AP Strange: 00:22

Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.

Beatnik: 00:31

But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.

AP Strange: 00:40

Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back, my friends, to the AP Strange Show. I am your host, AP Strange. This is my show, and today's show is brought to you by Disclosure brand, Utopian Energy Sources. With with your Disclosure brand, Utopian Energy Sources, you can have all the free energy in the world.

AP Strange: 01:27

We just need that pesky disclosure to happen first. And it's coming, it's coming soon and it has been for seventy years, but this time for real, no, for real, it's really coming this time. So, with that out of the way, I have a wonderful guest on tonight. He is somebody that I've been connected with and had the pleasure of being connected with after following his work for some time. You may know him from the UFO Trail blog that he has maintained for years or books such as The Grays Have Been Framed or Wayward Suns.

AP Strange: 02:02

Or you might know him for from his more recent efforts, Spearheading Expanding Frontiers Research with Erica Lukes. My guest tonight is Jack Brewer. Welcome to the show, Jack.

Jack Brewer: 02:15

Thank you, AP. I am delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

AP Strange: 02:19

Of course, man. Yeah. I've been pretty excited, you know, checking out what you've been up to lately with expanding Frontiers. It seems like you've been very busy with that. And we were saying kind of off before we were recording that there was a magical time on Twitter where a lot of us were all in the same place and I used to correspond with you and just kinda follow your stuff more closely.

AP Strange: 02:49

And nowadays we're all cast to the winds as it were on social media. But it's nice to check out what you've been up to. And like I said, it seems like you and Erica both have been very busy with a lot of great work.

Jack Brewer: 03:04

Well, you. Thanks. I appreciate that. A lot of people avert from public records requests and Freedom of Information Act requests because they are time consuming as far as you wait a lot. There's a lot of waiting involved and a large part of our work at Expanding Frontiers is Freedom of Information Act requests.

Jack Brewer: 03:34

But the upside of the wait is when you do, you get involved in a subject and you're looking it over and you see two or three things you can do a request on and you submit those. And then tomorrow you're reading something else and you submit a couple more. After doing that for two or three years, you start getting records in your inbox, like every day.

AP Strange: 04:02

Nice.

Jack Brewer: 04:04

And so we're hitting that point where we've got a lot of material to sort through and digest and decide how to present it and how does this relate to that. And it is exciting. It's fun. It's interesting. It's historical research and yeah, I enjoy it a lot.

AP Strange: 04:27

Yeah. I mean, I've never been one to really, you know, put in those requests and it's great that you have not only the archive that you're accumulating through your efforts, but you also have resources for people that wanna learn how to do it themselves, which I think is great.

Jack Brewer: 04:46

Yeah, we do. Thank you. We operate at expandingfrontiersresearch.org, and there's some different sections of that site that involve a blog and an online archive and a video page of interviews we do and things. And then we also have a Patreon that most of it's public that it really started just to give folks a convenient way to support us on a recurring basis. And my general method of operation is I'll share records first there just like the raw material.

Jack Brewer: 05:31

And then over at the blog, I will go into deeper analysis after I've digested it a while because it just takes a while to, especially when you get into things that are thirty, forty or hundreds of pages. Just I don't expect to like get every fine point, but I do try to make sure that I'm not missing some key point in it. And over time you start kind of getting some different tricks of the trade so to speak of how to keep track of names and like have searchable word docs that you can say, hey, have we come across this guy before? Let's you know, search our files and see if he's come up. And yeah, it gets really interesting to start putting all of the pieces together on how, for instance, one of the things we're deeply involved in now is how FBI investigations, espionage investigations overlapped into the New York Saucer Information Bureau different UFO investigators.

Jack Brewer: 06:55

And I can understand how people would be like, oh, the FBI was snooping around and oh, they're denying that they're investigating UFOs. But when you really start reading this stuff and digest ing it, I don't think they were interested in UFOs.

AP Strange: 07:12

Yeah, right.

Jack Brewer: 07:13

I think they were interested in people that were pretending to be interested in UFOs stuff Like like that's just research of and the investigation is figure out why were they investigating this person? Why did this person start hanging out at UFO meetings? And, you know, like that's one that has just run to current times too. Is you're just like, okay, so here's a guy that we know worked in the Pentagon, worked here, did this, was in the psychological warfare. I mean, from NACAT right up to present times, we got CIA assets that would have us believe they just decided to recreationally start hanging out UF, you Yeah,

AP Strange: 08:10

and like you say, it's been there from the very beginning and I found that to be super interesting with some of your recent work. I mean, I guess it makes sense, but there's so much CIA overlap with NYCAP as you wrote about extensively in Wayward Sons, and the intelligence community in general, but, and you kind of really outline that well in the book, but in these recent ones, it's more the FBI and it seems like it's centered more on contactees. Like I was reading Truman Bethrooms FBI file earlier because of because of something that was on on your site.

Jack Brewer: 08:49

Yeah. Yeah. And and it it's not entirely clear whether the contactee like Bethrum and Daniel Fry, like if they were knowingly being deceptive and if they were for what reason, was it like on behalf of a foreign government? Was it on behalf of the FBI? Was it just because they were greedy and they saw an opportunity to make a few bucks and, you know, get out of being, you know, laborers in California.

Jack Brewer: 09:31

Like what was the point? Then, and all of that's part of the mystery, but yeah, it is really interesting that we'll get a file and there'll be some things in it we didn't expect like, you know, you just kind of shrug and go, let's see what's going on with Ivan Sanderson. And then, he like initiated contact with the FBI and told them he wanted to help them out and that thought subversive stuff was going on in the UFO community. And so then you take a document like that and you go, okay, here's four or five other people that he told the FBI they should keep an eye on. So let's submit a request on each of these people and see if the FBI followed up on it.

Jack Brewer: 10:25

And it just keeps cascading into wider and wider nets. And our latest filled request that I haven't even posted yet is on a woman that called herself key phrase there, Lois Jessup at the New York Sossier Information Bureau. And she's quite mysterious. And I didn't really see that coming. I knew that she had been an editor and I knew she had written some woo about, you know, supposedly fringe things that happened in South And Central America and whatnot.

Jack Brewer: 11:12

But I'm finding that she was an editor at this place that Sanderson alerted the FBI about. And I'm not sure, I don't think that was her real name. I've found some historians that were just interested in her work for other reasons. And they can't figure out for sure where she came from and where she went. And then I came across a work of Ivan Sanderson's that he was literally looking for like after she had been with the New York group, like where did she go?

Jack Brewer: 11:54

What's she doing? And I find stuff like that pretty fascinating, you know? Yeah. And it all ties into an investigation of a man named Robert Stark that it's not clear, like it's clear that the FBI was investigating him because he was suspected of being a Soviet, espionage agent, but it's not entirely clear if they ever charged him or what became of it. And that kind of interests me too, as we keep getting files and sometimes they just kind of end in a place that doesn't seem like the ending, which kind of makes me think that there might be more that remains classified, like it may be they flipped somebody and got them working for them, or I don't know, but it, it certainly a wider angle point here is it certainly casts a lot more on the New York UFO culture of the 50s and 60s than we might get from some of the more credulous or easily satisfied outlets that that we might pick up information from.

AP Strange: 13:24

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I find Sanderson's role within this pretty interesting because as you said, he's kind of offering information up to the FBI and saying, you know, what they're talking about at their saucer group doesn't sound quite right. And I mean, wasn't even he wasn't an American. Right? Wasn't he born Scotland?

Jack Brewer: 13:48

That's correct. And the only reason he was here was he was British intelligence during the war was what he was doing in New York. So yeah, it is pretty weird. Something that Erica and I will kind of laugh about when we're exchanging notes and looking at this stuff and talking about it again and again, we'll like hit a point where we like, well, I mean, there it is. There's a UFO guy that's in FBI informant.

