8/27/26: Putin Escalates War In Ukraine, CIA Secret Cartel War in Mexico, Recovered UFOs?

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So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media. And we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. So as Ukrainian drone attacks continue to pummel Russia's oil industry, this CIA director traveled to Moscow to warn Putin against an attack on NATO interests. And in Europe, while Bloomberg is reporting, put this first element up on the screen, that Putin is considering ways to escalate the war against Ukraine with a lot of people are kind of around him starting to talk about the actual use of tactical nuclear weapons. And so this Bloomberg report doesn't say that anybody close to Putin is saying, that anybody in Putin's inner circle is saying is what they're saying is that kind of the hardliners who are influential in Putin's world are increasingly talking about the use of tactical nuclear weapons now. >> Which professor Mir Shimer has been saying here for months on the show and has been warning about this. >> Now the reason that a lot of other analysts think that that's not an immediate concern is something else that Bloomberg alludes to, that Russia has significant escalatory options at its disposal that it has not used yet. And that the thinking is that before you take the political hit from breaking the taboo against the first country to use nuclear weapons since the United States in 1945, you would do these other things. And the other things include major ballistic missile attacks particularly on the downtown Keeve, as well as striking, you know, infrastructure targets throughout Ukraine and other major cities. Putin has said, Putin has said in recent days that Russia is going to attack the kind of, you know, beating heart of the Ukrainian economy. And it comes as Ukraine is effectively out of ballistic missile interceptors. >> Exactly. >> Partly as a result of this war going on for four years, partly as a result of the United States launching a war against Iran and using the ballistic missile interceptors to defend its positions in the region as well as to defend Israel. And so now when there is a ballistic missile attack, even with conventional ballistic missiles, you often are seeing, you know, dozens or scores of casualties in Keeve, and that's before, you know, they've kind of climbed up this escalatory ladder. There seems to be, in the U.S., there seems to be very little focus on what's going on. It's like, oh, that Trump said he was going to end the war. He didn't end the war, hopefully. >> Oh, there isn't just focus, let's be honest. Like, they support this. The security establishment in Washington. And frankly, most of the Democratic voters, they're like, oh, this is good. Are Ukraine's taken the war to Russia? Like, they have Republican voters now that Trump has flipped. >> Right, yeah, you can flip it. >> You're right, yeah, good point. I just, you know, I have to update my priorities when it comes to the cult. But you're exactly right. And of course, everybody's, oh, Putin's shell. No, I'm a humanity's shell. Like, I don't want to see the normalization of tactical nuclear weapons. And this is actually exactly fulfilling the exact prophecy which we saw from the destruction of weapon stockpiles in Iran, because let's put D5 up here on the screen. This really colors in the lines of what we knew about this shady meaning, which everybody knew had taken place, but we didn't know the exact details. So the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, flew to Moscow and a surprise trip was to warn Russia not to attack NATO. Now, the reason why I think we should all take this very seriously is the last time that a CIA director flew to Russia was right before the invasion of Ukraine. >> He warned them not to attack Ukraine. >> Yeah, where they, I forget Bill Burns, I think was his name Bill Burns, Sadakross and Putin, he's like, we know you're going to attack Ukraine. Please do not do that. And Trump actually tried to downplay this as, quote, a routine, a semi-routine visit. >> Sorry, it does not true. >> No, we actually saw just yesterday there were pictures snapped of the CIA director, Secretary Hegseth and the entire National Security Council who met with Trump apparently about this meeting. So you can see it clearly important enough to summon full National Security Council, situation room meeting. And for him to fly to Moscow, there's obviously at least some intelligence, which shows that this is a potential possibility. But I specifically want to read this one. A shortfall in critical munitions driven by expenditures in Iran could also factor into Putin's thinking. The US has degraded its stockpile of certain weapons because of transfers to Ukraine after Russia's 2022 invasion, as well as the Iran conflict. And so the Neocons, ironically, who were obsessed with Ukraine and then also were even more obsessed with Iran, have now created a reality where Kiev has no interceptors left. We've got no interceptors left to give them. And Putin is now thinking, well, you guys want to give them all these drones and all this technology and all this weapons manufacturing support. And they're going to be sitting here taking out my critical oil infrastructure. Maybe I'll hit you a little bit. And I'll undermine Article 5 because you and I both know that if they're going to go and hit some town right on the border of a Baltic state, nobody in America is going to say, oh yeah, let's go to nuclear war, right? Nobody. And including me, I would say we