Sludge Report #7: Soviet UFO reports; the futility of the Galileo Project; Garry Nolan running his mouth.

At the September 2025 Congressional UAP hearing, George Knapp talked about his acquisition of Russian documents after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Soviets were "trying to build their own UFO" using the information they had acquired through their massive UFO information collection effort via their military, and that the people he had spoken to in Russia were no longer willing to talk to him. (Insinuating that they had been silenced or intimidated to desist from revealing further secrets) He was asked by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna about how he vetted the authenticity of these documents:

Luna: "Mr. Knapp, how do we know that the files that you obtained from the former Soviet Government are not BS [bullshit] and just given to you as a disinformation campaign against U.S. Government?"

Knapp: "Yeah, it's a good question. And so I shared some of them with the Senate Intelligence Committee when I first got back because that was requested by the Russians who shared some of that information with me. Secondly, I gave all of that material to the DIA through BAASS, the AAWSAP program. Sorry for the acronyms."

Luna: "Can you name names real quick?...Who did you give them to directly?"

Knapp: "I gave them to Robert Bigelow and to Jim Lacatski and they had hired a whole team to go through them and retranslate them and analyze it and they created a structure of how the UFO programs in the USSR, in Russia were put together. They said they were real. The final, the other person who said they were real is David Grusch."

The documents he acquired do seem, according to specialists on the Soviet investigation of UFOs, to be genuine, and there is some degree of potential plausibility to parts of Knapp's narrative about Soviet interest in exploiting UFO capabilities. After all, American aerospace firms during the Cold War expressed a similar interest, such as in the possibility of wielding anti-gravity, though these studies never moved beyond the theoretical stage. (https://www.twz.com/30499/the-truth-is-the-military-has-been-researching-anti-gravity-for-nearly-70-years). The McDonnell-Douglas Company was known to have investigated the supposed attributes of UFOs in an attempt to duplicate them (https://thesaucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com/2021/09/skylite-project-to-mimic-ufos.html), though these efforts did not seem to have gone very far either. It is entirely conceivable that the Soviets, in their contest for world hegemony with the United States, would have been similarly interested in gaining any advantage over their adversary even if it meant dabbling in fringe topics, which is further corroborated by Soviet investigations into extrasensory perception and remote viewing, mirrored in the United States by the CIA and the Army's own psychic ventures. (And it is not irrelevant that some of the same persons involved in the American Stargate Project should find themselves at the center of the current UAP saga after so many decades. Incidentally, the McDonnell-Douglas Company's investigation reportedly also looked into haunted houses and ESP, foreshadowing some of the paranormal/psi focus by AASWAP and its involvement at Skinwalker Ranch)

Knapp mentioned that:

"What hooked me on the story [UFOs] was the paper trail. These documents that shouldn't exist. We've been told for decades over and over, there's nothing to it. It's not a threat. You can go about your business. And then when FOIA becomes the law of the land, thousands of pages to the contrary leak out. There's a memo by General Nathan Twining in 1947 when the country was being overflown by dozens of UFOs, hundreds of UFOs in which he said, "Look, this is not visionary or fictitious. It's real. These things are craft. They're not ours. They outperform anything we've got." I mean, if you follow the paper trail of documents that they wrote before the military got wise and realized that FOIA really exists and changed their tune and not put things in writing, it spells it out pretty clearly. I'll go refer back to Russia. One incident I did not mention, Representative Burlison, is a Colonel Sakalov in that Ministry of Defense program said there were 40 incidents where Russian warplanes were sent to intercept UFOs and they were ordered to fire on them and for the most part the UFOs would zip away. Three of the pilots, though, did fire at these things. Those three planes stalled out, crashed. Two of those pilots died. And after that, the Russians changed the standing order. If you see a UFO, leave them alone. No country in the world wants to say and admit that these objects are flying around in our airspace and there's nothing we can do about it. I mean, who wants to say that? The US certainly doesn't. The Russians didn't either."

