Latest / Safe Aerospace Podcast / SpaceShipOne Astronaut Saw a Dozen Glowing Spheres in His Backyard | Kevin Curran & Matt Stinemetze

Transcript

SpaceShipOne Astronaut Saw a Dozen Glowing Spheres in His Backyard | Kevin Curran & Matt Stinemetze · Safe Aerospace Podcast

• 0:00
  He had a UAP encounter during his flight.
• 0:03
  Can you describe that incident for us?
• 0:04
  It wasn't actually during his flight.
• 0:06
  It wasn't during. It, yeah.
• 0:07
  Brian Binnie was the second private astronaut.
• 0:09
  Brian has just crashed.
• 0:11
  He's watching his childhood dream disappear.
• 0:13
  He's 47 years old.
• 0:14
  He's thinking my test flight career is over.
• 0:17
  It's six days after the flight.
• 0:19
  So. December 23rd, 2003, 4:00 in the morning.
• 0:23
  And there's flickering lights.
• 0:24
  And he opens up
• 0:25
  his eyes, goes to the bedroom window, and he said it looked like daylight
• 0:29
  had manifested itself in his backyard in the daylight.
• 0:33
  Were these translucent spheres?
• 0:36
  He said there were a dozen of them.
• 0:37
  As program manager of Spaceship one, again with advanced degrees,
• 0:40
  he looked into every prosaic explanation at could.
• 0:43
  Whether it's amaz.
• 0:45
  I mean, just everything.
• 0:46
  And ultimately, he determined that it was.
• 1:02
  Welcome to the Safe Aerospace podcast.
• 1:04
  My name is Ryan Graves.
• 1:06
  I think we have a pretty interesting episode for you today.
• 1:09
  I'm joined by Kevin current Matt Steinmetz.
• 1:12
  We often wonder about what astronauts might see in space
• 1:17
  if they see you as well.
• 1:19
  I think you're really going to enjoy what these two folks have to share about
• 1:23
  what might have happened to our second commercial astronaut in space.
• 1:27
  Is that correct?
• 1:28
  Awesome. Kevin, thanks for joining us.
• 1:30
  Let's start with the introduction from Kevin.
• 1:33
  What brought you into this conversation?
• 1:34
  How do we run into each other on the UAP topic?
• 1:37
  Yeah, it's a strange one. So basically
• 1:38
  I've been a career cinematographer for about the last 30 years.
• 1:42
  I do a little bit of everything, but for a living.
• 1:44
  I've made a living as a cinematographer, so I worked for pretty much every studio,
• 1:48
  hundreds of independent production companies living in Los Angeles.
• 1:51
  In 2020, the world slowed down and I had to make some life decisions.
• 1:56
  What I wanted to do with the one life that I know I have.
• 1:59
  And so, for better or worse,
• 2:01
  that became aerospace had read aerospace since I was a kid.
• 2:05
  And so when it came time to work again, I just leaned into it.
• 2:08
  So I told everybody when I wanted to do, and I got very fortunate.
• 2:11
  I was the closest camera operator to Blue Origin's New Shepard
• 2:15
  landings and, you know, so I shot the first four of those.
• 2:18
  So I was five feet away from Bezos,
• 2:22
  that whole crew on a 16, Shatner and Bezos.
• 2:25
  That was my camera, that the world saw all of those.
• 2:28
  It was an honor because, you know, that company could go on to become anything.
• 2:31
  I shot all the morning shows for Blue Origin and it was incredible.
• 2:35
  I worked for space a little bit Astrobotic a little bit.
• 2:38
  I worked on Artemis one for meta to an all the launch,
• 2:41
  you know, closest stage to the camera, our closest stage to launch.
• 2:46
  And then I was
• 2:46
  pitching a series and it was an aerospace series.
• 2:50
  It was getting a lot of interest but it just wasn't going.
• 2:53
  And so one of the episodes was from Mojave in the Spaceship One program.
• 2:58
  And so I reached out to Brian Binnie to even craft that episode.
• 3:02
  And Brian Binnie was the second private astronaut.
• 3:05
  And I said, hey, Brian, here's who I am.
• 3:08
  Here's what I want to do.
• 3:09
  I want to celebrate engineers and people that take us beyond our atmosphere
• 3:12
  for us in my career. This is my skill set.
• 3:14
  Can't go back and become an aerospace engineer.
• 3:16
  I'm a little too old for that.
• 3:17
  But I want to celebrate
• 3:18
  you guys and tell stories with the power that I have in media.
• 3:22
  I said, Brian, your life could have been very different
• 3:25
  if it wasn't for a series of events that allowed you to fly the final flight
• 3:29
  of Spaceship one because he had crashed the first rocket powered flight.
• 3:33
  So it seemed like to me it was a simple redemption story.
• 3:36
  I said, is there any truth to this?
• 3:38
  And, you know, he said, yeah, there's a.
• 3:40
  Lot of that specifically.
• 3:41
  Truth to that.
• 3:42
  It's like this cool redemption story.
• 3:44
  Like, have you thought a lot about how your life
• 3:46
  would have been different if it was marked by a failed
• 3:49
  and a crashed test flight at the age of 47,
• 3:53
  pretty much effectively ending your test flight career
• 3:56
  instead of a series of circumstances that occurred over the next ten months
• 3:59
  to allow him to fly the final test flight and become the second private astronaut
• 4:03
  and fly the last flight of the program and sell it all to all the IP
• 4:07
  to Virgin Galactic.
• 4:09
  And he said, not only is there a story there, I've been writing a book about it
• 4:12
  for the last 17 years, and I said, can I read it?
• 4:16
  And it was a PDF at the time.
• 4:17
  It was called The Magic Menace of Spaceship One.
• 4:20
  But as a documentarian, it was a dream because it was a day by day account
• 4:25
  from somebody with advanced degrees that was program manager for Spaceship
• 4:29
  One inside this really amazing program
• 4:33
  that essentially sparked commercial spaceflight.
• 4:36
  And we moved forward shortly after that to produce a documentary.
• 4:41
  And I can certainly talk about the UAP part of it.
• 4:43
  We'll get there in a moment.
• 4:44
  Name of the documentary.
• 4:46
  It's called Beyond Blue Sky The Untold Story of the First Private Astronauts.
• 4:50
  Amazing. And when did it come out?
• 4:51
  Came up on May 5th in honor of Alan Shepard's
• 4:55
  Reaching Space, going past Carmen line.
• 4:57
  That was the anniversary of him doing so.
• 5:00
  It's on Apple TV and Prime Video. Awesome.
• 5:03
  Very good.
• 5:04
  All right, well, let's jump over now.
• 5:05
  Matt, thanks for joining us as well.
• 5:07
  Where do you fit into this picture?
• 5:09
  So my name is Matt Steinmetz.
• 5:11
  I'm an aerospace engineer.
• 5:12
  I left college in 1998
• 5:15
  and went to Mojave, California for my dream job at Scale Composites.
• 5:19
  I was a classic kid like yourself, I'm sure,
• 5:21
  sitting in a cardboard box with motorcycle helmet on, playing,
• 5:24
  playing, you know, Neil Armstrong and and Buzz Aldrin
• 5:27
  and Michael Collins, and kind of set the space thing behind me.
• 5:31
  And then just kind of
• 5:32
  I won't, you know, by chance I was in the right place, right time
• 5:35
  and scaled started working on the world's first commercial spaceship.
• 5:38
  That was successful spaceship one.
• 5:39
  I was the engineer that led that program, and I was also copilot or Gib
• 5:44
  back, Cedar Guy and back in the mothership for all the space flights.
• 5:49
  So I released all the guys on the space flights.
• 5:51
  Very cool. Yeah.
• 5:52
  And so there I was in the early 2000,
• 5:54
  in the middle of history being made with commercial space.
• 5:57
  So we had a small team,
• 5:59
  you know, building the world's first commercial space spaceship.
• 6:02
  You know, it was very Buck Rogers. Cool.
• 6:04
  Yeah.
• 6:04
  See the pants? Flight tests.
• 6:06
  Crazy flight test world. Yeah.
• 6:08
  And so I did that early 2000.
• 6:10
  We obviously made history and then did a bunch of stuff since then.
• 6:13
  So how did you get pulled into that specifically?
• 6:16
  I mean, I imagine, you know, it's such a small project.
• 6:19
  They have such big dreams. And it's not like it's 20, 26 year.
• 6:22
  Wait, what year was it again?
• 6:23
  2003 I started. Yeah, I mean, spaceship.
• 6:26
  I mean, commercial space was just a vision at that point.
• 6:29
  Yeah.
• 6:29
  I mean, it was a huge, huge, huge gamble.
• 6:32
  And I think everyone probably knew that the first iteration wasn't
• 6:35
  necessarily going to be an economically viable system. Right?
• 6:37
  It was probably going to be a proof of concept to build off of it.
• 6:41
  So yeah, I mean, I imagine they were looking for incredible engineers.
• 6:44
  Yeah.
• 6:45
  I mean, we could go a long ways into the history of scale.
• 6:48
  But, you know, bird
• 6:49
  originally started routine aircraft factory building plans build airplanes.
