American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
NASA Whistleblower: “We Systematically Suppress UFO Data!”
18 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What role does technology play in our perception of UFOs?
They're not coming in from another star system every other Tuesday. They're present here. There are handfuls of people doing weird things here and there. Those people are all over the place. Some of them I knew when I was at NASA have come to talk to me and said, oh, yeah, I was interested. I know something about this or that.
Have you met anybody working on the crafts themselves?
I've met people who claim to have worked on them or seen them.
Really?
So, yeah. So the question I've had is why, when we had the NASA commission, why was there no section on what astronauts have seen in space? I talked to Alan Bean. He was from Apollo 12. He said that when he went up to Skylab, they actually photographed a red flashing light. Nobody puts lights on satellites. First, you don't need them. And second, it's more weight.
Also, satellites back then weren't doing proximity operations. They were just following predictable orbits. And they weren't changing orbits. They weren't changing orbits. They weren't moving around either.
Yeah.
They actually had a craft pull up alongside of them. Whoa! In half their orbit. And the cosmonaut drew a picture of the object. The story in Musgrave, a shuttle pilot also talked about seeing things like snakes.
Wow!
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Chapter 2: What details surround the cattle mutilation incident?
You're a physicist at the University of Albany. And to me, you are one of the few people who speaks about UFOs in a really concrete way. hard-headed way. I think you're one of the few people I know who are studying how these crafts actually fly, how to detect them. And so I'm really excited to have you. Thank you.
And thank you so much for having me. It's very exciting.
Oh, no, it's an absolute honor. And you have a NASA background as well. I want to know how you got into UFOs to begin with, because a lot of people with your sort of credentials and background think UFOs are a joke.
Right, yeah. I mean, I've always been interested in UFOs. I was 12 when Star Wars came out in 1977. And during that time, I mean, that was the same year Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out. It was, you know, another movie studio's response to Star Wars that came out in December. And I didn't like it as much because there weren't spaceships shooting each other with lasers, right?
So as a 12-year-old, that wasn't that exciting. But... But at the same time, you know, there were TV shows like In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy, and they would cover UFO topics. And that was on every night, like at 6.30 when we're eating dinner. So I watched that all the time. So I've always been interested in them. And I think... So I went to graduate school in 1988.
I grew up in Wisconsin, and I moved out to Montana to go to graduate school at Montana State University in Bozeman. And our first week or two there, I had just moved there, and there was a cattle mutilation. where two cows were killed and surgically manipulated. I don't have a good word for what happened to them. The blood was drained. The blood was drained.
The sensory organs removed, the genitals removed. One of them had like a core sample. It had this cylindrical hole punched through it.
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Chapter 3: How does the conversation shift to nuclear connections with UFOs?
Just bizarre. I mean, really bizarre. And the people on the news were crazed about this, right? Oh my God, there's, you know, these two cows on this ranch were killed and There were UFO reports in the county that night, hundreds of reports. And so the two stories were that it was either aliens or Satanists. And everybody's all got their undies in a bundle over this, right?
And so we're at the physics department, and some of us grad students are talking about this. And especially the new graduate students, we've all just moved there into a PhD program. So you're looking down the barrel of spending five or six years of your life at this place. And what kind of place did we just move to where cows are murdered this way, right? This is really bizarre.
So we're discussing this in the hallway. And it was this heated discussion. And I remember shouting at one point, I don't know why aliens would do it, and I don't know how Satanists would do it. I mean, it was that level of stupid discussion, right, that students would have.
And we were quite loud and disturbed one of the professors down the hall, and he came out from his office to find out what we were talking about. He comes down the hall, and we tell him, and I don't know if he was trying to make us feel better because it was the opposite, but he said...
oh, yeah, yeah, this happens from time to time, and they'll investigate it, and they won't figure anything out, and then everybody will just forget about it until it happens again. And we're just like, what? That's even crazier than what we're already talking about. And then he adds and he goes, but you know what's really strange?
There are, he goes, I have friends who work up at Malmstrom Air Force Base and they have problems with UFOs flying over the nuclear missile sites and shutting down nuclear missiles. And, you know, we listened politely and when he walked away, we laughed our asses off because this was the, at the time, it was the silliest thing I thought I'd ever heard.
I mean, UFOs are shutting down nuclear missiles and this isn't, everybody's not on red alert. Right. I mean, our entire military should be mobilized for something like that, right? So we just didn't believe it. We thought this was just silly. And it became kind of a running joke.
Anytime something weird would happen at school or somebody's telling a story, oh, this weird thing happened to me, someone would invariably interject, but you know what's really strange? UFOs are shutting down nuclear missiles up in moms from Air Force Base. We would all laugh, right? And so that was a running joke for a whole year. And so now time passes, and that was September of 1988.
And he had said that it was ongoing. He said they are doing this presently, right? And so now fast forward to... It was about 2015, so it's a couple years before the New York Times article. And I was teaching an astronomy class, and we got to the point where we're talking about possibility of life elsewhere. And some of the students wanted me to comment on UFOs.
