The Man Who Shaped UFO Skepticism | Donald Menzel Explained (Part 1)

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to that UFO podcast. First interview of 2026. I was going to say January 2026, which it is, but here we are. It's an incredibly cold day here in the UK. I have hand warmers, hot water bottles and a blanket. And if the video quality was any higher, you would see the breath coming off as I speak. It is that cold. But hopefully some hot topics to go all Alan Partridge on you to introduce you to a guest today I've not had on the podcast before, but he was born in the US. He was at the University of Oregon, a grad Go Ducks. I believe that's a US sports thing with an art degree and tech career. David Grush snatched his ontologicals, which is why he is on the show today. And that is the words of Mr. Ryan Perkey. Ryan, welcome, mate. Hi, thanks for having me on, Andy. Good to have you. And listen, you're one of the few guests I've ever met in person. And obviously I've met you in advance. We met at Sol. We had been speaking for the best part of 2025. One of those where I'm really bad at reaching out to people and yeah, we'll get something arranged and I don't get it arranged. But the timing looked good because we're not going to get to it just yet, but you've dropped an article on your substack, which is really, really interesting around skeptics, debunkers, Donald Menzel, the history of the UFO cover up, maybe back to even when it started and how that's pertinent to now. And I think it's going to be incredibly relevant going into 2026, even with Mr. George Knapp on the latest weaponized mentioning that something is coming down the pipeline that is going to throw a spanner in the works or attempt to with the UAP caucus and, you know, delegitimize the study or the issues they are trying to get into with UFOs. All of that is incredibly relevant. We're going to get there, but let's chat about you first, Ryan. Let's introduce you to the listeners and viewers. Who's Ryan Perky and what's brought you to the UFO dance? Yeah, so it definitely was the David Grush piece, although, you know, I'm like a child of the 80s. So born in 78, grew up with E.T., Star Wars, the whole lot. Right. And so I think I had Star Wars memorized when I was five or something. It would just come on TV and like one kid would call the other and we'd all run over to that house and watch it. And so, like, you know, always had that in the background of like, oh, yeah, there's stuff out there, probably. But then more so like the X-Files era, you always got the feeling that it wasn't going to go anywhere. Like it was held too tightly and the government wasn't going to let anything happen with it, per se. And it was just sort of a mystery that was going to be kept a mystery and lumped together with other amorphous mysteries. But it always had extra weight to it. Like you could tell that there was way more stuff to it in terms of sightings and records and history and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I was in a chat with somebody from work and Crush came on. I think I saw the article first and I was copying chunks out of that and sending it to friends on, I think, like a LinkedIn chat or something. And then I was, I remember I was like the last chat I sent was, oh, AI was all we were supposed to worry about this year. Now it's AI and aliens. And so that was like the moment where I was like, OK, it's time to take it seriously. Because this is somebody that's like high up in government and they're spilling the beans of the basic story that we've all heard over the years. You know, I think more and more for so many folks, 2017 was the last jumping on point for the UFO topic. The big jumping on point where folks were like, wow, this New York Times article dropped at the mainstream, the United States. It was picked up worldwide. UFOs are real. The US government confirms that, you know, however it was branded, it got people's interest. More and more, though, I think folks say that Grush was a jumping on point for them as well. So if people missed the 2017 incident, obviously COVID then happened. The world was turned upside down for many. But then 2023 seems to be this point where, again, folks like yourself, I met at Sol, people that get in touch with me. More and more I'm seeing I got involved when Grush spoke. And for me, that's something I've always tried to get across, that even in the UK, that really hit an air with the mainstream journalists in the UK. It's so hard for the UFO topic to touch these shores in any serious or credible way. But I had really respectable, if you can use that word often for journalists, respectable journalists from broadsheets get in touch with me through various means. When that happened, only for literally a couple of days, Ryan, to say this, this guy's come out, this David Grush, you know, is that an almost like surprise in their voice? They were even entertaining the notion of UFOs. But is this legitimate? Is this guy real? Is he actually sat there in front of, you know, US Congress and said what he said? And it was like, yeah. And they were almost looking for permission to like, can I write about this in these broadsheets, in these respectable newspapers that do not talk about aliens, they do not talk about