• 6:53
  He they build and him and his brother and Mike Melville and Sally Melville
• 6:57
  would make these plans for crazy airplanes you could build in your garage with,
• 7:00
  you know, beer cooler, foam and epoxy. Beers cooler.
• 7:02
  Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 7:04
  So beer cooler and, you know, hot wire.
• 7:06
  And next thing you know, you've got a long, easy or whatever cool homebuilt.
• 7:09
  But he started doing that at some point.
• 7:12
  You know, the, the big guy started paying attention
• 7:14
  and started having Bert designed bigger and bigger prototypes.
• 7:17
  So it went from plans build in your garage stuff that Burt was coming up with
• 7:21
  to more serious, bigger prototype airplanes
• 7:24
  like the early Beach Starship was an 80% prototype they built.
• 7:28
  There were things for Republic and all the.
• 7:29
  So they started this spinoff company called Scale Composites
• 7:33
  to do bigger, more official whatever you want to call it airplanes.
• 7:37
  Burt always had this passion for space.
• 7:39
  And so at some point
• 7:39
  he kind of had solved that problem, and he went to Paul Allen and said, hey,
• 7:44
  we can do this space thing, and I need an investor.
• 7:46
  And so it kind of launched.
• 7:48
  But, you know, just all the crazy stuff they did attracted guys like me
• 7:52
  and all the very talented people that were there
• 7:54
  that were part of spaceship and others, just because they were doing cool stuff.
• 7:57
  It wasn't just a, you know, sign on the dotted line, start your job,
• 8:01
  work on a bracket for an alternator for your entire career.
• 8:04
  Right?
• 8:05
  It was, which is kind of the aerospace standard.
• 8:08
  It was. We're going to his left for a while.
• 8:10
  All that was left and so scalable was very much like the show up.
• 8:14
  If you're talented, show up. We're going to give you way more than you can handle.
• 8:16
  Throw you in deep, deep, deep fire hose.
• 8:19
  You know, just,
• 8:21
  you know, crazy world where you would build an airplane in a year.
• 8:23
  And so it was very appealing to guys like me coming out of college.
• 8:27
  Do you know enough about space to compare those two cultures.
• 8:30
  A little bit?
• 8:31
  And I've got friends there and have had friends over the years
• 8:34
  there and have met Gwen and Elon and stuff.
• 8:36
  It's I think it's very similar in a lot of ways
• 8:39
  because we were a prototype world, largely building
• 8:42
  small airplanes over a year or year or two.
• 8:45
  Everything was that we could was owned in house.
• 8:48
  We didn't like sub out.
• 8:49
  Hey, you big company and build a wing and we'll build this other part.
• 8:53
  We did everything.
• 8:54
  And because of that, because we were building prototypes,
• 8:56
  we did a lot of times with like find
• 8:58
  the T-38 or a wrecked airplane or junkyard parts and we would steal
• 9:02
  what we couldn't come up with quickly and cobble it into a new, a new.,
• 9:06
  Not too different than what the Navy does.
• 9:08
  And so.
• 9:08
  So for different reasons, space was very similar.
• 9:11
  They didn't get used airplanes or whatever, but they very much
• 9:15
  or vertically integrated building a lot of the stuff in house.
• 9:18
  And so I think what this is my opinion, but what they would find over time is
• 9:23
  they'd go to a vendor to try to get x,
• 9:24
  y, z part and discover in space, especially aerospace.
• 9:28
  But for sure in space it was extremely expensive.
• 9:32
  The cost of entry just on any component was infinite.
• 9:35
  Yeah.
• 9:36
  Because, you know, it's stuff for space that largely had been built over
• 9:40
  the industry had been built over decades.
• 9:41
  So they would bring it inside because they had to,
• 9:44
  for cost reasons or schedule reasons,
• 9:46
  because they were on a way different timeline than NASA or whoever else.
• 9:49
  And so they would do it all in, in house and come up with a really.
• 9:52
  Cool stuff similar to what Elon does now. Honestly.
• 9:54
  Yeah for sure. Exact same model.
• 9:56
  And I don't know Blue Origin as well, but I know I suspect they're very similar
• 10:00
  were they bring it all in house and have control over it, and they kind of
• 10:04
  reset the bar on cost and schedule for, for, you know, new equipment.
• 10:08
  Vertical integration, leading the way for.
• 10:10
  Yeah for sure.
• 10:10
  Commercial aerospace. Very cool.
• 10:12
  And so how did you guys come together.
• 10:14
  Well so I met Brian and then asked him who could help tell this story.
• 10:20
  That was in his book.
• 10:21
  And that's how I was introduced to Matt.
• 10:23
  And that's one of those people that was just I mean, you can see him right here.
• 10:26
  He's, you know, jumps off the screen
• 10:28
  and he's fun and we're around the same age and just became friends through it.
• 10:32
  Nice.
• 10:33
  And who did you have to get permission to be able
• 10:35
  to create the video that you did?
• 10:37
  Because he had a lot of access and whatnot?
• 10:39
  I mean, I assume it was signed off on the top.
• 10:42
  Yeah, basically, I had to work with attorneys
• 10:45
  pretty much every step of the way, and it was a wake up call for me.
• 10:48
  And it was one of the things as a creative that I'm sure within aerospace
• 10:52
  is the same thing.
• 10:53
  We all get into our individual industries because of creative and the will
• 10:56
  to build something.
• 10:58
  They just hit. The wall and then the attorneys get involved.
• 11:00
  So there was attorneys throughout clearing every single second, every single frame.
• 11:05
  You have to do something
• 11:06
  called a stock log and sign off on every single little thing.
• 11:10
  So that was the thing.
• 11:11
  Occasionally that would just take the wind right out of your sales as a creative.
• 11:15
  Yeah, because sometimes you just have to wait on legal. Awesome.
• 11:17
  Well, okay, so you know, we're here today because I mean,
• 11:21
  frankly, it's a pretty remarkable story here.
• 11:24
  What, Brian, I mean, one, he seems like an incredible human being, an American.
• 11:29
  And I want to get into his background a bit more because I think
• 11:31
  you guys could probably expand on, you know, some of his earlier
• 11:34
  accomplishments as well.
• 11:36
  But, you know, as the second commercial astronaut in space,
• 11:39
  you shared in your documentary that he had a UAP encounter during his flight.
• 11:44
  Is that is that accurate?
• 11:45
  It wasn't actually during his flight.
• 11:47
  Oh, it wasn't during it. No one was it?
• 11:50
  Do you want me to get in?
• 11:51
  Well, let's not get into it now. Okay?
• 11:52
  I'll stand corrected, but we'll get into the details in a moment.
• 11:55
  But first, he created this this book, right?
• 11:58
  That detailed his experiences.
• 12:00
  Was this encounter in that book?
• 12:02
  Did he include it in that first draft?
• 12:04
  And is that kind of
• 12:05
  how did he I'd say we we we talked about his coming out on this.
• 12:09
  Let's just talk about the man first,
• 12:10
  who would be best to kind of give us a little rundown on who.
• 12:14
  Both give a snippet.
• 12:15
  Yeah, you go for it.
• 12:16
  I can tell you a little little bits and pieces, but so on spaceship two,
• 12:20
  actually.
• 12:21
  So I was the program manager on spaceship two,
• 12:23
  and Brian was kind of my cohort in crime, so to speak.
• 12:26
  And so he was a business guy.
• 12:28
  I was an engineer, and we shared an office.
• 12:30
  And so Brian was a gentleman,
• 12:33
  a professional, like, you know, a cool test pilot.
• 12:36
  Just a cool dude.
• 12:37
  Like a story I like to tell about Brian is that we'd have these trying, crazy
• 12:41
  high stress times.
• 12:42
  And so I'd kind of sit back and I go, Brian, tell me there I was.
• 12:45
  Story.
• 12:46
  Now, you being a fighter pilot, you know, there I was and whatever.
• 12:49
  But Brian would tell me these stories.
• 12:51
  Anything from, you know, from UAP stuff to there
• 12:55
  I was over the Gulf, you know, first night to go for and all this stuff.
• 12:58
  And so we kind of had that relationship, you know, we just we're both friends.
• 13:02
  We're both pilots. We both liked this aerospace stuff.
• 13:04
  And he was also an engineer.
• 13:06
  And so we could talk on all these different levels.
• 13:08
  And so yeah, we're pretty close spend a lot of time together.
• 13:12
  And he's just a cool dude.
• 13:13
  I mean.
• 13:13
  Well, can you share about his his Navy background? Yeah.
• 13:16
  I mean, I don't know all the details, but for me, as an airplane lover,
• 13:19
  I, you know, I like to hear all the stories.
• 13:22
  I mean, he went back was, you know, training the Tweety birds, the old.
• 13:25
  I don't know what that is T2 or something. I don't.
• 13:27
  I'm not even sure. Yeah.
• 13:28
  This whole way before my time he flew.
• 13:30
  You know, he was flying a Corsair TOS before Gulf War.
• 13:33
  You know, old engine technology.
• 13:35
  He had great stories about, you know, there
• 13:37
  I was lined up pitching deck and the spool time on an engine back in those days.
• 13:41
  What, like 10s or something. And so you'd get low.
• 13:44
  They'd say power, power, power.
• 13:45
  And you'd throttle up and it just.
• 13:47
  Wait to happen. So he had all kinds of there.
