Like comments and subscribe. And then apparently decided that the appropriate response to not knowing something was to declassify it, which is honestly a refreshing approach to uncertainty.

1:21 Here's the thing though. Before you laugh, or before you panic, I want you to consider this. Humans have been reporting strange things in the sky for literally thousands of years. Mesopotamian texts, medieval European chronicles, indigenous world traditions from the Amazon to the Australian Outback. We have been looking up, confused and afraid for as long as we've had eyes. Unusual practice. What do you think? What do you? Think you know, the only thing that's changed in 2026 is that now there's a government file about it and someone might actually finally open it.

2:04 So today, on Unusual practice, we are going in, as we always do, not into the conspiracy rabbit hole, not into tinfoil territory, into the actual documented record, what governments have known, what pilots have seen, what radar has tracked, and what it means that the most powerful country on earth is now officially, publicly saying it might be the time to show us. Oh my gosh, did you hear that? Because the question was never really whether UFOs exist. The question is, what are we actually afraid to find out?

2:51 This is the most unusual practice. You think what you think you know with Charlie.

2:58 This is Charlie currently confused and questioning every decision that led to this podcast. But hey ho, hang on tight 'cause it's about to get weird.

3:22 Let's start with a #701. That's how many UFO reports out of 12,618 investigated. the US Air Force could not explain when Project Blue Book closed in 1969. Seventeen years. Government scientists, Military interviews, standardized questionnaires, and 701 cases that just stayed there and they were filed under. We just don't know. I'm sorry, what Now? Here's the part they buried. The CIA leader admitted that U2 spy plane flights accounted for more than half of all UFO reports during the late 50s and 60's.

4:12 The government was mistaking its own secret aircraft for something alien, which is a very human solution to the alien problem. Just make yourself the mystery. But the Robertson panel, the CIA's internal committee on UFOs, made it explicit. The goal wasn't to understand what people were seeing. The goal was to decrease public interest, not truth. Silence and Doctor J Allen Hynek, the astronomer hired by the Air Force to debunk all of it, spent years doing exactly that until he could not anymore. He coined the term close Encounters.

4:57 The man they hired to disprove UFOs became the godfather of UFO research. That's what happens when you actually look at the data. On November 14th, 2004, I want you to imagine Pacific Ocean, 100 miles off San Diego. The USS Nimitz carrier group is running drills. Radar operator Kevin Day starts tracking objects on his screen, descending 80,000 feet in under a second. For context, that's from the edge of space to sea level almost instantly. Nothing human can possibly survive that. Commander David Fraver, Top Gun graduate, 16 years of flying, gets scrambled to investigate.

5:46 He finds a white wingless 40 foot object shaped like a tic tac candy. No propulsion, no exhaust, and when he moves towards it, it actually moves towards him. It was aware we were there. Fraver told 60 Minutes it accelerated, vanished, and then reappeared waiting at the exact GPS coordinates the Nimitz had predesignated as its patrol point, a location that was a secret that it couldn't have possibly known. The encounter meets all five of the Pentagon's own criteria for a genuine unexplained anomaly instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity, no thermal signature, no propulsion and transmedium travel.

6:38 5 for five. His wing man, a decorated Navy officer, asked herself seriously, how in a world would I fight this? The footage was classified, shared internally with defense contractors. The pilots who filed reports got laughed at for years. The public found out thirteen years later when the New York Times broke the story. That's not a conspiracy theory. That is what we call the timeline. So your alien had a room at the Holiday Inn Paramus. Now here's something the Western media doesn't cover. The Soviet Union had its own UFO program, and theirs was much bigger, more systematic, and frankly, by far more disturbing.

7:26 At 4:00 AM, northwest Russia dockworkers on the early shift see a blinding light rise from the direction of Lake Oniga. That was on September 20th, 1977. It expands into something resembling A glowing jellyfish, hovers, then fires ultra thin beams of light downward. After 12 minutes, it punches a burning red hole through the clouds and disappears. This was witnessed simultaneously by approximately 4000 people across 6 cities, including Helsinki, Finland. Police, sailors, a task news agency reporter, neighboring government sent formal letters to the Soviet Academy of Sciences asking whether this was a new weapon and whether it was environmentally dangerous.

8:22 Moscow's response? We're baffled to The incident triggered a meeting at the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The outcome was a top secret investigation program called The Network. It was run jointly by the Defense Ministry and the Academy of Sciences. It became the largest government UFO investigation ever conducted by any nation. It ran for 13 years. It investigated around 3000 reports. Their conclusion? 5 to 10% remained completely unexplained. Same number as Blue Book, different country, somehow the same answer.

