HELLO FUTURE: Trump, Obama’s “Aliens” Comment — What Did They Really Mean?

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Did you see this President Barack Obama, Former President Barack
Obama telling a podcaster that aliens are real. They're real.
That's what he said. And then he of course launched
a million articles it felt like all over my newsfeed
on social media about Obama confirms aliens existence. And then
he clarified on his Instagram that really it was just
statistically speaking and that when he was in the White
House he saw no evidence of extraterrestrials. He just thinks
that given how vast and big the universe is, that
there would be alien life. Hello Future, It's me keV.
This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier. The planet
is still Earth. The year is twenty twenty six. My
name is Kevin Surreally. Remember you can download the iHeart
app and get all of the latest episodes of Hello Future,
However you podcast, and check us out on Meet the
Future's website at MTF dot tv. My guest today, I'm
so excited to welcome him to the program because he
really is one of the most serious folks who covers aliens,
covers UAPs UFOs and everything that it means. The sole
Foundation is his organization. His name is doctor Peter Skayfish.
He is a socio cultural anthropologist and the executive editor
of Soul Foundation. Sool Soul Foundation, Doctor Skafish, Can I
call you Peter please?

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Well, Peter, thank you so much for showing up to
meet the future. And I am thrilled to have you
on on such a busy time for this topic. And
shout out to Andrew Bates who helped connect us. But
first of all, what does the Soul Foundation do? Before
we talk about Obama? What does the Soul Foundation do?

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Okay, great, and Kevin, thanks for having me on. I
think the fact that you, as I believe you were
Bloomberg's chief Washington d C. Correspondent, doing this interview right
after Obama made that comment.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Via your own.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Podcast, that's about right where media is on this, because
thank you, you should have more curious, first tier coverage
of this in media.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Just that statement.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
But I think that it's been so difficult for serious
people in media to absorb what's coming out of Washington,
d C and the sciences on this that it's really
people like yourself who are stepping out of the normal
media environment, even though you know had standing in it,
who are giving this serious coverage so thanks, and.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
I appreciate you saying that, and we can extrapolate just
a little bit on that because I'm not important to this.
You are. But I hope that people copycat off of me.
That's one of my biggest ambitions is that people understand
that you're not going to be laughed out of the club.
You're not going to be you know, poked fun of.
Originally I was, but you know, I mean, worse things
have happened to worse people. But thank you for acknowledging that.
But back to you. Tell me what Soul Foundation does
and how you got to where you are.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Okay, Okay, Well you're absolutely not going to be laughed
about this right now, but certainly there won't be laughter
for much longer. I think we're on a pretty short
timetable at this point, and I have not said things
like that in the past. Before you're going to start
to see some kind of very fulsome acknowledged acknowledgment of
the reality of UAP, by which I mean the fact
that these are objects, technologies, vehicles that aren't anthropogenic. They're
not of human origin, not of human make design operation. Okay,
And I think that Obama's comment shows that we're speeding
along to that, to that kind of acknowledgement. But let
me come back to your question, what's the sole foundation.
I'm a cultural anthropologist, very serious academic I had you know,
I have a serious academic, intellectual publishing career. Have been
a great institutions universities worldwide with positions. My co founder,
Gary Nolan, who you know is much more accomplished than
me in academia, is Nobel level literally was considered for
the Nobel Prize last year, Nobel level immunologists and cancer researcher,
one of the best people doing cancer research, I think
in the country, maybe the world. So the two of
us co founded this organization and it's really designed to
be the kind of research institute and public education institute
that would take on the issue very holistically and do
so to effectively prepare all social institutions for greater public
awareness of this, if not disclosure, which is to say
that we are preparing human beings for this. I don't
want to sound pretentious by saying preparing humanity or humankind.
We're not operating at that scale, but that is, you know,
the intention.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Just five years ago, the US government's recent acknowledgments of
UAP have really changed the conversation here in Washington. But
every issue in Washington, I mean, and I will put on,
you know, my former hat as I like to call it.
I like to wear many different hats, whether I like
it or not. In Bloomberg, every issue has a center,
has a research engine, has a think tank, has really
you know, money thrown at it to really get to
the to the bottom of it. And when we think
of UAP, I think the average person is wondering, well,
what is it? But there's so many other questions that
have to come from that. How do we track it?
Is there a database, how do we look at how
do we classify them? How do we even know if
there's multiple different you know.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Times of them.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
You know, all of these questions that are big questions.
And what I love about the Sole Foundation's work is
that you help to come up with those questions, categorize
those questions. Because I always say, like, as a journalist,
when you're asking the questions, you're helping to frame the conversation.
And you guys are helping to frame the conversation. You know,
you're a background PhD. University of Berkeley. I mean, you're
helping to really frame the conversation for Washington, but also
for academia, for private sector, industry, and all of this.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
We have, you know, kind of three primary areas of activity,
which are academic research, public education, and advisory and policy work.
But before I go into that, let me say that
I mentioned that because we have spent a lot of
time in the last couple of years framing the intellectual conversation,
framing the educated public conversation, because it needs framing before
you're even going to have the context where you know,
a brage of research of different kinds is going to
be meaningful to people. I mean, we do that, our
colleagues do it, or advisory board members do it, and
there's a lot of research going on, much more than
you would expect. But that public discussion and which you're
setting the parameters for public discourse is actually more important
right now now because what's happening with government is things
that are kind of speeding along on this. But look,
we were set up. We were established to do something
you pointed out, which is to be effectively the think
tank the advisory body to the US government. Now we've
done that in a very I think kind of limited
fashion so far, because there isn't a lot of advising
to do formally, there is activity non classified advisory work
to do. Okay, because this is a longstanding classified issue
in the United States government.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
That's not made up. That's true. What looks like fiction
is real.