• 13:49
  I was, you know, sure, I was dead stories.
• 13:51
  And then he transitioned to the early model F-18, F-18, c probably.
• 13:56
  Yeah. And flew those in Gulf War.
• 13:58
  So he had tons of go for original Gulf War stories.
• 14:01
  Some of them are in the books, some of them are not. But love golf.
• 14:04
  Just another F-18
• 14:06
  got out there.
• 14:07
  40 missions, bunch of boat landings, 33 combat missions.
• 14:11
  That's incredible.
• 14:12
  Especially during the Gulf War as well.
• 14:14
  And probably, like a lot of us, once he finished his combat tour,
• 14:18
  he probably applied to test pilot school and was accepted there through the Navy.
• 14:22
  Is that correct?
• 14:22
  Went through the Naval Test Pilot School, if you're aware.
• 14:25
  Yeah, yeah.
• 14:27
  Pax River. Yeah. Tax river.
• 14:28
  Very good.
• 14:29
  Then landed in China Lake and I think that was pretty much the course of it.
• 14:34
  I think it's important to start with,
• 14:35
  can I address Brian's background a little bit, please?
• 14:38
  So basically, Brian grew up between Indiana and Scotland.
• 14:42
  So that's where he was raised.
• 14:44
  And his father was a professor in physics.
• 14:46
  And so Brian's early childhood was kind of marked by his father
• 14:50
  knowing the power of like, experiential learning.
• 14:53
  And so he used to take those plain Jane like wooden model
• 14:56
  airplanes and just shoot them up anytime he had free time.
• 14:59
  And it just goes up like a rocket.
• 15:01
  And then wings pop out and it comes back down.
• 15:04
  And Brian said from the time
• 15:05
  he was like 3 or 4 years old, he just became obsessed with flight.
• 15:08
  At that point, anything that could go up there.
• 15:11
  And then his mom kind of, inspired him to get interested in things even beyond,
• 15:17
  he calls it
• 15:17
  that dimension where planes could fly and birds could fly, which was space.
• 15:21
  So his mom would sit there and talk to him about the planets and the stars
• 15:25
  and the galaxy, what he could see visually, and just got inspired
• 15:29
  to think of Earth in its place within this big, vast universe.
• 15:34
  And that's really what sparked Brian, his parents, to get interested in that.
• 15:38
  So he knew high school wasn't the place where he could pursue those dreams.
• 15:42
  But once he got to college, he just it was on.
• 15:45
  So he went to Brown and Princeton, got advanced degrees and aeronautical
• 15:49
  engineering, fluid and thermal dynamics, and then flew, you know,
• 15:54
  at Princeton and a sail club quite a bit, and then try to join the Air Force.
• 15:58
  That didn't work out.
• 15:59
  And I think it was a friend that told him about the Navy.
• 16:02
  And then he joined the Navy, and he just didn't really think about it like that.
• 16:07
  It could be a possibility of allowing him to continue to fly.
• 16:10
  But while he was at Princeton, a naval trainer came out, I think, in
• 16:14
  like a T 34 and allowed him to loose and rolls
• 16:18
  and all kinds of stuff and experience that third dimension freedom.
• 16:22
  And he said from that point, he was hooked.
• 16:24
  By the time he stepped off that plane, he signed up for the Navy.
• 16:27
  Very cool.
• 16:28
  20 years.
• 16:29
  In the 234.
• 16:30
  Yeah. Corpus Christi, Texas.
• 16:32
  Follow a plane.
• 16:33
  Certainly not a jet, man.
• 16:34
  That's a very cool story.
• 16:36
  And, you know, you often hear people getting the bug like that.
• 16:38
  I was a late bloomer.
• 16:39
  I didn't really get the bug until I was almost on college.
• 16:42
  Please continue.
• 16:43
  Yeah.
• 16:43
  So I mean, basically he flew that 20 years.
• 16:46
  He realized he had a shelf life in the Navy, much I'm sure everybody knows it.
• 16:51
  But then he just wanted to continue flying.
• 16:53
  So he, the Navy wanted to push him kind of into dust jobs
• 16:56
  mostly like getting, you know, funds from the Pentagon.
• 17:00
  He wasn't interested in that. He just wanted to continue test flying.
• 17:02
  So he kept hearing Mojave all over the place.
• 17:05
  He knew he had to go to the commercial side
• 17:07
  and ended up in Mojave, worked for a company called Rotary Rockets,
• 17:11
  which was a single stage rocket designed to go to space.
• 17:15
  I think they flew for test flights, but the idea was single stage rocket
• 17:19
  display space and then Chinook helicopter blades that would come out and
• 17:23
  like allow it to, to land.
• 17:26
  I think they did.
• 17:27
  In itself.
• 17:28
  Flights of it.
• 17:29
  Brian was one of the test pilots.
• 17:31
  And he said that that essentially allowed him to land in Mojave
• 17:35
  and kind of get his bearings.
• 17:36
  And during the course of that, he ran into Burt Rutan.
• 17:39
  Yeah.
• 17:39
  We had this crazy rocket with helicopter blades.
• 17:42
  We survived that. Right?
• 17:44
  Yeah, exactly.
• 17:45
  And so, he was in that environment.
• 17:48
  It's pretty small out there. The community is small.
• 17:50
  And Brian said he had put out like fliers.
• 17:53
  He was an avid golfer to see who wanted to go golfing.
• 17:56
  And one of the people that answered was the infamous Burt Rutan.
• 18:00
  And so him and became golfing buddies.
• 18:03
  And when Rotary Rocket essentially couldn't get more financing to
• 18:07
  for their next test flights,
• 18:08
  Burt said, why don't you come to us and we'll figure out a position for you?
• 18:11
  Sounds like Brian had fate intercede a few times in his his life there,
• 18:15
  he says. Far? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
• 18:19
  So then he worked at scale, and he worked on a few project
• 18:21
  before coming to spaceship one
• 18:23
  and becoming the the program manager essentially for a spaceship one.
• 18:27
  How risky is it?
• 18:29
  I have some sense and it's ill informed, but maybe the general public doesn't.
• 18:34
  How risky is it to be a test pilot in a in a program like that?
• 18:38
  Well.
• 18:40
  You know, he's been up and he's he's the one.
• 18:43
  Well, so I'll give you my perspective.
• 18:46
  Right. So we use rotary rock as a jump off point.
• 18:49
  So I was an engineer
• 18:51
  young engineer at that time when Rotary Rocket was being put together.
• 18:53
  And I think I watched it physically fail with my own eyes
• 18:58
  on the ground during testing 3 or 4 times, like for example.
• 19:01
  So it had a rotor blade like a helicopter, but it had peroxide rockets
• 19:05
  on the tip to oh,
• 19:07
  so if if it was a rocket, it'd be in space, it'd be falling,
• 19:10
  the rotor blades would come out and the,
• 19:12
  you know, the wind moving past it, spin them.
• 19:14
  So for the test vehicle, they had to spin up the rotor with power.
• 19:17
  And so the way they did that was the tip rockets.
• 19:20
  So one day one of the rockets shot off and took, you know, 50ft of hose with it.
• 19:23
  And it was streaming purple peroxide, toxic peroxide.
• 19:26
  And and that's a ground test that was a tethered down ground test
• 19:30
  and stuff like that would happen all the time.
• 19:32
  I mean, in test flying, right?
• 19:35
  Your job is to go suss out all the crazy things that are
• 19:39
  potentially looming behind the curtains of this machine.
• 19:43
  That's very complex machine.
• 19:44
  And obviously, the bigger the more complex machine, the more dangerous it is.
• 19:48
  Is that.
• 19:49
  Ultimately like a simulation problem?
• 19:51
  I would say no, because like that example I just gave was it's so many times it's
• 19:56
  the we used to have a saying, it's never the things that you think of that
• 20:00
  you simulate the bite you.
• 20:02
  It's the thousand things
• 20:03
  you don't know how to simulate or are too dynamic to actually simulate.
• 20:07
  So could I simulate everything on a vehicle?
• 20:10
  Sure.
• 20:11
  How many infinite dollars and infinite time do you want to spend?
• 20:14
  The reality is, at some point,
• 20:16
  every customer has to draw a line and say, we've done the best we can,
• 20:20
  but we just can't fiscally or timewise keep doing this simulation.
• 20:26
  We have to go test it.
• 20:27
  And so obviously the bigger governments can do much
• 20:30
  more simulation than private industry, just because there's more money and more,
• 20:34
  more time there.
• 20:35
  So the concept of a digital twin is a, you know, a hot topic.
• 20:38
  Yeah. You know, engineering.
• 20:40
  So I didn't know if if that was maybe a pathway to something.
• 20:43
  But, you know, I think to your point is just they're just too complex machines
• 20:47
  for us to fully simulate in a way that, you know, reaches any level of certainty.
• 20:51
  Well, my boss used to have a great analogy.
• 20:53
  So he would always say that the the simulation expert,
• 20:57
  whether that was a structural analyst or a CFD, you know, an aerodynamic,
• 21:01
  would always come to them with an answer after it failed.
• 21:04
  So something would fail, and then they would run
• 21:06
  a bunch of simulations and go, oh, there it is. Yeah.
• 21:09
  So the reality is you can you can spend a lot of time and money simulating stuff.