shouldn't do it. And to give a sense of, let me roll D2 here, to give a sense of why Putin is being pressured and contemplating serious escalation. This is the Kosovo oil refinery that just fell victim to a Ukrainian drone attack. One of the biggest refineries in Russia and put up D3 here, Reuters reporting and others as well, that it's been taken offline, that a central node of the Russian kind of fossil fuel economy shut down as a result of this. And we could put up D4, this is part of a pattern. And so this is Ukrainian media, but this is verified. This report August 14th, Ukrainian drones attacked nearly one-third of the large oil refineries in Russia, in addition, one of Russia's major oil refineries, which I can't pronounce, or should it get, I don't know, if you can handle that one, completely stopped operations following Ukrainian attacks. They're hitting export capacity in the Caspian and the Black Sea, they're taking, you know, Russians are hitting Ukrainian ships, Ukraine is hitting Russian ships. And that's on top of the, this is harvest season, Ukraine and Russia provide, you know, this region provides something like a quarter of the grain for the world. And so both sides are seeing their economies getting battered. Russia is also, there was also yesterday, another massive attack on basically what is Russia's Amazon, what's called wildberries. What Ukraine has been doing has been blowing up these absolutely massive warehouses and destroying billions of dollars worth of goods that are, you know, held in waiting to to be transited to small business owners, and I've seen a bunch of interviews with Russian people who, you know, they're living off of their version of Etsy or whatever, you know, they're just retailers who have seen their entire lives wiped out by these attacks on these warehouses. - And here's the thing, for the Ukrainians who are like, "Oh, but they've been attacking us for four years." Yeah, fair, no, fair, all's fair in war, but that's the problem, is you can't claim, you know, some moral high ground when you literally invaded Russia like two years ago and held a significant part of its territory, now you're hitting their critical infrastructure and you're crying if they're gonna hit your critical infrastructure, your only defense is just gonna be, well, they started it. Yeah, you're right, but you can't end it. You literally can't, you know, it's what it took 'cause you get accused of being a Putin shell, and as usual, nobody who is obsessed with Ukraine ever actually even reads the news, their own senior defense official, who Zelensky just fired, prompting mass protests throughout the country, wrote an entire thing about how Zelensky has no plan to end the war, how they potentially had a chance in some of these initial attacks, how the current attacks have no actual endgame, and I mean, you could read between the lines for his own firing and say that he was fired because he probably was in the meeting, saying, "I think this is a real problem, we have no actual plan to end this entire thing and we're eventually gonna lead to disaster." So, both sides of the conflict, it's very actually, it's very Iran-US, in a lot of the same ways, where it starts out, in one limited way, things dramatically change as security architecture, people hunker down, they're both trying to hit each other in a very painful way. Russia, though, has the manufacturing on its side, it has the population, obviously advantage on its side, and Ukraine is increasingly reliant on a West, which is broke from munitions and can't necessarily help them, and so they're gonna escalate the only way they can with their drones, which, again, you have to come credit, at least for being able to build them, but they're using them in a way that's gonna invite a major retaliation from Russia, and then what happens, we're all living in a new world. - And, right, and we're all gonna see higher gas and prices and inflation across the entire global economy, plus people are gonna starve to death, as a result of the food crisis it's creating. The, one of the things that has been reported to be a major hiccup in the peace talks that just broke down, has been apparently Russia's insistence on ceasing towns and areas, being given, you kind of rush and speak in areas, that they haven't taken yet, that they couldn't take by force, which, to me, it's not something that's followed like extraordinarily closely, I understand Ukraine's point there. They're like, okay, it's one thing for you to ask for the territory that you already control. - Yeah. - You tried to take this stuff, you couldn't, and you wanted us to give it to you. Like, that's, like, come on, get out of here. Like, what are you talking about? On the other hand, if there is an ability of the entire world, China, the United States, Europe, Africa, South America, everybody just come together and be like, guys, we have to figure something out here. - Yeah. - So if you're right. - Like, something has to give here. - Someone now is the time. - Someone needs to end the war in 24 hours. - Somebody needs to do it. - Somebody needs to end the war in 24 hours. - Before they even take office. - Hopefully. - And apparently, Chairman Xi, telling Putin don't even think about using nuclear weapons, we'll see what that matters. And they're gonna meet next week. - Yes, that's right, so good point. I think SEO or some meeting is happening soon. Let's get to Mexico. We've got Juan David Rojas standing by. - Didn't catch the latest role in the Martin unfiltered podcast. - Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. - It's