What’s the connection between almost 80 years of UFO encounters?

MYSTERY WIRE — The flying Tic Tac, the Gimbal, a Metallic Blimp, Pyramids and more have been seen near United States military jets and ships over the last 17 years. Most people would call them UFOs, but the government calls them UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).

One man who has been researching them for more than 50 years says it might all be the same phenomena.

Rich Hoffman is a 26-year systems analyst for the U.S. Army and a co-founder of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). The SCU is a private group of scientists, military analysts, and investigators.

Hoffman has investigated uap encounters and sightings dating back into the 1940’s.

It’s experience that has given him insight into a pattern he sees continuing to this day.

“There seems to be the potential that it’s connected to either water as a base,” Hoffman told Mystery Wire in a recent interview. “If you think about that, you know, what, what are we doing, we’re sending out crafts to other planets, we’re not sending out humans, per se, we’re sending out crafts to go land on these other planets. If we found that there was some sort of a life form on the planet, how would we approach that if the planet was largely water, we might want to go and hide in the water and just observe them and survey them for a long time to write, do reconnaissance work. Well, some of the size of the objects we have that are being reported as UFOs are like no bigger than a grapefruit, do you think that that’s piloted? No, that’s remote.”

Many have called these unidentified objects drones. In Hoffman’s day job, he says frequency analysis of what he called the “drone killer” is one of his projects. And it is a stationary device and a handheld one he called the drone killer gun.

When asked if this drone killer was used onboard any Navy ships, Hoffman said he can’t speak to that because he’s “over in the Army side of the house.”

“When I’m talking about drone killers, I’m talking about small, what we call small UAS or Unmanned Aerial Systems,” Hoffman said. “I’m talking about like the Phantom DJI and stuff like that, I’m not talking about knocking out of the sky, you know, anything like a Tic Tac, okay, so I’m just wanting to qualify that, although that might be the next step, let me tell you.”

A simple Google search for “drone killer gun” turned up dozens of articles, images, and videos of large handheld devices that look like guns. One of them is even stamped with the name “Drone Killer” on the side.

Hoffman says his work deals with the CORIAN by CACI and Flex Force Dronebuster guns.

According to at least one manufacturer, these devices interfere with the radio waves controlling the drones allowing the operator to either take control of them or drop them out of the sky.

Below you can read the transcript of the interview at the top of this story.

Duncan Phenix  
Joining me now is Rich Hoffman, Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, systems analyst. There’s is that correct?

Rich Hoffman  
Yep.

Duncan Phenix
Down in Huntsville, Alabama, home of rocket city. And several other interesting things. We talked with you several months ago. You said the Space Command was in the process of locating there, has anything moved on that?

Rich Hoffman 
Well, I think that there was like, slow progression to it. But yeah, it’s and then I think it was also being still, I’m not sure what the status is, but I knew it was being competed. I think, you know, Colorado wanted to hang on to him as much as they could. But I think, from what I understand, it’s still progressing. And, you know, another thing I don’t know that you’re aware of it that but FBI has moved here.

Duncan Phenix 
I heard that.

Rich Hoffman  
From Quantico, you know, you’ve got I think about 6000 people that are here from the FBI that are coming down as are here as well.

Duncan Phenix 
And another business that definitely turns up every now and then in our line of work, Lockheed Martin, they’ve got facilities down there.

Rich Hoffman
Yeah, I mean, the whole push for hyperspace, they opened up a little place here to study hyperspace, and stuff like that. So, you know, so we’re really getting into a lot of different technologies and stuff like that. It’s very exciting.

Duncan Phenix 
Explain if you could, just to anyone who has not come across you before, exactly what is your real job? And what is your passion?