• 21:13
  And if you don't know what questions to ask,
• 21:15
  you're going to answer questions that maybe don't really address issues.
• 21:19
  You will always have risk and things that are not understood.
• 21:23
  And so that ultimately becomes the job of the test pilot.
• 21:26
  You are the guy that has to go put it in the real dynamic environment and see,
• 21:30
  see what things work and what things don't.
• 21:32
  It's just the way it is. Very cool.
• 21:34
  And that was really the Spaceship One program.
• 21:36
  I mean, there was just I mean, there were 17 test flights.
• 21:39
  They started with glide test flights first and then the power test flights,
• 21:42
  pretty much.
• 21:42
  I mean, every single one of the powered test flights had anomalies, except
• 21:46
  for the last one, which was kind of a quote unquote perfect flight.
• 21:49
  But it's all just I mean, all the footage that I would see, all these sync cameras,
• 21:53
  them just figuring out stuff in real time, how to bring people
• 21:57
  back down to the ground safely.
• 21:58
  One is a great example simulation.
• 22:00
  We did know wind tunnels.
• 22:02
  You know, wind tunnel is not a computer
• 22:03
  simulation, but it's a simulation in a in a tube with air flowing past.
• 22:09
  Of what the air physical simulation.
• 22:11
  We didn't do any of that. So one of the failures we.
• 22:14
  Had didn't do any. Of that. We did not do any of that.
• 22:17
  And that was a financial thing a financial. Yeah.
• 22:19
  Because, because again
• 22:20
  you can spend infinite time and money and doing whatever you want.
• 22:23
  Wind tunnels, one of those things
• 22:24
  we believe we had a big enough grasp on it with some light level CFD.
• 22:28
  So computer based fluid dynamics as opposed to a wind tunnel.
• 22:32
  But on flight seven you probably remember the numbers are,
• 22:35
  you know, 20 some years ago, the numbers are getting lost on me.
• 22:37
  But and it's shown in the documentary, we had a tail stall.
• 22:41
  So the tail keeps a thing in trim, and if the tail goes away,
• 22:45
  the thing will end over end.
• 22:47
  So tail stalled, entered a spin, and basically the pilot
• 22:51
  had to figure out what was going on and kind of recover.
• 22:53
  One of the things that we did after that flight is we made a full scale mockup
• 22:57
  that we stuck on the front of a truck, and we drove up and down the runway.
• 23:00
  And so we still didn't do a wind tunnel, but we did a, you know,
• 23:04
  the next best thing, which was sort of a wind tunnel constraint.
• 23:08
  So yeah. Well, that's very cool.
• 23:10
  All right. Well, so Brian.
• 23:12
  Brian comes on to the scene.
• 23:14
  He is the active test pilot now for spaceship one, right.
• 23:19
  What year is this?
• 23:20
  I mean, it started in 2000.
• 23:24
  One one.
• 23:25
  They rolled it out and then they started test flight in 2003.
• 23:28
  Well, take me through,
• 23:31
  you know, kind of a little bit of his arc there, you know,
• 23:33
  because we talked about the crash and whatnot.
• 23:35
  And I don't think everyone knows too much about that.
• 23:37
  So yeah, let's explore that a little bit.
• 23:39
  And then that will, I think, lead us into, you know, his UAP experience, which
• 23:43
  I think came relatively, you know, well after, you know, later in his career.
• 23:47
  One thing I was going to make clear was there
• 23:48
  were we initially started with four test pilots.
• 23:51
  So Doug Shane, who was called VP of the company,
• 23:55
  number two at the company, Pete Siebold, we can get into details if you care.
• 23:59
  Mike Melvill and then Brian, Doug did the first flight on the mothership.
• 24:02
  I think that's shown in the movie.
• 24:04
  And then pretty quickly decided, I'm going to run the test program.
• 24:07
  I don't want to be in the seat for these programs.
• 24:10
  So he was the mission control guy you hear on the comms.
• 24:13
  And then Pete, Brian and Mike were the test pilots.
• 24:16
  Okay. Got it.
• 24:17
  I mean.
• 24:18
  All of them are amazing individuals, but Mike Melvill was the first employee
• 24:22
  of Aircraft Factory
• 24:23
  and then became the first employee by default of skilled composites.
• 24:27
  And he's fascinating.
• 24:29
  So basically, the way him and Burt had met was Mike
• 24:33
  built one of the home builds, a very Viggen like in his garage in Indiana.
• 24:36
  Nobody would certify it.
• 24:37
  So I'm like, flew out to Mojave.
• 24:39
  And Burt Rutan said, who is this guy?
• 24:42
  And hired him pretty much on the spot.
• 24:44
  But he had never graduated high school.
• 24:46
  Incredibly gregarious, amazing human being.
• 24:49
  He became the go to test pilot.
• 24:51
  He was just such an intuitive flier.
• 24:53
  So for all these test flights, all these research aircraft, Mike
• 24:57
  was kind of the go to guy.
• 24:58
  So going into spaceship one, he was still the go to guy.
• 25:02
  So he appeared most of the load, even though it was three
• 25:07
  centrally functional test pilots for the spaceship one program,
• 25:10
  he flew the first five glide flights, I believe.
• 25:14
  Yeah.
• 25:15
  And that continued kind of through the program.
• 25:18
  So he flew like 60% of the test flights.
• 25:21
  Pete flew maybe three of them.
• 25:24
  And then Brian flew, I think three of them as well.
• 25:28
  Okay.
• 25:28
  Before it's.
• 25:29
  Weird contrast.
• 25:30
  You had hero fighter pilot, right?
• 25:32
  Brian out of the Navy used to crash in airplanes into decks.
• 25:36
  Right.
• 25:37
  Advanced degrees, Vance degrees. And everything.
• 25:40
  Pete Siebel was kind of the engineering test pilot.
• 25:42
  Tons of commercial aerospace, time test pilot, scaled flying, weird airplanes.
• 25:46
  Not military.
• 25:47
  Not military.
• 25:48
  Very much a real smart engineer.
• 25:51
  Built a simulator. Sculpted poly,
• 25:55
  Cal poly.
• 25:56
  Another story.
• 25:57
  But yeah, this engineer with test pilot background.
• 26:00
  And then you had Mike who was a self not self-taught but,
• 26:03
  you know, all commercial aerospace but tons of history with Burton
• 26:06
  scaled and RAF flying, every weird thing that Burt dreamed up.
• 26:10
  So you kind of had three very different personalities, very different skill
• 26:14
  sets that you could pick and choose who didn't into what flight.
• 26:18
  And so imagine Brian being kind of late to the party.
• 26:21
  Yeah.
• 26:21
  You know, kind of military culture.
• 26:23
  Everybody else is civilian. Yeah.
• 26:25
  Kind of a weird fit.
• 26:26
  And so I can imagine him just looking at this going, wow, uphill battle.
• 26:30
  Right.
• 26:31
  Well, it was a small project
• 26:32
  and you guys were kicking it off with who you could get.
• 26:34
  I mean, that makes it makes sense to me, I guess
• 26:36
  Brian's flights were probably later in the program.
• 26:38
  Then he flew.
• 26:40
  Yeah.
• 26:41
  So he was worried for the first several test flights that he he's like, where
• 26:45
  where am I as a test pilot in this program?
• 26:46
  Mike's flying flight after flight after flight.
• 26:49
  So, it was the later glide test flights that he got.
• 26:53
  He got the 10th flight was the one that he first got?
• 26:57
  Yeah. Oh, that was his first flight.
• 27:00
  Think so?
• 27:00
  I'm pretty sure I think that's right. Yeah.
• 27:03
  And then he got the first rocket powered flight.
• 27:04
  As someone who had flown supersonic, the only pilot had flown supersonic
• 27:09
  of the three test pilots.
• 27:10
  So they gave it to him,
• 27:11
  or he was the only one to step forward with an experimental plane
• 27:15
  and experimental rocket to essentially fly the first.
• 27:18
  Super.
• 27:19
  Flight and have the first private, because it was also
• 27:22
  the first private aircraft to ever go supersonic.
• 27:25
  Was it? Yeah. Private.
• 27:29
  Commercial.
• 27:30
  This was like, imagine this. Is like, yeah. Yeah.
• 27:32
  This is like a homebuilt airplane.
• 27:34
  Yeah. With a rocket engine for all.
• 27:37
  That's a big deal.
• 27:38
  Yeah, that would be a scary thing to volunteer for. So.
• 27:40
  And why Brian, you can respect this as a pilot.
• 27:43
  That was a hand flown.
• 27:44
  No sass. There's no computers. There's.
• 27:47
  You are connected from the stick to the tail surfaces with cables.
• 27:51
  Yeah. Right.
• 27:52
  So you are flying the thing supersonic.
• 27:55
  So if there's transient supersonic you're going to feel them.
• 27:58
  Yeah. And you got to be.
• 27:59
  Yeah.
• 27:59
  You got to be careful if aircraft is not designed correctly.
• 28:03
  And that when it gets into the transonic transonic regime
• 28:07
  between about 0.95 to 0.11 .05 or so, I think those are the right boundaries.
• 28:12
  And then, of course, supersonic aircraft can do some very weird things.