AP Strange: 14:24

Mean, we got it, right?

Jack Brewer: 14:26

I mean, are we done? You know, there it is.

AP Strange: 14:29

Well, he's former SIS and an FBI informant, you know?

Jack Brewer: 14:34

Joseph Bryan with NICAP. I mean, CIA asset. He failed to mention that he was a psychological warfare expert as he spent a decade on the NACAP board of directors. Yeah, you're just like, so I, and we'll just laugh and like go, well, so I mean, we're done, right? Mean, there you go.

Jack Brewer: 15:02

And I mean, it's just kind of funny how the skeptic side and the rigid believers alike can always just kind of see a way that something doesn't matter. Know, that like you like you could take that information and show someone that's really vested in supporting the UFO narrative and wanting to believe that NYCAP was vested in revealing truth. And they might say something like, well, it would make sense that the CIA would want to know what Kehoe was learning and things like that. And then you can show it to a rigid skeptic and say, well, so he worked for the CIA, that doesn't mean he's not allowed to be curious what UFOs are. Maybe he just, you know, I mean the direct, you know, former CIA director was on the board for a while, Hill and Coder, I mean, maybe they were just friends and on the board.

Jack Brewer: 16:22

And like both of them seem naive to me in a way that like, I'll give you this as an example AP. I came across some FBI records where a FBI clerk in New Orleans wanted to join NACAP. He thought it was interesting. And so he asked his direct superior and eventually it ended up up the chain to the Washington field office and, you know, the top of the line Hoover, you know, what do we do about people that want to be in NICAP? And Hoover explained why they had reasons that they didn't want to publicly endorse or oppose Kehoe and his rhetoric and we don't investigate UFOs, we're just staying out of that.

Jack Brewer: 17:24

And so I bring this up because my point is if a clerk at an FBI office was told to stay out of that, I really don't think that like intelligence officers at the upper levels of agencies like the CIA would be encouraged or even allowed to just moonlight as UFO investigators. Honestly, I find that like naive. I mean, like, you worked for the school board for crying out loud and you wanted to be in certain recreational clubs and agencies season and stuff, they might discourage that just because of the reputation that comes with it much less if you were with the CIA, you know.

AP Strange: 18:24

Right. Do you suppose that might have been that Hoover would have been concerned about stepping on the CIA's toes if they were already involved with it?

Jack Brewer: 18:35

I think that's a really good point too. I think he knew a lot more about things than he often led on. He had informants or assets connections at some of the earliest meetings when the CIA was reaching out for help to academia about Project Bluebird and artichoke and what became MKULTRA. And we obtained documents, FBI records over the years that show how he had his finger on the pulse of that as it was developing. So yeah, I think it's real likely that you end up with agencies investigating other agencies and investigating people in their own agencies.

Jack Brewer: 19:35

And yeah, I think that's a very real part of it, yeah.

AP Strange: 19:41

Yeah, yeah, mean because with something like the JFK assassination, you're looking into that it becomes kind of clear that the FBI and CAA didn't really talk to each other. Yeah. So what do we know about this Robert Stark character because I realized you're just kind of on the trail now, but, and I have to admit when I was reading it earlier, I thought it said Robert Stack for a second, and I was like, no way. Like, so the Robert Stack, and then I looked at it more closely and realized I was wrong. But

Jack Brewer: 20:23

Well, he he only came up because Sanderson jumped out there and said, I mean, he took, Sanderson jumped out there and told the FBI along with a New York editor named Hans Sanderson, who was Swedish born that was attending these New York saucer meetings. They jumped out there in the late fifties and told the New Jersey office of the FBI that they thought subversive stuff was going on. And by that they meant they pull you in, this should ring a lot of bells too, they pull you in to get scientific information about UFOs and to hear what the latest news then is about UFOs. And then when they get you there, they talk about writing your congressman to declassify everything and tell you how horrible the US government is and that you know we should all be protesting and they're like using UFOs as a vehicle to rile up citizens. And so the FBI just kind of made note of that.

Jack Brewer: 21:53

And then in 1963, they circled back because they were investigating a guy named Robert Stark for possible espionage. And my first understanding of this was I obtained a document responsive to Sanderson that indicated they went back to him because he had indicated that he would be willing to talk to him. And they were like, we think this Stark guy might be connected with this saucer bureau that you told us about. And he wasn't Sanderson wasn't attending anymore, but he knew some people that were and he told them to talk to them. And Lois Jessup was one of them he mentioned that I talked about a little bit earlier that she's a real mysterious character.

Jack Brewer: 22:52

And interestingly too, one of the things I'm finding in Stark's files is there were several women in his life and he would use different aliases and they would use different names. And he rented an apartment for a while with a woman that claimed to be his wife, but they didn't use the name Stark. And when the FBI showed pictures to the landlord of various women they knew he had been associated with, they didn't recognize any of them. So there was yet another one still that was apparently claiming to be his wife at this apartment. And so while the FBI wasn't directly finding anything illegal that he was doing, and at a bare minimum, was going to a lot of trouble to have different identities in different cities and whatnot.

Jack Brewer: 23:59

And it wasn't clear why. And of course, something like that would be a major red flag. And what, but to answer what else we know about him, one of the big things was he claimed to be from Detroit, but he had a European accent. So that was problematic. And he had worked for a Russian immigrant in New York that was very successful in the electronics business and sold a number of companies and retired in good standing.

Jack Brewer: 24:44

And so they, you know, FBI cold war paranoia, if you just even knew somebody from Russia, you're halfway, you know, to an espionage charge already, but then in, in the bureaus credit, this guy was doing some really weird stuff. And then, like I say in the middle of it all, he just starts writing UFO articles that he wants Daniel Fry to publish in his newsletter and hanging out apparently at New York Saucer Information Bureau meetings. Understandably that that's a pretty perplexing, you know, file to go, okay. And so sometimes they just follow him and they like have him walking around downtown and frequently changing directions. And it's interesting reads just to learn about the trade craft.

Jack Brewer: 25:51

Like they'll see him throw stuff in a garbage can and they'll circle around and like get the garbage so they can examine what what is he, you know, what the hell is this guy doing Lying about who he is, where he's from, what he's doing, what his name is and hanging out with saucer people.

AP Strange: 26:13

And

Jack Brewer: 26:15

I'm still working on it. I don't know what they ended up deciding. I have found though that I believe it's our guy died eventually in, I believe it was New Jersey. So, I mean, you know, he didn't die in prison or he didn't, you know, get shot in an alley in a standoff or anything. Like I used that obituary I got from newspapers.com in order to find more records on him from the FBI.

Jack Brewer: 26:55

So, I mean, that's pretty good indication it's the right guy. And I think some of that's really curious that like, we just don't know yet if we ever will exactly where the investigation went and what became of it. And, you know, as long as we're on that, I'll go ahead and say two. And I always try to be mindful of that I don't know what these people were doing. I don't know who they are, you know, were they hiding from things they've done in another country?

Jack Brewer: 27:32

You know, I And don't I'm always kind of aware that they may have descendants, know, this may be someone's grandfather, someone's father, and occasionally I get contacted by people that are the descendants of people I write about and they'll ask me, did you ever get that FOIA request that you mentioned in this one article and things like that. And so I try to be mindful of that too, that while they can seem like characters in a movie or something, you know, these are live, were at one point living, breathing people that the FBI was just following around, you know.

AP Strange: 28:18

Right. Yeah. And the FBI followed a lot of people around, so.