Rich Hoffman 
Well, my real job is, you know, I’ve been working, at least for the last 26 years now, I think I’ve been working with the Army Materiel Command. And I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but it’s like the, it’s like the, the corollary to it, you know, Project bluebook, was underneath the Air Materiel Command. So it’s, it’s kind of like a corollary to that. And that was at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. So you have an the Materiel Command are basically the logistics arm of the Army, if you would, and, of course, the Air Force as well, but it’s the logistics arm. So if you think about it, in the context of, you know, soldiers need food, clothing, and the whole nine yards, Army Materiel Command tends to do that. And another thing is that, you know, we supply all the bullets, you know, we add to the different services, so we’re ammunition and everything else as well. And so we have a very big portfolio of types of things that we do in the logistics world, besides moving soldiers and equipment and food and everything else you could possibly need for a soldier. But the headquarters here is pretty much spaced all around the world. I mean, it’s got commands and organizations everywhere. So I think when you think about the military industrial complex, it’s pretty much us. Or at least, that’s what it feels like, we have all these like, you know, depots and arsenals and things like that around the country that come underneath us. And so it’s an exciting place to work, I work in the IT world, and so I’ve held various positions within that organization. You know, everything from the standpoint of I’m working on like projects, like portfolio management, IT, that’s where you’re looking at the investments in or you’re in your bang for your buck. I worked with the Y2K, the knowledge management aspects, and we had of that, where you’re trying to make sure you don’t lose good knowledge, and you pass it on to the next people. I’m working on wireless. And an interesting project that I’m working on non helping to support is I’m the spectrum manager, helping to look at frequencies and spectrum that we have around our organizations right now to see how it’s being used. Because that’s a concern. I give you an example of that. The FAA has been talking recently about concerns where, for example, if you’re using like a GPS spoofing or something like that, you know, suddenly the plane is now veering off course. That’s a concern, right? And then I’m also doing a project that’s looking at killing drones. So if you think about it, you know, you hear all these stories, you know, in the UFO community about the objects that are coming across our military installations and facilities, right. And even on ships and things like that, you know, so there’s a concerted effort on the part of the DOJ now to across the god to put in drone killing devices. And so we’re putting in everything from radar to jammers to GPS types of equipment, we’re using spectrum, we’re using a whole variety of things to be able to go and to now stop that drone and go after that bad operator that might be a mile or so or even further off the post, and go after them.

Duncan Phenix  
This gives me a chance to just jump right into it then. So are you able to speak to any specific named devices? Or what you said, they’re drone killers. So basically, you’re, that what you’re working on is something that is going to stop said drone from flying, hovering, or doing whatever it’s doing. So there’s obviously a definite need for that one. Two, it’s incredibly high tech, it sounds like. Three, were they used on any of the ships that we’ve been recently reporting on?

Rich Hoffman  
Well? Keep in mind, I’m over on the Army side of the house. Okay, so let me let me say that I don’t know what they have and have not. Let me explain that when I sat across the DOJ, we’re looking to put these so we’re actually putting these devices and you can look it up. It’s, it’s no, it’s available online, it’s the CACI, and a couple of other companies are out there putting things like the CORIAN system, you can look up CORIAN and find out about it. But you also have these like handgun kinds of things we can use to be able to knock them out as well. But, so you know, with the advent of drones and things like that, that are popping around, yeah, you want to be able to use them. Now. When I’m talking about drone killers, I’m talking about small, what we call small UAS or unmanned aerial systems. I’m talking about like the Phantom DJI and stuff like that, I’m not talking about knocking out the sky, you know, anything like a Tic Tac, okay, so I’m just wanting to qualify that, although that might have to be the next step, let me tell you. But anyway, the idea is that people can fly in drones and do all kinds of like intelligence gathering or something like that, over our bases. And even in the context, if you take a look at the the Pentagon and their releases, when they talk about UAP they’re including in some of this things, like drones that because people see them and they don’t know what they are, and they call them UAP, or they call them a UFO, or they call them whatever like that. And so they can just as well be misconstrued and misidentified as anything else. And there’s been a lot of incursions, that I’m talking about in sensitive areas. And if you look at just protecting our critical infrastructure, we’ve got, you know, like power plants and stuff like that, you have to pay attention to that. So I’m looking at it from that standpoint, and that’s the kind of project that we’re working with, on and, and so we’re looking at those incursions by the way.

Duncan Phenix 
Now, obviously, that’s your job. Your passion and that’s a new job isn’t your passion, but your passion also is Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, as you were saying, and researching that trying to get the best possible explanation for what’s being recorded out there. You’re well known for investigating the Aguadilla case. We talked about that last time and I’ll definitely be linking that in the story. So obviously, your two worlds kind of collide it would seem, at least in discussion, is this a topic around the office? I mean, do you discuss the real world events with technical events?