• 28:15
  Like you try to pitch forward
• 28:17
  and you actually pitch back and all sorts of crazy stuff.
• 28:20
  So we had. All of that.
• 28:21
  And you know, the modern fighter
• 28:23
  can do that with like these incredible digital systems that like react in real
• 28:27
  time to these changes, but to like manually fly.
• 28:29
  Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Yeah.
• 28:31
  And from an engineering standpoint, we kind of tend
• 28:34
  to think I can predict things.
• 28:35
  I can simulate things up to transonic, and then I can predict things after it.
• 28:39
  Supersonic.
• 28:40
  But that dead band in the middle,
• 28:41
  there's a lot of different disciplines that just kind of go off the map.
• 28:44
  Yeah.
• 28:45
  So how it's really going to behave there, you don't really know.
• 28:48
  Back to the why do you need a test pilot there?
• 28:50
  That transonic thing is a big deal.
• 28:52
  So the approach we took I think number one
• 28:55
  was put a guy in there that at least has been supersonic and respect that.
• 28:59
  You know that regime that was Brian.
• 29:01
  And then number two is we're going to light the rocket motor and go
• 29:04
  blasting through it, not hang out in transonic.
• 29:07
  So we're going to go past it through it.
• 29:09
  And then we'll come back through it.
• 29:10
  But not like dilly dally. Yeah.
• 29:12
  Yeah that makes sense.
• 29:13
  Was that the flight that he had his incident.
• 29:16
  Yeah. Yeah. So can you tell us talk us through that. Yeah.
• 29:18
  Do you mind if I go backwards a little bit
• 29:20
  and just write the fourth wall a little bit?
• 29:22
  I just feel like from the edits going on in my head, and
• 29:26
  I just want you to have a clean entrance to, like, the three pilots.
• 29:29
  Yeah. Okay.
• 29:30
  So there were three test pilots in the In the Spaceship one program.
• 29:34
  There were Pete Siebold, Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill.
• 29:37
  They couldn't have been more different.
• 29:38
  Pete Siebold was picked out of Cal Poly by Burt Rutan.
• 29:42
  He was just a whiz kid.
• 29:44
  He didn't graduate from there. Bert.
• 29:46
  That was his alma mater, so he just picked him out.
• 29:48
  So I think he was 30 at the time and he built a simulator from scratch.
• 29:52
  Had flown a biplane since he was a kid.
• 29:55
  Just incredibly intuitive.
• 29:56
  Brilliant engineer. Mike Melvill.
• 29:59
  He was from South Africa, never graduated high school.
• 30:02
  He was birds go to test pilot, and he was just an incredibly intuitive
• 30:06
  flier who had flown the vast majority of Burt Rutan research aircraft.
• 30:11
  Then he had Brian Binnie, who had advanced degrees from Brown
• 30:14
  and Princeton, had flown 20 years in the Navy.
• 30:17
  And he came to Scaled Composites, which was kind of completely outside
• 30:21
  of the commercial test flight world.
• 30:23
  And that was kind of a big bridge for him to overcome to, to be in that world.
• 30:29
  But incredibly intelligent.
• 30:30
  Had run programs, ran the spaceship one program, and their age differences
• 30:34
  couldn't have been more different.
• 30:35
  So Pete Siebold was like 30, Brian Binnie was 47
• 30:40
  and Mike Melvill was in his 60s.
• 30:43
  Full spread? Yeah. Full spread.
• 30:45
  So those were the three test pilots who were jockeying for position to get,
• 30:49
  you know, test flights and also to attempt to become the first private astronaut.
• 30:54
  Very cool.
• 30:54
  How did that get determined?
• 30:55
  Who was going to be the first?
• 30:57
  That's fascinating.
• 30:58
  So that was one of my big questions getting into the documentary.
• 31:02
  So theoretically, Doug Shane, who had flown the White Knight and ran
• 31:07
  Mission Control, who had also been an old timer with Burt
• 31:10
  but steeped aerospace engineer also from Kansas.
• 31:13
  He theoretically was the person that was choosing
• 31:17
  flight assignments behind the scenes.
• 31:19
  It was really Bert approving everything, and I had to get into that
• 31:22
  in the documentary to just figure out who's really making the calls here.
• 31:26
  But it was, at the end of the day, Burt written, and who can blame him?
• 31:30
  Because, I mean, it's his reputation at stake.
• 31:33
  Yeah.
• 31:34
  And his company and and and and yeah.
• 31:36
  Yeah. No that makes sense.
• 31:38
  And I would probably act the same way if I was putting that much investment in.
• 31:41
  Well very cool.
• 31:42
  It's, I mean it sounds like an amazing group of test pilots.
• 31:46
  And I imagine it must have been an interesting competitive environment
• 31:49
  to operate as someone that's operating, you know, similar environments
• 31:52
  for similar types of people.
• 31:54
  I can imagine it must have been
• 31:55
  a fun, fun group to hang out with, but also a challenge at times as well.
• 31:59
  Yeah. A roomful of.
• 32:01
  The dynamic really changed over time too, because,
• 32:04
  I mean, it was test flight program and it was dangerous.
• 32:08
  And Mike Melville
• 32:10
  got a lot of the assignments that were life threatening, you know?
• 32:14
  And so ultimately, he wanted to train Brian
• 32:18
  to essentially be able to get back into the cockpit.
• 32:21
  And that's really what allowed Brian to fly the final flight of spaceship one.
• 32:24
  Well, when you say get back in, you mean after his incident?
• 32:27
  Yeah.
• 32:28
  So you can you describe can you describe that incident for us?
• 32:31
  Yeah.
• 32:31
  So what happened was it was the first rocket powered test flight.
• 32:34
  Brian was the only one that had flown supersonic
• 32:36
  so that you signed it to him, or he was the only one left stepping forward.
• 32:40
  It was a test flight to 67,000ft to test the feather as well,
• 32:45
  which was this novel thing we can get into later.
• 32:48
  But Brian basically flew it.
• 32:49
  It was a 15 second rocket burn.
• 32:51
  It was pretty much a flawless flight until he came back down to land.
• 32:56
  And spaceship one
• 32:57
  looks like a wiffle ball from the inside, so it's difficult to land.
• 33:00
  You have chase planes calling out wheel heights.
• 33:04
  Yeah.
• 33:05
  And you need them and. You got a flare.
• 33:07
  And for simplicity's sake, Brian came down
• 33:11
  pretty hard and crunched the right wheel, and then it slid off into the desert.
• 33:15
  There was an engineering analysis done after that
• 33:18
  because a lot of people looked at it initially, like Navy guy
• 33:21
  landing on a carrier just came in too hard and crunched this experimental,
• 33:25
  fragile plane of flare and just off.
• 33:28
  But there was some engineering analysis done after that, and they realized
• 33:33
  that something else had caused it, which can certainly get into.
• 33:37
  The thing with flight Test.
• 33:38
  Right, is there's never one thing
• 33:40
  you probably experienced this in a fighter community.
• 33:42
  So there's always multiple factors.
• 33:45
  And so whether it's, you know, defaulting to your DNA
• 33:48
  and just landing like an F-18 and not flaring or so we had some issues.
• 33:52
  We actually had dampers, like, imagine your shocks in your car
• 33:57
  that we had added to the rudders, those dampers, any fluid in that damper
• 34:00
  or on the damper would actually freeze.
• 34:02
  And so you'd have a breakout for.
• 34:03
  So again I'm connected to the surfaces on the back.
• 34:07
  There's no computers, no mechanical systems.
• 34:10
  It's just me cable tail surface.
• 34:13
  And so the rudders on that vehicle when you
• 34:15
  when you stepped on them had a big breakout for us on that flight.
• 34:18
  And so he had gotten into some Pio stuff early and that kind of freaked him out.
• 34:22
  And I think
• 34:22
  probably there's a little bit of truth to all the bits and pieces,
• 34:25
  but there's that and there's the fact that he just went supersonic.
• 34:28
  So the gains are high and his stress was up and everything else
• 34:32
  and by the way, are in a wiffle ball and it's hard to see.
• 34:34
  So just.
• 34:35
  One thing.
• 34:36
  Yeah. Yeah. Super super tough environment.
• 34:38
  And yeah, he just kind of landed hard, broke a gear and skate off the runway.
• 34:42
  How long that slow things down?
• 34:44
  Three months.
• 34:44
  Three months, which let's just stop there.
• 34:48
  We crashed an airplane.
• 34:50
  Three months later we flew it again.
• 34:51
  Yeah, that is unheard of.
• 34:53
  I mean, that kind of just
• 34:55
  that tells you in one little example, the pace of that program.
• 34:58
  It was just crazy. That's amazing.
• 34:59
  I mean, we broke a skid,
• 35:02
  barely on the ground, skidded off the runway, dirt everywhere.
• 35:05
  You know, a lot of programs.
• 35:07
  They would have said to risky to ever fly again.
• 35:09
  Let's just park that one and build another one.
• 35:10
  And we we went and flew again three months later.
• 35:12
  So very cool. Pretty nuts. Amazing.
• 35:15
  And what year was that?
• 35:17
  2000, 2003 December 17th, 2003.
• 35:20
  Yeah. So it was the 100th anniversary of others.
• 35:23
  Yeah, yeah.
