HELLO FUTURE: Episode 3: The Varginha Case — Testimony, Democracy, and the Sol Foundation Approach

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Last month, I had the privilege of attending an event
in Washington, D C. At the National Press Club, one
of those iconic American institutions that really celebrates the best, yes, folks,
the best of what the Fourth Estate can and at
one point, dare I say, stood for in Washington, D C.
And as a beacon of freedom of speech and around
the world. Nowadays, of course, trust and media at an
all time low, but the event brought an emotional reaction
to me. I witnessed probably about two hundred folks who
were there, members of the press, not every outlet was there.
The lawmakers were there, policymakers from Congress, Capitol Hill, as
well as Brazilian officials and its centers on aliens. Hello Future,
it's me keV. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier.
The I it is Earth. The year is twenty twenty six.
My name is Kevin SURREALI subscribe to the Meet the
Future newsletter at MTF dot tv. And remember you can
get all of the latest Hello Future episodes on your
iHeart app or however you get your podcast. Doctor Peter
Skayfish is here. He is the executive director of the
Soul Foundation, the go to source. It's not one of
those kooky organizations. It's it's the go to source for
really serious research on UAP's UFOs and really this whole system.
They were I believe you guys were there. You had
a presence at this National Press Club engage engagement that
I went to on the Varhena case, which is in
nineteen ninety six, witnesses in Varhena, Brazil reported a cigar
shaped object crashing into a field, followed by claims of
three young women who encountered a non human biological entity
and that additional beings aliens were covered, some were dead,
one possibly alive. Nearly three decades later, the case resurfaced
informal discussions that included written testimony, video statements, and a
lot of back and forth. Geopolitically. Doctor Peter Skayfish he
is a socio cultural anthropologist. He is the co founder
of the Soul Foundation. We're going to talk today about
how serious institutions should approach this and how this specific
case from nineteen ninety six really could be a watershed moment.
Dare I say in terms of disclosure because of the
host of different questions that it unleashes. Peter, your reaction
to the Varhenia case.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
The Sole Foundation was established at the behest of a
couple people from the US government who encouraged Gary Nolan,
my co founder, and I to start it not just
to deal with are their UAP and are they of
human origin, but to really deal with the problem of
what's now called non human intelligence, which is that the
vehicles are not anthropogenic. And there is the question of
whether when people report these kinds of events, whether you're
dealing with another biological species or multiple biological species that
are present terrestrially. So that event is important because it's
one of a number of reports not just of landings,
but of crashes or forced landings of UAP vehicles in
which people then see parent living beings, sometimes injured, and
then they report also the presence of in this case
the Brazilian military, but US military and intelligence personnel. Now,
I think even for UAP kind of warm or open
people who are listening to this, this is going to
sound kind of crazy. So I want to step back
and give some context. I mean, look, who was it
among American politicians that took Roswell very seriously and made
inquiries into it during his presidency. Bill Clinton, and he
had John Podesta involved in that, and that did help
force the Air Force to publish two reports on the
Roswell event, the famous alleged to some people nineteen forty
seven Crash Report and Recovery and Recovery of Biological Beings
in New Mexico. You know, Clinton took that very very seriously,
and he said as recently as I think four or
five years ago, I tried to get to the bottom
of Roswell during my presidency, and I could never do it.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
He told James Corden back in twenty twenty two that
he tried to. He sent agents to Area fifty one
to look for aliens.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, he said that, and he said, up the coalition.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
This is where my previous life comes back into play
as you think of the coalition that Bubba former President
Bill Clinton coalesced. You know, here was a governor from
the South, a Democrat who really had a way of
talking with middle class America and won over red states.