Rich Hoffman  
I’ve been extremely open about it and my whole cube is decked out in UFO stuff. You know, I mean, if you come around to my cube, you’ll see in fact it you know, a friend of mine did a little illustration or a characterization of me that I’ve got up on my Facebook page, I posted it up several times and stuff like that, but it’s like me sitting in a rocket, like a chair that’s actually hovering and and I’m in my cube by the way at work and my computer’s going crazy and you see me typing and there’s like if you take a look very carefully there’s string on the back of my face it I have an alien head behind me so you know and so he’s done all this characterization because everybody knows that I’ve been involved in this thing for a long I don’t hide it. In fact, many of them are very interested in what I’m doing and what I’ve been about, and I’ve been in this for 57 years, so you’re not going to change me too much. I’ve seen too much and investigate… My my whole thing has been UFO investigations. That’s where I’ve been, I’ve been in that world. In fact, that’s the role that I played, even when I was the deputy director of investigations for MUFON. And I also then got into another role, which is the director of strategic projects when I was with them. And that was to be able to put in things like sky hub and UFODAT some of these like systems to be able to go out and collect information and data. And so I tend to be in that technology side, I’m looking to be able to put those kinds of things out into a very active areas. And so that’s kind of like me, in a nutshell, it but I’ve been at this for a long time. And certainly more than just the Aguadilla case, and I was just on a team basically doing that. But I’m talking about many thousands of cases that I’ve been out and investigating. And then I had access, and I’ve researched a lot of those sightings we had in the MUFON database when I was in that role. But in 2017, I left MUFON and I ended up … we created our organization, the SCU and so I’ve been pretty much focused on building SCU up because we’re largely a think tank, and we’re wanting to bring on scientists and getting that kind of like study going on. And it’s been very successful.

Duncan Phenix 
And you just recently held a virtual conference, correct? The Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference.

Rich Hoffman  
Yeah, we just had that this past weekend. So and it was about, I think it was like 250 people that showed up. We were very pleased with that. We had people from around the world attending, it was very exciting. And we had excellent speakers, I mean, just the speaker, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it or not, but a lot of PhDs presenting, and it was a excellent topics, and we the people that we and the feedback that I got, was there raving about it? And I’m extremely pleased, by the way.

Duncan Phenix  
Any highlights that came out of the conference?