• 35:24
  So that.
• 35:24
  Same day, some astronaut actually they didn't ball up the right flier replica,
• 35:29
  but they landed in mud, I think on national TV.
• 35:31
  Something. Like that.
• 35:32
  So historic day for multiple reasons.
• 35:35
  All right.
• 35:36
  Well, it must have been I mean, you know, as a pilot, I've never,
• 35:39
  you know, I've had some very minor issues and never crashed.
• 35:41
  Yet I certainly know folks that have none of which was their fault,
• 35:45
  but it can be jolting across that threshold in your career, right?
• 35:49
  Go from invincible to very vulnerable pretty quickly.
• 35:53
  Right? But yeah.
• 35:55
  Yeah. Thankfully, we have ejection seats.
• 35:56
  They have ejection seats.
• 35:57
  No, no. Yeah. So that's I mean, that's a tough spot. Be it. Yeah.
• 36:01
  It's nice having an escape latch as much as it will hurt.
• 36:04
  But he recovered.
• 36:05
  He was fine physically. He was fine physically.
• 36:08
  All right.
• 36:08
  And then so what was what was his kind of road there?
• 36:10
  And was his next flight the big flight. Wow.
• 36:15
  So how'd that all transcribe.
• 36:16
  It gets you know, cleared I guess for flight.
• 36:18
  And then how far in the future is that, that final flight.
• 36:22
  Ten months away. Ten months.
• 36:24
  The UAP story occurred right after that.
• 36:26
  First that crash.
• 36:27
  All right. Well, then perhaps it's time.
• 36:29
  I think it. Might be. All right, let's. Do it.
• 36:31
  So Brian has just crashed.
• 36:33
  He's watching his childhood dream disappear.
• 36:35
  He's 47 years old.
• 36:37
  He's thinking my test flight career is over.
• 36:40
  Nobody's going to ever give me a chance to fly,
• 36:42
  let alone get a chance to fly another flight, a spaceship, one.
• 36:46
  His dream of becoming an astronaut is disappearing.
• 36:49
  Brian is an incredibly intelligent, very thoughtful person, and he's processing.
• 36:55
  How can I possibly get back into the cockpit of spaceship one?
• 36:59
  He's losing some sleep.
• 37:00
  It's six days after the flight, so December 23rd, 2003.
• 37:05
  He lived in Rosemont,
• 37:07
  which is about ten minutes south of Mojave, in a two story house.
• 37:11
  4:00 in the morning, he's got his eyes closed,
• 37:14
  and he said it looked like somebody had turned the television on.
• 37:18
  And there's flickering lights and he opens up his eyes.
• 37:22
  Television is not on.
• 37:23
  His wife still asleep next to him.
• 37:25
  The flickering is coming from his bedroom window.
• 37:27
  Goes to the bedroom window, opens up the window blinds,
• 37:31
  and he said it looked like daylight had manifested itself
• 37:34
  in his backyard and it was dark everywhere else.
• 37:38
  He could see in the daylight were these translucent spheres, he said.
• 37:42
  There were a dozen of them.
• 37:44
  Six of them were beach ball sized,
• 37:47
  bounding around the perimeter of his backyard.
• 37:49
  He had a six foot like retaining wall, and he said they were emitting light,
• 37:53
  but they couldn't possibly be the source of the daylight.
• 37:56
  That was just kind of this.
• 37:58
  Door catching shadows or.
• 38:01
  Yeah.
• 38:02
  But it was a light.
• 38:03
  It was a fixed shape, translucent.
• 38:06
  He described it like a soap bubble that kids will blow like a giant soap
• 38:09
  bubble, but fixed shape emitting light from the center.
• 38:13
  He said there were six of them, again, beach ball size,
• 38:16
  and there were six volleyball sized ones 20 to 30ft off the ground.
• 38:21
  There were more free floating and moving around
• 38:25
  and he watched it for over a minute.
• 38:29
  He said.
• 38:29
  Within the course of that, from 40 to 50ft away, two of the volleyball
• 38:33
  sized ones came to the window, passed through the window into him.
• 38:39
  He turned around, thinking they were going to be in the room
• 38:42
  and they weren't there.
• 38:43
  And he said he joked in the documentary, whatever they were,
• 38:47
  maybe they were probing me and checking me out and finding nothing of interest.
• 38:50
  But I turned my attention back to the yard
• 38:52
  and the whole thing gradually dissolved away.
• 38:54
  Back in the darkness and Brian again advanced degrees.
• 38:58
  Princeton and Brown looked into every prosaic explanation
• 39:02
  he possibly could, and ultimately determined that
• 39:05
  whatever it was, was something that was potentially watching him.
• 39:09
  This is long before any of the House oversight committees
• 39:13
  and yourself showed the courage to come forward and testify.
• 39:17
  So it was. Brian wrote the book.
• 39:19
  It was like 2020 when I saw it, and I remember him
• 39:23
  describing it and telling it to me, and I didn't know what to do with it
• 39:26
  at the time, because I just wanted to do a simple redemption story on aerospace.
• 39:30
  But I.
• 39:30
  Was your first kind of introduction, perhaps, to this topic? Yes.
• 39:35
  And so I remember driving home after Brian
• 39:39
  really told me
• 39:40
  all the details of that story, because we had dinner and talked about it,
• 39:43
  and I didn't know what I was going to do with it.
• 39:45
  But we recorded on camera shortly thereafter, and I was glad
• 39:48
  I did because it was really important to his experience.
• 39:51
  But ultimately he thought that it was something that allowed him to perceive it,
• 39:58
  however briefly, and that it gave him hope that there was something
• 40:01
  much bigger than him.
• 40:03
  And it got him out of that funk of like, okay, I'm going to trust the universe
• 40:08
  instead of cycling and wondering how I'm going to get back into the cockpit.
• 40:11
  I'm just going to continue running this program and trust
• 40:16
  whatever's going to happen is going to happen. Trust that is. The right.
• 40:18
  But I gave him hope, and that's how he looked at it.
• 40:20
  He looked at it as a beneficial or a hopeful experience.
• 40:24
  That's incredible.
• 40:25
  So we're talking 12 orbs
• 40:28
  of two different sizes, ten, 20, 25ft.
• 40:31
  Did he say how long the event lasted?
• 40:34
  Over a minute.
• 40:35
  And so it was volleyball size once and then beach ball sized one.
• 40:38
  So the beach ball sized ones were kind of patrolling the perimeter
• 40:41
  almost like sentries, he said.
• 40:43
  Just kind of bouncing back and forth until they ran into each other
• 40:46
  and then separating.
• 40:47
  And the volleyball sized ones were free floating above.
• 40:50
  And those were the two.
• 40:50
  That and everything was illuminated in his backyard outside.
• 40:55
  Of daylight.
• 40:56
  Yeah, it just in his backyard.
• 40:58
  Did he look up?
• 40:59
  He said, I don't know if he looked up.
• 41:00
  I didn't ask him that specific question, unfortunately passed away since then.
• 41:04
  I didn't ask him that specific question, but he did say
• 41:06
  it looked like dark everywhere else he could see.
• 41:09
  So that's consistent with me.
• 41:10
  Basically, like directional lighting is consistent
• 41:13
  with other reports that we have.
• 41:15
  I will say it's not the first report of an astronaut
• 41:19
  that has had experience with orbs.
• 41:21
  I'll just say that in their close proximity.
• 41:23
  So how did he.
• 41:25
  How did he share this?
• 41:26
  So this happened in 2003.
• 41:29
  You said he
• 41:30
  wrote it in his book, which he didn't share until 2020.
• 41:34
  And that's when you learned about story in 2020.
• 41:37
  And what about you? When did you learn about his book as well?
• 41:40
  In 20.
• 41:40
  20, I was telling you earlier, I shared an office with him so we'd tell stories.
• 41:44
  So I don't remember when, but at some point I heard the story
• 41:48
  and I can kind of like Kevin.
• 41:49
  I was like, I don't know what to do with that, I didn't.
• 41:51
  He's a guy of integrity, of faith, of all these things.
• 41:54
  And so when he told me, it wasn't like, this guy's a kook or something.
• 41:57
  It's hard to rise someone like that off, especially when.
• 41:59
  Was like, well, I know this happened.
• 42:01
  I can't explain it. I don't know that he can explain it.
• 42:03
  It's like to me it was no different than any of the like.
• 42:07
  There was the first night of Gulf War stories.
• 42:08
  It was it was a story. It was an experience that Brian had.
• 42:11
  And I believed him.
• 42:12
  And I don't know what to do with that kind of just set it aside, to be honest.
• 42:15
  But it would have been between 2000 and 3 and, you know, 2020
• 42:19
  some time probably in the middle there.
• 42:20
  Can either of you provide a perspective, perhaps, of his mindset
• 42:25
  or how he kind of came out about this, how he started sharing?
• 42:28
  So like say, but in the book, but, you know, was he
• 42:31
  you know, he mentioned it to you
• 42:32
  or there are other people he's mentioned he broadened that circle.
• 42:35
  What did that look like?
• 42:36
  Yeah, he mentioned it to other people at scale.
• 42:38
  Like he didn't want to give Burton any more reason to ground up,
• 42:41
  you know what I mean?
