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American Alchemy with Jesse Michels

Former NSA Director Breaks Silence on UFOs

26 Apr 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What credentials do the guests bring to the discussion on UFOs?

0.031 - 6.299 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Whenever you see something that doesn't fit what you know, a real scientist should get excited, not skeptical.

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10.004 - 35.145 Unknown

My two guests today have credentials that are impossible to ignore. Dr. Eric Hazeltine was director of research for the National Security Agency. Basically, he was the tip of the spear on science and innovation for the U.S. 's most hardcore intelligence agency. Before that, he was an executive vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering.

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35.765 - 44.355 Unknown

He's a neuroscientist, a futurist, and has over 70 patents to his name. He possibly has one of the most intriguing resumes of all time.

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44.535 - 54.827 Dr. Eric Haseltine

When you look at all the many thousands of reports, and we've looked at all, and some I have guilty knowledge of from when I was inside the government, it's real, and it's something we do not understand.

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56.073 - 69.795 Unknown

Dr. Chris Gilbert has an MD and PhD from one of France's top medical schools. She's worked with Doctors Without Borders across four different continents, and she's pioneered her own incredibly unique methods in holistic medicine.

69.996 - 76.967 Jesse Michels

In our own body that we've studied so much, there are things we're discovering that we had no idea existed.

76.947 - 96.441 Unknown

She also happens to be Eric's wife. Together, they've co-authored several books, including The New Science of UFOs and The Shadow of Time, a book involving ancient archaeological objects with anomalous properties being systematically excavated by private corporations. This thing's a cover-up.

96.421 - 111.957 Unknown

So when I found out that a former NSA director of research, who is privy to just about every sensitive piece of intelligence in the United States, wrote a book about anomalous objects being recovered in the desert, I had to reach out and learn more.

Chapter 2: How do consciousness and noetics relate to UFO phenomena?

112.478 - 116.001 Unknown

Do you guys have kind of a base case for what's going on?

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116.021 - 126.332 Dr. Eric Haseltine

I think what we're seeing with these credible real phenomena is something really bizarre and out there. We might all be Martians.

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127.213 - 132.541 Jesse Michels

What is to say that life doesn't exist 120 light years away from us?

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134.585 - 138.41 Dr. Eric Haseltine

I think it's almost certain that we're evolved from building blocks that are extraterrestrial.

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Chapter 3: What insights are shared about time travel and UFOs?

139.712 - 147.825 Dr. Eric Haseltine

There was some advanced civilization on Earth many hundreds of millions of years ago that discovered near-luminal travel.

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150.725 - 161.362 Unknown

This whole interview is a fun game of cat and mouse. It's me basically trying to figure out whether Eric and Chris's fiction books were at all informed by what Eric saw behind the curtain.

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161.382 - 165.81 Dr. Eric Haseltine

You can move something through the air where there's no engine on it at all. You're just pushing on it with photons.

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165.83 - 192.929 Unknown

Did you do that at larger scale? Yes. Whoa. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and enjoy a mind-expanding conversation with a bunch of rabbit holes you won't want to climb out of with this week's American Alchemists, Dr. Eric Hazeltine and Dr. Chris Gilbert. Ignition sequence start.

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192.949 - 196.594 Jesse Michels

How is this possible? Nothing too unusual about that. Their existence cannot longer be denied.

205.484 - 230.121 Unknown

Oh, man, this is a total honor. I feel very, as is often the case, but maybe especially today, intellectually underqualified to be in this room. Dr. Chris Gilbert, Dr. Eric Hazeltine, you are the former director of research at the NSA, the National Security Agency. And that role actually ended up with you on an A&E history series, Alien Files Reopen.

230.481 - 234.968 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Having been at NSA and being one of their senior leaders, I find that highly unlikely.

235.066 - 250.086 Unknown

Which is fascinating. You guys co-authored a book about UFOs together, which I can't wait to get into. You also worked at Hughes Aircraft. Disney Imagineering, Dr. Chris Gilbert. You've done amazing work around the world as a physician, MD, PhD.

Chapter 4: What is the significance of the new science of UFOs?

250.747 - 267.392 Unknown

And you guys have co-authored a few books together, and I want to talk about those. You've independently offered, you know, A Spy in Moscow Station. And you guys have just an incredible background, both individually and together. So it's an honor to be with you today.

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267.873 - 268.834 Dr. Eric Haseltine

It's a great honor to be here.

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269.536 - 271.198 Jesse Michels

Yeah. Thank you so much for having us.

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271.347 - 287.618 Unknown

I wanted to talk about your book, The New Science of UFOs, because I think it's a really great kind of survey level overview of all of the possibilities. I think often in this space, there's a lot of kind of mushy brain thinking and, you know, just...

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287.598 - 313.15 Unknown

Almost people are over-indexed on intuition and you really kind of lay out all of the possibilities from spoofing techniques to man-made craft to, you know, genuine non-human intelligence. And then you even get into frameworks for thinking about the non-human intelligence. So, yeah, why don't we start there? What are the possibilities kind of high level when it comes to UFOs?

313.13 - 340.824 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Well, I'll start and then you can fill in where I miss things. First of all, a little context for the book. I spent years at the CIA after leaving NSA and ODNI, where I was basically the CTO of the U.S. intelligence community, the whole thing. And I was an analyst for a particular target. and was trained in analytic tradecraft, which is basically the scientific method.