Jack Brewer: 28:22

They absolutely did. That became apparent to me too, following the files of people like different people at Harvard, the astronomers and the Ivy League astronomers, that part of being involved in classified projects meant that you spent your life under surveillance. That not only did you get checked out to make sure you're a good security risk, you're going to continue to get checked out to make sure you remain one. And yeah, people, you know, like I say, these Ivy League professors, they end up with just hundreds of pages of FBI files that just, you know, span thirty years. Menzel, Shapley of, you know, this ongoing go check him out every now and then for the White House or for this, or he's been asked to be on this project or that project and it's pretty much never ending service like that.

Jack Brewer: 29:39

Yeah.

AP Strange: 29:40

Yeah. Well, I mean it sounds to me like the Stark character maybe knew he was being shadowed because he seemed to but it's kind of wild because he could be anything from like a valiant Thor type to to just a serial bigamists that things he's being followed by private investigators or something, you know?

Jack Brewer: 30:04

Yeah. Burn after reading kind of thing that, Yeah, I, I was working with someone once on UFO stuff that became convinced that they were under surveillance and I respected this person and their judgment. And one of the reasons I respected them was that what they did about this was go see an attorney and ask them, tell the attorney why I think I might be under surveillance. This happened, that happened, the other happened. And you know, what are my options about it?

Jack Brewer: 30:51

And the attorney asked them some things about some family members and distant family members and knew a checklist of scenarios to go down that a lay person in the UFO community that's not a legal expert wouldn't know to do. And it became apparent that there were some reasons that were much more likely they might be under surveillance than they happen to be interested in UFOs and be working on something with me and go to a conference every now and then. In fact, the attorney told them given that one of the scenarios they told them that a family member had gotten involved in, they told them I could guarantee you that you're going to be monitored until they resolve this with your family member. And they actually felt better, you know, like knowing that and like understanding what was probably going on. And I respected that.

Jack Brewer: 31:57

Yeah, if you really think that car on the street is looking at you and all, yeah, you would rationally do something about it in some scenarios rather than just you know build mystery and you know like how we see at these conferences or you know that they'll actually discourage you from going to outside professionals you know.

AP Strange: 32:27

Right. Yeah. Because that's how they're regularly in. But yeah, that

Jack Brewer: 32:32

comes to mind that there's a lot of reasons people might get like you're saying private detectives and whatnot, local law enforcement investigations, a lot of reasons people might have had their phones tapped in the 90s or had someone follow them around the strip mall to see what they're doing that UFOs would not be at the top of the list, even though that might be the first thing the person's thinking of. Yeah.

AP Strange: 33:10

Yeah, yeah. So, have you been able to find any writings by Stark? You mentioned, I saw in one of the blog posts that you wrote that he had tried to get published in Daniel Fry's Understanding newsletter, but it seems like they didn't end up printing it. Do we have any copies of his writings?

Jack Brewer: 33:34

That's a great question. The FBI was interested in finding it and couldn't. And I got some, the answer to your question is I don't have them yet, no. But I did get the titles of them in the records I just got on Lois Jessup that probably over the weekend, next week at the latest, I'm hoping to share with everybody. And what's really interesting as an aside, of how the process works, one of the files PDFs I got that's responsive to Lois Jessup was also responsive to Daniel Fry.

Jack Brewer: 34:29

And when I did a request on Fry, I got this same document, but it was heavily redacted and I appealed it and I haven't gotten a response back yet on the appeal. The same document I got on Lois Jessup, it has much less redactions in it, including giving us the names of several articles that Stark allegedly wrote. And I just couple nights ago, I was putting those on a word program so that I can start trying to find them. Yeah. Okay.

Jack Brewer: 35:13

Yeah. Yeah. So I don't have them yet, but we can start trying to look for them if they ever got published. Letter that the FBI got ahold of from Fry to Stark says that Fry wanted to publish them. But of course that doesn't mean that he did or that they ever came to an agreement either.

Jack Brewer: 35:44

Doesn't mean he used the name Stark. I've come across at least one pen name he used along with aliases he used. So it was a lot easier to hide in those days than when they can just check our credit card number and see where we've been for the last ten years, you know? Yeah. Right.

AP Strange: 36:11

That's for sure. Yeah. I mean, it seems like he probably was leading multiple lives at the same time. So you would expect that he'd write under a different name, but but Fry's newsletter was kind of one of the big ones for the contactees of the time. Had he was one of the more popular voices during that era.

AP Strange: 36:37

So it would have been good distribution anyway.

Jack Brewer: 36:41

You start to wonder, is he like trying to put coded messages in something that he knows will get a wide distribution? Is he trying to put subversive stuff? Like some of it's clearly subversive about, you know, like I can't remember off the top of my head, but just my emotional memory is like, you know, demand that they stop lying to you about UFOs.

AP Strange: 37:11

And

Jack Brewer: 37:11

know, like it's certainly planting seeds about, you know, the federal government is lying to you. And, you know, they were, they are, they do. And yet that's also a talking point of, you know, foreign adversaries that, you know, are going to point that out. Yeah.

AP Strange: 37:41

Yeah, that's for sure. And I mean, like, it's not entirely off the mark to say that there was subversive and un American stuff in the contactee worlds because you know, one of the other files that you've uncovered are more related to bathroom, but also George Hunt Williamson was they started to notice like, hey, these guys are kinda palling around with William Dudley Pelly. We know that name, you know.

Jack Brewer: 38:11

Yeah. I mean, yeah. I pretty much have a working theory at this point. I'm sure it's not original by any stretch of the imagination, but I pretty much at this point think that the reason Pelli got interested in really jumping on the esoteric and paranormal and alien stuff with both feet was because a condition of his parole was that he couldn't distribute material about fascism and Nazis and stuff anymore. So he couldn't do any kind of political activism, was it a condition of his parole?

Jack Brewer: 39:03

He was, you know, convicted of sedition. And so it seemed pretty clear to me that he could just say it's aliens that are, you know, they look like Aryans and they're mentally superior and they're spiritually superior and we need to follow these alien teachings. And like you're saying, and like Nick Redfern and others have written about these alien teachings were often about do away with the weapons, get rid of the nuclear arms, you know, disarm, be open, declassify documents, things that would be an adversary's agenda. Yet, yeah, it's kind of psychotic too that you're thinking, so peace activists are the enemy?

AP Strange: 39:58

Right, yeah.

Jack Brewer: 39:59

Yeah, yeah. So, and then you have the marriage of, you know, the hippies and the right wingers because their common denominator is distrust of the government. And, but yeah, it definitely all ventures into Pelley and the silver shirts and everybody's always, everybody, not everybody, but there has always been a percentage of people in the UFO field that seemed like they were looking for a crowd that was easy to convince of something. Yeah.

AP Strange: 40:45

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, especially if it's been outlined to somebody like Pelly that they're not allowed to outwardly promote propagandistic ideas about fascism and that they might go, okay, well, I'll just move it into a more esoteric philosophical realm and, and, you know, secure the hearts and minds of these Marks over here that are looking for flying saucers.

Jack Brewer: 41:14

Yeah. And, and then you see that the guys that were working with Pally, like Hunt Williamson, they're showing up at the contactee event and so is Keyhub that's claiming to not want to have anything to do with these outlandish contactees, but there he is on the speakers list with them. And yeah, I just start to wonder about that, that like, so where the travel expenses and the speaker stippin and all of that come from for this event that we have documents that some of these people, Bethram was promoted by people that worked for Pelli, you know? And so it seems like reasonable speculation that some of the others may have been too. Like, you know, I don't wanna go off the deep end here, but I mean, a lot of questions could be raised about Kehoe and his alliances and political leanings.