Speaker 3 (07:35):
Is there has been decades and decades of secrecy about
this and within the intelligence community, and you could guess
primarily with agency or agencies. This has been taken very
seriously by small components of those agencies, and they've worked
on it.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
They know a lot about it.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
But you and I out in the public, we know
very little about what they know and what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
So there's a lot of classification.

Speaker 3 (07:59):
But as you pointed out, Congress really beginning in twenty
eighteen twenty nineteen, following a decisive New York Times story
in twenty seventeen that showed that DoD had at least
a small office working on this, Congress became interested. And
that was through the work primarily of actually Marco Rubio
on the one hand and Christian Gillibrand on the other
The two of them really drove that conversation, and Rubio
drove the conversation about secrecy, and that led to the
passage of what is now I believe eight pieces of
legislation by the US Congress. That alone is a fact
that deserves a lot of media coverage, and it's been forgotten.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
It never it totally got forgotten. What I love about
the Rubio jilibrand name drop and clearly two politicians who
are on very different sides of the political spectrum. But
you know, I've been saying this for months. I mean,
this is such a bypart as an issue. I mean,
there's a transparency argument, of taxpayer transparency argument. I mean,
even if you think that this is all a load
of tinfoil hat wearing crazies like me, who I've never
worn a tinfoil hat for the record, but and I
know our listeners don't think that. But even for those
folks who criticize us, I mean, if the government is
spending taxpayer money on this, so we the citizens, we
the people, do have a right to know where it's going.
But I think one of the things which I understand
the need to keep it classified to an extent. What
do I mean by that? I understand, Like I don't
think I've been very open about this. I don't think
that there's some secret government that is trying to hide
the existence of aliens from Americans or from global civilizations,
particularly when the Catholic Church, I'm a proud Catholic has
the previous pope has said that he would baptize aliens,
you know. I mean, so, I think that actually most
religions and large scale religions are really well set up
or the existence of extraterrestrial beings or other UFOs simply
because many people who are faith practicing individuals believe that
God or their existence or whatever they consider to be
a higher power created the universe. And I just think
from a mathematical standpoint, so I don't buy this argument
that I would hear as a kid that it would
upend religion if the government said they were aliens. I
don't buy that. And I love that in the Soul
Foundations and doctor Peter Scaifish, executive director of the Soul Foundation,
check them out at the Sole Foundation sol Foundation dot org.
He's my guest today. I love that one of your
mission statements is to foster a greater sense of common
humanity across cultures, faith, nations, and politics, including supporting the
development of a UAP focused initiative at international institutions, which
I want to touch on a little bit later. I
think it has to be kept secret because whatever country
cracks the code of the technology DNA of these UAPs
is going to have a massive advantage in defining the
next century. And dare I say millennia about where humanity
goes as a species and as a consciousness?

