Gary McKinnon

Rich would end up dying just two years later, but towards the end of his life, he would privately say things that sounded very similar to this UCLA speech, things about prodigious American space capabilities the public could barely dream of.

Ben Rich's son, Michael Rich, was the president and CEO of RAND Corporation for decades.

RAND was the Santa Monica-based federally-funded research and development center evaluating the prospects of Project Orion, nuclear pulse propulsion craft that could theoretically carry very large crews, reach Mars or outer planets, and enable long-duration missions.

Not coincidentally, RAND has also conducted comprehensive research on the non-engineering side of deep space travel, crew psychology and isolation, life support logistics, radiation hazards, resupply challenges, cost and national priorities.

Rand Corporation also happened to be intensely interested in the gravity manipulating deep space propulsion work of Townsend Brown.

His work going dark after he showed them a demo in 1967.

President Ronald Reagan may have also inadvertently left a hint around secret American space capabilities in his diary entry from June 11th, 1985.

Lunch was with five top space scientists.

It was fascinating.

Space truly is the last frontier, and some of the developments there in astronomy, etc., are like science fiction, except they are real.

I learned that our shuttle capacity is such we could orbit 300 people.

You read that right.

Not one shuttle crew.

Not a single mission.

300 people in Earth's orbit.

In space.

If you ask your favorite AI conversation agent, it'll tell you that we only have 10 or so people in space today.

But we somehow had the capacity for 300 in the 80s?

In 2020, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel's Defense Ministry's Space Directorate, essentially the father of the Israeli space program, publicly claimed that American astronauts and alien representatives were operating on underground bases on Mars.

These bizarre hints have stacked up over the decades, and maybe they are mirrored in one of the most famous fictional versions of a secret space force, Stargate.