Jack Brewer: 42:34

And that just doesn't seem to be something that the UFO crowd likes to give a lot of attention to.

AP Strange: 42:46

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's one of the harder things to discern when you're looking at history is people's motivations and intent. You can never really know. I mean, even for people that are currently with us, it's hard to know. You can directly ask them, but That's great point.

Jack Brewer: 43:08

That's a great point. One of my pet peeves is when I'll see, especially if I see it in an article, but even in a post on social media, if somebody will say, such and such believes that yada yada yada, I think you don't know what they believe. You just know what they said they believe, you know?

AP Strange: 43:33

Right. Yeah.

Jack Brewer: 43:34

Yeah. And you can quote what they said. You can document what they do, but no, you know what they're thinking.

AP Strange: 43:46

Do Well, see, this is exactly one of the things I think that we're definitely aligned on is people like to make a lot of assumptions and I feel like you definitely have it in you to pump the brakes and look at different angles and say, wait, well, we can't assume what they were thinking, but evidence points to this, but there's also this and this and this. Things are very nuanced and a lot of people like to really jump to conclusions or just take for granted that somebody else's opinion about something is, it's already a settled, something about their personality has already been settled for us, you know? So, I do appreciate that though, because like, feel like that wasn't a very elegant way of saying it, but for me on my part, but I feel that way about everybody that I look at where it's, I'd like to know what was going on in their head, but I'm never going to. The best I can do is read all the things they said, read other people's opinions about them and if you're gonna write about it, present it as much of it as you can and kinda let the reader decide.

AP Strange: 45:10

I feel like you need to give your readers a little bit of the benefit of the doubt that they'll come to their own conclusions.

Jack Brewer: 45:18

I agree with that and thank you. I appreciate your assessment. I try, I'm certainly not above getting caught up and wanting to see things the way that all confirm my suspicions and theories. And it cuts both ways, like the same way that we'd say, we don't know, you know, that this guy is really as credulous as he pretends to be. It can cut the other way too, like back to Kehoe, his real talent from the best as I can tell was public relations.

Jack Brewer: 46:11

That's what he was good at. He built NYCAP up with a lot of members. He got on well known TV shows. He had been the tour manager for the famous navigator. And that's what he was good at.

Jack Brewer: 46:35

Yet while he talked a really good game and did a lot of lobbying in Washington, some of it successfully At the, the basic point, what he was doing was soliciting intelligence officers to give him classified information. And I can certainly understand where a UFO person would look at that and say, but people should leak UFO stories. People should get that out in the public. Yet I can also understand how the FBI and the CIA and the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations may have looked at it like whether you're sincerely this gullible or not either way, like, like it, it really doesn't matter to them what you're thinking and what your intention is. Like, like, like maybe someone isn't like, maybe they are so indoctrinated with the alien thing that it really, they really don't believe in their heart of hearts that a person may have seen an exotic aircraft or that a person may have seen technology they're not supposed to be talking about that they witnessed at an air force base or during a flight.

Jack Brewer: 48:23

And maybe they really don't know that, but either way by encouraging them to get you that evidence and leak that evidence, it does become the intelligence agency's job to tell you to F and cease and desist, you know, whatever their level of intellect or credulousness may or may not be.

AP Strange: 48:51

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And I mean, one thing that's always fascinated me in this and especially since I put myself forward on the internet as somebody that wants to talk about UFOs or any of this stuff is people's emotional investment in a lot of this. And people do kind of let their emotions take over with some of it, which I think is fascinating.

AP Strange: 49:16

I had somebody that I just would casually comment back and forth to on Twitter, just unload on me one day and ended up blocking me just because I I was I was saying that the whole Eisenhower meeting aliens at, air force base thing was like a really old hoax that's been around forever. Like, he was so invested in this myth that he was saying, oh, you sound like one of those debunkers now, you know? Yeah. And more recently, I had done an episode about like eighties youthology and we were just kind of kinda weird dunking on the UFO cover up live thing and I had somebody on leaving comments on the YouTube video being like, so it like you guys so you guys are all skeptics now? What?

AP Strange: 50:14

We don't believe in UFOs anymore? I'm like, no, I don't believe in UFO disinfo. Yeah. That's different than UFOs. But the emotional part of it is, is powerful.

AP Strange: 50:27

It's kind of crazy. It overrides people's ability to think critically about it at all.

Jack Brewer: 50:32

Yeah. You remind me of a conversation I was in recently about media literacy and like it's one thing to debate the substance of an issue, you know, an article. Do you believe in this? Do you not believe it? Do you think it's feasible?

Jack Brewer: 50:58

That's one thing. And then it's another thing to say, can develop the skills or I can use my skills I have developed to look at this so called news special or to go through this article line by line. And I can see whether they've given me the information I need to make a decision to have an informed opinion. And that's altogether different than arguing about the topic itself is the structure of the article. Does it cite its sources?

Jack Brewer: 51:45

Does it say where it got this information? Does it just say, you know, the Washington post has learned and then takes off on 12 paragraphs that you don't even know where it came from? A lot of the time. Yeah. That's what it does.

AP Strange: 52:03

Yeah, exactly.

Jack Brewer: 52:04

You know, And, you know, AP with me, I think the UFO stuff, the paranormal stuff, the experiences, I think it comes down to, if I'm telling my story and I want your support with my story. Here's what I remember. Here's what I think happened best of my ability. I have a certain responsibility to tell you, I just want emotional support with thinking about this and going through it. But if I want to share a story with you and I expect your acceptance of it as fact, that's just unreasonable.

Jack Brewer: 53:01

You know, I you can't, you can't. And, you know, there's our narrative, there's our identity. There's what we relate to. I know, I know that people that are into the paranormal and the esoteric identify with that and large amounts of our identities can be on these different milestones of experiences in our life. That's fine to be taken that way.

Jack Brewer: 53:41

The challenge when we start presenting to someone that we want them to accept our interpretation as an objective reality is that they should be allowed to investigate. They should be able to then start asking questions and wanting documentation. And that's just not cool to dissect someone's experience in life like that. And from when I was on the experience or side of the desk with it, I also discovered that something that's not cool about it is it's not just my story. A lot of the time that if I start getting on the radio or whatever talking about something that happened forty five years ago when half a dozen people were around, and I want that accepted as objective reality, well then the people listening have a right to ask me who were those half a dozen people, and can I talk to them, and can I this, and can I that, and what was the date, and what was the town, and all?

Jack Brewer: 54:54

And if you don't want to go there, then don't go there. You know, mean, don't have the authority to involve everybody else in that process that may or may not want to be in it. So there's a lot of emotional stuff that goes with it. And yeah, I think we do have responsibilities to identify whether we're looking for emotional support or whether we want objective investigation about an event. They're completely different areas of expertise.

Jack Brewer: 55:37

They're different support systems and that, you know, there's just, I mean, we could talk for hours about that alone.

AP Strange: 55:50

Yeah, for sure. But I mean, it's kind of analogous to what you were saying about media literacy because if you're inclined to believe in one narrative or another anyway, and you're reading an article, a lot of them are intentionally written so that you'll fill in the blanks with X, Y or Z to come to a conclusion, but sometimes not, but either way you will because if you want it, if you're looking at it wanting to read it one way, then you're going to read it that way.

Jack Brewer: 56:24

Absolutely.

AP Strange: 56:27

So I think the work that you were doing with yet another aspect of expanding Frontiers is media literacy and a series called the learning to learn, which I thought was really cool. You had a couple of different people involved on that one, which I think is sorely needed in our world today.