340.904 - 357.531 Dr. Eric Haseltine

And we call it the method of competing hypothesis. When we see a phenomena or an event, we say, what are all the different hypotheses for what could be driving this? And then we go and we look for evidence that would support or contradict each of those.

357.511 - 380.451 Dr. Eric Haseltine

And at the end, we weigh it and come out with an assessment with the probability of what we think is the most likely of all of those with some confidence. And so, for example, in Iran, you have the Iran group at the different agencies doing that now saying, okay, the Iranians have a nuclear program.

381.532 - 406.998 Dr. Eric Haseltine

What is our best guess at what probability about where they are in that program and what their intent is? Right? So that's an example. So with the UFOs, UAPs, we did the same. We said, okay, here are the reporting. What are all the different things that could be? And now let's examine them. So we have a matrix in there, which is a little bit geeky in that we present all of them that we surfaced.

Chapter 5: What are the implications of magnetic levitation in UFO technology?

5628.856 - 5655.824 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Levitate me. Yeah. No, I didn't know that. But we've done it with birds and frogs and spiders. What? Yeah. And here's the way it works. Magnetism isn't just what you think of as a, like a piece of iron or a rare earth magnet or something like that. It's what we call ferromagnetism. There are a zillion other kinds of magnetism. There's ferrimagnetism. There's diamagnetism. There's paramagnetism.

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5656.425 - 5673.839 Dr. Eric Haseltine

And these all have to do with If you have a charged particle that's spinning, it will create a magnetic field. Okay? Sometimes that magnetic field works in the direction of the inducing magnetic field. Sometimes it's diamagnetic. It's the opposite. So you get, instead of things being attracted, they get pushed away.

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5673.959 - 5674.64 Unknown

Like bismuth.

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5675.222 - 5675.482 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Yes.

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Chapter 6: How does AI influence our understanding of consciousness?

5675.863 - 5682.949 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Yeah. Exactly. Yes. And that was found maybe with a UFO and they think, yeah, maybe. So it could have magnetic levitation.

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5683.19 - 5683.45 Unknown

Yeah.

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5683.47 - 5707.273 Dr. Eric Haseltine

And that's possible. And you can take non-metallic things and you can tractor beam them basically. Right. There's also such a thing as optical tweezers. where if you create a very, very strong electromagnetic field with a laser that's very precise, you can move particles of dust around with this laser, and it's called an optical tweezer.

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5707.894 - 5732.867 Dr. Eric Haseltine

So remote force fields, if you will, are absolutely possible. Now, when you do the math of how big a magnetic field you would need, to control something many miles away, it gets to be... But I wouldn't say it's impossible. What I'm saying is magnetic fields decreases the cube of the distance as you go away. It's not inverse square, it's inverse cubed.

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5733.347 - 5757.21 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Because they're dipoles, there's no such thing as a magnetic monopole. So... It's the same time you have one magnetic field reinforcing, you have the opposite end taking away. So this is in Maxwell's equations, right? So essentially to a first order goes off as a cube. So to have a steep magnetic gradient that would cause this at a very long distance,

Chapter 7: What role does the gut microbiome play in our health?

5757.19 - 5785.639 Dr. Eric Haseltine

We have no idea how to do that, but we can't say it's impossible. So pushing and pulling with magnetic fields is possible. These fusion drives are kind of interesting. And the most interesting of all is the warp drive. Okay. So now this is when you get into NASA has funded this. Mm-hmm. Okay. Even though they don't know that it's possible, they don't know that it's impossible. Okay.

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5785.659 - 5811.819 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Some physicists have postulated what they call negative energy, which isn't the same as the energy we see, you know, black, dark energy. It's not the same as dark energy. Yeah. Negative energy, because energy and mass are basically the same thing. Yeah. They create gravitational effects. So pure energy has a gravitational effect and so forth. Slows down space-time, all that.

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5812 - 5834.734 Dr. Eric Haseltine

But what happens with this energy is that it creates a repulsion. Mm-hmm. The Albuquerque drive is basically you have a huge mass or energy in front, which is positive mass or energy, and you have a huge negative in back. And so you create a wave of space-time that's moved.

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Chapter 8: How do the authors view the relationship between UFO phenomena and fundamental physics?

5834.754 - 5843.146 Dr. Eric Haseltine

So the way the warp drive works is imagine a surfer who's on a wave and is stationary with respect to the wave, but the wave is moving.

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5843.607 - 5860.392 Dr. Eric Haseltine

And we know that space-time can move at faster than the speed of light. Because the hyperinflation that happened after the Big Bang, or some think that happened, which is a pretty good evidence for it, is that space-time itself can move faster than the speed of light.

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5861.073 - 5870.627 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Which means that if you're in a bubble of space-time that's moving faster than the speed of light, you're not going to experience any acceleration or deceleration because you're not moving in that frame.

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5870.607 - 5873.953 Unknown

Yeah. Seems like a really hard engineering problem.

5874.715 - 5880.625 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Oh yeah. Well, first of all, we don't know that negative energy exists. It's the same kind of thing that would have to keep a wormhole open.

5880.786 - 5881.046 Unknown

Yeah.

5881.066 - 5887.418 Dr. Eric Haseltine

Right. Right. The only way a wormhole works is if you have that in the middle to keep things from collapsing.

5887.482 - 5898.947 Unknown

But it is interesting because Miguel Alcubierre did this proof that theoretically, even within general relativity, you could get faster than light travel if you do have negative energy. And so... Yeah, yeah.

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