Speaker 3 (11:12):
Is that what you think or why I might not
go that far that one nation state would define the
next thousand years? But yeah, that is a reason that
there's secrecy. But let me step back. We were starting
pretty conversational and we've got a lot of issues on
the table, and the occasion for the conversation was the
Obama comment. So Obama's comment, from my point of view,
is really about UAP. We know, we walked it back
a bit, and I don't want to focus on what
he said in the walk back for the moment, at least.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
I want to focus on what he said.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
He said, Hey, look, aliens are real and I haven't
seen them, but they're real. And let's just take that phrase,
and let's take what he said in twenty twenty one
on I believe Stephen Colbert show. He was asked about
UAP by Colbert, who is into the subject, and he said,
you know, he said, hey, I'm being serious here, as
as somebody who covered Washington, you're gonna, I think and
a lot of your listeners are going to understand to
use some terms of art. In the following statement, he said,
we have footage and records of things in the sky
that we don't know what they are. And I believe
he said, we couldn't understand their movement, their trajectory, basically
their performance characteristics. Footage and records, Well, you know, as
somebody who covered DC records in d C, that's basically
a term of art that means you know, that means
federal records often use that term to refer to classified records.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Now, we have a.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Lot of reasons to believe that Obama as president, would
have been briefed about this, end discussions about this during
his eight years in the White House. Now, one of
those one of those reasons is James Clapper, his Director
of National Intelligence, appeared in Dan Ferre's documentary Age of Disclosure.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Creat which documentary if you haven't seen it.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
And great documentary because that takes my world from about
twenty twenty one to twenty twenty four and puts it
on the screen. I know very well a lot of
the intelligence community officials and scientists were in that film.
A lot of them are friends and colleagues that work
very closely with some of them, and you're kind of
getting you know, maybe two three four percent of the
conversation that I was part of in those years, and
it's an ongoing conversation where these are people who, to
put this briefly, they were adjacent to, or they were
legally exposed to information from, or they worked on the
classified effort the US government has had for decades on this. Okay,
so they know very well, and I can attest to
the fact that they know it that the intelligence community,
a small component of it, really does track and detect, recover,
and study UAP vehicles.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
All that is true.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
I also can say I know that because of my
professional work, I have been not just in conversations but
situations where it was made so clear to me that
that's true by retired government officials who you would never
doubt if you were in conversation with them, that it
would take the most corrosive skepticism on my part directed
toward myself to say that I don't know, so I
can say I know that's going on the US government.
So we go back to Obama James Clapper. James Clapper
not the kind of Director of National Intelligence, if there
has been one since that office has been created, wouldn't
be informing his boss about something of such significance. It's
really the magnitude is difficult to define. We also know
is briefly we also now have the main whistleblower, David Grush,
a former National Reconnaissance Office official who was really and
I know him very well, cleared into extremely sensitive programs
in the government. I mean things that you know, I
have a sense of what he was doing. He was
not a kind of lightweight at the mid level in
the intelligence community.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
He was a high achiever.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
He was entrusted with really sensitive stuff and he was
legally exposed to this stuff. Now, his part of his whistleblowing,
one of his motives is he's not happy that you've
had all sorts of people, but including some of the
highest intelligence officials not being more direct about this in public.
He recently claimed, and I don't know that this is true,
that Clapper actually managed one of the most sensitive components
of this or sensitive efforts of this in the US
government prior to becoming the DNI, and that the Deputy DNI,
Stephanie Sullivan, was also very witting to it. Take that
kind of statement, which I believe is true. Look at
who Obama's intelligence officials are. Then they knew about this,
they had been.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Of course, a lot of people know about it.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
A lot of people know about it, but not very
many people in the intelligence when you really know about
the real stuff.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
And doctor Peter Skfish, executive director of the Soul Foundation,
which is the pre eminent organization that is really driving academia,
public private partnership and UAP research. It's like an engine
in the field. Thrilled to have him on the program.
And we're talking all things about Obama's comments which put
it back in the news. We're gonna in a future
episode talk about what happened in Brazil and the I
think it was the eighties or the nineties, and how
that's coming to Washington. That's getting lawmaker attention. But it's
really on a collision course with the space industry, which
is experiencing you know, I always say we're in the
start of the Fifth Industrial Revolution. The private space industry
is booming right now. There's so much capital being an
investment flow is just being really pushed into space, which
I think is awesome. At the same time, we're also
we've seen the creation of a new military branch with
the United States Space Force. I believe that we are
in a crucial battle against the Chinese Communist Party for
a space race, a modern space race, and I think
freedom really depends on it. And I'm a huge advocate
for space and everything. So while our technology is booming
and we're capturing images from galaxies far far away, making
Galileo like discoveries really like every week, and our understanding
of the universe is just continuing to expand. Meanwhile, all
this money in companies and is being thrown at it.
Why wouldn't the power is it be or the intelligence
community want to leverage all of this newness and buzz
around it to get more answers on this issue. I
guess like, why not now? In order? And do they
really have a choice anymore? And when is that tipping
point coming?