Jack Brewer: 56:50

Well, thank you. Yeah, those are public service videos that are freely offered at the EFR Patreon, the Expanding Frontiers Research Patreon. Yeah, I did relatively short and concise, like half hour interviews with people with qualified opinions and qualified experts on how we go about separating the signal from the noise and how we learn about the things that matter the most to us without getting bogged down in all of this other stuff. And yeah, Vanessa Velilco was helpful. She was willing to be interviewed.

Jack Brewer: 57:41

Sean Beetle, Sarah Scholes, Erin Gullius, and then Erica Lukes and I reviewed it. I've often thought about that's something I could like revisit annually and do four more or something like that, you know.

AP Strange: 57:58

Yeah, Yeah, I think it's a great idea. I mean, seems that our public education system doesn't support the kind of critical thinking and media literacy that it ought to. And I think the technology has eclipsed educators' ability to keep up with. So I think it's a valuable resource for a lot of people.

Jack Brewer: 58:29

I hope so. I appreciate you bringing that up. We try to provide, you know, useful, meaningful content and it's rewarding to do. Enjoy doing it.

AP Strange: 58:45

Yeah. Yeah. And I appreciate that it's there. Now going back to what you were saying earlier, and I can cut this out if you don't wanna talk about it, but you said looking at it from the experience or side, you've had your own experiences and are you comfortable talking about it?

Jack Brewer: 59:07

I'm comfortable enough talking about it. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for asking. I think that most of us get involved in this subject, a high percentage of people, because it's of interest and it's often of interest from a personal perspective.

Jack Brewer: 59:29

And when I came into it, I was what I might would in hindsight call more of a John Keel perspective of I was kind of a counterculturist at heart. I believe I still am. I'm just kind of an old hippie that doesn't look like a hippie and doesn't do the things I did when I was 25 years old anymore. But I think that that's what brings a lot of us here. And it's kind of an anti science.

Jack Brewer: 01:00:13

I think Keel kind of wrote with that bunch of stuff shirts that are afraid to look at the truth and don't want to see their paradigm shift and all of their papers be shown to be wrong. And I came to feel like that while I still appreciate Keel and I still respect Keel and I'm just using him because he's kind of a benchmark which is another shout out really. Yeah. I came to think that that's kind of a lazy, lazy man's way of looking at it all that there's also a lot of truth in the works of Doctor. Julia Shaw and historians and people that bothered to get college degrees and put their research in systematic professional ways that they present it.

Jack Brewer: 01:01:22

But yeah, when I came to the genre, that was why I had a UFO sighting as a child. I was interested enough in the truth of it to really try to get it under a glass. And in hindsight now, because of like the things I've learned about human memory and looking back at things, I pretty much at this point have to accept that I do, I don't know what happened. And I can't really separate thinking about what happened from what happened. You know, it's been fifty years, man, literally fifty years.

Jack Brewer: 01:02:12

So like, you know, do you think that I could tell you the difference between what happened when I was 11 years old one Christmas morning and just a project, a mental projection of what Christmas when I was 11 years old was probably like.

AP Strange: 01:02:34

Yeah.

Jack Brewer: 01:02:34

No, I could not. And so, and again, part of my interest in that sighting and the things it brought up was, well, what can I learn from other family members about it? What can I learn about the area I lived in and things like that? And it can just become a jumble and we kind of go down this Richard Dreyfus, I'm making a reference to Close Encounters of the Third Kind kind of obsession that often doesn't lead anywhere healthy and give John Keel credit for that. He warned of that too, that he said he's seen many a person end up a babbling idiot that, you know, just kept scratching and clawing.

Jack Brewer: 01:03:28

I do feel good now that I'm okay with the ambiguity. I don't know what happened. It may have been nothing. It may have just been misidentifications. It may have been, who knows?

Jack Brewer: 01:03:43

Shamanic journey, who knows? Yeah. There are, think a big part of the point AP is there are people that if you'll let them will pull you towards a conclusion that makes them feel better about themselves. Yeah. That's, that's probably my biggest concern about the UFO community is that it it's, it has a way of welcoming emotionally vulnerable people that don't find acceptance with their stories.

Jack Brewer: 01:04:28

Other places, they don't have other places to share them. They might find a UFO meeting, a regional meeting to work better for them than a therapist or a 12 step group or something along those lines that might would also be helpful. And then once they're in that, they're rewarded whether it's consciously and intentionally or not, they're rewarded by the group and the facilitators by building the narrative and sticking with the narrative. They're going to lose that support and that emotional attachment, that, that emotional acceptance. Like you say, when you start at, when you say, well, I don't know that Eisenhower thing.

Jack Brewer: 01:05:30

Oh, I better shut up about that.

AP Strange: 01:05:32

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Those guys unloading on me about it. It means a lot to him that that's true.

AP Strange: 01:05:41

Yeah, no, and there are a lot of vulnerable people out there that have experienced something, right? And I think that the support for them should be above the exploitation or the, even if it's not intentional exploitation, but people love to use other people's experiences to bolster their point. And if it means omitting facts, if it means finagling some facts and changing them so that if it's the narrative better, then they'll do that. And and it sucks for the person that had the experience because they were just looking for acceptance somewhere, you know?

Jack Brewer: 01:06:23

Yeah. And they, a lot of the times they mean well, the same way that I would say a really high percentage of UFO reports and reports of alleged abductions. I don't think the vast majority are intentional deception. I don't think the vast majority are what they seem to be, but I don't think people are being intentionally deceptive. But in that same way, the people that facilitate the, these UFO groups and meetings, even investigation of UFOs sometimes at some organizations, they mean well and just don't even realize how they're just stomping all over reasonable protocols.

Jack Brewer: 01:07:29

Like I remember Mark O'Connell, he's a talented writer and thoughtful commentator in the UFO genre. And I remember years ago reading one of his blog posts about a woman at an organization that just everything was an orb, you know, like everybody, everybody she got assigned to, they were seeing orbs, you know? It was like, got the idea from reading his blog posts that she legitimately believed that, but I mean, that's potentially harmful to people and it's certainly not helpful. What, what can you, I mean, we have like entire organizations of people saying, you know, give us your $50, get your training manual, and we'll give you names and numbers to go interview about the UFO they saw. God only knows what all happens

AP Strange: 01:08:40

after that. And we have robots now that are doing it so people don't have to. I mean, there was an article in, futurism that I was reading recently about an AI, somebody became fascinated with their AI conversations and it fed into their psychosis where they were out in the desert like trying to get the aliens to come pick them up and like destroy the guy's life. Like he had a successful business and a marriage and it all fell apart, I

Jack Brewer: 01:09:16

saw that one and it even told them that his faith in the AI was what opened the experience to his reality. I read that. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:09:30

Yeah. And and somebody had when I shared it online, somebody had commented like, is this is straight out of like the cult, how to make a cult manual. Absolutely. We streamlined the process with technology, way to go.

Jack Brewer: 01:09:47

Absolutely. When back when I was writing the grades had been framed or I guess researching what became writing at AP, it was so creepy to have the people like Emma Woods tell me the things that were coming out of the David Jacobs camp of, you can't go to the police, you can't go to a therapist, they won't believe you. They'll call the authorities on you. They'll have you There Baker was no one but David Jacobs and his entourage that you can rely on. And that was one of the things I thought of when I was reading about Guantanamo Bay and how those consultants, psychologists, consultants that develop the enhanced interrogation techniques, torture were aiming for what they called learned helplessness, you know, learned helplessness.

Jack Brewer: 01:10:58

And I thought that's absolutely it that nobody else can help you. Nobody can do anything but me and don't even tell any and don't tell anybody you're telling me this like, oh my God, that's just so sick.

AP Strange: 01:11:15

Yeah. And I think there's a prominent UFO person that, or a UAV person that was involved with those types of interrogation techniques, but his name is not coming to mind right now.