And this is this transparency issue is very important to
a lot of people, myself included.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Keep going, sorry, okay, so I want to say that
Clinton took Roswell very seriously. His chief of staff and
later Obama's chief of staff, one of the most powerful
people until you know, maybe recently. The Democratic Party. John
Podesta also took very seriously a reported UAP crash and
recovery in a town called Kecksburg in Pennsylvania, which took
place in the nineteen sixties, and Podesta provided a lot
of support to a Freedom of Information Act, not just requests,
but I believe it turned into a suit. The journalist
Leslie Kane led in the two thousands to try to
get records declassified records on that event. So I'm just
saying that we've had people in federal government have publicly
endorsed the idea that this is happening. I'm going to
add one more person, which I think this is going
to surprise you, Kevin, but New Mexico Governor now deceased,
Bill Richardson, who was also the Secretary of Energy, said
following one of the primary debates in two thousand and eight, said,
following the debate in an interview, the government never came
clean about what happened to Roswell and completely shocked Chris Matthews,
who was interviewing him, who kind of jumped out of
his skin and say wait a second, you're telling me
that there's a conspiracy in the US government to cover
up ailiance, and Richardson grinned demurred and said, well, you know,
Roswell's in my state, and that's good for tourism. And
then he came back to him and said, but I
want to tell you the government never came clean about that, okay.
And that was following the debate in which Dennis Kassinich
was humiliated after being asked a question about UFOs. Okay.
So that's a president and two cabinet officials backing the
idea that this should be taken seriously. Now let's come
to your question about this event. To speak of another politician.
Harry Reid, a former Senate Majority leader, initiated a program
in the two thousands, a study program with a twenty
two million dollars appropriation which studied and in a very
fulsome way UAP. I know a lot of the scientists
who worked on that program. They take the event we're
talking about in Brazil very very seriously, okay. And most
people who have looked at it, like myself, who are
academics or investigators that look into UAP, we take this
very seriously. So this was a great event. The filmmaker
James Fox organized it. You had Leslie Keane providing support
to it. You had other crucial people Kirk McConnell, former
Senate staff member there who had worked on UAP legislation.
Everybody's wanting to endorse the fact that this should be
taken seriously. And what's the core testimony that there was
a crash, eventual recovery of the vehicle by US military
and the Intelligence Committee, and that even there was a
surviving so called alien being that was actually then taken
to a nearby hospital and operated on by a neurosurgeon
who was present at this event give some testimony about it.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
So this is the I had a Meet the Future moment,
I call it, where I'm sitting there and I'm listening
to this testimony, and look, you're sitting there and you're
hearing from very senior officials in the Brazilian government, members
of Congress there. The mainstream press is not there. They're
just have a lot of friends in the media, and
I wish that they would meet the future with me,
but they just don't take this stuff seriously. It's really frustrating.
But I'm sitting there, and I thought, and we said
this in the previous episode, and I would encourage you
to go back to our first part that we've had
with Peter for the Soul Foundation. I get the different
implications now, especially after interviewing doctor Skayfish. Economic implications, religious implications,
maybe not so much on the religious front anymore, geopolitical implications, societal,
cultural implications about what all of this means. Obviously, if
one company has a leg up on the technology of
a UAP, that's proprietary information, there's reaction to that and whatnot.
But this is where I had to meet the future
moment was if you believe that an human being came
into contact knowingly or unknowingly to an alien, there are
health questions that come out of that. There are real
health questions.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
It's an obvious biosecurity issue.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
It's an obvious biosecurity issue, and it's obvious to you
because you're a genius of this stuff. It was, it's
not obvious to the average person. But if it is
an average biosecurity issue, just like if there was an
oil spill or a crash, or a bomb going off,
or a pandemic that the Chinese Communist Party just happens
to accidentally unleash to the world, and I am being
smug and glib because that enrages me to this day.
If an alien comes into contact with human beings, they
have a legal case to know what the heck they
were exposed to, and there are real questions. That's the
gacious things in a co completely new, destly new public health.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
That's that's a very good point. But you know, keep
in mind you were asking me in a previous episode
about why why why there is blanket secrecy about you AP.