Rich Hoffman  
Yeah, there’s so many highlights. I could you got? You got a couple hours. I mean. So, you know, I mean, like Dr. Hal Puthoff was our keynote speaker. And he talked about the challenges that we’re going to be facing as we move this thing over from the intelligence world, if you would, there’s been a back and forth, you know, should this be in the intelligence community? Should it be in the scientific world? Or how do you balance the two? Because, you know, SCU has been focused on trying to create a bridge between the two. And he spoke about that very fact on in his opening presentation. And he talked about the upcoming report that’s going to be coming out, he talked about the expectations on that, and then how do we get science, again, to be on board with this? And what can we do to bridge the two? So, anyway, excellent presentation. You had Dr. Matthew Szydagis talk about dark matter, in relation and dark energy in relationship to UAPs. And, I mean, when you start to, like, think about his presentation, blew my mind, because less than 1% of the universe that we see out there is actually just made up of the particles and things like that, that I’m looking at you seeing your solid and everything else. But the rest of it is all made up of either dark matter, dark energy, or, and those two things that we just can’t see. Right, you know, so scientists are trying to still grapple with those ideas and those kind of concepts, but I mean, and then there’s like a 5% area that he showed in a little pie chart where we’re like only 1% of that 5% that makes up the physical universe as we see it. And that just blew your mind. I mean, it’s like, wow, I mean, I can’t even fathom that. So he was like, getting into the idea of, you know, I’m sure you’ve heard of that. zero point energy? Well, zero point energy is related to the dark energy that’s out there and you could actually construct or, you know, create propulsion, if you would out of that or use that in some way. He talked about the idea that you can conceivably have people out there in a dark matter universe, creating, you know, their own kind of craft, if you would, and we  just wouldn’t even fathom that. That you got dark matter and dark … and you know, it basically within you did you know that I mean, we you don’t even think about that. So we got, I guess what I’m trying to say is that was that was another one of those excellent, little Aha, wow. We had Dr. Silvano Colombano. And I don’t know if you are familiar with him. But a number of years ago, he wrote a paper he was with NASA. And he talked about the idea of, basically, that we ought to be studying the UAP phenomena. And he got a lot of pushback. And, in fact, he had to cancel out, he was going to be our keynote speaker at the 2019 conference. And so he left NASA, he’s now with us, and he was able to have a discussion. And so we talked about, we talked about, you know, the fact that there’s actually a cost benefit to studying UAP, it’s well over the cost benefit you get from doing SETI. And we said, well, that’s interesting. And he made the case for that, right. And I’m going like, well, that’s great, let’s divert the funds from SETI over to SCU and allow us to do the scientific work to be able to study life on elsewhere, because they’re, quite frankly, they’re right here. And then you had Dr. Robert Powell who talked about the statistics that are on how do you deal with statistics that come in on reports? And how do you sift through all those reports that have a lot of IFOs or things that are you don’t want to study? And how do you focus and get the things you really want to study, which is the UFO, right? I don’t want to talk about birds, planes, you know, everything else that gets reported, you know, as that, but when you took a look at all the sightings that have ever been received, if you would, it would just if you put it on a map, it would look like Well, that’s the population counts you get in the major cities, right. So in other words, you’d see those like little dots, and they would all be on those major cities and across the country. And it doesn’t tell you anything from a pattern standpoint, right. But if you could somehow take it in your reporting database and use these tools, you’re able to go in and use things like key words, to be able to help pull out information from the report, you would then be able to go and to very quickly have it sort and help you to reduce those other things, to the point where you could get something now that’s a smaller thing you could actually study. And that was a great idea. And it ought to be, you know, looked at from the reports that we get to be able to sift through. And then we talked about the Fermi Paradox in terms of another way of looking at the Fermi Paradox. And that calculation with that to determine about life elsewhere. And you know, the prevalence of it. We had a panel that talked about the upcoming Task Force and a couple of other key things that are going on. And I mean, it’s just a jam packed. We had Dr. Michael Masters talked about his notions related to time travel and the fact that if you looked at us in terms of the fact that we’re bipedal, we have two eyes to you know, and that type of thing. And isn’t it interesting that the abduction and some of the experiencers claimed to see that the beings have the same body, you know, and so, he looked at it from the standpoint that from his perspective of … study of how we continue to evolve, that we would evolve into these beings likely over a period of history. And that, quite frankly, they could be using things like time travel or some way of doing that, to come back to the past, and even to collect DNA and carry it forward. Because if you think about this, this is an interesting concept. You know, in the previous world history, you had little pockets of people residing together around the world, right. And there was no interbreeding between the different populations. In fact, you had a little bit of incest going on in the little communities, right? You know, and then now what happens is, we’ve kind of homogenized ourselves, because now we’re moving around the planet. And all of our DNA is becoming very like each other, if you would, and we’re very homon… and so we’re not really it’s like a, he was describing it, it’s like, you know, think about it in the context of world now and doing incest together. And that might have impacts to our DNA down the pike. You know, there’s no variation in our DNA. Well, okay. So if I come back in time, and I, you know, I pick you up, I get some DNA samples from you, I can carry it back and create some genetic variation. So, interesting concept, right? I mean, it’s a hypothesis and so it’s fascinating to hear these people that are coming forward with these ways of thinking that you don’t typically do on an everyday. And these are scientists, these are professors, you know, they’re teaching it in college, you know, and some of these people and it’s remarkable.

Duncan Phenix 
I was gonna ask that when it came to talking about the more recent UAP videos and news and just the headlines in general, you know, as the term might be mainstream media, the big boys getting involved and questions on UAPs getting into the White House press conference or news briefing room and into the Pentagon in fact three times now I think it’s almost daily at this point. Was there a feeling of sort of wonderment, sort of surprise, or was it about time? it? What was the sense you got from everybody?