Jack Brewer: 01:11:27

Right. That's absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah. That famous UFO person that can for now remain nameless.

Jack Brewer: 01:11:38

That's another good example of guys that we're supposed to thank just decided that UFO stuff looks fine. I think I'm going to go do that a while. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:11:52

Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen that Age of Disclosure movie that or the documentary that had just come out?

Jack Brewer: 01:12:02

I have not, AP. Did you watch

AP Strange: 01:12:06

No. I think I would need to be paid handsomely to sit through that.

Jack Brewer: 01:12:12

Yeah. I feel like there are things I wanna learn about just to observe it, like the FBI records that I can so enthusiastically just take off on a tangent and talk for a half hour without coming up for air. Or then on the other hand, there's stuff that like, okay, I think I'm thoroughly convinced that's just like a bad scene and is like passing the spoiled milk around saying, oh, this is spoiled here, taste it. Like, I got it, man. That's spoiled.

Jack Brewer: 01:12:56

I believe you, you

AP Strange: 01:12:58

know? Right.

Jack Brewer: 01:12:59

Right. Like how many, oh, like this journal asked me to do a review on one of those Pentagon Skinwalker Ranch books.

AP Strange: 01:13:15

The werewolf at the Pentagon or whatever.

Jack Brewer: 01:13:17

Yeah. One of the three or whatever it was. And I, I told them upfront if you'll provide the book and you want me to do it, but like, if, if this changes your mind and you want to withdraw the invitation, it's okay that I can tell you, I do not envision a scenario that I would read this book otherwise. And I am like really confident that I'm going to be extremely critical of what's in it. And they were like, no, that's cool.

Jack Brewer: 01:13:54

If that's what you want to do. But yeah, it's like that. It's like, like how thorough do I want to take notes? I mean, I I'm sure I can point out something on every damn page of the book. That's just a, an irrational logical fallacy, you know?

Jack Brewer: 01:14:15

Right. I'm no intellectual heavyweight. I mean, don't have a degree. I didn't graduate from any college, but I can like read the list of logical fallacies, look at a George Knapp article and go, man, this is just meaningless. Said, somebody said stuff, you know?

AP Strange: 01:14:40

Yeah. Yeah. No, I hear you. And it's like sometimes you really have to kind of bring people around one person at a time because just like I had that one person flip out at me about the Eisenhower thing, I had another one that was very excited about a poll quote from, what's his face, Eric Davis, the guy that's a CIA advisor, science guy, about a presentation he did on UFO crash retrievals. And it's like, oh, this article says aliens are real.

AP Strange: 01:15:21

And I'm like, no, it doesn't. And they're like, well, it says that they retrieved alien craft. And I'm like, no, it doesn't. It said he did a presentation about UFO craft retrieval. Like, that could be a hypothetical craft retrievals.

AP Strange: 01:15:34

That could be protocols for what you would do in case this ever happened, know. It could be about a story, unverified stories about those in a presentation. It's like the article is leading you to believe and he is leading you to believe by what he told the journalists in the language he's using that he has knowledge of alien life aboard craft from retrievals but he didn't actually say that, right? So, he didn't actually-

Jack Brewer: 01:16:06

That's a great example of how you just need to go line by line and say, I know what this makes me think it just verified, but did it really verify it? That's another thing I actually came to enjoy about reading the FBI files is sometimes they're difficult to read because they're not set up like a magazine. They don't have cool pictures. They don't have subtitles that let you know when something important's coming. They're often just walls of text, you know?

Jack Brewer: 01:16:49

But one of the cool things about it is you do get that kinda like, you know, throwback the dragnet, the just the facts ma'am kind of thing. It's like, It's like, okay, boss, you said go talk to this guy, here's what he said. And I'm just putting it in the memo, there you go. And yeah, you do have to be mindful of this isn't the FBI saying this is true. This isn't documentation that happened.

Jack Brewer: 01:17:22

This is documentation. Someone said this during an interview on the date of this memo. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:17:30

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's all super important stuff to consider. And I mean, a lot of the post 2017 UAP language has been almost exclusively designed to lead people to assumptions.

AP Strange: 01:17:59

More than ever before in the UFO world, seems catered to a certain kind of person just buying into it whole hog, you know?

Jack Brewer: 01:18:11

Yeah, does. And like you mentioned earlier, often and one outlet or another, it can seem designed to do that on purpose that, like if you've read something like three times, like three or four lines, like three times, and you're still going, now what does that say? Who said what now? You're still trying to like, get it in your head that, okay, so the taxi driver said he had a fare that said he knew somebody that had said, you know, like, you know, like you gotta like read it like a bunch of times to like get this straight

AP Strange: 01:18:58

about.

Jack Brewer: 01:18:58

So it's not even Eric Davis, it's not the Admiral, it's somebody they were talking about that said, and it's like, oh my God, what am I even like? Just stop even clicking on this crap.

AP Strange: 01:19:17

Yeah. There's actual foyer records to be read. Yeah. And it does, you know, it's kind of like a it becomes like a cult mentality. And, you know, I I found that really disturbing on UFO Twitter is like, there actually seems to be like, what I was calling like the cult cult of Elizondo.

AP Strange: 01:19:41

He's like a messianic figure for some of these people.

Jack Brewer: 01:19:47

Yeah, I think it got kind of dangerous.

AP Strange: 01:19:50

Yeah.

Jack Brewer: 01:19:52

Mean, some of those people were pretty indoctrinated and radicalized if you ask me, you know?

AP Strange: 01:19:59

Yeah. Oh, I agree. Yep. This is something I, you had mentioned Sarah Scholes earlier. I had talked to her about it at one point.

AP Strange: 01:20:09

I think she was working on another book, wasn't she? I don't know if that stopped happening, but, I'm sure

Jack Brewer: 01:20:16

she's working on a project. I don't know which one, but I'm confident she is.

AP Strange: 01:20:24

Yeah. Well, we can't speak for her. I should track her down and get her on the show and then I can ask her myself. On the topic of cults, this is something I found interesting because it's not anything I ever really looked into before, but you were looking into the Ramtha, Jay Z Knight stuff on the blog fairly recently.

Jack Brewer: 01:20:47

Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. One day Erica says, Hey, have you ever done any requests on Jay Z Knight? And I'm like, oh yeah, that woman that was like one of the Mufon big spenders and all. And so I looked it over and I thought, okay, one of the things with doing, the FBI is pretty much my go to agency, and then I'll branch out the local law enforcement or other federal agencies.

Jack Brewer: 01:21:19

And one of the things about foying the FBI is the person has to be deceased or it's an invasion of privacy. Won't release records on a person that's alive. And so since Jay Z is alive, one of the things I've learned to do is we'll let's a foyer accompany, we'll ask Ramtha School of Enlightenment. That'll be our And FOIA the FBI only gave us a couple of responsive pages, but it was involved a memo where they had been in touch with the Thurston County Washington Sheriff's Office because someone had asked them about, is this ramp of stuff cool? What's going on with this ramp of stuff?

Jack Brewer: 01:22:18

So they reached out to the sheriff's office and this memo documented that the sheriff told the FBI they're aware of Ramtha, that they're, they're well aware of that bit. So Erica and I were like, how aware? We sent a public records request to the sheriff's office and God bless them for about eighteen months. They kept sending us intermittent releases, periodically giving us more files. We ended up with hundreds and hundreds of arrest reports, documents, witness statements, video recordings, audio recordings of police interactions responsive to for one reason or another, Rampus School of Enlightenment.