UFOs. It's not even a joke piece. These papers do not write puff pieces or joke pieces or fluff pieces. They write real serious, you know, financial stuff, you know, political, geopolitical. So, yeah, I think more and more we've got to give props that David Grush was a huge jumping on point for people like yourself in 2023. What was it particularly for you that Grush said? Because I suppose some folks might argue David Grush didn't say a lot that other folks hadn't said in the past. We have recovered alien bodies or bits of bodies. We have recovered alien craft. And I'm using the rash terminology because that's essentially what he was saying. You can dress it up however you like in terms of terminology. But he said all these things folks had said before. But what was it, Ryan, that struck a chord with you? I think because he was still in to some degree and he wasn't retired. It was like a very, very fresh story. And his role to me was different in the sense that he was an investigator. Like they seemed to get that across in the early stories that he was assigned to look into the elements of this and figure out what was going on. And then additionally, I forget if it was Carl Nell or I think it was Colonel Carl Nell in the article that was referenced as, you know, background on Grush. And just in one of those chats, I said something like, yeah, this guy additionally sounds, you know, not like some fly by night, whatever. And then Carl Nell's background of, you know, aerospace, like C-suite and all of that leverage. So it's like, okay, something's definitely going on where it's involving active government and active defense contractor connections saying, yeah, this is real. The history is real. It's been a cover up. And, you know, it's still trying to be covered up. But now that there's these whistleblower protections in place, we're going to uncover it and do X, Y, Z. So that to me was sort of the whole packaged element. And 2017 was on my, like I remember when, you know, it's like I remember where I was standing when I saw the news. I was actually in Shanghai at that point in time. And so I remember looking at it and thinking, oh, wow, they're actually going to like roll out some of the tech or something. Like they're actually going to start, you know, talking about stuff that's been in the background for a long, long time. Because you'd always heard about, I don't know, TR-3B or the different things that were mythical. Like that was something big in the X-Files was like Agent Muller's trying to find both aliens and what the government's doing with it. And he thinks he encounters a bit of both every time. So, yeah, there's always been that element. It's getting quite strange to think that next year is going to be the 10-year anniversary of the New York Times article dropping, which just shows you that time absolutely flies. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because I think in that time we're going to have the X-Files reboot, whatever that's going to look like is going to be out. We're going to have had the Steven Spielberg Disclosure Day movie. We'll have been out for over a year at that point as well. And whatever impact that may have. And that's one of the listener questions later on around Hollywood and that kind of stuff for you. But listen, let's talk about very quickly again before the article, your location. You mentioned you were previously based in Shanghai, but you currently reside in Hong Kong. Is that right? Yeah. What's the UFO topic like in Hong Kong? Is there any conversation? If you go to a bookstore, can you pick up a UFO book, a UFO magazine? What's the culture like when it comes to UFOs? Yeah, I'd say Hong Kong's a little different than mainland China. So back in the day, you'd have the conglomeration of UK media coming over to Hong Kong and maybe being in print in both English and Chinese. So you'd have stories that would show up that would be mainland China based, but then picked up by a UK reporter and then press released in both English and Cantonese or traditional Chinese. So you can go to the library and find archival newspapers that have Chinese charactered news articles that are in Chinese talking about UFOs or UFO sightings, just like you could in English. So like, you know, if you're Richard Dolan and you speak Chinese, you can put in Chinese characters and do a whole archive dump on sightings. And so that's here. I'd say present day, you have some of the meditator aspect of it, like the CE5 aspect, where Buddhism's a common religion. So you have people that are meditatively focused and trying to make contact that way. And I don't know if it's interpreted as much as like other beings from other places on crafts or an aspect of the world or, you know, something like that. But that's also something that's around and active here in Hong Kong. I mean, not to a large degree, but if you did, you can find it. Yeah, I'd say so. I mean, no, that's that's cool. On that, the article you've written, really good timing to get you on early in the year because the UFO topic's in a really strange place that we've had age of disclosure. It's had this pretty sizable social media impact. It's performed really well. We've got David Grush. His new interview has just dropped last night. No doubt that'll