That's going to be one of the reasons, because to
admit that this is true entails a loss of confidence
among your citizenry and also an admission of your lack
of sovereignty politically, because you know, on many issues you
can't guarantee basic security, including the biosecurity thing, because you're
going to be asked a number of questions then like okay, well, okay,
what about space viruses? Okay, for example, and you may
not be able to answer those questions. There may not
be enough data on that.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
Data on space viruses. I've never heard anyone in my
life use the term space viruses, but I'm going.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
To I was, I was saying that in an ironically
I love it.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
No, I like it.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
I think it's I'm not a molecular biologist. I'm not
an anologist. I don't know who in space medicine thinks
about that, but obviously someone right the Apollo astronauts had
to go through quarantine after they came back, precisely because
there was, you know, concern about this kind of thing.
But you know, I was being a bit humorous to
use the term. But you know, that is an obvious
question if people have these kind of and they do,
and if they have these kind of encounters. But you
also raised another issue, which is like, there's something very
profound that takes place there, and do people have a
right to know about it?

Speaker 1 (11:29):
They do have a right to know.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
They do have a right to know. You know, Look,
I would say, because I don't think everyone appreciates the
significance of it or understands that he was telling the truth.
But go go listen to the NRO official not now
out of the NRO David Rush's testimony in twenty twenty
three to the House Oversight Committee. This is he's kind
of the Edward Snowden of UAP secrecy. He went through
the legal whistleblower process, so that's an important distinction, and
he was very proud that he did that. And he
was an intelligence officer or not a contractor like Stodents,
so you had a very different relationship to adhering to
the law. He went through the Inspector General process and
the intelligence community to put a complaint forward. But in
his testimony he says, and I know this is one
of his major motivations, the US government does not have
the right to classify facts of nature, and they do
not have the right to prevent human beings from knowing something.
This maybe is my interpretation of some of this that
is fundamental to their understanding of themselves. Okay, that's where
there would be an argument, and is not a legal
claim that there's something like a right to know. Somebody
who knows national security law would say, no, you don't
have a right to know certain things. But here we
would want to have a send a philosophical sense that
there might be a right to know this. And I
think what you see in Varhinia case is the kind
of testimony that people need to hear because regardless of
where we come down on the level of its veracity.
Some of these cases are genuine. There are many such
encounter reports. Some of them are genuine. I've interviewed plenty
of people have had encounters like this, and first they
need to be out there for consideration, regardless of what
we think the veracity of them is. But then some
of them are true, and people need to know that
this is real, you know, And that's been one of
the motivations for the interest. I'm certain of this of
people like Bill Clinton, John Podesta, Obama, because he's clearly
signaling that he he is not just interested, but he
knows about this same thing on the Republican side, because
we don't want to be partisan on this.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
This is this is something that Junior Secretary Ruveo.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, Trump to.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Some extent, though I don't know what he's mean what
I mean, he's had how much time, So I mean,
if I had to interview Donald Trump again, I can
guarantee you I would ask these questions because we do
have a right to know. Americans have a right to know.
And as you were talking, I just kept thinking, you know,
I'm a proud Catholic and I don't like to talk
about my spirituality much, not because I have shame with it,
but just because I'm not one of those you know,
I'm not here to.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
Well, but on this point, on this point, you should
because it's.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Let me at home.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Ye.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
Well, that's that's what I mean. Is I'm thinking so
much about what the Catholic Church did to Galileo when
Galileo said that the solar system did not revolve around
planet Earth, that we revolved around the Sun. And what happened.
They took him to court, and then what happened He
stuck to his guns. And I think it's such a
beautiful story because the ending of that story is that
the Catholic Church now operates observatories because they realized they
were wrong. They realized that science can coexist with theology,
with religion, and they now they operate observatories, one of
which is in Arizona, the Vatican Observatories. They they and
and and the the commentary. We've explored it in previous
episodes on the show of the Pope, saying that you
would baptize an alien, and how they Christianity and Judaism
are really well set up for scientific discovery on this topic.
