The government has been tracking UFOs for 80 years. Your uncle has been tracking them for one night. One of them has nothing to lose by telling the truth.

As plugged in, intrigued, and invested as one might be with UFO cases, it’s also quite normal to feel dejected, zoned out, and frazzled as part of the process.

Luckily, after I sat down and talked the whole thing through with Joshua Golembeske, Senior Director of Production and host of Cosmic Disclosure on Gaia, the word “credibility” began to take on a whole new light.

Passing things off as “crazy”

We kicked off by discussing the credibility of the individual. When we’re faced with a doozy of a story, namely a non-military personnel seeing a UFO, it too often gets passed off as a lie.

Apparently, there are three “lazy labels” that get plastered on each claim: that an experiencer is “crazy,” was high on drugs, or was just flat-out lying. Golembeske was straight out of the blocks to debunk this:

“Why would they lie to me? It doesn't make sense. I'm pretty good at knowing someone's lying, though I've probably been duped. In this space, there's so much disinformation,” he pointed out.

But empathy over frustration is the best tonic here, as Golembeske is privy to the fact that the general populace is “inundated and manipulated by the legacy program. So when everyone's a hardcore skeptic, I actually have compassion.”

And for those unfamiliar with the legacy program, there has been notable traction in the last few years unearthing the fact that the US government could be reverse-engineering decades’ worth of UAP technology.

"They've done two things. They've made us terrified of it, and they made it silly. What an unbelievably powerful psychological tool to get people not to look at it," observed Golembeske.

Nuts and bolts UFOlogy

Despite said head frazzling, Golembeske helped level things up by referring to the term “nuts and bolts UFOlogy", which is the government-evidence-only crowd. He pointed to the “vicious” nature, especially when it comes to binary must-be-true vs bullshit claims.

And, when red herrings are being churned out haphazardly, Golembeske urges caution:

"Video is not very reliable anymore because of AI and trickery. It's got to be like sensors... flare footage, radar."

In fact, there are five observables put forth by legendary whistleblower Luiz Elizondo, including instantaneous acceleration and low visibility (or cloaking), which can help establish credibility from a physics (or the craft going against human physics) perspective.

This is where we steer away from the nuts and bolts and get to the sum of the parts of disclosure.

“Multiple witnesses from multiple locations are ideal. Not in the same group of people,” asserts Golembeske.

And this is where the tide began to turn, as I realized that when cases are closed, or evidence is retracted, it’s hard to deny the sheer number of testimonies.

Golembeske also pointed to a 2004 Nimitz, California case, a 2013 Puerto Rico incident, and a 2015 Gimbal video shot near the Florida coast, which, again, had trained observers, that should be enough to satisfy the nuts-and-bolts crowd.

Other cases in point

So which cases actually meet the bar? Golembeske rattled off a few.

Firstly, the 1947 Roswell incident, where it’s alleged that the US military cleared the rubble away from a crashed UFO craft in New Mexico, in the US. Claims that they had claimed a “flying disk” were mysteriously withdrawn within 24 hours. This withdrawal of evidence deepens the mystery and adds fuel to the fire of disclosure, rather than it being a mere case of the pilot crying wolf.

Also, a 1976 Tehran UFO incident is held up to scrutiny today, as two F-4 fighter jets witnessed a glowing object. As they flew closer towards it, their tracking systems jammed up and malfunctioned, along with their weapons systems. However, as they turned back, operations returned to normal, further adding to the mystery.

And, from around the end of 1989 into the spring of 1990, there was a wave of UFO sightings in a compact space of time across Belgium that saw “thousands of witnesses, including police, pilots, and military personnel, all describing the same large triangular craft,” explained Golembeske.

What is eerie in this situation is that the Belgian air force intercepted and analyzed data from the F-16 fighter jet radars, yet “a core portion of that wave is still unexplained and well documented.”

But there’s one case in particular that rises to the top of the pile, and that’s the 1997 Phoenix Lights case in which "the governor of the state came forward and said he saw it. Kurt Russell said he saw it. Over 10,000 people reported it," claimed Golembeske, who was in a jubilant mood.

A giant triangle, multiple football stadiums wide. The only thing they could do is speculate and be even crazier. 'Oh, it's a giant hologram!

Why now is different

For all our talk and whizzing by the decades, comparisons of the Manhattan Project cropped up. Discussions about the development of nukes were hidden from the public, as depicted in the 2023 Oppenheimer movie.

Politically, even the chamber has been kept in the dark, pretty much since the end of the Second World War.

“Congress has realized they're mad because they've realized that something without their oversight that's sucking up trillions of dollars has been going on for 80 years.”

Steven Spielberg’s upcoming movie this summer, Disclosure Day, should make the UFO topic more credible than his 1982 movie about extraterrestrials.

Golembeske fuses the otherworldly with our everyday lives in a way that really brings home.

We're living in a science fiction reality, and we all have horse blinders on. I know it's going to be crazier than any of us can possibly imagine.

And that’s why when auld Uncle Hank claims there’s something out there with a drop of brandy, perhaps we shouldn't roll our eyes quite so fast. The old man might just be onto something.