come up in the speaking as we go along here. I know you've caught it. I've caught it kind of 14 minutes on the Megyn Kelly show. So you have the 3i Atlas conversation, which kind of muddied the UFO waters over the last year in a lot of respects for me. However, we then have had the CIA classified documents around 3i Atlas. I'm not confirmed they've got them anyway. There can be different reasons for that. I've got Avi Loeb on the podcast next week to talk about 3i Atlas and its various permutations as it heads away from the Earth now at this point. People might have caught my hand warmer there, folks, if you're on YouTube. I'm holding nothing secretive here. It's not a government recording device. It is literally one of my kids' hand warmers. It's that cold. But yeah, and the skeptics and debunkers have a huge role, whether we like it or not, in this UFO conversation. I personally think there's a massive element to what many of them do, especially being skeptical, because I myself am skeptical. I think it's healthy to be skeptical of a lot of elements of this topic, because it keeps you a little bit grounded. It helps you not dive in to head first into things and just believe everything's real. But your article, Ryan, unquestionably skeptical, like Donald Howard Menzel. When you hear people say the UFO cover-up is a deep state NSA and CIA-led decades-old PSYOP, Donald Menzel is who they are talking about. So do you want to introduce the article? And obviously, who is Donald Howard Menzel? Yeah, sure. So the article before it probably came out about four months prior, and that was just introducing the topic. And it was unquestionably skeptical about UFOs and same sort of format and everything. And that was looking at it from the angle of, you know, why is this topic treated the way it is? Because you have active scientists that are actually putting out peer-reviewed work with tons of citations. It might not all be about UFOs, but, you know, they have their credos of being a real acting scientist. And then you have these people that are saying, oh, we're scientific skeptics, and this is all nonsense, and you should believe us, but we don't have any citations worth merit. You know, we're not on the same tier. And it's kind of like, okay, so why is this going on? And so that was the initial jump in, and that was just from a conversation with somebody that was like, yeah, does anybody know a 100% debunker in real life? Like, they go around just debunking, debunking, debunking. Like, that's their, you know, they hear something, they debunk it. And nobody in that chat was like, no, yeah, like I know somebody or anything. And so that, like, really sort of triggered the search. And then I got to Donald Menzel because I went back through the current day to where it started in the past, or at least where I could, you know, find a distinct starting point. And it was like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, CSI, CFI, those groups, like Mick West, Susan Gerbeck, all the people that are in present day that you've heard about. And then they were originally in a group that was CSICOP, PSYCOP, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Against Paranormal something or other. So, you know, they had this big, long acronym, and it was literally pronounced in their documents, like in Skeptical Inquiry magazine, they say it's pronounced PSYCOP. And so it's like, okay, it's like they got the memo to run a PSYCOP, and they took it too literally. And then that happened, that happened right before, or yeah, just like a couple months prior to Donald Menzel dying. And then there's been books written by Stan Freeman, Kathleen Martin, that covered how Donald Menzel, Edward Condon, who was the Condon Committee, and Philip Klass, who was Standard Aerospace. He was a journalist for Aviation Week, and then later Aviation Week, Space Technology, which was McGraw Publishing. And so those three were like pen pals. And you'd have like Edward Condon writing to McGraw Publishing and saying, wow, this Philip Klass guy is really hitting it out of the park on these UFO stories. He's like, I've never read anything better, and I'm a physicist, so, you know, take my word for it. And so then I got to Menzel, and I was like, okay, he's like the granddaddy of the lot, and he has the black and white CIA records, the black and white NSA records, and then the more gray MJ-12, and all of that background. And so I just kept digging and kept finding, kept finding, kept finding. It's like, it didn't hit dead ends. It just kept getting more and more and more stuff. So that was endless. So that's why I was four months in between the one and the other. Let's, let's start with Menzel and who he actually is. Yeah, so Donald Menzel was a kid genius. He graduated university at like 21, 23, 24. I was PhD. So very young PhD grad. Then went to one year, I think Iowa State, one year Ohio State, or Iowa, Ohio State, and then was like observatory astronomer. So like professional on the West Coast, doing science, doing research. And then by age 31 or 32, he was a Harvard astronomer and working out of the Harvard College Observatory in the early 30s. And then from there on, he was one, one or two of the very first astrophysicist grads. So he was him and maybe somebody