And so I do think that the people. You said
it so beautifully where you said the government cannot classify nature,
and I wish that the government both parties. This isn't
a critique on any party. I wish that the powers
that be in the United States government would lead humanity,
lead the world and learning from the mistakes the previous
iterations of humanity and listening to that, because we do
have a right to know. I really want to ask
you just a quick personal question.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
Okay, how did you.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
Get into this?

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Okay, how did I get into this? Now that's a
long story. That's a long story. I can point to
my childhood first and say that I was very interested,
as you know, like a six seven eight year old
in this and in fact reading as a child. But
a very famous occupant encounter that involved multiple witnesses at
a Christian boarding school in Papua New Guinea in nineteen
fifty eight, in which actually people saw documents on board
UAP vehicle and waived at them and received some kind
of gesture or signal back. I was so kind of
touched by that as a kid that I insisted in
my second grade teacher that I had something to say
and I needed to give a speech to my class.
Now for a good part of my adult life, I
started to think, you know, God, I wish i'd given
a speech about ecology or civil rights and racism. I
started to think, Okay, I'm a bit mad that that
was what inspired me as a kid. Now I think, okay, okay.
The same thing that told me then that this was
important is the same thing that tells me now that
this is absolutely something that people who feel inspired too
are called to work on, this should be doing. Okay,
this is going to be I really think, and I
can make a case for it the twenty first century issue.
I think it will displace AI as an issue. It
will be right up there with ecology and climate. I
think if I could predict the two issues in the
twenty first century that we know of now that will predominate,
it's going to be the so called NHI non human
intelligence issue and climate and ecology. And I think.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
Aiiither intelligence include AI or no.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
It does, but I mean it in the sense people
use it when they talk about what used to be
called extraterrestrial intelligence in the context of UAP. Because you
want to be careful about being reductive about the origins
of of UAP and whoever, and whatever their makers are.
I think this is going to be the focus of
the twenty first century. So that's that's the short answer.
But I took this very seriously in private, behind closed
doors as a PhD student at Berkeley. I always quietly
studied it. I always found interlocketors to talk to about it.
And actually in the mid two thousands I encountered for
the first time someone who had a family member who
was part of the classified intelligence community effort, and that
person had spilled beings to the person I knew, and
so I felt, wow, I'm a degree of separation away
from this. I knew what I was being told was true,
that this really exists, and it was the full thing
that people think is fiction. So that gave me a
lot of time to prepare before we started SOUL. I've
been thinking about this for years. I always intended to
work on it professionally. That's another way I got into this,
so to speak. Now the other thing, and we're not
going to have time to go into it, but I
want to at least will in the future. I at
least want to, you know, just kind of put this
on the table. Is most people who work on this
professionally have had experiences with it. I've seen things, I've
experienced things that's happened to me. It's too long of
a story to go into here, and I don't know
that I'm ready to really kind of narrate that publicly.
When you've seen one that changes you and you're you're
no longer It's one thing to know about this theoretically,
it's another thing to experience it. Same thing with my
co founder Gary Nolan, who has been very open about this.
He saw UAP vehicle as a kid fly over him.
That just changes you fundamentally. Not always, Okay, some people
forget about it, they repress it. But for those of
us who it touches in a way that it stays conscious.
For us, you don't forget, and it can motivate you
to really dedicate yourself, you know, both professionally and vocationally.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
You know what it is. For me, it's understanding our
place in the universe. It's just a fundamental question for me,
who are we in the universe?

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Who are we in the local galaxy?

Speaker 1 (19:58):
You can just st always.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Maybe it's just our quadrant of the galaxy, right, I mean,
it's you know, because we're talking about scales that are
unfathomable to most of us because we're not mathematicians or physicists, right,
But I would give you this who you know. It's
also the question of it's very related. It's folded in
with the question you just asked, who are we and
who do we want to be as a species? And
I'll tell you that in thinking not just studying academically
UAP and witness encounters and thinking about what social and
government policy should be and how the government should handle disclosure,
not just in doing that, but thinking philosophically about what
the ramifications are for humanity, It's occurred to me that
you wouldn't be capable of interstellar travel and or some
kind of travel let's say, in something like superposition outside
space as we know it's something like quantum travel or
through warping space time. You wouldn't be capable of that
in a sustained way, especially if it involves moving between
planets and stars, if you didn't have something like cohesion
at the species level, something I like to call species cohesion.
