Retired Colonel on aliens: "there's zero doubt"
Replacing UAP whistleblower David Grusch, Karl Nell, Aerospace executive, Senior military officer and corporate strategist, answered Alex Klokus’ questions regarding UAP and aliens.
On May 21, 2024, one of America's largest high-tech conferences, SALT I Connections New York 2024 hosted a 20-minute discussion on UFOs. SALT founder Alex Klokus interviewed Karl Nell. This retired Colonel was first mentioned in the Debrief article vouching for the identity and quality of whistleblower David Grusch.
After detailing an impressive CV, including national defense, space issues, degrees in Strategic Studies and Computer Science, and stints in the private sector with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, Nell answered a bold question from Alex Klokus about his opinion on the possibility of non-human intelligences visiting Earth:
“Non-human intelligence exists. Non-human intelligence has been interacting with humanity. This interaction is not new. And it's been ongoing. And there are unelected people in the government that are aware of that.” He added “There's zero doubt.”
The importance of such a position cannot be underestimated. Not only does a senior U.S. defense official declare that non-human intelligences have been in contact with human beings, but he validates what has been labeled a conspiracy theory for decades. In fact, he mentions the fact that, according to him, unelected civil servants, therefore not having the delegation of power through democratic mechanisms, would know about this. And he goes on to insist that he has no doubt about it.
Of course, one wonders what information Colonel Nell has at his disposal to make such statements. The question is put to him by Alex Klokus. Karl Nell replies that others have already made similar statements, citing Haïm Eshed, former head of Israel's space program and intelligence officer, and Canada's former defense minister, Paul Hellyer.
In an interview with Wired, the latter declared :
"I'm sure that there are aliens that are aware of what I'm doing, probably more than one species because they communicate by mental telepathy, and consequently they can read your mind, and you can't hide what you are thinking even".
Haim Eshed told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that there was a "Galactic Federation" in contact with "the Americans, the Russians, the Japanese, the British and the Chinese".
But Nell considers this to be "data". One wonders what prompted him to choose these declarations supported by no tangible evidence, when radar studies showing inexplicable kinetics of craft arriving from nowhere and seen by multiple witnesses on the ground have long been published.
He then cited the names of :
Christopher Mellon, deputy assistant of the secretary of defense with access to US secret programs,
Lue Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon's UFO investigation program, AATIP
David Grusch, a whistleblower who filed two complaints about the concealment of a UFO recovery program from the authorities and the reprisals he suffered.
Some might wonder whether Mellon and Elizondo would have the same positions as Eshed and Hellyer.
He went on to mention the efforts of Senators Schumer and Rubio, both members of the Gang of 8 - the highest security body in the US - who have both spoken out to complain about withholding information about the UAP.
Later in the interview, he mentioned Senators Rounds and Schumer, who proposed a law to organize the controlled declassification of U.S. ufological archives, and their joint colloquy before the text was largely gutted by the House of Representatives, led by Congressman Turner, from the Wright Patterson Air Force Base constituency. Nell expressed hope that new legislation currently being drafted will further strengthen this text.
As a second argument, he presented a logical deduction for the presence of life on other planets and their possible visit without SETI signal detection, taking the model of man and the gradual abandonment of radio technologies.
The rest of the discussion focused on the fundamental issues involved in removing the secrecy on the subject, and the societal risks of a catastrophic disclosure of all the elements that have been hidden from the public. He explained the governments’ desire to conceal this information, pointing out that this is not the first time this subject has come to the fore of public attention. For him, however, the moral, societal and technological benefits outweigh the need for national security.
He believes, however, that we shouldn't be naïve in considering what he calls "civilizations" to be either entirely altruistic or entirely ill-intentioned.
Asked by Alex Klokus about the possibility of achieving an end to UAP secrecy in the midst of current geopolitical tensions, Nell replied:
This is coming up in sort of arms regulation to mutually assured destruction, however much we don't like it is sort of a stable, kind of, geostrategic regime. You know, the Reagan era, defense shield idea, is also a very stable scenario, but to go from one to the other is very unstable. And so this topic sort of mirrors that.