else, but it was very, very early. So he's actually studying the physical effects of stars and, you know, what are stars made of? How are they working, kind of dabbling in fusion in that regard and measuring like how much hydrogen is being produced by a star or how many elements are being emitted by a star? Like all these different things that are physical aspects of space. And how does he get to be involved in the UFO topic, specifically covering it up? Because I found it really interesting that he was actually in Roswell at the time of the crash, wasn't he? But not necessarily, well, on the surface of it, not necessarily there because of the crash. Yeah, yeah, that's a, I mean, the timing around that one's very interesting. So the conventional timing is he just went to go try to find a spot for an observatory. And that spot was Sacramento Peak. And he was working with another scientist. There was two heads of the project, O'Day. And O'Day wanted to make sure that the spot overlooked White Sands Missile Range and Hullman Air Force Base. And so that's why the location on Sacramento Peak has, in my article, there's this graphic of a V-2 rocket shooting off from White Sands, going kind of over Hullman and then off towards the distance. And then Sacramento is one of the radar locations and equipment locations measuring all the aspects of the V-2 as they try to figure out, you know, how it's performing, what's going on, et cetera, et cetera. So that's like the conventional explanation of why he was there. But his introduction, like when he officially got into the UFO topic, is a little harder to determine. He could have figured something out by looking at photographic plates. And when may I get into that later, because that's a very hot topic nowadays with Beatrice Villarelle and her work. Because he was of the character that was connected enough and clever enough to possibly have figured out what Beatrice figured out. And he had the actual assets available to him. He had the plates from Harvard. It was something he could have looked at. And he was involved in very early computers. So that was the other aspect of the article that sort of connected a lot of dots. Because after he got to Harvard, Harvard neighbor is MIT in that area of Cambridge. And they're walking distance from each other. And at MIT was Vannevar Bush. And so Vannevar Bush was working on early analog computers. One day, Donald Menzel comes over and he says, hey, I've got this problem with the computer. Maybe we can build something to solve it. And they tinker around and they create this like sort of automated tracing paper thing that helps Donald do some math or accomplish a certain task. And computerized in that sense of computers back then, which is more or less like a mechanical machine that did it. And so from that phase, yeah, yeah. He got involved into crypto and the NSA side and all that. Yeah, I'm just looking at some of the pictures again as you say that. Because those computers are very much almost like just like typewriter type machines. But you are going back to the very advent here, folks, of what a computer could be, should be, what it would come to be now. And even if you think how much a computer has changed from the first PC I got in the kind of mid to late 90s, I was really lucky to get one early on. I was actually given a PC. My gran used to clean a house for someone who was pretty wealthy. It was a family of doctors. And their son had a PC that literally, it was like MS-DOS for what that means to people. It didn't come on. There was no Windows 95. It literally was just for like typing. And I had this PC that I couldn't do anything with except just type on it. I couldn't print stuff off. I couldn't access anything. There was no programs, no folders, nothing I knew how to do. I was like eight or nine years old, but just typing on this computer. But it was the coolest thing to then a year or so later, after I jammed a floppy disk in it because I covered it in sellotape, I got my first proper Windows PC, accessing Windows 95. And then even from there, how different things are now and how unusable those computers would be. So you see that evolution of the computer and stuff, which is really interesting in there too. So what was Menzel's part in the war? Because this is a really interesting time, isn't it? The 30s, the 40s, you're coming out of the First World War, things are changing. You then hit the Second World War. Did he have a part to play in that? Yeah. So in between World War I, World War II, I think he was too young for World War I. And then when World War II rolled around, since he was already connected with Bush, he early on worked in the Office of Science Research and Development. And was working with Bush for just maybe even a year, I think even less than that. And then got commissioned in the Navy as an officer. So he was a lieutenant commander in the Navy. And then at that point in time, comms, so communications intelligence was separate to each branch. So Navy had one, Army had one. There was no Air Force. It was Army Air Force. So they both had their separate sort of communications fields. And in that, it was OP-20G that the Navy ran. And those guys became NSA as well as the Army Signal Intelligence became NSA. So after the war, those