Rich Hoffman  
Well, I think that for for all of us, it’s about time, in fact, it’s overdue. I mean, I think a lot of people felt that same way. Especially, I’ll tell you, me, I mean, with 57 years under my belt from age 13. You know, I’ve been I’ve been involved with this. And so I lived through all those Blue Book years, and I kept waiting for this to be treated on the evening news seriously, right. And it wasn’t, you know, largely a lot of people have while there’s a flying saucer that was reported that, you know, and he would occasionally hear about something, but not very much. And occasionally, that there would be a show that would be on maybe TV, like, you know, Walter Cronkite had, you know, a show called UFOs: Friends, Foe, and Fantasy, I can remember that a long time ago. But I mean, so you had those little drought periods, and Blue Book was kind of interesting, and you’d hear about that. And then it suddenly died when Blue Book closed, then the next thing you know, is you just, you know, the only way you’re gonna get news is look at the weekly tabloid that’s out on the end of the cashier stand and see Hillary holding an alien baby, or, or something of that nature, somebody whole shaking hands with an alien that was now in Congress or something. So that was the only thing you’d hear about. And today, with all of this activity going on, and all these serious discussions on the news, I mean, for me, this is a huge change. I mean, it’s, it’s exciting as hell. I’m thrilled. You know, I mean, this is like, wow, I’m living it up. And I think everybody else has pretty much the same way. They’re like saying, Wow, it’s getting really a lot of attention now. And, you know, there’s almost like a vindication for all the people who have been in it for a long time. You know, and we’re saying, well, you should have paid attention to this a long time ago, you know, and so there’s a vindication going on which we’re all going like, Yay. And the fact that you’ve got, you know, congressmen now coming on board and talking about it, and you’re going to have this Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, talking about it. Wow, this is great. 

Duncan Phenix  
Are you hopeful with the expected report? That’s, you know, at least on paper due by June 25, but as Congress is Congress does, you know, that they could easily just say, it’s not ready? Or just put out a one pager and say, we’re getting to it. But are you hopeful that it will be a serious, comprehensive report, and not just another end of Blue Book? You know, that’s nice to hear, moving on.

Rich Hoffman 
Over my years, I mean, I’ve had many disappointments, you know, I’ve been hopeful for before, in fact, I was hopeful when the Condon Report was going to come out that it was going to end up saying, well, yay, verily, they’re here. And it’s no, there’s no problem, you know, and then what do we get? We got a big disappointment, even though it said 30% of them they couldn’t explain, does that make any sense? So I’ve had many disappointments, you know, I’ve been waiting with anticipation. And so I’m very, I’m being very cautious. And the reason why I’m being very cautious is because we’re starting to get a little hints, you know, about the fact that there would probably be something in the way of an interim report that would be available to the public. But we’re also hearing that all those big annexes and various other kinds of things that are going to be probably shown are going to basically be classified. And that, you know, there’s where the rubber meets the road, because it’s really going to be the fact that you’re going to probably see, you know, some, they could potentially be seeing some of the video evidence that shows for example, objects coming out of the water, very clear UFOs in front of an aircraft as opposed to something blurry or infrared. And so I believe that when they get the chance to see all this wonderful evidence, it’s going to become a topic of like, Well, what do we do now? You know, I mean, and so it’s going to have an impact on the standpoint of, well, we need to do something. And my hope is, my big hope is that it carries on with something now that’s funded. Because the Task Force is not funded, and that they put in some program that basically now gives the authority to be able to go over to now get the data that is out there in the government world, if you would, so to speak. And my bigger hope is that they can look at us as having some role to do some sort of academic or scientific-like work, that could be supportive. But yet, more from an unclassified standpoint, if you get what I’m saying right. That somehow we can have a scientific study where we can definitely share some information or at least be working on it to help somebody out. But I really believe very strongly, Duncan, that it’s going to be the classified world is going to get the biggest bunch of this information. But I do think that the unclassified thing is going to be in the same narrative that we’re hearing right now, which is that there is a phenomena out there. We don’t know what it is, we can’t explain it, and that there are these vehicles and things that are performing way beyond anything that we’ve known of. And in fact, it may include going back to like previous sightings throughout, you know, 50 years or longer in terms of its coverage, but the things that we’re doing those five observables that Lue (Elizondo) talks about. I mean, UFOs have been doing that back in 1955, 1947. You know, they’ve been doing that all along. So I mean, there you go.