Jack Brewer: 01:23:22

And I did some blog posts about it and we set up a searchable database that's in the online archive at expandingfrontiersresearch.org. And one of the things that arose during that, that is what I was recently on about that you're referencing is I came across in those records, a reference to a letter that had been written by a doctor to the Thurston County Public Health Department alerting them of concerns he had about activities at Ramtha School. And so then I did a FOIA request more recently to the health department. They referred it to the prosecutor's office and God bless them again. I mean, whatever people want to say about Thurston County, Washington, they've got their act together on the public records request.

AP Strange: 01:24:36

Yeah.

Jack Brewer: 01:24:37

They have been providing me with now two releases, including the letter that was sent from the doctor that was concerned about alcohol consumption and malnutrition and things like that among ramp of followers. And if I recall correctly, and I I'm going to be adding this to the database that we've set up and the latest release involves more photos of activities that were brought to the prosecutor's attention, concerns about drug use, minors being involved in these activities. And then there's various administrative things that were brought to the prosecutor's attention like Ramtha needed to get some engineers to work on their sewer systems and wells to be in compliance with County code, stuff like that comes up as well. But to the best of my knowledge, in spite of the fact we've gotten records where her followers and Jay Z Knight were even implicated in murder investigations over the years, to the best of my knowledge, She has successfully defended herself from all civil lawsuits, all criminal lawsuits, and pretty much never had anything come of it that I know of. Now, much internally it affected her quality of life?

Jack Brewer: 01:26:40

That's like we were saying, I can't tell you what somebody's thinking.

AP Strange: 01:26:45

Yeah.

Jack Brewer: 01:26:45

But she's certainly been controversial and a lot of stuff, a lot has happened up there. I mean, they, they were preppers that were building underground places to live. When whatever went down, went down, they were hoarding materials, valuables that made them targets of crime.

AP Strange: 01:27:15

Yeah.

Jack Brewer: 01:27:16

As one detective wrote in a memo where he was giving a case report or a status update on a case, he wrote that what we have here, and I'm paraphrasing, is well-to-do people move in near people that aren't well-to-do and they don't even use banks. They just like keep everything in a trailer and they get killed, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:27:51

Yeah. It sounds like a whole dark story that we're only get a little bit of. And it seems like she for the most part gets away with all kinds of stuff.

Jack Brewer: 01:28:03

I'll tell you AP, I don't think the, the most of it will ever come out. It it's so deep. It's so dark. It's so strange. It's so protected.

Jack Brewer: 01:28:24

There's so many layers and yeah, it does have this foreboding energy for lack of a better feel about it too, that like, if I don't have to dig a lot in that, I think I might be more mentally healthy just to here's the records if a researcher ever wants it, knock yourself out. One thing that I found particularly interesting, for example, that's sometimes it's just a single reference and you don't find anything more about it, but they had an email complaint to the sheriff's office once about open mail that someone in ramp the circles was complaining about that her mail was being taken and she had had some correspondence with the FBI. And one of those letters was open and then it just like wraps it up by law enforcement says they interviewed her and talked to her and she's supposed to like figure out if she wants to file charges or, you know, see if the landlord's going to give her a mail or what's going on. And I was really curious about like, for something like that, I'd just like to know what was she corresponding with the FBI about? Like ramp to have her doing FOIA requests or I don't know, you know, I don't want to speculate.

Jack Brewer: 01:30:06

I mean, I can think of a lot of reasons that it's nothing nefarious or it's nothing, you know, not like, like if you're undercover, you're not going to call the sheriff and tell them one wouldn't think, it was just, it just seemed odd. I thought like, there's obviously a story there and I don't know what it is. However simple it may or may not be, you know, it's not just my mail's been open, it's my mail with the FBI is getting open. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:30:41

Yeah. And wasn't there a story I'm gonna get this wrong right now because I read it the other day, but that somebody at Ramtha had complained about radio signals blocking the reception of the messages from from the alien intelligences.

Jack Brewer: 01:31:00

Yeah, yeah. That was, that's it essentially. One of, in these records we're getting that were given to the prosecutor's office, the health department was discussing in emails, how they should address increasing public concern about signals from radio towers and cell towers. You know, for a while there, there was the, that's how they're coming for us mind control. They're taking over the, you know, four gs, five gs, whatever the QAnon thing was that was going around.

Jack Brewer: 01:31:51

I wasn't up on all that, but I got the gist of it that, cell towers are the thing. They were discussing in their emails, do we need to do a statement on this? Or is it, you know, like worse to even address it? Or what do we do guys? You know, people are calling.

Jack Brewer: 01:32:14

And one of the people involved in this email chain said that he was the former executive director of the state board of health is why he was in their email chain. And he said that one time that, that like, it can get crazy that he said one time at an open forum that they held for the public, ramp the followers came and complained that something needed to be done about cell towers. And not only did they cause cancer, but the, like you said, the cell tower signal is jamming up Ramtha's signal and Jay Z Knight's having trouble picking it up because

AP Strange: 01:33:05

of the song. What a shame. And to his

Jack Brewer: 01:33:10

credit, he was just the facts, man. He was just alerting the group of this is what they said, you know.

AP Strange: 01:33:22

I did not conduct a thorough investigation. Yeah. Well, how would one do that? We don't know the we don't understand how to contact Ramtha or how that energy works between Ramtha and Jay Z Knight. Only Jay Z Knight knows that.

AP Strange: 01:33:38

But apparently, if if he was near

Jack Brewer: 01:33:44

T Mobile flip phone, it would have jammed it up, I guess.

AP Strange: 01:33:48

Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Well, one of the most interesting things about that or something I definitely didn't know was the Z stands for zebra.

AP Strange: 01:34:01

What a name.

Jack Brewer: 01:34:04

Yeah. What was she like? Like Judith Darlene Hampton, I think. And then she said Judy zebra night would work better for me.

AP Strange: 01:34:14

Right. Oh, okay.

Jack Brewer: 01:34:15

Judy zebra.

AP Strange: 01:34:18

Wow. Have you uncovered any evidence that she's related to Art Bell in any way? I've heard rumors that she was Art Bell's cousin.

Jack Brewer: 01:34:28

I have heard, heard whispers. I do not know. Something that I regularly do is reach out to people when I write about them. Yeah. And she's no different.

Jack Brewer: 01:34:47

I reached out a few times to email addresses I could get on her or her organization and her spokespeople. And none of them ever expressed any interest in replying to me. Sometimes that, I think it's the right thing to do. I think it can kind of take your writing, you know, a step further, like instead of just writing about David Jacobs, let's, you know, tell him I'm going to be in Eureka Springs. Can I get twenty minutes?

Jack Brewer: 01:35:28

You know? Yeah. I think it takes it to another level. I don't make a lot of friends that way though. I'll

AP Strange: 01:35:41

I tell you

Jack Brewer: 01:35:43

have some people that appreciate what I do and the old adage is certainly true that truth stands up to scrutiny. I mean, people like Sarah Skolz never have any problem having me bounce a few questions off her about her book or her article. Vanessa Vililko doesn't have any problem with me asking her some questions about the work she did in college and things like that. Brandon Fugal, not a big fan of Jack Brewer inquiries. So just take that for what you make of it.

AP Strange: 01:36:29

Yeah, and I mean, my understanding is that the interactions with Jacobs were were pretty contentious.

Jack Brewer: 01:36:40

They they they were he we reached a point that he he asked me to turn my recorder off and I complied. I mean, I'm not gonna I'll tell you too, John Alexander is the only person that ever agreed to let me interview them that then reneged. And then when I, I, I pushed it and said, I, because I was like, come on, you agreed to let me talk to you. Can I turn my recorder on? He's the only person I've ever asked.