two got smushed together. And that's what made the NSA. And since Menzel was involved in computers, like the early Enigma machines and all of that, he had a bent towards that. He had a bent towards cryptography. And another good article that I reference in there is the Cryptological Contributions, Donald Menzel. That was written by Craig Bauer and I think John Edwards. And so that one really goes into what he did. You can find PDFs of it online. And so, yeah, like that whole background was really fascinating. And then his security clearance in that regard with the Navy was top secret ultra. Because the Brits called what they were doing to crack Enigma, ultra. And so the ultra level of secrecy was anything that they got out of cracked Enigma messages. And so when it was that, it was given ultra level stampage. And they would work with the U.S., only other people that were cleared at ultra level. So Menzel is a guy who, like you said, from a very young age, child genius, prodigy. He is involved in early computers. He is involved in, like you say, crypto, cryptanalysis, breaking code. He is well respected. He'll be well thought of. He is the kind of guy who would be involved in a lot of these programs that even we're going to get into crash retrievals and whatnot. You mentioned the crash retrieval in 1941 in Cape Girardeau in Missouri, things like that. He would have been the kind of guy that a government would want to go to, wouldn't he? Because it would have been much smaller. You don't have tens of thousands of people involved. Smaller circles, smaller people, levels of people to trust. Menzel ticks the boxes for we have this issue or this new issue we're starting to come across. It just makes sense to get him involved, wouldn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's the same problem that you hear about today of people having the tickets or not. And so when they're trying to do something super secret, they want to find somebody that already ticks all the boxes and they don't have to do the background check again. They don't have to figure out if this person can be trusted, you know, X, Y, Z. And so Menzel at that level, they knew that he had what he had. And then his war performance was admirable. He got medals of recognition. He did stuff like figure out. So since he was looking at the sun, the ionosphere, one of the things he figured out was that the ionosphere could actually interfere with radio transmissions. And so a big part of his observations of the sun were to figure out the timing around when is the best time to send radio transmissions in World War II so that they just wouldn't get garbled and messed up. Not alone, you know, if they're a secret or not, if they're encoded, you know, if it's encoded, but then the sun knocks it out, you know, it's not going to work. And so they had this distinct advantage that they were actually sending their messages at some of the best times and getting some of the best quality transmissions based on his research. The other thing that he did was figure out that pilots in the Pacific, which is, you know, massive ocean, you only have two chances of landing. It's either from where you took off from or an island that has a strip on it. And so there are these transponders that the U.S. put on these islands that might not be completely populated, but they would have like food and a dirt strip and something like that. So if a pilot had a problem, they're instructed to switch over to their transponder readings, find that transponder, land at that that airstrip and then, you know, radio for help from there. And then they're also instructed if they're not getting a signal to go up in elevation, like fly higher, because they're thinking you'll be higher, you'll you'll have, you know, more line of sight or whatever. But Minzel figured out that actually they flew in an area that was having interference. And if they flew lower, they would get better signals. So they switched the instructions, fly lower and where they were having people that were just like ditching in the ocean because they weren't finding the transponder. Now they're connecting and actually like saving their lives. So there's that aspect. And then he also did some some direction finding of U-2 submarines. So like Wolfpack submarines from from the UK, from the Germans, they the U-boats would go. They'd shoot their shot. But since they're rationing gas and oil, they would go to the Caribbean and hang out like underwater and then surface with a, you know, put up a scope, get to like periscope depth and watch where the ships leaving from that region of the U.S. and from that side of the world and where they're going. And then they would surface enough to radio back to Germany, like the routes that they think these ships are taking in order for other U-boats or other military vessels with ammunition to shoot at them, more or less. And so what Minzel also figured out there, along with some others, was the direction finding around those U-boats. And so they would surface, send the radio signal and wherever it was first caught, you know, is still encoded and they had to still figure out, you know, what they were saying. But wherever they first received it, they would start to triangulate from that and then go back and