First Joe Rogan, now David Grusch. Ol’ TTB does seem to be getting around these days…
By now you have probably heard of David Grusch, the former military intelligence officer who testified before Congress on the U.S. Government’s secret UFO – oh, excuse me, we’re supposed to call them unidentified aerial phenomena now – initiatives. His appearance and subsequent notoriety has caused quite a stir, though it’s not clear the testimony shed any really clear, fresh light on what’s been happening off the public record for the past 80 years.
Moving right along: A couple of months ago, I serendipitously happened upon the YouTube video channel “American Alchemy” hosted by Jesse Michels.
I previously posted a link to one of his videos – the one where Jesse sits with Eric Weinstein and Hal Puthoff, the one that introduces some information about gravity research in North Carolina in the mid-1950s that I found (not) surprisingly “Townsend Brown” adjacent. I posted a note in the comments below that video that said simply “Dude! We need to talk!”
A few days – maybe a week? – later, I got an email from somebody who had read The Man Who Mastered Gravity and had a fistful of questions for me. I saw the name at the end of the email but it took me a minute to make the association. It was the same Jesse Michels from American Alchemy – but he had not seen my “We need to talk” comment. He’d found and read the book and was calling me entirely out of the blue.
That’s what I’d call “from serendipity to kismet.”
Over the past few weeks I’ve spoken to Jesse several times. He asked a lot of direct questions about the revelations in the book – good questions that go right to the heart of what can or cannot (mostly cannot) be corroborated. He said he was working on a project that would include an extended, favorable shout-out for the book, which sounded great to me. Now that project has been released and… goodness, what an undertaking!
What Jesse has done is compile a comprehensive, nearly two-hour documentary that neatly crystalizes almost the entire history of – well, what are we calling it this week? – the UFO / Aerial Phenomena / Paranormal Activity / Extraterrestrial / Fermi Paradox of unexplained paranormal activities over the past eighty years or so.
The centerpiece of this production is a series of conversations with David Grusch, the military/intelligence veteran who testified before Congress in July about what the U.S. has been keeping under wraps about UFOs, crash retrievals and recovered (i.e. dead) alien ‘biologics.’
I really don’t know what to make of Grusch. I don’t doubt the veracity of his testimony, but it seems to me he goes right the edge of new revelations without really getting there. He is billed as a “whistleblower” but I keep getting the impression of guy who puts the whistle in his mouth but for whatever reason doesn’t quite blow on it. I get that he is constrained by external forces and NDA commitments, but too much of the discussion between he and Jesse (and Jesse’s crew) dwells on pure speculation.
On the other hand, that speculation is quite comprehensive. In the course of two hours they manage to cover just about every possibility re: what the hell is really going on out-and-up there. Extraterrestrial visitors? Top secret domestic (or foreign) military research? Time travelers? Take your pick – or maybe it’s all of the above.
About 46 minutes in, Jesse neatly segues into a discussion of Townsend Brown and how his story dovetails into the mysteries David Grusch has exposed. Jesse has graciously given me permission to extract that portion of the documentary, so here’s that segment:
I highly recommend watching this entire two hour documentary. I have watched the whole thing once and I’m tempted to watch it again – if only to make note of the countless peripheral subjects that Jesse seems to have at least enough cursory knowledge of to drop into the conversation. It’s hard to watch a presentation like this and not think “jeez, I have a lot of homework to do.” I’ve written two books. Jesse sounds like he could write a dozen, except he’s too busy making videos like this to be bothered with anything as old fashioned and analog as a book.
On the other hand, he sure cites a lot of books, and it’s gratifying after all these years to find mine among them. In the notes accompanying the video on YouTube, there is a list of his sources. Just seeing my name in a list that includes Nick Cook, Jacque Vallee and J. Allen Hynek was enough to make me think maybe I have added something useful to the canon. That sort of validation has been a long time in the coming.
I also appreciate that he’s included a couple of shoutouts to Linda Brown, though she understandably remains “in the wind” and “under the radar” at present.
My favorite thing might be the quote from Eden Phillpotts that appears near the end of the documentary: “The universe is filled with magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
Gee, I wonder where he found that…. ????