Duncan Phenix 
But why do you think the … or do you think there’s anything to the focus, right now being on Navy interactions? And not, you know, you think UFO, Air Force are in the air, but of course, Navy flies, Marines fly, Army fly? But, you know, is it just circumstantial that that’s where the public information is coming from or is there really something to what the Navy does that might be attracting these interactions?

Rich Hoffman  
Well, let me share with you one thing, and that is that I think that, you know, if you take a look at the UAP overall, in terms of cases, reports and stuff like that, you’ll see that there’s a strong, there’s always been a strong relationship to water. The water somehow, I’m talking about lakes, streams, ponds, everything, you know, all the way up, there seems to be a connection to water, I had cases back in the 70s, and stuff like that of UFOs hanging over ponds, and looks like they were sucking up water. So there appears to be some sort of a relationship, if you’d stand back and look at the whole overall phenomena, that there is water. So it makes sense, to a large extent, because, you know, three quarters of our planet is water. And we really shouldn’t be calling ourselves a planet Earth that we should be the planet water, right? I mean, if you really want to get down to it. And so consequently, that’s a huge area of a place for easy hiding, easy maneuvering without being seen. And if you want to pop up and do something, you can do that. So I think the Navy is probably, well I mean, experiencing quite a number of these things. Because number one, they’re out in the area where they seemingly are. And if you really, if you got rid of all the inland kind of like, you know, cases, if you would, that I talked about a minute ago, and you eliminated all the ash and trash that’s out there in the reports, the things that are identified, there’s a small preponderance of cases that you can look at and say that these are unknowns. And then you can even go a little bit further and necking that down and saying, well, these might be unknowns that are flying over areas that are classified aircraft, and you’ll just never get an answer on it, right? You can’t identify it because they’re not going to tell you about it right. Or, or there’s and then there’s other natural phenomena that we experience on land, let me tell you like things like spook lights, for example, there’s Earth lights, or that type of phenomena, where you can have a some sort of a glowing ball of gas, if you would, that moves across the sky and zips around and does all kinds of maneuvers. And that’s a natural phenomena. And we don’t understand that one. And those get reported as UFOs. Some, again, some of those things that I’m talking about when you get down … so you’re talking about a very small percentage of cases that are actually you know, real unknown unknowns, if you would, I can’t identify these at all. And that’s probably even larger if you go out into the water. And so the other thing is, I’ll come back to this much, the Air Force wanted so badly to get out of Project Blue Book. Right? It didn’t want to deal with this whole topic it would try to get, in fact, the whole intent of closing it down was to shut up the public and then not deal with it, at least deal with it from a public perspective. Okay, that doesn’t mean that they’re not concerned about the air. But they could have a, like, an AATIP, if you would, within their organization and keep it quiet. Right. So we don’t know. And there’s no evidence to say that they’re not in applying in, they could be, but you just don’t hear about it. And there’s no, there’s nothing that really tells you. And they are concerned about air defense, you know, and so I think that they’re being cautious probably. And I think that, you know, once you get this, whatever this reporting process in place, and it needs to be at the very high level the DNI level, if you would, for the Department of Defense, and to have all the services play equally. In other words, the Marine Corps, the Army, if the Army sees something, it needs to report it up to a specific place. And all these military branches ought to be cooperatively putting their same stuff together to a central body. And then you need to also be tying in, and this is where it gets really interesting, because you have to DoD, but then you have other organizations like NASA, and you have a whole bunch of other organizations. Who has the authority over NASA? Do you think the Department of Defense would have the authority to be able to tell them to not want, I want you to give me this, right. So you got to have it when you think about that in terms of the government? How do you position it so that they have the authority to go after the FBI, to go after Homeland Security? To go after NASA, and any other bodies like the NRO, that might be collecting information and have that all centrally come together? So there’s a challenge that the Senate is going to have to deal with, you know, in coming up with a game plan for going forward, that’s got to be with the authority that they need the funding that they need to be able to do this.

Duncan Phenix 
You deal with analysis and structures of things real and ethereal, you might say. Do you think the government is just too entrenched after all these decades of having things behind closed doors and separate offices, figuratively and literally, you know, in the stovepipes, as you might say, you know, that they just can’t get out of their own way, on this one, or, I mean, do you really feel that there’s an effort for them to politely get out of their own way?