Colonel Nell’s words make one wonder which is more dangerous: a technologically superior species watching us? Or the reaction of state entities refusing to let rival nations overtake them?
One of the most curious things Nell said went almost unnoticed in the mass of information he delivered:
There's the possibility that there's some non-public agreement.
What kind of agreement would prompt a state to organize incommunicado storage for over 70 years, and who were the parties involved ?
Translation by Guillaume Fournier Airaud
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Full Transcript
Alex Klokus 00:02 : And I'm very lucky to have Karl Nell here joining me for this conversation. Karl, thank you so much for coming. And Anthony and AJ over at Salt. Thank you so much for hosting this. So Karl, maybe to begin, can you share a little bit about your background, who you are, and perhaps why people should care what you say?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 00:24 : Sure Well, thanks, Alex. It's a pleasure and honor to be here. And it's a fantastic event. And I'm glad to see a large bunch of folks that stuck it out to the end for this talk. So I was fortunate, I had a four-year RTC scholarship to Penn. I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. The army sent me overseas to do Signal Corps engineering projects. So I did a lot of strategic comm projects in Europe. I ended up working in army Space Command, I commanded a satellite ground station, we were re traced to the Joint Chiefs. I spent some time at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the army ultimately sent me to get a master's in mechanical engineering, a master's in Strategic Studies, graduate work in computer science. It was on track to stay in, but I decided I want to pursue more of a technical career. So I got out and ended up working at Bell Labs, which was a fantastic place. Unfortunately, I was there during the trivestiture that folks may be familiar with where the company got split up. I left Bell Labs and ended up working in Lockheed missiles and space. I worked at Northrop Grumman. I've ran strategic technology programmes in the defence industry, I worked for a lot of the three letter agencies, ultimately was a deputy CTO for a $2 billion dollar company, I was the vice president general manager of a Northern Virginia based R&D firm. I stayed in the military. In the reserve, I commanded at every grade level through brigade, I was fortunate to stand up the Army's newest expeditionary MI brigade, I was the deputy chief of staff for combat command. Ultimately, this experience sort of combined to give me the opportunity to come in and advise futures command, the largest reorganisation in the Army Reserve, since really 1973, on how the army can be more effective, and my last assignment was involved with the UAP Task Force, which maybe is the most apropos for this discussion.
Alex Klokus 02:32 : And so karl, here's the million-dollar question. Do you believe that a higher form of non-human intelligence has visited this planet?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 02:43 : Right. So non-human intelligence exists. Non-human intelligence has been interacting with humanity, this interaction is not new. And it's been ongoing. And there are unelected people in the government that are aware of that.
Alex Klokus 02:59 : And so, karl, that is quite a bold statement. I'm wondering, and I'm curious, how confident are you that that is true?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 03:09 : There's zero doubt.
Alex Klokus 03:13 : And, karl, what evidence have you seen, what was the moment where you developed this level of conviction? Because, what you're saying is extremely consequential and very important. And I know that a lot of people here even perhaps may not believe that statement.