Knapp may well be alluding to real incidents, but they could be cases in which MiGs were scrambled to intercept Blackbird spy planes flying along the periphery of the Soviet landmass. Soviet fighters often did stall out in the thin atmosphere in which the Blackbirds operated, as confirmed by SR-71 pilots. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBu6mRDaro&t=3979s) These stories, told by aviators on the Soviet side, may have been folded into or confused with UFO accounts. Conceivably, elements of their military may have used the UFO angle to avoid embarrassment in front of their political masters or to avoid reprimands at the hands of Communist Party spot-checkers at a time when the country's technology was not up to par with America's best reconnaissance platforms, capable of sustained cruising speeds of Mach 3.2. It is also possible that some of these sightings were in fact of balloons that reached higher than expected altitudes before bursting and against which fighter units were indeed scrambled. (https://web.archive.org/web/20010413152736/http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/phenomena/russian_ufo_report_000808.html) In the paranoid security environment of the Soviet state, where information hoarding was rife, military units were likely not always informed about the provenance of strange aerial sightings. Equally, we can imagine that higher commanders, after being notified of these scrambles, might have issued orders to the relevant air defense units to desist from further pursuits while not bothering to inform them about the origin of the "UFOs". This context would provide a fertile ground in which uncertainty, mystery and conspiracy theories would naturally evolve and percolate through the ranks of military cadre (something apparently mirrored to a large degree in the American context, if some of the "whistleblower" stories are anything to go by) regarding the government's knowledge about the objects' "true" nature. The Soviet Union's NII22, a joint office of the Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Defense, was tasked with investigating UFO reports collected by the military. Interestingly, it also corroborated J. Allen Hynek's finding that pilots, including military pilots, made for comparatively bad witnesses in UFO cases, which would provide a further ingredient in perpetuating UFO legends. Soviet aviators, I presume, would rarely have been informed about matters such as secret rocket launches at Plesetsk (itself a hotspot of UFO sightings) or other classified activities, and that this would have inadvertently helped spread UFO stories not only throughout the Soviet military but also more broadly among Soviet society. (Again, the American counterpart offers a similar dynamic: the "covert gossip" and "periphery hypothesis" with regard to the U.S. intelligence and military establishments. I can only imagine that Soviet service members would have found themselves in an even more agonizing situation when trying to psychologically process UFO encounters that they had virtually no prospects of airing in an open legislative setting). Incidentally, it is also conceivable that the Soviet security apparatus saw such tales as having a side benefit, either passively allowing them to circulate and spread, or actively encouraging this themselves, but in either case using the genre to all the more effectively conceal their actual secret programs from Western intelligence, though this occasionally could blow up in their faces, such as with the "Jellyfish" UFO scrutinized by aerospace and weapons experts James Oberg and Curtis Peebles. (https://www.debunker.com/texts/soviet_coverup.html)

On the issue of nuclear base incidents (a favorite of Knapp's, and one that he seems to think clinches the entire issue about whether UFOs are space visitors), NII22 also inspected the Ukrainian missile silo that would become famous in UFO circles after the fall of the Soviet Union. The site was host to an event in 1982 in which missiles were suddenly put into a pre-launch sequence and were seconds from taking off before being manually remanded by personnel. The silo had reportedly been harried by mysterious lights witnessed by dozens of people during this incident. These sightings turned out to of unrelated military exercises nearby involving flare drops and night-time bombing practice. Oberg makes a revealing remark: "the missile base commander, while genuinely alarmed, [by the sudden activation of his ICBMs] evidently found it more convenient to blame extraterrestrials rather than his own maintenance troops for the scare." [Our emphasis] This culture of shifting blame to avoid severe reprimand, along with the Soviet penchant for secrecy and “passing the buck”, could well explain much about the UFO saga in that former empire. Knapp, however, prefers to take the stories emanating from the USSR at face value without paying any heed to the human cultural and social settings that might condition these stories. So too, sadly, did many of the congresspeople at the hearing, who simply accepted the alien/NHI narrative as the most likely explanation. This shows a deep ignorance about the true scope of the UFO "phenomenon", one that could have been more profitably explored had more skeptical voices also been called to testify.

In the episode two of the first season of TMZ's "UFO Revolution", strained explanations for why high-quality UFO/UAP photographs/footage are in so little supply (despite the proliferation and ubiquity of increasingly advanced commercial cameras and cellphones) were provided by Ralph Blumenthal (one of the coauthors of the famous/infamous 2017 New York Times piece) and Jeremy Corbell. Blumenthal suggested that "this is a hallmark of the phenomenon", while Corbell offered that "the phenomenon" wants to remain secret and "understands what that takes". (https://tubitv.com/tv-shows/200044922/s01-e02-the-truth-seekers. 29:59) In other words, the aliens or "NHI" are obscuring their craft on camera. Why they would not simply make themselves entirely invisible to us if they wish to remain concealed and are so advanced that they can manipulate our technology to such a degree is unclear, but one can indulge any speculation at this point. My question here is: doesn't this render Avi Loeb's Galileo Project (which I believe Corbell, at least, has promoted) pointless, since its aim is to capture a high-quality snapshot of a bona fide anomalous craft?