9:08 Unusual practice takes you where most conversations never go. Hidden histories, counterintuitive truths, and cultural twists that flip your perspective. Deep ideas delivered short and sharp, just minutes that feel like years of discovery. You'll learn what most people miss in a lifetime, giving you the kind of knowledge that sparks conversations, ignites debates, and makes people lean in closer, Concise, surprising, and impossible to ignore. A Soviet nuclear missile facility near Usovo, Ukraine, on October 4th, 1982 had military personnel claimed seeing unidentified lights performing slow, complex maneuvers above the base for two hours, and then at precisely 2137 hours, the launch control panels light up.

10:04 No orders from Moscow, no authorization, and no human input. The missiles were aimed at New York City, and they appeared to be initiating launch sequence on their own. For 15 seconds, Soviet officers watched in horror, powerless. Then, at the exact moment that the objects departed from the sky, the sequence aborted. Power returned to normal, and a subsequent investigation found no equipment malfunction that could possibly explain it. Investigative journalist George Knapp obtained these documents from post Soviet sources and later testified about the case before the US House Oversight Committee.

10:50 These UFOs perform incredible maneuvers. Knapp told Congress. And right at the end of this 4 hour period, the launch control codes for the ICB Ms. lit up. This was not isolated. In 1967, at Malmstorm Air Force Base in Montana, retired US Air Force officer Robert Salas described an almost identical incident. A glowing object hovering near nuclear silos, multiple missiles simultaneously shutting down or entering unauthorized modes. He testified about it Underoath before Congress in 2023, Whatever the explanation, and none has been confirmed.

11:31 Something was appearing over nuclear facilities on both sides of the Iron Curtain and interacting with weapons systems. Both superpowers. Same pattern, and neither could explain it. And apparently that's not a fun fact. That is something that actually did happen. OK, so here's what makes the Soviet incident genuinely unsettling. Because it's not a new story. The idea that something is watching our weapons circling our skies, appearing in our most consequential moments. Humans have been reporting that for thousands of years, not as metaphor, but more as a testimony.

12:10 The Nazca lions in Peru. Enormous geoglyphs, A Condor the size of a football field. A Hummingbird, A spider carved between 500 BCE and 500 AD into desert floor you can only fully see from the air in a civilization with no aircraft. In 2024 alone, a Japanese research team using AI found 303 previously unknown figures. We're still finding them. We still don't know why they were made for a perspective nobody on the ground could ever have. Japan around 1000 BCE. The Dobu figurines 15,000 recovered across the country.

12:55 Humanoid Google eyes textured suits what looks disturbingly like breathing apparatus near the mouth. Official explanation Fertility goddess. OK, maybe, but those same forms appeared simultaneously in eastern Siberia, in cultures with no documented contact with Japan. Same eyes, same shape, thousands of miles apart. Medieval Europe. Church archives across the continent record fiery disks, lights and formation objects moving against the wind. The Nuremberg broadsheet of 1561 depicted what witnesses described as a full aerial battle above the city globes, crosses, cylindrical tubes documented by the local astronomer, taken seriously by the population and treated as a portent rather than a hallucination.

13:54 And in Australia, the Wangina figures an Aboriginal cave art that may be among the oldest on Earth, with enormous eyes, no mouths and always depicted as arriving from above. So none of this is proof of anything extraterrestrial. We can say that clearly. But here's what it is. Independent cultures, 0 contact with each other, spanning 10s of thousands of years, consistently depicting the same types of things coming from the sky. That's not a coincidence, that's a pattern. And in about 5 minutes, we're going to talk about what human brains do with patterns, because that part matters a lot.

14:43 Now, For now, just hold this. Governments have been classifying these reports for 80 years. Humans have been making them for 50,000. Which raises an obvious question about who's actually been keeping the longer secret. When do you first recall being? Abducted now moving on to West All, Melbourne in 1966. On April 6th at 11 AM, over 200 students and teachers at West All High School watch an unidentified silver grey object hover, maneuver and disappear behind a tree line. The science teacher, a confirmed skeptic, watched it evade 2 civilian aircrafts, accelerating every time they got close before vanishing within the hour.

15:35 Military personnel, police, men in suits and the school was assembled and told do not talk about this. The teacher was warned he'd lose his job. His camera, allegedly containing a photograph, was confiscated. So the idea is usually you do not silence 200 school children over a weather balloon. Hello, George. And here we come to my favorite story. In 1947, Roswell, NM, something came down. The Army Air Force initially announced they have had recovered a flying disc, then weather balloon, then decades later a classified Project Mogul surveillance balloon, then crash test dummies.

16:31 Four different official explanations for one event across 78 years. That's not transparency. That's clearly a government rewriting its own homework. Now here is where it gets really strange. And I want to be clear with you upfront what I'm about to describe. It sits on a spectrum that runs from credible whistleblowing to elaborate fiction. Now you decide where it lands. A book published in 2008, The Alien Interview, claims to contain top secret U.S. Army Air Force transcripts passed to the author, Lauren Spencer, by a former military nurse named Matilda O'Donnell McElroy.