say, OK, it's here. And then they'd send out some planes and have like a five mile search and sink submarines that way. So he saved lives. He sunk submarines and he cracked codes in World War Two. So Menzel, obviously a huge part to play in World War Two. Like you see, all these emerging technologies, all these emerging ways of manipulating technology they had. He's at the forefront of a lot of that. So, again, makes sense for the involvement potentially in the UFO topic. Where does he go after the war? Where the war finishes, what happens to Menzel? You've then had the Roswell crash in 1947. We've talked about him being in the wrong place at the right time, the right place at the wrong time or the right place at the right time, however you want to look at it. Do you think there's something more to him being there at that time or was it just a coincidence? Yeah, that's where it's really tricky. I mean, that's where it's definitely the grey. It's not so black and white in that era. So the one thing that is clear with Menzel is he didn't go back to Harvard alone. Like he didn't go back, you know, and end his military career. He was still very much part of the military because he was still a Navy commander, a Navy reserval commander. So he was in the Navy reserve and he was a commander at the Boston headquarters and they were still focused on cryptanalysis and cryptography. So he was still in and in that regard, more or less secretly in because he went back to Harvard and his Harvard professor on that side of life. And the war was over and, you know, wasn't wearing the uniform, but was still doing very much a lot of the work that he was doing in the war. And that was partly due to the Cold War spinning up, Five Eyes becoming a thing and all the involvement there and then could as well possibly be related to any discovered crafts. So if he was ultra cleared and magenta was a thing that was recovered and they sent any sort of message about it being recovered, it would have been at the ultra level. It would have been, you know, cryptanically secured at that level as high as they could do it. And he would be one of the people involved in that process. So he might have known then, he might have known at Gerardo, he might have known at like the Battle of Los Angeles or any of these other recoveries that have been like very under the radar in that period of time where it's pre-Roswell. Like that, however many have any sort of literature around them, any of those are all very hard to get details on. So that's, that's the big thing. And then with Grush coming out, like we mentioned at the head, he was one that said, yeah, magenta. And people started really diving into that. And again, same thing, they keep finding stuff. And that was a big part of soul that we were both at with Pinotti describing his process of, of uncovering different things from magenta. And then additionally in the age of disclosure afterwards, when Dan Farah was going on his like interview round circuit, he was on, I'm forgetting the name, but one of the news nation guys, uh, that's not Ross Colhart, the other guy. And yeah, yeah, yeah. And I put it in my article, just like a gift. Cause yeah, that's it. Right, right, right. I put a, I like, I gift it so that there's no sound, but it's the, the closed caption of this one scene where he's like, in addition to what people told me in the age of disclosure and is in the movie, they were also telling me that there was recoveries pre-World War II or during World War II. So that again, you have Grush, you have Dan Farah, and you have just the general literature that says a few of these things were recovered prior to Roswell. See, for me, Ryan, this is like a really exciting time if you're involved in a UFO coverup, because magenta you mentioned was 33, 1933. Yeah. So again, you're almost a hundred years removed from that. Roswell, obviously in the late forties, you talk about the Missouri, um, forgive me Christ, I've got that many in my head now. Uh, what was 1941? Yeah, Gerardo. Um, you've then got Battle of Los Angeles that happens. So in this space of less than 20 years, you've got all these potential crashes, flaps happening, sightings, and the infrastructure for the coverup is only just being put in place. So this is the beginnings of what we still see now, isn't it? And I think that's part of the issue that so much of what has happened is just a continuation of things that were put in place through probably not the thirties. I imagine it was very much like haphazard. What do we do? This thing's come down, throw a tarp over it, put loads of soldiers around the perimeter, don't let anyone in, hoy it in the back of a truck and let's move it. Um, but documentation, personnel are all gone. And so you can only go so far back, can't you? But these were the people who were putting in place the coverup that was going to be affecting us in modern day. And even then you see the majestic documents you've got copied in there as well. Um, the MJ-12 group that Howard Menzel is listed as part of, was it President Truman who signed that off? Yeah. So again, these groups that are part of UFO lore and legend, you've got Menzel's name and fingerprints all over the topic from the very early days. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's why in the article, I say it's sort of a mute point by 1947 because he's in that MJ-12 document. And so, you know, at least by then it's, it's concrete enough to put into something like that. And, you know, somebody could say, oh, it's fiction from the eighties, but you'd have to have somebody that was pretty smart because they would have known that Menzel would have lined up with this photographic plate fiasco that he would have lined up with. All these other aspects, like Vinnie Verbusch's computer development, the Eckert's computer. Like, so I even traced down a guy that did his PhD dissertation on, um, Wallace Eckert, who developed an automatic computer machine that would take the photographic plate. So the glass star photographs, put it on this machine and then it's gears and levers and everything else. And it's light sensors would slide over the plate and find the stars and then punch a card and then say, okay, the stars here and then go to the next one, punch the card, punch the card. And so you'd have these punch cards that are telling you like the dial locations of where the stars are on the plates. So he wrote his, his dissertation on that guy, Wallace Eckert and his wife, uh, Dorothy Eckert. And I emailed him at one point and I said, wow, do you know if Menzel knew this guy where they connected at all? And I gave him one document that I came across that they both went to like some, uh, math conference or something, something that I found, you know, just in archive.org or wherever. And he's like, no, like, not that I know of. Yeah. I see it in that document. And yeah, I see the Beatrice VRL stuff. And yeah, Wallace Eckert would have related to VRL and in terms of, you know, they both looked at photographic plates, but nothing on, on, on Menzel. And so then like, you know, this is the guy that would know. And then I find this other thing on the Smithsonian around computers and Eckert and, um, Aiken, the other computer guy at Harvard. And so I'm like, Oh, this looks interesting because it's an oral history of the computer development in the U S from the American history museum. So email Smithsonian say, Hey, can I get a digital copy of this audio tape? Has it ever been digitized? They're like, no, uh, we haven't done that yet. Uh, if you pay, we'll do it. And I was like, all right, I'll pay. And okay, we'll throw in the transcript. I was like, great. So I get the transcript and I'm reading it and it's Donald Menzel talking. He's like, Oh, the Eckerts. Yeah. They're good friends. Like I knew Dorothy back in, in my work at lick observatory in 1928 or 29. And then we called her doll. That was her nickname, Dorothy doll Eckert. And then Wallace. Oh yeah. He's like, he was the guy I'd always go to because I was interested in the automatic measurement of star positions. And it's just like, okay. So yeah, if somebody that was writing the MJ 12 document knew all that, uh, they did their homework and yeah, they're pretty impressive. Um, I found it really interesting about what midway through the article, if that, um, where there's you, you speculate was Menzel involved in early targeted experiments to shoot down UAP. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah. Well, so in imminent with Lou Alessandro's like in your background there in one of it, he attributes the crash in Roswell to a high powered radar being turned on or some accidental thing, but involving radar causing the craft, either the navigation or the propulsion or whatever to fits out. And the craft crashed. And then additionally, um, the most famous FBI memo on their website, they say the one that got the most views was the quote unquote HODL memo, which was a guy HODL who was investigating something. And he had an informant tell him that down in the Southwest, New Mexico and the deserts in New Mexico, there's a new radar that's been turned on and it's knocking down UFOs. It's knocking out flying saucers. I think is the, is the quote in the memo. And so I had those two sources saying that to some degree, uh, the U S or, you know, at least whoever was out in New Mexico knew that this radar system setup that they had was able to impact UFOs and flying saucers. And, you know, I didn't put it in the article, but if you think about the scientists back then, you had, uh, the Manhattan project right there. And Trinity is another sided crash. So Jack Follet and, um, blanking on her name, another, yeah, yeah. So they both wrote a book on Trinity that says there was a crash there in 45, I think. So, you know, there's another one of the early ones. So there's definitely that. Uh, and the scientists of that era famously, um, they weren't shy about experimenting, right? So there's this other story again, not in the article, uh, people can look it up. And it's, uh, the thing called the demon core and the demon core was a sub, uh, subcritical chunk of plutonium, sort of like in a sphere is in this round ball. And you can see a, a, a fictional, uh, recreation of, of one of these incidences where he was basically fiddling it with a screwdriver. One of the scientists. And he was, he was separating the, the two portions of the plutonium to just a degree so that the guy, your counter would get more active, the closer it got. And he was measuring the output that