real. - Those are the very people who I always say voted against their own economic interests, and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. - It's raw. - I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. - Roland Martin unfiltered. - I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. - Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. - Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. - 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. You better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now. - And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHOT radio app, Apple Podcast. - Wherever you get your podcasts. - I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. - That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko, where we have real conversations just like this. - Sometimes I'll have my girlfriend pre-tute spicy food and kind of baby bird it into my mouth. - Is that weird? - This week is Human Connection Week. We're taking a peek into the lives of various strangers who found my phone number online. We'll hear their funny moments, their difficult ones, and their unexpectedly profound ones. These are real conversations with real people figuring out life one call at a time. Listen to Therapy Gecko on the IHOT radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Well, it's that time again. Backpacks, first day of school outfits, and the low key anxiety of, it might be doing this right. - Good mom's bad choices is diving into the back to school season. The way only we know how unfiltered, funny, and full of the moments other shows won't touch from surviving morning drop-offs to the guilt of missing the first bake sale. - I already told me the sheet next season she wants to join a club team that's by your house. So I was like, so you want me to pick you up from school. - I'll take you by my house, but then I have to take you there, and then I have to drive back. And then some days I'm here, and I have to go pick you up at school, and then bring you back. I was just like, hell no. - This is the space where moms trade their highlight reel for the real reel, whether you're a new mom, a veteran mom, or just trying to make it to pick up on time. This season of good mom's bad choices is for you. Listen to good mom's bad choices from the Black Effect podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. - All right, joining us now is journalist Juan David Rojas to discuss the question, has the CIA launched a secret war in Mexico wanna be, thanks so much for being here. - Good to see you man. - Good to see you guys guys. - All right, so has the CIA launched a secret war in Mexico? - There's been a number of disturbing allegations that Ryan, you and Emily and I some months ago, we talked about how there were these two CIA deaths in the state of Chihuahua, which was on the border. And you know, the story there was that that was these two agents died in a car crash. At the time, I was a bit skeptical that we were getting the full story since then, and talking to people with, you know, close to the matter, I find it to be more believable. But after that, we started to get these whistleblowers, anonymous whistleblowers within the agency, telling us that there's apparently a secret of this covert assassination campaign by the CIA against cartel operatives. And then March, in Mexico, there was a lot of confused reporting about this car bombing against supposedly a Sinaloa cartel operative. And apparently what these anonymous sources have said is that this was a hit by the CIA. And there's a number of really, what's odd about it is that these anonymous whistleblowers here, I have the quotes. Like CNN said, the quote, "The March car bombing was a targeted assassination facilitated by CIA operations." And then for the time, someone told them that the agency provided intelligence and support, but was not on the ground when Mexican authorities killed the operative. So you know, there's a lot of ambiguity, leeway there, or interpret what's being said, the second quote kind of like gives a hint that like Mexican authorities are involved there's some degree of coordination which could be better, frankly. And this is the last thing. This has all come in tandem. There's a lot that's been going on between the US and Mexico just this year. In tandem, we've seen this campaign of targeted law fair against sitting Mexican politicians specifically and exclusively from the governing Morano party. So we could go ahead. Yeah, go into it. Yeah, so basically they indicted like the whole state of Sinaloa, which per like the famous cartel, Sinaloa state, like it's, you know, every governor ever is like involved in the drug trade, you know, going back to like Kiki Kamarina, the DEA agents assassination in the 80s. Like the governor at that time, like supposedly sheltered the head of the Guadalajara cartel after he ordered Kamarina's killing. But it was really unprecedented when indicted sitting governor. It was never done because there's always thought that it would be counterproductive. It would really screw up relations. And also, you know, like you're messing up like this entire, you know, like security ecosystem, you know, you need to work with these guys to some extent. And the problem isn't Sinaloa actually. It has been counterproductive. I'm good friends with a journalist there and he said that since Rocha Moja, the governor there resigned, the security situation has gotten worse. you guys covered back when how Joaquin Guzman, one of Enchappo's sons, tricked a mageau into flying over to Texas and they both got arrested. And this kicked off this horrific civil war within the cartel. It's created a lot of violence within the state. So now you have like loyalists of mageau, the mageaus, and then the Chappo, the Chapitos, going at it. And Rocha Morges supposedly was like on the side of the Chapitos. So once he was out of the way, the mageaus moved in, they've been settling scores. And it's been a complete disaster, so. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so talk us through the politics of this. Why, what is the CIA objective be? And what would the US objective be? In only targeting officials that are linked to Claudius Scheinbaum's government. Are the kind of opposition party conservative figures just so above involvement with drug trafficking? That they can't find anything on them? Or what are they actually going for here? That's the big question. And a lot of former intelligence officials have been asking that question too with no good answers. So and look, the drug trade in Mexico, a cartel corruption, this goes way back. Once upon a time under the one party pre that the government, the country for 70 years, the country really was basically a narco state. It was really the pre and charge like telling the traffickers what to do. Now the funny thing is that back then, the CIA was like okay with drug trafficking. Historically, the CIA didn't care in general about the drug trade in Latin America. One because they thought it was useless to oppose it in two. They cared more about like opposing leftists and communists. And so that's now where we get the whole like narco communists than come in. But so, you know what we've seen in the rest of Latin America is that the Trump administration is really willing to condone corruption from like right wing politicians. And you know, talking about like the drug trade, like the Trump pardon, like gangster, disciples, kingpin, Larry Hoover. So it's hard for me to make a case that really what they're after is like, you know, gains on security in the drug trade itself. But so what I've noticed and after the the Sinaloa indictments, they seem to have taken like a softer approach. They seem to be trying to co-op certain Moderna governors specifically on the border mind you. So Mexico has six border states with the US. And three of the governors there, all the three that belong to Moderna specifically, they've all had their visas revoked. Some of them have investigations against them in the US. And all three of them are supposedly cooperating with the US authorities as informants. So there's questions there of if they're trying to build like a bigger indictment. But the other three governors are all opposition. And notably Chiwawa, which is opposition governor, governors where we saw the deaths of those two CIA agents. Right. And yeah, like I can tell you, like one of those governors is very like cooperating with corruption to like an article corruption. So what I think, just step back a little bit because you said that this is all, let's put your piece up on the screen. You had said will Trump target Mexico net and acts the Forever War logic demands it. Can you link kind of the World War III element that you had worried about here with what you're talking about in these corruption scandals? Exactly, exactly. So the thing is like really the the key bit of interest between both countries is the border. Everything that matters between the US and Mexico is the border. It's Mexico's ultimate source of leverage both for immigration and trade. And so what I think they're trying to do, and again, this is speculation on my part, I laid out in the piece, they seem to be trying to co-opt governors that they view as unfriendly from the governing party that's left-wing. And they seem to trust the ones from the opposition. And I think a lot of this is geared towards kind of safeguarding the CIA operations along the border. Down the line, there's elections next midterm elections next year in Mexico. The three more than a governors are actually, well, there are elections in their states. So maybe the idea is to try to get opposition governors in there. And beyond that, well, you know, this is an administration that, you know, declared a war in Iran is escalating the Ukraine war. Kidnap Maduro wants to invade Cuba. And in their own state of war, at words, they also would like to bomb Mexico. So I think that really what they're doing, they're kind of laying the groundwork for if they're interested in the future, really trying to secure the border. And if they ever decide to take kinetic action in the future, I mean, this is a very dangerous and real possibility. Yeah, no, fascinating stuff. Really scary. All right. One, continue to stay on top of the story. And we'll hope to see you again in the future. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Didn't catch the latest role in the Martin unfiltered podcast. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests. And they complained about the very thing they received. It's wrong. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. 12 seats. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts. I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos and I cannot decide if I like him or not. This week is Human Connection Week. Well, it's that time again. Backpacks, first day of school outfits, and the low key anxiety of, it might have been doing this right. Good mom's bad choices is diving into the back to school season. The way only we know how unfiltered, funny, and full of the moments other shows won't touch from surviving morning drop-offs to the guild of missing the first bake sale. I already told me the sheet next season she wants to join a club team that's by your house. I'll take you by my house, but then I have to take over there, and then I have to drive back. And then some days I'm here, and I have to go pick you up at school and then bring you back. This is a space where moms trade their highlight reel for the real reel, whether you're a new mom, a veteran mom, or just trying to make it to pick up on time. Listen to good mom's bad choices from the Black Effect podcast network on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joining us now is great friend of the show Ben Shrekinger. He is the publisher of paradigm.News. Let's put it up here on the screen, gentlemen, and there will be a link down in the description. He, Ben previously at Politico, he wrote a great book on Hunter Biden, interviewed him here at Breaking Points, has now decided to look into the UFO phenomenon and to uncover everything that he possibly can. So he writes, reality shock, a beginner's guide to UFO's aliens and disclosure. Big picture, Ben, before we get into the piece, why did you decide to do this? You had a good gig going. You're at Politico, Hunter Biden, Corruption Guy, and you're like, you know what? It's UFO's for me. You know, for one thing, I just got sick of Washington. I took some time off. I haven't been in DC for a year and a half. I've decided to come back for the fall because the story's so good. But I'm inspired by what you and Crystal and Ryan and everybody have done here. I think that internet media is still evolving. I wanted to throw myself into the middle of it, and I became completely obsessed with the UFO, the UAP issue, the mystery. There's clearly room for investigative reporting to get to the bottom of this. And I think it's going to be a massive, both political and cultural phenomenon over the next 12 to, you know, 120 months. And where did you find the immediate gaps? Like, where does your journalistic capacity kind of fit in? Like, what's been what's been missing in this conversation? What are the first things you've kind of uncovered? Yeah, you know, to start with, I think just putting everything that's happened in the last three years, especially since David Grush. gave testimony to Congress, since the first attempt at a UAP disclosure act started. Lay that all out, and then lay that out in the context of what's been going on on this topic for 80 years. I think that's sort of part one, before you even try to add new information, I think you need a sort of a lot of context and sense-making, and that's what reality shock is for. And then in terms of where there's room to investigate further, I think that David Grosh has been escalating his public claims. I think there's room to get to the bottom of what the basis is for him, for example, going on Dr. Phil and saying that people have communicated telepathically with aliens. I think probably there needs to be some work done, trying to delineate between this UAP issue, which is a very real, concrete airspace security issue that not only is the US dealing with, there's now reporting that Europe has been making progress on track of UAP, there's an investigation in Japan, and figuring out how that does or does not relate to claims of non-human intelligence. There are obviously a lot of claims floating around, some of them from people who should not be dismissed out of hand, that these two things are intimately related. Some of that may be disinformation, some of that may be misunderstanding, and I just think that somebody needs to sort of focus on it and try to start blocking and tackling and getting some more clarity. - All right, so Ben, go into the piece, reality shock, it's very long, which it's very good. I read through the entire thing, it's a good primer. Why don't you pick some tidbits for the audience who may be skeptical of sick of hearing me cover, the ins and the outs, and I get it. It's been years, I've been talking about this topic, we're always being promised, including me, I get fatigued people who are like, oh, something big is coming and it's like, okay, all right, we've been hearing this now for quite some time. So give us a reality check and a reality shock. - Yeah, one of the things that shocked me honestly was worrying about the extent to which not only our government, but foreign governments over the decades have taken the UFO phenomenon seriously as a potential threat and seriously as potentially representing non-human intelligence. There's a memo from 1950 by a Canadian official who cites conversations with people in the United States writing back to Ottawa, saying that the US has recovered downcraft and is trying to reverse engineer them. So David Grush didn't invent this claim in 2023 as early as 1950, an official of a neighboring country, believe that to be true. Very possible that he was exposed to disinformation that was cloaking some sort of, you know, terrestrial Cold War American program, but nonetheless fascinating. In 1972, there's an Australian intelligence analyst named Harry Turner. He also concludes that the US is secretly reverse engineering alien craft. So there's a lot in the history here that made me fascinated, made it harder for me to dismiss this. Even if it is just a story of how did these intelligence analysts over decades keep arriving at the same wrong conclusion, that's a fascinating story. And it gets more fascinating when you have David Grush not analyzing the United States