• 42:42
  So he, he had some trusted people
• 42:44
  within that community that he told, and then he told his immediate family.
• 42:48
  But it was a really small selection of people
• 42:51
  until he flew the final flight.
• 42:54
  He was very secure in his legacy.
• 42:56
  And then he told a lot of people within the test flight community.
• 42:58
  But I was the first member of essentially the press that he told about it.
• 43:02
  Did you have any sense of how other people reacted to it?
• 43:06
  I think it was probably
• 43:07
  just like anybody else, based on, you know, who it was in their perception.
• 43:10
  Again.
• 43:11
  Yeah.
• 43:11
  Brian is an incredibly incredible human being.
• 43:14
  Harvard book scholar, advanced degrees all over the place.
• 43:18
  So you have to trust.
• 43:20
  For me, it's like I trust somebody saying something like that.
• 43:24
  I don't dismiss experiences.
• 43:26
  Did he provide any any interpretation of the event?
• 43:31
  Yeah.
• 43:31
  So he, as program manager of spaceship one, again with advanced degrees,
• 43:36
  he looked into every prosaic explanation it could, whether it's amiss.
• 43:40
  Ferric I mean, just everything.
• 43:42
  And ultimately,
• 43:43
  he determined that it was something that allowed him to perceive it.
• 43:47
  So some form of entity or something else that allowed him
• 43:50
  to perceive it in a time of incredible need. So.
• 43:54
  So it was a very personal experience. Yeah.
• 43:57
  So it changed his perspective on the whole spaceship.
• 44:00
  It was an on shift for Brian.
• 44:03
  In a religious sense or in a I think both.
• 44:06
  Yeah. Physical realist.
• 44:08
  Is this a a non-human intelligence encounter for him
• 44:11
  or is this a religious experience for him, do you think?
• 44:14
  I think for him.
• 44:16
  I've asked his wife that question since he passed away as well,
• 44:19
  because she's religious.
• 44:20
  She said that it was more of a
• 44:22
  not necessarily a spiritual sense, but more of a non-human intelligence
• 44:26
  sense like that something was allowing him to perceive it.
• 44:31
  Did you either of you have conversations with him
• 44:34
  as this topic UAP has picked up since perhaps 2017 or so?
• 44:39
  I mean, Brian passed away on September 15th of 2022.
• 44:43
  So that was before your. Before the hearing.
• 44:46
  There was a little bit that, you know,
• 44:47
  it started picked up a little bit in 2016 Chatter I didn't know.
• 44:50
  Yeah, it didn't really reach it I'd say until about 2023 or so.
• 44:54
  Yeah.
• 44:54
  Although I would suggest that that is continuing right now is a lot going on. But
• 45:00
  how old was he?
• 45:01
  Was he when he passed away?
• 45:02
  69. Yeah.
• 45:05
  Sharing what he passed away from.
• 45:06
  I've been I've been told cardiac arrest.
• 45:09
  But yeah.
• 45:10
  I don't want to be the person to be overly conspiratorial.
• 45:13
  But, you know, there's many folks that have studied the effects
• 45:17
  of close encounters with some of these objects, and typically
• 45:22
  they do come with a degree of radiation or negative physical effects
• 45:26
  that could occur naturally, suggesting it happened
• 45:29
  in this case, but it's just the first place my mind goes, right.
• 45:32
  I mean, a relatively healthy pilot.
• 45:34
  I will say, though, pilots, you know, do have propensities to pass away
• 45:38
  relatively young, especially ones that have been
• 45:41
  flying fighters.
• 45:42
  Yeah, a number of cancers and stress and anxiety issues and PTSD, etc., etc.
• 45:47
  but also it was very interesting that this was a hopeful experience for him.
• 45:51
  Right?
• 45:52
  He didn't immediately report
• 45:53
  any type of weird biological effects or perhaps an ability to sleep.
• 45:57
  And he.
• 45:58
  No, he said it actually was it was just the opposite and allowed him to sleep.
• 46:02
  So it was the.
• 46:03
  Stress of yeah, he said it allowed him to kind of get outside of his little world
• 46:07
  that he created.
• 46:07
  How do I get back in this little spaceship to become an astronaut?
• 46:10
  To what is this thing?
• 46:12
  Let's just let's just, you know, I know there's a lot of folks who,
• 46:16
  regardless of just how fantastically credentialed Brian is, people say,
• 46:21
  well, that's an interesting story, an interesting ghost story,
• 46:24
  but let's all let's let's put all that aside and just assume,
• 46:27
  you know, what he experienced happened and we don't have an answer for it.
• 46:31
  What does that apply to you?
• 46:33
  Why did they want him to be able to accomplish
• 46:37
  what he accomplished shortly afterward?
• 46:38
  Well, what's interesting is after that, which none of us were aware of,
• 46:42
  was people like your yourself came forward, and a lot of other people
• 46:46
  that had the courage to come forward and testify on UAP.
• 46:49
  One of those people was Jeffrey Neuchatel, who was out at Vandenberg
• 46:54
  and had three incursions with multiple witnesses
• 46:58
  on October 14th and just before the end of October, of a massive red cube
• 47:03
  that came over some of the missile silos, and then of giant bright light.
• 47:07
  That was within two months of Brian's
• 47:10
  experience, 190 miles away.
• 47:13
  He had no way of knowing that at the time, unless it was rumors
• 47:17
  within the test flight community.
• 47:18
  But perhaps something was out there already and just.
• 47:23
  Yeah, I know Jeffrey well.
• 47:24
  I mean, he came to us with this story for the first time, and we shared with folks.
• 47:28
  That's fascinating that I didn't I didn't put those those two numbers together.
• 47:32
  But yeah, that's, that's right in the same period.
• 47:35
  Very interesting.
• 47:35
  So I mean, you had Columbia that happened during the space program
• 47:39
  and just those experiences, right within 2003, in the same
• 47:43
  general proximity is, I don't know, some strange data points.
• 47:47
  Yeah. How did Brian's wife
• 47:50
  view this?
• 47:50
  Did you ever talk to her. About you?
• 47:52
  Slept through the whole thing, but she viewed it.
• 47:53
  She's very religious.
• 47:55
  She thought that ultimately she believed that there was some form of entities.
• 47:59
  And she said within the documentary, too, there's a lot of things in the universe
• 48:03
  that we just don't understand.
• 48:05
  So I think she.
• 48:07
  Was almost by definition,
• 48:08
  like if you have like the slightest amount of humility,
• 48:11
  you should be able to accept that
• 48:12
  we probably know very little about our universe.
• 48:15
  Absolutely. Yeah.
• 48:16
  I mean things like,
• 48:17
  I mean just entanglement and all kinds of strange physical phenomena
• 48:20
  that are real that we just can't perceive.
• 48:22
  You got to be humble about all those things, right.
• 48:24
  And if we're not special,
• 48:26
  you know, there's trillions of moons and trillions of planets out there.
• 48:29
  And we're not special as in terms of a species
• 48:32
  that can escape their atmosphere.
• 48:34
  You know what else is out there?
• 48:36
  What knows about us, you know.
• 48:38
  Why would they want Brian to help?
• 48:39
  You know, maybe.
• 48:41
  I don't know. You know, it's really fascinating.
• 48:43
  It's encouraging too, because if it was his interpretation of events,
• 48:47
  which was a beneficial entity that wanted to give them hope, that's a great thing.
• 48:52
  But that's his interpretation.
• 48:55
  I will say my experience with people who reporting encounters
• 48:58
  that are more personal, I'll say that seems to be the overwhelming trend.
• 49:03
  They're not scary experiences, and they usually come with a sense of calm.
• 49:07
  And I don't mean just, you know, someone seeing a light in their bedroom, but,
• 49:11
  you know, pilots actively working to avoid some of these objects airborne
• 49:15
  are kind of getting this entire sense as well as they turn away from these objects.
• 49:19
  Right?
• 49:19
  So it's interesting, me and I, you know, I continue to understand how little,
• 49:24
  you know, have increased humility for how little we understand of the universe
• 49:28
  and have become more and more aware of the limitations that we have
• 49:32
  for interfacing with the with the universe.
• 49:34
  Right. Yeah.
• 49:35
  At least as we perceive it.
• 49:36
  And there's some incredible work going on by cognitive scientists
• 49:40
  and mathematicians and physicists around just trying to get that
• 49:44
  first foothold into understanding what consciousness really is.
• 49:48
  Because at the end of the day,
• 49:50
  UAP and conscious, I can't get away from the link
• 49:53
  that there seems to be between the two, not only the the law of.
• 49:57
  Perhaps that's how some of these are operated,
• 49:59
  but the actual interactions that humans seem to have with these,
• 50:03
  whether they're lights in the sky or something more personal,
• 50:05
  there's always this aspect
• 50:06
  that it seems to be almost individualized for that, that observer.
• 50:10
  Right.
• 50:11
  And sometimes even two observers in the same place report drastically
• 50:15
  different experiences when they think they're viewing the same object.
• 50:18
  It's fascinating.
• 50:18
  That was Brian's first place that he went was that, you know, he he wasn't visited.
• 50:23
  He was allowed to see something that was was already there.
• 50:26
  I think that's a pretty keen observation.
• 50:30
  Yeah.
• 50:30
  And, you know, I mean, he's one of the most credible observers out there, right?