17:15 According to the material, McElroy was stationed at Roswell in 1947 and conducted a series of interviews over six weeks with a surviving entity recovered from the crash, a being she called Errol, who communicated entirely through telepathy.

17:39 McElroy described Errol not as a biological entity in any conventional sense, no internal organs, no reproductive system, but as something more like a conscious intelligence inhabiting A constructed body, a kind of doll, or a vessel.

17:57 The being identified itself as an officer, pilot, and engineer from a civilization called the Domain, an interstellar force that has been using the asteroid belt as a base of operations for the past 10,000 years. The Milky Way, according to Arrow, is a minor territory in a much larger domain.

18:22 And now here is the best concept of all. The is be concept. Isbe is be the part that genuinely unsettled me when I watched it years ago and a lot of people with me. The being told McElroy that all conscious entities are is bees, immortal spiritual beings. They're not bodies with souls, not souls that occupy bodies, that death is not ending but a transfer, a recycling, and that humanity has been deliberately kept amnesiac between incarnations, trapped in a kind of spiritual loop, unaware of its own nature or history.

19:09 That is either the most profound thing anyone has ever heard or the most elaborate science fiction ever dressed up as testimony. And here's the honest assessment.

19:26 Matilda O'Donnell McElroy has never been independently verified. Yeah, her story exists almost entirely through Spencer's account. Serious UFO researchers, including Bill Ryan of Project Avalon, have called it a dishonorable hoax that confuses the Roswell issue and discredits legitimate witnesses.

19:49 Critics point to anachronisms throughout terms like computer and database used in alleged 1947 transcripts, language that didn't exist in common usage until decades later. So almost certainly not real. And yet the concept it raises, which is that consciousness might be non biological and non local, is not weird science. We've been hearing about this for quite a while now. It's actually an active area of serious philosophical and neurological debate. The hard problem of consciousness, why there is subjective experience at all, remains genuinely unsolved.

20:29 Jacques Valet, one of the most rigorous scientific researchers in UAP history, argued that what we're dealing with may not be extraterrestrials from another planet at all, but intelligences from another order of reality altogether. Researcher John Keel coined the term ultra terrestrials being does that have always coexisted with humanity, existing in wavelengths of energy we cannot detect, manifesting across history as gods, demons, fairies, apparitions and now aliens. Which brings us back to Roswell and to David Crush, a real person.

21:06 A documented former intelligence official who testified before Congress underoath in 2023 that the US government has retrieved non human biological matter from crashed vehicles. Over 40 sources with direct knowledge Pentagon denied it. Grush said he'd feared for his safety since going public. No confirmed alien interview, no verified nurse and no is be on record. But also four different government explanations for one event, a congressional witness risking his career in his safety, and a question that refuses to stay closed.

21:53 Something happened at Roswell. We still don't know what, and the fact that we don't 78 years later is itself the most interesting data point of all.

22:12 So back to February 2026, the true social post, the secretary of war, he said war, not defense, ordered to release the files. This happened because a reporter asked Trump about a podcast comment Obama made in a lightning round suggesting aliens are real. Trump's response was to accuse Obama of leaking classified information and to announce he'd declassify everything to help Obama out. You genuinely cannot write this yourself. Anyway, is this theater? Probably partly. Astrophysicist Frederica Bianco said it out right.

22:52 This is a distraction from ongoing political crisis, Congressman Thomas Massie posted. They've deployed the ultimate weapon of mass distraction, but the Epstein files aren't going away, even for aliens. Fair. But here's what the pure cynics miss. The legislative machinery underneath this is real. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act passed bipartisanly mandates that every federal agency transfer all UAP records to the National Archives. The phrase technologies of unknown origin and non human intelligence is now in U.S. Federal law.

23:37 That sentence exists. Therefore, if it exists, why does it exist? Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for intelligence, was clear about what genuine disclosure actually requires trained security officers reviewing documents line by line, agency by agency, with full understanding of what was classified and why, not a social media post. Harvard astronomer Abby Loeb, who has briefed Congress on UAP, said this. Declassify events from 50 years ago. Technologies from that era are no longer strategically sensitive.

24:19 Even that limited step would give scientists something real to work with. Whether anything actually gets released depends entirely on follow through, which is not this administration's strongest quality. But the pressure is real, and 80 years of public patience is running out. I'm Donald Trump and I approve. This message? OK, let's have a quick brain check. There's a term, and it's called apophenia, coined in 1958 by German psychiatrist Claus Conrad. It means the unmotivated seeing of connections, finding meaningful patterns in random data.