Rich Hoffman  
It’s gonna be a tough cultural change for them. Because, you know, the whole culture of the DoD is, again, it’s around the idea that there’s a threat. And you have to be able to deal with that threat. And the threat can come from many different areas, adversaries who want our information data. And this is one of the challenges we have with the overall side of this is that it’s a delicate balance between what do you need to have the keep secret that you don’t want the adversary to know? Who can now use it and leverage it against you? Right. So as much as the UFO community would like to have the DoD and everybody else spilling their guts, there’s a need to balance that with the fact that, do you want to give your enemy information that they can now use to their advantage against you, right? So there’s, there’s always been that kind of, like, push me pull me kind of thing that goes on that they have to deal with. And it’s a struggle, because let me tell you, I mean, I work in the Department of the Army here at Redstone, and there are literally every day on Redstone with the Space Flight Center here and all that other stuff like that. Everybody is being bombarded with, you know, hackers that are attempting to break in to get our information. And I will say this much that, you know, there are concerns that some of our r&d efforts that we’ve got, have been breached, and are being breached by other adversaries. If you take a look at some of the drones that are being built in China. It’s not because that they developed it, it’s because they stole the plans that we’ve got and they’re using it to build them over there. Right. So you know, while the DoD has a test of balance, the equation and be cautious about not giving in it just can’t open the doors and say here open kimono come on in and get everything right. And the same with organization. So like, you know, I was talking to somebody else about this, but, you know, like, you know, you got Lockheed Martin and all these other companies, they’re great hiding places, by the way for against FOIAs. I mean, you can basically have all this development that’s going on out there. And they’re gonna get a lot of good information about the UFO phenomena, or, you know, whatever.

Duncan Phenix
I was gonna ask you about that, because in the recent, one of the recent Pentagon things, he made a point of saying it, but he definitely said it not off the top of his head. The spokesperson John Kirby said that we don’t believe this is of the United States government or military? Well, you know, that, of course, leaves the door open to the Lockheeds, the Raytheon’s, the you don’t know company.

Rich Hoffman
Yeah, sure. And, and so the development that’s going on in Lockheed Martin, and Boeing and all these other places and stuff like that, I mean, it’s, they’re not going to be open kimono. I mean, you don’t tell, you know, your adversaries, you don’t. And you don’t tell even other corporations that you’re working, whatever, you know, against, if you would, I mean, I’m developing something for my organization called Lockheed Martin. And it’s going to be a future craft, it’s going to do this and do this and do this. And I’m not going to let you know about it. I mean, why would I do that? I’d be stupid now that somebody else is going to come and get that information, and steal it. So they’re also protected, and very, you know, quiet about what they do. And rightfully so, because secrets are easy to be stolen and so they could have answers that you and I will never know about. And by the way, because they may have government contracts in certain areas, you know, it’s not like the government representative out there is pretty much shielded. And oh, by the way, if, you know, from knowing about it, so they can honor honestly answer, well, I don’t know anything about it. Right. And if they get requested for information from a FOIA, because FOIA is only applied to government, they don’t apply to a contractor or a company. You know, so the FOIA goes to the government officer, he says, Well, I don’t know anything about it. Right? And he’s the lead for it. And that’s all being done by my contractor, you know, and so they can point the finger over there and say, Well, there you go. And so that’s the way it works. I mean, it you know, it, there’s contracts that specify all the details of what you can do, what you’re expected to deliver, and everything else, but the details in terms of what’s going on, and that Lockheed Martin facility over there, that’s Lockheed’s business, that’s not mine. There’s where the rubber meets the road, you know, I mean, and you people want to say, well, it’s taxpayer money that’s going out to the those … it’s not all taxpayer money. I mean, Lockheed Martin is a corporation, it’s got shareholders, it’s got a whole bunch of other people that are in it, right. And so yeah, there, they might be getting remuneration from the government work that they’ve signed up to be able to deliver. But that’s not stopping them. And they’re not using that to go over and build the F 22. aircraft or the whatever, you know. So I mean, that’s kind of like the people need to understand that before they want to make these claims about certain things, and the government keeping things from them.

Duncan Phenix 
One last question. And I like to hear the answers from people I talked with about this. What is, like you said, you’ve been looking into this for a few years. And around the block a little bit. At this point, with your experience taking everything into consideration. What does your gut tell you? And I can even narrow it down of the recent leaked videos. Say the Navy incursion? What does your gut tell you? What’s happened? You want to make a prediction?