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 03:30 : Right, well, probably a better way to ask that is how can the folks in the audience come to a common understanding of what this phenomenon is. And so there's sort of two tracks here. One is from first principles, and another is actually from the data. So let's take a look at the data. So we can look at some folks that have very high level access to information like Paul Hellyer, who was the defense chief for Canada has come out and said the same thing. We look at Haïm Eshed the former head of Israel's Space Force has said the same thing. Chris Mellon, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intel SAPCO has essentially said the same thing. Lue Elizondo has said the same thing, David Grusch has said the same thing. David Grusch, cleared for presidentially level material. So you're looking at people that are in a position to know this, and they're telling you the same thing. You could take a look at the Gang of Eight in the Senate, and in Congress. So there are two members of the Gang of Eight, Marco Rubio and Senator Chuck Schumer, that signed up to the UAP disclosure amendment last year, that basically said, they're not being told the truth, and we need to push forward on that. So that's sort of an overview of some of the data from a first principle standpoint, what's so unusual about this realization ? There are billions of stars in the galaxy. Life here evolved in 500 million years, which is basically a blink of an eye, we found planets around every star that we looked at, it's likely that the universe is full of life. If you look at the SETI program, in particular, the SETI program has all the same assumptions that you would accept and probably make with respect to this topic, except that they believe that non-human intelligence is transmitting signals here. But at the same time, like we're not transmitting signals, SETI doesn't transmit signals. And the only signals that are actually broadcast of high enough power into space for somebody to pick up come from broadcast television, and ballistic missile early warning systems, which you could argue our technology is moving away from: we're going to satellite, we're going to fiber, broadcast TV is a thing of the past. And if you get to some state where society is stable, maybe we don't need ballistic missile early warning systems. So the other guy is probably not going to transmit. But what the other guy may do is come here, if that's possible to do, and there are physics models that suggest that that may be possible.
Alex Klokus 06:08 : And, Karl, what you're saying is extremely consequential. And you've referenced other people that have said the same thing that also have similar credibility. There are similar reasons for why we should believe many of these folks, yet the government itself has not formally disclosed. They've been very reluctant to do that. Why? Why do you think that is?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 06:30 : So there are six basic reasons. And this, again, you could draw this out from first principles. There's a national security reason, there's the lack of a plan, there's the potential for societal disruption. There's the possibility that there's some non-public agreement, there's the potential for misdeeds and desire to cover up misdeeds, and there's just the basic organizational intransigence and lack of priority that might be associated with the topic. So all these things are factors that the issue is that, really, the national security issue subsumes all the others. And so there's an opportunity, maybe, to contract the national security issue, similarly to what was done with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, such that nuclear energies, not necessarily classified, is available to the public, but lack of a plan and the potential for societal disruption are key ingredients that would prevent any responsible leader from coming forward with information that they don't have the means to address in a responsible way, it would be irresponsible to do that.
Alex Klokus 07:31 : Okay, so what you're saying is that you have absolute conviction that a higher form of non-human intelligence has visited this planet, that there are factions within our own government that know about this, yet, we still don't have a plan, and they may represent a security issue, this may pose a threat to humans, yet you still believe that we should disclose? Is that right?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 07:58 : Correct. So there are really three reasons that trump all those others, and those others are basically valid, like I said, so the first issue is the moral right, that the government exists for and by the people. And so the nature of reality is fundamentally not government information, people have a right to know the world in which we live. And the pursuit of happiness requires that knowledge. So that's sort of the first kind of overarching philosophical foundation for this. But you know, as a corollary to that, if there are misdeeds that were done, then they need to be remediated if there's lack of proper oversight, which is suggested by some of the whistleblowers, that needs to be remediated. So the first issue is the moral issue. The second issue is being in a reactive mode is never preferable to being in a proactive mode. So reactive mode is basically trying to prevent Disclosure. But failing that, you might get a situation where you have catastrophic Disclosure, that creates all the problems that you were trying to prevent. So a more balanced middle path of controlled Disclosure is the best way to do this, which is again, an argument for some amount of disclosure. And the third part is simply societal advance and global competitiveness, more brain trust needs to be brought into this topic in order to make progress and to improve society. And, and so all three of those things together, trump, the six other reasons for non-disclosure.