way. So they could calculate, you know, whatever they had to do in regards to that. And then, uh, the screwdriver slipped and it clicked together. It started glowing blue. He grabbed it with his hand, separated it. And then it, the scene, you know, is about there. And he's like, everybody freeze, take all the metal out of your pockets. And he starts throwing chalk around. He's like, trace around your feet. And then he goes to a chalkboard and he's doing all these calculations. And I think the scene ends and he's like, I'm dead. And then he's like, everybody get out of here. And then, yeah, shortly, like a day or two later, you know, dies from radiation poisoning. Another guy also died from dropping a brick on it, more or less like a barium brick that was reflecting back the radioactivity. But all this is to say is these scientists were cranking to the point of death on their experiments and willing to risk these big risks to advance in this nuclear age, in this brand new, like atomic age. It's like if a UFO crashed there, they're not the ones to like leave it alone. No. You know, they're not just going to say, oh, we can't figure it out. Like they're going to try to find somebody they'll figure out and they'll try as hard as they can to figure it out. Do you know, Ryan, growing up, I used to listen to a lot of, I've touched on, I'm a huge fan of radio and broadcast. And I think podcast is essentially on demand radio, folks, is what this is. And I, from a very young age, used to listen to a lot of talk radio late night. I still, and as a child, much to my, you know, my wife hates this, but I go to bed with podcasts on at the side of the bed. I need the audio. I need something auditory on during the night to go to sleep and all that kind of stuff. And I remember I used to listen to a lot of talk radio, talk sport in the UK, would have late night. James Whale, who sadly passed away quite recently, was someone I listened to growing up and done a lot of great shows. All kinds of weird and wonderful guests would be on the James Whale show. It wasn't sport related. And I remember he had a guest on one night who was talking about all the different kinds of experiments that had been done, especially going through like the 20s, 30s, 40s, the war periods were a big one, obviously. Then into the 50s and 60s after paperclip and that transition of scientists from Nazi Germany to the US and the UK and all the weird stuff they were doing. Quite often on their own people, their own soldiers, the homeless, drug addicts, all that kind of stuff. And it was fascinating and horrific and all that kind of stuff. But I always loved those kind of books. If you don't think that kind of stuff probably still happens now, but just very quietly, then I don't know what to tell you. I imagine it does. And I imagine some very horrific things happen. But like you say, this was a time where so many new elements of science and technology were coming into the fore. Scientists didn't have the same restraints. They probably would have to go under now. Human rights were an afterthought or you could probably hide things a lot easier than you would now on social media. So fascinating time, a crazy time, a dangerous time. And like you say, scientists were making discoveries at the same time going, oh, yep, I'm dead. Mary Curie, you know, we've got the Mary Curie Foundation Cancer Research, very famously died because of her research and the work she was doing. But so many great things that happened then had a kind of tragic backstory for the betterment of society. But so many things probably happened that were for nefarious means, the cover up of UFO technology for war reasons, for governments, national security. And that's where I think even now when people hear about this national security threat, we're sick of everything being clouded when it comes to the UFO topic under national security. Again, folks, making the point here, this is where it all comes from. This is where it started. These are the people that started this off. This isn't a new thing or a new phenomenon that we're covering things up under the auspices of national security. This is where it started back in the 40s, back in the 50s, and has just carried on since then. Taking a sidebar, because we're talking a lot about Menzel and obviously the article is very much based on the man himself. We're talking here about sceptics and pseudo-scepticism. What for you as a sceptic then? Because I think if you say in modern times, sceptics for the UFO topic that come to mind immediately for most would be Mick West, Neil deGrasse Tyson and the likes. What for you as a sceptic and what differentiates healthy scepticism to going to the extreme? That is all for part one. Part two will be out in the next couple of days. You can listen to this episode already in full, ad-free and with no sponsors for less than the price of a coffee. If you head on over to Patreon or Apple, you can subscribe to the podcast for less than the price of a coffee or take up the two weeks free trial that are available on those platforms. You can head on over to Spotify and search That UFO Podcast Premium and get access to this episode in full. No adverts, no sponsorships and also with some extra bonus content as well. Thanks for listening folks.