Rich Hoffman
Yeah. Well, I mean, let me clarify that the phenomena hasn’t changed over my 57 years. So it’s the same phenomena that if you asked me 57 years ago, what do I think of that phenomena? Well, it’s always been around, and it’s probably going to continue to always be around. So I think that ultimately, this phenomenon has been there longer. And oh, by the way, it wasn’t Lockheed who built the ones in 1947. You know, a Tic Tac performing its maneuvers today is the same kind of maneuvers you saw in an object in 1947. Or in 1952. And nobody on this planet is making anything like that back then especially. We’re doing combustion engines, we’re doing propulsion systems that are … and if you think about even the changes we’ve seen in aircraft designs over the years, we’re still pushing something in order to go forward. We’re not there where we’re building craft that don’t have any apparent propulsion systems on them, you can obviously see it’s got a propulsion system, and you don’t build today, we, you know, if you think about it, here’s a disk shaped object back in the 50s, that was seen coming out of the water going into the air, and probably shot off into space. Alright, so I mean, it’s the same object, right. But you know, you don’t, you don’t build a submarine, you build a submarine specifically for working in the ocean. But you don’t take that submarine and stick it up in the air and expect it to fly. Right? It’s the design won’t work, right. And then think about the material science that was going on, when you have an object dropping from like, 20,000 feet, to stop at sea level in .78 seconds, any kind of thing that we would have that would have disintegrated and fallen apart and, you know, broke up into multiple pieces, you know, and and then certainly, if there was anything in the craft, it would be a puddle on the bottom of the floor. Well, that didn’t happen with a tic tac, you know, it kept moving around doing all kinds of crazy things, right. So if you think about that kind of thing, and even the discs that were reported back in the early days, they were doing the same kind of thing, you know, going from standstill to instantaneous acceleration, shooting off at incredible rates of speed. And oh, and so, this is a phenomena  that’s been around here, probably, throughout recorded history. And if you look at Vallée’s work, you know, on the wonders in the sky, he’s, you know, he has been able to collect reports throughout our written history. So I mean, I guess I’m trying to say it’s a phenomena, it seems to be long lasting here. It’s been here a long time. And there seems to be the potential that it’s connected to either a water as a base. And if you think about that, you know, what are we doing, we’re sending out crafts to other planets, we’re not sending out humans, per se, we’re sending out crafts to go land on these other planets. If we found that there was some sort of a life form on the planet, how would we approach that if the planet was largely water, we might want to go and hide in the water and just observe them and survey them for a long time to, right? Do reconnaissance work. Well, some of the size of the objects we have that are being reported as UFOs are like no bigger than a grapefruit, do you think that that’s piloted? No, that’s remote. And so many of these things could be remotely piloted, if you would like drones, if you would like what kind of what we’re doing. And there are no more than space probes that are coming out and checking us out and keeping tabs and somehow reporting back. So we can all speculate about the different things that these things could be. You know, and I guess my gut is that I go back to the fact that there seems to be a water interest. And by the way, that would translate into nuclear interest. Because if you were also living on this planet, and you had something that was now blowing up nuclear detonations in the middle of the ocean, wouldn’t you be a little bit concerned about your longevity with that as well, right. And so you might be out trying to send a subtle message by stopping nukes underground to be able to tell you guys, Hey, quit playing around with these things. That might be just a way of letting you know that. Don’t do that. And oh, by the way, I can do that. And oh, by the way, I know where your cap point is. And I’m going to shoot. I’m gonna come over and let you know that I know where your cap point is. Because I and then what does that tell you? It tells you that over the period of the time that they’ve been here, that they know how to understand our languages. And I’m saying languages because we have multiple languages on the planet. And oh, by the way, that they show up on every part of the planet. And people are claiming that they’re having conversations with these things. And so I guess what I’m trying to get at is it’s like they know us awfully darn well, whoever they are. And if Michael Masters is correct, and they’re us from the future, that makes perfect logical sense.

Duncan Phenix  
All right, Rich Hoffman, thank you for taking the time to talk with Mystery Wire today. We really appreciate it.

Rich Hoffman
You’re welcome, Duncan.