actions from the outside, but from inside with apparently full access, arriving at this conclusion yet again. I had some interesting interactions with Jim Clapper's lawyers in the course of reporting out this piece. The point of this piece was not to report out new information, but I did want clarity for something he said in age of disclosure, this sort of pro-disclosure documentary that came out last fall that was very popular. He said that when he was in the Air Force, they had a program for looking into anomalous activities they otherwise couldn't understand. Often over ranges out west, notably Area 51. Jim Clapper on camera talks about anomalous activity over Area 51. And it's a very short clip. And I know that people in the disclosure movement treated it as a big deal that they went to the hill and they said, look, we need to get more information out. Out of the Air Force about this, because officially, the military was not looking into UFOs from the late 1960s until the 21st century. So if in the middle of this period, there was a UFO program at the Air Force, that would be notable. I went back to Clapper's attorney for clarification. He said something along the lines of, well, director Clapper was talking about how in the 80s, when we were testing stealth aircraft, there were a lot of reports. And many of them were traced back to these stealth aircraft. Wow. If you ask me that it doesn't add a lot of clarity, he's not emphasizing the idea that there are unexplained activities under Area 51. I think it was a lawyerly comment. And then after my piece came out, in the liberation times, I saw a headline that Jim Clapper is now getting uncomfortable with the attention around disclosure. So what was going on with the Air Force in the 1980s? I'd like to get more clarity there. Great, great question. And I'm particularly interested in the way that this, the entire UAP conversation intersects and interacts with classified programs. Sometimes, I suspect that it operates as kind of a cover for other interesting things that you'll find. Curious if you end up looking-- I think it was back in 2024 in New Jersey when there were all of these unexplained UAP observations above military facilities in the region. Mayors were talking about it like we covered it in time. And then a few weeks after that all kind of faded, you had this extremely complex drone attack by the Ukrainians deep inside Russia, where they drove kind of mack trucks, filled with drones, deep deep into Russia, and then released them and attacked a bunch of infrastructure nearby. It felt to me like an interesting coincidence that perhaps we had been observing what was being understood to be some type of UAP phenomenon. But what it may have been was training for this operation that was then successfully carried out later. Do you ever look into that weird 2024 New Jersey phenomenon that was major international news for a couple weeks and then just kind of vanished from the public consciousness? I've not yet had a chance to go deep on it. It does deserve-- someone needs to look back at that and write the definitive account of that. I've heard rumors none of them bear repeating. Certainly, whether it's that New Jersey drone flap or other aspects of this, it's quite queer that some of this activity is human technology. Some of it may be American adversaries. Some of it, it certainly is American technology. I'm looking at the moment into some leads involving plasma physics and what our military is able to do with plasma physics. I expect that will be a piece of the puzzle when all is said and done, but it's not by any means queer that that's going to be the entire answer to this. You know, some of the other things that you point at are scientific research and some grants that you found interesting. Can you go into that? Yeah, well, what I'm seeing is that, you know, UFOology, if you want to call it that, grind up in the '90s, you know, what you assumed, what you absorbed from the culture was that this was for kind of weird people who need to get a life to work in foil hats. Turns out that over the decades, there have been very serious civilian efforts to collect and analyze UFO data. And now that's migrating into the realm of institutional science. You have the Galileo project at Harvard, which wants to use advanced instruments to study UAP. You have a paper in a Nature Portfolio Journal claiming that there's a statistical link between nuclear tests and strange lights appearing in the night sky in the 1950s. And there is funding. There is grants starting to be made here. New Jersey itself appropriated some money, partly to study UAP after that drone flap. At the University of New York, State University of New York in Albany, there's been a gift to a physicist named Kevin Knuth, who's studying UAP physics. And my expectation is that trend is going to continue and that there's going to be more scientific funding for this in the future. It's very interesting. And I'm excited to have somebody like you who is on the beat and is going to dig into all of this. So everybody go and subscribe to the newsletter. It'll be right there, paradigm.News. Link down in our description as well. Ben, thank you very much for doing this. And for dedicating your efforts to this phenomenon. Thanks, guys. This is great. All right, everybody. Great show. Thank you, Ryan. Let's appreciate it, brother. For Friday. I think so. Excellent. Pretty sure that's the plan. So anyway, there you go. That's what's happening, and we'll see you all tomorrow. 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