Related to this is that in a WatchMojo on UFOs, it was noted that: "Their [Hal Puthoff and Eric Davis's] most extraordinary claim: that UAPs may operate with a space-time distortion bubble that alters gravitational and inertial forces." Bob Lazar (and other "whistleblowers") have made similar claims, and it is perhaps problematic that the documentary film "The Age of Disclosure" depicts a "Sport Model" flying saucer inside such a bubble. (https://youtu.be/sjmJmwsjdGI?t=715) (This in itself is not a deal breaker for the documentary, but it does at least raise questions about which stories may have fed into the narratives it presents.) In the WatchMojo piece, it was also mentioned that "This [gravitational distortion bubble] could also explain why all the UAP photos have always seemed ridiculously fuzzy, a result of the camera trying to capture an object within a bubble that is warping space-time itself." (https://youtu.be/sjmJmwsjdGI?t=730) Puthoff adds: "It's not surprising when someone takes a photo of a UAP they finally get a fuzzy and distorted picture because they're actually a photo through a space time barrier." (https://youtu.be/sjmJmwsjdGI?t=741) Yet we often hear from former UAP-adjacent insiders and whistleblowers that the government is concealing "much clearer" photos that show much more detail than the videos that have been released. Is this a case of hedging one's bets? And returning to the Galileo Project, these issues would seem to negate that effort's worth (by the logic used by these ufologists). If these craft are traveling around ensconced within artificially induced gravity fields, then are any clear photos even to be had? There might be a way out of this seeming conundrum: if there should be clear images under a given set of conditions (say, when we can photograph helicopters or fixed wing aircraft traveling at similar speeds on a clear day) but they all turn out to be fuzzy anyway, this could be taken for evidence that an exotic mechanism like gravity manipulation is at play. But again, this contradicts the claims made by some UAP advocates that there are clear images that have not been made public.

Does it seem odd that the aliens don't hide their true nature from the U.S. military (who reputedly want to reverse engineer their technology) but do hide it from the civilian population? Will we ever get to the bottom of this labyrinth? Somebody in one of the "Legacy Programs" who doesn't like what's going on should (when the guards aren't looking) wag their finger at the aliens and tell them, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."

Another item in "UFO Revolution", which frankly made my blood boil, was when Garry Nolan accused the comet expert community (i.e. the subject matter experts and practicing scientists who specialize in comets and space rocks) that they are lazy and dogmatic for rejecting Loeb's supposition that interstellar rocks are probable extraterrestrial technology (and that Neil deGrasse Tyson is "jealous". lol! How fricken childish can you get, dude?). “Look at the people who are most against it. They're actually not practicing scientists.” This is absolutely, demonstrably and pathetically incorrect, just flatly wrong any way you look at it. The comet experts have repeatedly called out Loeb's claims with SCIENCE, which they've published in numerous peer reviewed journals, and have roundly and thoroughly debunked the notion that there is ANY indication that these objects are likely to be technology of ANY sort. Yet Loeb and Nolan want us to ignore that so that they can pose as the "real" scientists in this saga and cry about how the "stigma" thrown at them by the scientific community is being done to protect orthodoxy and squelch independent thought. See these in-depth and exhaustive breakdowns, citing the above-alluded subject matter experts, on why Loeb is simply wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nYXIeZh_bw; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf9oBlkQQCo.

That brings me to another thought: the whole impetus for the Galileo Project was these interstellar objects and Loeb's position that they exhibit features and behaviors that are inconsistent with natural comets or rocks, and that ʻOumuamua could be a solar sail. Yet what does that have to do with craft entering our atmosphere and reputedly outmaneuvering our best fighter jets, turning at 90-degree angles, hovering and then shooting off, etc.? An entirely different suite of technologies would be needed in one case versus the other (with the anti-gravity manipulation mentioned earlier being often cited by ufologists as the most plausible candidate in their minds for the capabilities exhibited by UFOs) Even IF these interstellars were alien tech, that would in no way give credence to UFOs being extraterrestrial. Given this clear incongruity, it seems that Loeb is simply riding the coattails of UFO mania/enthusiasm and whatever it kicks up in order to inject public interest into his project and to attract funding from the federal government. Is it any wonder that his narratives and even his personal appearances have become mixed in with the likes of Eric Davis (who believes that the Earth is being visited by Reptoids, Greys and Nordics, that the Holloman AFB UFO landing incident actually happened, and that former Director of Science and Technology at the CIA, Glenn Gaffney, should be crucified and tortured for supposedly denying AAWSAP a slice of the alien technology pie)? Loeb himself has cited the problem with UFOs and their poor photographic evidence. I suspect that this is ultimately a weird religious thing. That might sound like a cop-out on my part, but Loeb has said some eschatological-sounding shit that he's related to Judaism, the coming golden age of humanity and other religiously tinged themes. And there's no doubt that he's wrong about the interstellar objects, so there's that.

But as Belle of the Ranch says on her political podcast: It's just a thought. Y'all have a good day now.

Increasingly, my reaction to these jokers.