24:59 Conrad was writing about schizophrenia. Then researchers found something a bit uncomfortable. And this is completely normal. Every brain does it. It's visual equivalent is pareidolia. Seeing faces and clouds figures in static. In a 2022 EEG study, the brain's pattern detection response fired before participants consciously registered what they were looking at. The pattern is identified before you decide anything, before your rational mind gets a vote. So when 13,500 people in Belgium report the same triangular craft over 16 months, or when thousands of people in Arizona simultaneously describe the same V shape moving silently across the sky, or when people on six different continents across 3000 years draw the same big eyed figures descending from above, we should hold two things at once.

26:00 Our brains are built to find patterns, and sometimes the pattern is real. The Phoenix Lights, March 13th, 1997. Thousands of witnesses across Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada that same evening had the same description, an enormous, slow, silent V shape. One report it hovered above a nuclear plant so low that the security supervisor considered shooting it down. Same night, no coordination, same object. That's not pareidolia, that's data. UFO belief and organized religion share almost identical psychological architecture.

26:46 Superior beings watching over humanity promised revelation. Faith in the face of ambiguity. Community built around shared mystery. The only real differences are the historical age and the merchandise. Still, what's actually in that drawer? The realistic version? A lot of heavily redacted memos, bureaucratic chains of communication that reveal more about institutional dysfunction than cosmic revelation. Radar logs where the anomalous readings turn out to be atmospheric interference and a genuine irreducible residue of pilot reports.

27:24 Multi sensor confirmations and radar tracks that nobody even after exhaustive analysis can possibly explain. Now the files are classified not because of what was spotted, but because of what surrounds it. The classified sensor systems, the submarine positions, the air defense capabilities that become visible in that data. The UAP is almost incidental. The classification protects everything around it. But there's one genuinely strange scientific possibility that doesn't get enough attention. The UK's classified Project Condon report concluded that novel meteorological plasma phenomena, which is self illuminating atmospheric electromagnetic fields like supercharged ball lighting, are responsible for the majority of otherwise inexplicable sightings.

28:20 Objects that move with apparent purpose change shape, evade radar and leave no trace. They're not alien, not human, just atmospheric physics we don't fully understand yet. Ball lightning has been reported credibly for over 800 years. One researcher called the quest to understand it tracking the Sasquatch of Meteorology. Scientists once voted formally against the existence of meteorites. Rocks from space, they said, were impossible. Well, they were wrong. So the history of science is full of things that were impossible until they weren't.

29:04 And here's where we land. There are right now approximately 12,241 nuclear warheads on this planet. Russia holds around 5459 of them. the United States holds around 5177. The last binding arms control treaty between the New START expired in February 2026. As of today, the two largest nuclear powers are operating with 0 mutual limits on their arsenals for the first time since the 1970's. The Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, in force since 1970, required nuclear states to pursue disarmament in good faith.

29:54 As the United Nations Secretary General noted on the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, not one nuclear weapon has been physically destroyed pursuant to a treaty. Smash the Like button. We signed the papers, we held the ceremonies, and we kept the weapons. And you're wondering why they keep us distracted? And now we're arguing about whether the president's true social post means aliens really are coming. Here's the Fermi paradox in its darkest form. The universe is enormous.

30:34 Life almost certainly exists elsewhere. So why the silence? Why no signal? Why nothing? The answer that I think that nobody puts on a poster is possibly. Maybe because advanced civilizations don't survive their own freaking technology. Maybe they build weapons they can't unbuild and get distracted by politics they can't solve, and they just simply don't look up in time. Maybe the alien files, when they finally open, they don't point outward. Maybe they point at us. There are algorithms running right now, designed deliberately, expensively, with full knowledge of the psychological research, to keep you angry at someone who looks different, votes differently, praise differently, or was born on the wrong side of a line someone drew on a map.

31:31 Outrage is profitable. Division is profitable If your attention is on the fight in front of you. You never look at the bigger one, and the bigger 1 is this. One species, one planet, one atmosphere, 12,000 nuclear warheads, AI systems we're still learning to control a sky full of things we cannot explain, and not a single problem among any of those that gives a damn which political party you support. The alien question, at its best stripped of the noise, is a question about human maturity. Are we capable of looking at something we do not understand and saying we just don't know yet, without either worshipping it or destroying it?

32:24 Are we grown up enough to follow evidence wherever it leads? Or do we keep classifying it, denying it, making a documentary about it, and moving on to the next distraction? So making it this far, Respect y'all. You've either been genuinely fascinated for 30 minutes or you've been doing laundry and just didn't want to change the podcast. Both are valid, both are highly appreciated.

33:04 If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a review, and make the algorithm aware that we exist. Until next time, stay curious, stay bold and stay aware. And remember, the sky is full of questions. The least we can do is look up and take care of one another.

33:27 Somebody just followed me.