Jack Brewer: 01:37:25

Can I turn on my recorder that didn't give me permission to turn on the recorder? And he didn't say, no, you can't, but he said, what do you want to turn it on for? And I mean, to get it straight, like to know what you said, to have a record of what I asked you and what you said. And like, if you don't want there to be a record of that, I think that kind of speaks to the whole process, doesn't it?

AP Strange: 01:38:01

Yeah, right. That kind of says it all. Yeah.

Jack Brewer: 01:38:08

Right. Like, AP. I'll I'll talk to you an hour or two but like, you're not gonna record it or anything. What the hell point then?

AP Strange: 01:38:20

Right. You know? Yeah. Well, there's something to be said for private conversation, but clearly if you're interviewing somebody, that's not the point, especially if you're gonna be writing about it later or publishing it in some way, you know, like

Jack Brewer: 01:38:36

And someone in his defense to be totally fair, I was more conspiratorial at that point in my writing than I am today. I feel like I've had some good mentors about how you can pursue things that are interesting to you without having to accuse people of things like just the facts, like we were talking about and let it speak for itself. I got criticized pretty good one time by a blogger that you know my first response, my first emotional response was to write a rebuttal and criticize some of their criticism. And then I thought, just think about it and if you still want to later, okay. But maybe some of the criticism's correct.

Jack Brewer: 01:39:45

Like, like maybe they are going a little over the top. Like, I didn't really say this that they're like they were giving me some straw man, but I thought, but the gist of what they're saying, yeah, I am suggesting what they're criticizing me for suggesting. So am I splitting hairs by saying, but I didn't come right out and said it. I was careful with my wording to not say it while I implied it. And I thought it was the right thing to do to give that some thought.

Jack Brewer: 01:40:23

Maybe I should think about that. If I'm not willing to come right out and say something then maybe I should find a topic I am willing to make a definitive point about and, you know, not throw it back at the person that was criticizing me for it. I think there's something to be said for that, but yeah, I mean, with John Alexander, I mean, no, we're just, we're just not going to be able to work this out. He did let me talk to him for a couple of minutes. And one of probably the main thing I got from that interaction was I asked him, how is it possible that you could have worked with General Stubblebine for so many years?

Jack Brewer: 01:41:19

And he says one set of things, you say another set and like tongue in cheek, I would say, let me introduce y'all to each other so you can figure out what the hell really happened. You know, like how can you have such conflicting narratives? And he said something that I thought really made a lot of sense was Stubblebine was my boss and I don't know why he says the things he says. And I thought, I believe that. I think I could believe that to a certain extent, but see, that's what I think made John Alexander a professional as compared to just your garden variety UFO loan that's running from one UFO conference to the next on the speaker circuit.

Jack Brewer: 01:42:21

He was really good at throwing just the most batshit crazy thing into the mix you've ever heard after he's been talking for twenty minutes about some of the most sound, rational stuff that, like, just makes complete sense. And now he's going to tell me they got people in Central America that are hovering three feet off the ground. And all they gotta do is take Ayahuasca to float around the tree tops, you know, and, or whatever it was he was going on about. But my point being that, I think he was a professional disinformationalist or whatever his purpose of being in the UFO community was, was that he could seem just as rational and down to earth and sincere as he could not. Like, no, you can't record what I'll tell you, but what do you wanna know?

Jack Brewer: 01:43:30

Yeah. And then say something that makes complete sense. Like he was my boss. What do you want me to tell you? You

AP Strange: 01:43:38

know? Yeah.

Jack Brewer: 01:43:40

How the hell should I know? You know? It had this feeling of it. Like, he's basically saying, look, look dude, the benefits were good and the pay's all right. What, what the hell are you doing with your Right.

Jack Brewer: 01:43:56

You know? Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:43:57

Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it can be easy to forget that, that a lot of these people are also just people.

Jack Brewer: 01:44:08

That's right. That's right.

AP Strange: 01:44:10

Yeah. And like we said earlier, we can't possibly know people's motivations, but sometimes it just boils down to something as simple as, oh, man's gotta work. You you gotta who's gotta put a roof over your head? Know?

Jack Brewer: 01:44:23

You know, AP, I think that was part of the process. My my interactions with him, I've been a big fan over the years of Sharon Weinberger. I think she does good work. And one of the things I feel like I've picked up from her work is keep a lot of sunshine on things, keep it above the board. Everything's on the record, know, or like I don't like you were saying about Sarah, I can't speak for Ms.

Jack Brewer: 01:44:56

Weinberger obviously, but that's my interpretation from reading her work is that you know, she goes to people on the record. And I found that since I started really noticing how people were doing it and paying attention to it to really be helpful that like if I reach out to somebody for, and I tell them, I'm looking for a quote for a blog post, here's something that happened. Do you want to say anything about it? And they start wanting to say, well, I don't want you to write this, but well, then I don't need to know. Don't, don't share with a blogger or something you don't want written.

Jack Brewer: 01:45:45

And I've come to identify that they're just trying to manipulate me emotionally sometimes with that too. Like to earn sympathy that's not deserved and stuff like that. Like, I don't want your don't tell anybody but stories. Just answer the question. Do you want to comment for a blog post for a book or And I, and my point being back to Alexander, don't be creeping around UFO conferences playing gotcha with intelligence officers.

Jack Brewer: 01:46:21

That's just not going anywhere. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:46:26

They're professionals, like you said, you know, like

Jack Brewer: 01:46:28

Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:46:30

They do that for a living, you know?

Jack Brewer: 01:46:33

Yeah. Like, you can hold them accountable. You can say, why does stubborn mind say this? Why do you say that? What's your answer?

Jack Brewer: 01:46:42

But like you said earlier about getting emotionally invested, try to keep it impersonal. I'm just writing an article. If you want to say something for it, fine. If you don't, fine. I'm just pointing out that you and the people you worked with have a lot of inconsistencies with what you say you worked on, you know?

AP Strange: 01:47:02

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've been going for a little while now, and this has been a lot of fun. So for listeners, this is Jack and I haven't actually spoken face to face virtually this way before. You know, we've we've been in contact before.

AP Strange: 01:47:23

So this has been a real blast actually actually being able to to chat with you and go back and forth. I I I think it's long overdue. So

Jack Brewer: 01:47:35

It is overdue. It is. And and I will keep in touch. And I I really appreciate you having me. Thank you.

AP Strange: 01:47:45

Yeah. Absolutely. So, for people that wanna keep up with, everything you're doing, the website is expandingfrontiersresearch.org?

Jack Brewer: 01:47:57

That's it. You can find all of our stuff from there. Can visit, you'll see a menu with our blog and you'll see a link to our Patreon and you, yeah, you can get to all of our stuff from expandingfrontiersresearch.org.

AP Strange: 01:48:15

And you're on a blue sky with that as well?

Jack Brewer: 01:48:18

I am. Expanding Frontiers Research and I have an account on there too, Jack Brewer.

AP Strange: 01:48:26

Okay. Are you still adding to the UFO trail blog or do you

Jack Brewer: 01:48:30

I do not. I go by it every now and then to moderate comments that come and go. I haven't written there in a long time. I do the EFR blog. There is a lot of material though at the UFO trail that there is of interviews and articles on intelligence officers and things like that.

AP Strange: 01:48:59

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've found it to be a really great resource over the years. Thank I'm glad it's still up there. And then, and then your books, your books can be purchased pretty much on Amazon or yeah.

Jack Brewer: 01:49:13

Yes, they are available on Amazon. The Grays Have Been Framed and Wayward Signs.

AP Strange: 01:49:21

All right, excellent. Well, thanks again, Jack. Thanks so much for coming on.

Jack Brewer: 01:49:26

Thank you.