And if you think about probably if they're biological I'm
just being speculative now, if they're biological beings, like us.
They evolve through time, they're subject to environmental pressures, innerspecies competition.
They probably have achieved a level of cohesion that whatever
their ethical mentality or political mentality is, okay. They could
be totalitarian, they could be anarchists, they could be something
in between, but they're going to have a greater sense
of unity and they're going to function better as polities.
They probably function very well collectively. Whatever their mentality is,
it could be very authoritarian or totalitarian. They probably do
not tolerate something all of us tolerate at a baseline level,
which is allowing members of our own species to go
through needless illness, to be hungry and starve, to not
be educated, to not have political and human rights, to
not have social and economic well being. And I could
go on. I point that out.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
Because so Well said, keep going here.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
I point that out because working on this professionally and
working on it intellectually has actually affected me where I
think one of the saddest and most pathetic things about
human beings we choose to because it's very difficult not
to choose to to accept that as our state is
a species, which is that a certain number of us
very large number of us are going to lead difficult
lives and nothing can be done about it. And of
course this isn't true. But collectively and even at the
individual level, none of us feel the power or the
will to change that fundamentally.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
And I think that analysis but Devil's Advocate and then
we gotta go Oka, And you've been so generous with
your time. Devil's Advocate. They're all at war with each
other on their own foreign planet and they're just like,
get me off of this planet, Let's go to Earth.
But I'm an optimist. I like your framing a lot
better than mine.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Well, well, good, good point, But I still want to
leave us with that thought, which is I love you know,
as we become concerned, as we become concerned with all this,
we really should be thinking along those lines.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, it applies, but I love about that thought and
I totally agree. But you know, but what I love
about that thought is like the biggest question that I
always get from people who don't care about space, And
I feel like I'm the space of Angelizer now and
I've convinced everyone, But but uh is, well, what about
people here on Earth? But what you just said is
like what the science that it would take for us
to actually explore our place in the universe would dramatically
help every person on this planet. I listen, I want
to collaborate with you. I want to I could talk
to you, I could do I could do so much
with with this conversation. But I'm just so grateful the
conclusion of our first of three episodes or the last
of three episodes. But I know we're going to keep talking,
and there's so much that we got to do together
in the coming months. I just want to thank you,
doctor Peter Skafish. If people want to learn more, how
do they get in touch with you online? The Soulefoundation
dot org. Sol Foundation dot org, the Soulefoundation dot org.
If they want to connect with you anything else you
want to plug.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, yeah, please, I would put quickly you can. You
can write us to engage us about anything at information
at the Sole Foundation dot org. You can also reach
me at Peter dot Skaefish at the Sole Foundation dot org.
And there are two things I want to plug. One
is that if you have had encounters as an anthropologist,
I want to talk to you about those. I do
research on that. And the weirder the better because we
have to look at all data on the so please
get in touch. The other thing is that we have
a lot of really important research in public education initiatives
coming up or we're underway this year, and that we're
planning for twenty twenty seven. If you're interested in philanthropic
support of those, please get in touch. It's needed. The
philanthropy around UAP is very immature. People think there's a
lot more money around this than there is. There isn't
and you know, five figure gifts go a long way.
People think they don't they do, you know, and we
are always chasing those whale sized gifts too. But please
get in touch if you want to support this stuff.
We have a menu of options for that. The last
thing I'll say is we are planning. We don't know
when it's going to be our next symposium. That is
kind of the place to be for the UAP conversation,
and that's where a lot of academics, venture capitalists, technologists, retire,
government officials, media people. It's where a lot of professionals
go to just network about this and so be on
the lookout for that.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
Amazing doctor Peter Skfish, appreciate you pending your time. Thank
you so much for all you're doing and really appreciate it.