Alex Klokus 09:25 : And what do you think happens if we don't disclose? I know you mentioned this idea of catastrophic disclosure. Maybe disclosure may be forced upon us. How do you think about that?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 09:39 : So the situation is usually thought of as a binary state. It's like an all or nothing. And people have sort of argued this, but anybody paying attention realizes the government has already indicated that unidentified anomalous phenomena are real. They're not ours and they're not our adversaries. The Pentagon has said that, like for people are paying attention, that shoe already dropped. So for a lot of people, they think that the second shoe to drop is : “this is non-human intelligence”. And maybe the conversation stops there like, the president comes out and says, you know, “there's non-human intelligence”. The truth is that, that will precipitate this crescendo of other questions that maybe the government's not ready to answer, that will court, if not precipitate, potential negative ramification for society. And so as an example of this, I would actually point to something from the ancient past, the Bronze Age collapse. So Eric Klein, Princeton University, 2015, wrote a very interesting book called 1177 BCE, the year that civilization failed. And so this is well known to current scholarship. Within a single lifetime, all the very effective ancient civilizations of the Bronze Age failed, due to a confluence of reasons that are not necessarily fully understood today. So we're talking about Egypt, the Hittite Empire, the Minoan Empire, the Minocean empire, the Babylonian Empire, all these civilizations failed, never to return, other than, let's say Egypt. And so these are highly sophisticated civilizations with highly developed infrastructures highly developed administrative states, they were globalist in a sense, very similar to today, in terms of the known world, the known Near East, they're economically interdependent. They had both diplomatic ties and commerce ties. And yet these civilizations failed in a single lifetime, because of stressors that these civilizations collectively could not address within the timeframe. And so if we look at our society today, one might argue that it's similarly fractured, similarly under economic stress, similarly, under cultural stress, as well, fractured and fragile diplomatic situation, it mirrors very much this scenario. So for a responsible decision maker, that is certainly a factor.
Alex Klokus 12:04 : When you say that, are you implying that perhaps we as a society may not be ready for Disclosure? Or are you saying that we may not be able to defend ourselves against this other force?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 12:21 : So there's sort of different viewpoints on whether people are ready to deal with this phenomenon. And popular culture is kind of infused with this stuff: Roswell became a meme a long time ago, we got programs on Ancient Aliens, Skinwalker Ranch, all this stuff. I guess I would draw an analogy, though, for people that believe in a certain faith tradition, whatever that faith tradition is, and hold to that and subscribe to that in a very serious and devout way. And, and sort of pose the question, even for folks of that ilk, and I would count myself as one, if you're confronted with the reality of your religious belief system, like the reality of the metaphysical Angel, a messenger from God, what have you, that's going to be a sea state change in your way of dealing with reality even though you already believe it. So it's one thing to believe, and it's another to know. And I think in this context, this phenomenon has the potential for an analogous effect, both on the individual and on society.
Alex Klokus 13:27 : Yeah, but do you think that this phenomenon, this non-human form of intelligence, represents a threat to humanity?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 13:35 : So this is a good question, too, and some other folks sort of frame things in that light. And I guess I would suggest that if we're, the universe is governed by conservation laws. And it's probably reasonable to assume the laws of nature that we understand, apply everywhere, we may have incomplete understanding, undoubtedly, we do have these laws, but they're sort of homogeneous, and they apply throughout the universe. And so those laws are governed by conservation rules. There's conserved quantities. And so this reality really forces a Darwinian type competition in order to survive. And so it's reasonable to assume any other civilization that's evolved, has come up through the same Darwinian evolutionary process. So I think it's naive to expect complete altruism until or unless you get to a state of post scarcity, where you essentially have no physical needs that were kind of encumbered within, in this universe. And so in some sense, it's the economics of the future that are going to determine whether there's cooperation, competition or some kind of symbiosis, and inform the intention. But to assume either mal-intent or complete altruism, I think, is somewhat naive.