• 50:34
  Not just only
• 50:35
  because of his intellectual background, but because it was ability in real time,
• 50:39
  he would always talk about being a Navy pilot and testing into that program
• 50:43
  just because he could see in advance, like,
• 50:46
  what might happen better so than most people.
• 50:49
  That's the name of the game, the jet.
• 50:51
  Absolutely.
• 50:52
  Well, how did this affect both you?
• 50:54
  I know you already talked about a little bit.
• 50:56
  Hey, it's a data point from someone that I respect, but
• 50:59
  did you start perhaps either of you start following along, perhaps a little bit
• 51:02
  more to what was happening publicly, or do you just kind of tune it out,
• 51:06
  perhaps until Kevin got, you know, in touch with you to reach out?
• 51:10
  How is this, you know, kind of perhaps shifted
• 51:13
  your interest or lack of in this, in this topic?
• 51:17
  It's an interesting topic for sure.
• 51:18
  Me personally, I've lived on the at least in that phase of my life
• 51:22
  and the cutting edge, a crazy dangerous flight test programs and stuff.
• 51:26
  So I was saturated.
• 51:28
  It was.
• 51:28
  I won't say it was just an interesting blip, but that I never paid attention to.
• 51:31
  But I didn't have any more data
• 51:33
  or anything to to add a more color to the story Brian told me.
• 51:37
  So for me, it was kind of like another one of the interesting stories
• 51:40
  that I heard and didn't really know what to do with.
• 51:43
  I tried to believe, at least some level, that I keep my eyes
• 51:47
  and ears open, that I'm not like, this is the way everything works.
• 51:51
  This is. This is the rules we've been told.
• 51:53
  So shut up and just do what you're told.
• 51:55
  And this is how whatever science is and you know,
• 51:59
  so to me, it's it's another blip on the radar.
• 52:02
  I'm not sure what to do with, but I try to,
• 52:05
  Yeah, try to just keep my ears and eyes open.
• 52:08
  What motivated you to come and talk today?
• 52:10
  It's just kind of a I don't know, it's a cool topic.
• 52:12
  I mean, to me, honestly, spaceship one was a very high point in my career.
• 52:17
  And so anything to to kind of kind of talk about that phase of my life is kind of
• 52:22
  reinvigorating the adrenaline to fund the whatever happened back then.
• 52:26
  And so this story specifically is a part of that.
• 52:28
  But to me, it's it's spaceship on.
• 52:31
  Yeah. Talking about this really cool thing that we did.
• 52:33
  That was pretty cool and kicked everything off that we're seeing today.
• 52:36
  What about you?
• 52:37
  Kevin.
• 52:37
  Yeah, it's, it's interesting because I've always had an open mind.
• 52:40
  I've always been a first, kind of person.
• 52:43
  But, I was really interested in astronomy as a kid, like, from a very early age
• 52:48
  in aerospace and astronomy.
• 52:49
  So I knew as much as you can know how vast the universe was.
• 52:53
  And I started thinking when I was a teenager, like,
• 52:56
  I mean, it's one of the biggest questions, right? Are we alone?
• 52:58
  So if you just kind of start to understand the scope and magnitude of the universe,
• 53:03
  and if we're not incredibly special, even though it's a special time
• 53:07
  for your species to be getting outside the gravitational pull of your own home
• 53:11
  body, whether it's planter or moon, it's a unique time for our species.
• 53:14
  Right?
• 53:15
  And if other species have done that on different moons and planets,
• 53:19
  it's fascinating. Right?
• 53:20
  So I, I mean, just as an example, James Webb Space Telescope detected bio possible
• 53:26
  biosignatures 124 light years on a planet away from us.
• 53:33
  And so we flew in 1903 for the first time.
• 53:36
  Kenny Clarke. Right.
• 53:37
  I don't know, 123 years later, we're able to do that.
• 53:42
  What is some advanced civilization that is able to escape
• 53:45
  their gravitational pull, able to detect and from how far away?
• 53:50
  So if they're if we aren't an anomaly, they've known about us for a long time,
• 53:54
  potentially. Right.
• 53:55
  That's just kind of like the mental mind game or the thought experiment.
• 54:00
  Even. Using tools that we can all imagine. Right.
• 54:02
  Detecting RF or optical other things.
• 54:05
  Totally.
• 54:06
  But we also forget that we had Nobel Prize awarded a few years ago for
• 54:11
  the discovery of non-locality of space, right, with quantum entanglement.
• 54:15
  You know, what other
• 54:16
  sensor and detection and communication capabilities might exist?
• 54:21
  You know, when we further understand how we can harness,
• 54:23
  you know, those realities of the universe that we exist in
• 54:26
  and yet aren't easily observable or interactable in our in our normal day,
• 54:30
  perhaps a lot like UAP, right? Yeah.
• 54:33
  Matt, I'm going to ask you straight up, no UAP stories.
• 54:37
  No, not to date.
• 54:39
  Well, I'll tell you what you know.
• 54:40
  Yeah, exactly.
• 54:42
  Not yet.
• 54:42
  You know, I've talked to probably a couple dozen people who, you know,
• 54:46
  have expressed support or reached out or I've talked to and they said not not yet.
• 54:50
  Or, you know, I have not.
• 54:51
  And I'd tell them exactly that. I'd say not yet.
• 54:54
  And I'd say,
• 54:55
  you know, of those a couple dozen people are ones that came back to me
• 54:58
  later and had an experience.
• 55:00
  So not yet is the best way to think about it.
• 55:02
  I think it happens quite more than people would realize. For sure.
• 55:04
  I think we said earlier, like, if you have your mind open
• 55:08
  and you're not just rigid in your belief about whatever,
• 55:11
  if you have the humility to say, I don't understand everything which I do,
• 55:15
  then, you know, then something might happen or not.
• 55:19
  But, you know, you got to have your mind open.
• 55:21
  Yeah.
• 55:22
  It's, you know, it's it's it's interesting
• 55:24
  when you think about scientific paradigms, right.
• 55:27
  Because they're defined by these known incomplete axioms or rules or
• 55:33
  equations.
• 55:33
  Right.
• 55:35
  F equals m a later replaced by equals m c squared.
• 55:39
  But then of day they're just models. They're just maps.
• 55:41
  They're not the actual reality.
• 55:44
  I think what's so fascinating in this conversation is that,
• 55:47
  you know, these are these are anomalies are outside the paradigm.
• 55:50
  When you're inside the paradigm, your existing models,
• 55:53
  all they do is reconfirm the existing paradigm. Right?
• 55:55
  That's all there. That's all they can do. Right.
• 55:58
  And to find those anomalies on the outside,
• 56:00
  that's where the true science happens, whether it's in a a particle collider
• 56:04
  or a telescope or perhaps a radar system on a fighter jet.
• 56:08
  Those data points are contrary to everything we know sometimes,
• 56:11
  which is what makes them outliers by definition.
• 56:13
  But those are the the signals that we look to towards a new paradigm.
• 56:17
  I think.
• 56:18
  I think the disservice, honestly, to our country
• 56:20
  is to paint every story like this is a little green men.
• 56:24
  It's it's to, you know, it's to kind of villains
• 56:27
  that to where people people keep their mouth shut.
• 56:30
  If you had told anybody in the US ten years ago there'd be a Chinese spy
• 56:34
  satellite floating across northern U.S., they'd say, you're crazy, right?
• 56:38
  We need to keep our eyes open and and not just paint everything
• 56:42
  that we don't understand as, you know, as whatever.
• 56:45
  Otherwise, we we miss learning.
• 56:47
  We miss changing the paradigm.
• 56:49
  We miss a lot of things.
• 56:50
  And national security is just one of those, right? Yeah.
• 56:53
  So I'm not saying UFOs or whatever, but when we don't understand it,
• 56:57
  we should ask more questions and try to try to dig
• 57:00
  a little deeper as opposed to just, you know.
• 57:03
  I don't know what they are either.
• 57:04
  But ultimately,
• 57:05
  if if there is a gap there that we're willing to ignore,
• 57:07
  the adversary is going to take advantage of that.
• 57:10
  Yeah.
• 57:11
  Well, this is amazing.
• 57:12
  I really appreciate you guys coming out.
• 57:14
  I really wish we had the opportunity to have Brian here in person.
• 57:17
  It's always sad when, you know, a legend like
• 57:20
  that moves on to to the to the next phase there.
• 57:23
  But he's done some incredible service to not just our country
• 57:28
  and not just to the space program, but to also inspiring
• 57:31
  the next generation of people to go work at companies like space
• 57:35
  and all these other companies that are doing amazing things now.
• 57:38
  So I hope he has the opportunity in some form or fashion to to
• 57:42
  realize that his story, you know,
• 57:43
  I think we'll have an impact of people outside of just who you shared.
• 57:46
  So thanks for coming forward and sharing it.
• 57:49
  Absolutely. Yeah. It's been an honor.
• 57:51
  Thanks, guys.
• 57:51
  Thanks for joining us.
• 57:53
  If you liked this, please make sure you subscribe and hit that like button.
• 57:56
  And if you would like to learn more about this case and have access
• 58:00
  to our episodes early, you can become a member at Safe Aerospace.
• 58:05
  Thanks.