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Chapter 4: What insights are shared about UFO technology and movement?
The first one was Robert Salas talking about UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I heard about this in grad school. That was a joke, right? And then I'm listening to this. I'm like, that's just not a joke. Between September of 66 and March of 67, we lost 30 missiles to UFO activity.
It's wild. Yeah.
30.
30.
That's pretty insane. Now what are you doing? He's talking about events from 1966. Right. And I heard about it in 1988. And the professor that told me in 1988 about this said that it is happening. So this has been going on for 20 years? And no one's paying any attention to this. I mean, the army is still not – the military is still not mobilized and worrying about this.
And I thought, there is something really wrong here. And I spent some time thinking about it. I was up late that night teaching class early, right? I didn't – barely slept. But I'm thinking about it and I thought, I mean, it's either nonsense and the people who are in charge of our nuclear missiles are –
people we shouldn't be trusting with anything, or this is actually real, which makes more sense considering the amount of time that's involved, a 20 year time span. And, um, And nobody's reacting to it, maybe because they all think it's nonsense. And I thought, this is extremely dangerous. We're going to get blindsided by something if we're not careful.
And I thought, somebody ought to look into this. And I thought, I'm going to start looking into this UFO business. What is here? How real is this? How possible is this? So that's when I started looking into it. And I had actually given a talk in our department yesterday. Like a year later, after I'd looked into it somewhat, I thought, this is actually really interesting.
So I gave a talk in our physics department about it, just an informal talk, and the room was packed. I mean, I don't know how many people can actually sit in that room, but it was well over the... I mean, we had people sitting cross-legged right up to the front screen. And the talk went on. There were so many questions. The talk went for almost three hours.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the JAL 1628 incident?
We can see... Big thing. This one is size is carrier. So mothership.
And I remember that being on the nightly news. I remember watching, it was on NBC, Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung. I remember that being on the news and being, holy shit, there's giant aircraft carrier-sized walnut-shaped UFO followed that Japanese Airlines for 45 minutes across Alaska.
Wild. Give us the whole sequence.
Yeah, so these guys, so the... Japanese Airlines, it's not a passenger jet. It's a 747. They are transporting Beaujolais Nouveau. Yep, they got wine in the back. Let the skeptics rejoice.
Chapter 6: How did Reagan's scientific team respond to UFO data?
No, the pilots were not drunk on Beaujolais Nouveau. It's just a silly thing. They're just transporting it. Yeah, they're just transporting it. And they're flying across Alaska. And first, I don't remember all the events. Several things happened. They actually saw several UFOs.
First, these rectangular things show up in front of the ship and have these lights that go up and down, shining light into the cockpit. And the pilots could feel the heat from the light of these objects. And they're like scanning or, you know, like that kind of behavior. And they follow in front of the plane for some time.
And then this giant walnut-shaped object shows up that's something like four 747s in length. Right, so this thing's the size of an aircraft carrier. And the pilot said that when it was in front of the plane, he couldn't see anything but the craft.
Chapter 7: What were the findings related to UFOs and nuclear sites?
It's that big. So it's unmistakable. I mean, and he's screaming at air traffic control. you know, what do I do about this? And they're not picking it up on radar. And so it was later found that military height finding radar was picking it up. And so that radar actually, those radar records actually got collected. And so those walnut shaped craft basically follow the 747 for about 45 minutes.
stayed about seven kilometers away, but it would go from one side of the plane to the other. It was bouncing around from one side to the other. And we analyzed its speed and acceleration just crudely based on the description of what it was doing.
So it would go, so at one point it would be at like one o'clock and then the next sweep of the radar, which is about 12 seconds or so, would be at six o'clock. And so we were using that information to estimate speeds and accelerations. Daniel Kumbay, another physicist from the Niels Bohr Institute, actually took the radar.
I didn't know that we could get our hands on the radar measurements when we published that paper, but he actually got the radar data.
Chapter 8: What does the Cometa Report reveal about UFOs?
And he analyzed that. He was analyzing the jumps. And he found that the object was accelerating at – took several jumps, different accelerations at different times. But there were three – three of them were – the accelerations were greater than 9,000 Gs. One of them was like 11,000 Gs. And the top speed he estimated to be 250,000 miles an hour.
Wow.
And at 250,000 miles an hour, you can get to the moon in 54 minutes.
Whoa.
That's not a joke. So you've got something the size of an aircraft carrier that could get to the moon in less than an hour, right? That's basically what you're dealing with here. And we have the radar data from that.
You have the radar data.
You have the radar data.
That's amazing. I didn't know that.
That's amazing. Yeah. John Callahan, who was the FAA chief of accidents and investigations, actually reviewed the case. And then President Reagan's scientific team and the CIA showed up and they wanted all the data. No way. And so they came to collect the data. Callahan copied it and put it in a box that he just put under his desk. And so he had a copy of it and he didn't turn that over.
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