Speaker 3 (18:20):
Well, they're probably not going to have a choice about
I think how this is being dealt with, you know,
certainly within a decade, because the cat's out of the
back at this point, and you have an administration right now,
you know, whatever one might think of that administration that
is pretty pro disclosure and pretty informed about this. Marco
Rubio was the person in the Senate that really I
think knew the most about the classified effort on this
and was the most active on it. And you also,
ever are F. K. Junior, who's been briefed by different people,
uh include including the whistleblowers. You have Chelsea Gabbard who
has been because I actually during his campaign he was
You had a number of people that were coming out
of the military and the intelligence community who knew very
well that this stuff was real because they'd worked on it,
who talked to him. There there were, you know, different
efforts to inform the campaigns of this, and historically the
Republicans have been more not historically, but in the last
years they've been more open to this than than the Democrats. Unfortunately,
it's created a kind of lopsided thing. I mean, you know,
you know, if you go back to the two thousands,
it's really the Democrats that were driving something like disclosure.
John Podesta primarily but also here here.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
John Podesta was one of the I mean talk about
people who really put their neck out there for when
it was really you were you were laughed at when
we're talking about the issue it is.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
He's kind of he's kind of the og for cabinet
level pro public pro disclosure stuff. Because you never had
anyone like that before.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, never.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
And I think what's fascinating is to hear you say that.
I mean, I just had to meet the future moment
where you're absolutely right. I mean, if you go back
to the early two thousands, we have seen this, to
see how different factions of in this political life that
we're all kind of navigating through. And maybe Obama was signaling, hey, Democrats,
don't let the Republicans completely own this issue.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
Well, I want to come back to that. I actually
think that's what's happening. People didn't catch that he made
a comment about this in December as well, and you
have you have messaging clearly coming out of the administration
that there that Trump is thinking about saying something. These
it's not made up. The Republican political commentators or reporters
are getting statements about this supposed speech. There may be
no speech, there may be you know, I think this
is a testing of the waters. And I think, you know,
and I say this with with you know, respect and
admiration for Obama. I think Obama is concerned about legacy
on this because this is a really complicated things for presidents,
and I'm going to come to that in a second,
and I think it historically has been.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
But I think he's also concerned with.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
The problems that could ensue if disclosure is done purely
for political reasons, which I think is probably what's being
considered here. I don't mean by other people in that cabinet,
by like Rubio, but I think we we know that Trump,
you know, would see the political opportunity in it and
wouldn't wouldn't do anything if there wasn't political opportunity. But
the reason I say that about Obama goes goes back
to your question the point of departure about his comments,
and also about the It goes back to the question
of your ap secrecy. The information I have, which is
really I would characterize it as it's information I work
with professionally trust is true both because I've vettited it,
I've investigated it myself. It reconciles with public data information
and it's it's proved pretty actionable and work adjacent to
government is that this is an issue that is uniquely
under direct president presidential authority. Okay, so it doesn't the
classified effort or program if it's one program that deals
with UAP holistically, uh in the intelligence community is an
operating by normal chine of command.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
It's under there, and let's dive more into why that is.
Okay on our next episode for why the UAP issue
falls significantly below the commander in chief level, the doctor
Peter Scape, executive director of the Soul Foundation, thanks so
much for showing up to meet the future