Alex Klokus 14:56 : Yeah. So it sounds like, what you're saying is, it's impossible to know the true intentions of a higher intelligence, we may be competing for the same scarce resources, we may not be, right ? We may be almost irrelevant to them. And they may be acting altruistically, although we cannot safely assume that. And so I guess I'm curious, if we continue down this disclosure path, do you believe that Disclosure is inevitable?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 15:22 : So, again, people that sort of look at this topic and study it, and there have been some good examinations on this, from a historical standpoint, have realized that we're not in a really a new state. This sort of Disclosure emphasis has come and gone over time. So this is not the first time we've arrived at this stage. I would suggest that maybe the peak of this current cycle happened last December with the Schumer amendment, and then it got rolled back as it was defeated in the house. And so it remains to be seen if the process is going to continue. One hopes and can maybe draw a little bit of confidence that maybe this will come around is the colloquy that Senator Schumer and Senator Rounds had back in December, after their amendment got killed. They basically went on the Senate floor and articulated their rationale for the legislation. And I think Senator Schumer, to quote him, almost said it was a travesty that this did not pass. So this is a bipartisan colloquy on a topic that I guess most people would probably consider fringe. And yet these two senators felt the need to do that, and to double down on their desire to see this through. So hopefully, we'll see maybe a reintroduction of some version of that this summer, with a goal of maybe putting it into the NDAA. By the end of the year.
Alex Klokus 16:48 : Do you think that it's imperative that the United States leads on the disclosure efforts?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 16:54 : So this is an interesting question, too, because this is a global phenomenon, and it's affecting other countries, just like the United States, the reporting on this is clear: over decades, other countries have reported this stuff. And not only that, the Vatican has come out and made statements that reference or tangentially referenced this topic. So, organized religion has a say, in this topic as well. So it's really a “whole of planet, whole of humanity problem”. And so the US has got its role to play. But these other countries have their role to play. And it will be who of us to recognise that, US action can be preempted by another party. And it'd be probably more conducive to work collectively.
Alex Klokus 17:38 : I think the one thing that I don't fully understand that I'd love to get your thoughts on, Karl, if we assume that a higher form of non-human intelligence has been visiting this planet, if we assume that some of the statements made by folks like Dave Grusch are true, that we have crashed materials, and if we assume that those crafts, that we may have, exhibit characteristics that defy our current understanding of physics, it would seem that, that technology would provide an incredible strategic advantage to whatever nation ends up reverse engineering at first. And so, to me, that would imply that there is a race happening to reverse engineer this, and that this topic would be a top priority. Do you agree with that?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 18:26 : So I think some of what you say is a reasonable conclusion to be drawn. And I've suggested something similar in past statements. The point here, though, is to go from a pre Disclosure to a post Disclosure world, maybe two stable states that are separated by an unstable middle ground. And so how you make that transition? Again, this speaks to the concern about this catastrophic Disclosure. And this is coming up in sort of arms regulation to mutually assured destruction, however much we don't like it is sort of a stable, kind of, geostrategic regime. You know, the Reagan era, defense shield idea, is also a very stable scenario, but to go from one to the other is very unstable. And so this topic sort of mirrors that.
Alex Klokus 19:14 : I know you and I were talking earlier about this idea that in order to really understand the phenomenon, it's likely that we have to further our understanding of reality itself. And I guess I'm wondering, I can imagine a future where we acknowledge, and we know that there is a higher form of non-human intelligence, yet we still don't truly understand the phenomenon, we still don't truly understand reality. And so I guess I'm wondering, do you think that we'll ever truly understand what's going on, or if part of the game, part of the journey, part of life itself is operating in an environment where at least part of it is fundamentally unknowable to us?
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 19:56 : So it's a totally philosophical epistemological question, right, really about the nature of knowledge itself, right? Like, how can we know what we know? And how can we be sure about what we know? I guess, personally, I subscribe to the idea that there is an ultimate truth. And that humanity being created in the image of a higher power is endowed with the quality to pursue an understanding of that. And so, part of our objective in this existence is to seek that out and try to understand, that ultimate truth to a greater and greater degree. And this will be a component of that, obviously.
Alex Klokus 20:33 : Well, Karl, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. I'm hopeful and optimistic that together, maybe we can move the ball forward here and further our understanding of what is really going on. Because I certainly agree with you. I think it is very consequential that we figure this out. So thank you again for coming. Thank you again, to SALT for hosting us. And thank you all for listening.
Ret. Col. Karl Nell 20:59 : My pleasure, thank you.