Secretary Of Energy Breaks Silence on UFOs

Summary

Jesse Michaels interviews John Herrington, former U.S. Secretary of Energy under Ronald Reagan, about the long-reported link between UFOs and nuclear sites, and about how nuclear secrecy laws might shield UFO secrets. Herrington flatly denies Brent Friedman's viral story that he once confessed to being briefed on aliens in an underground West Virginia facility, calling it total fabrication. Friedman responds in a follow-up segment, standing by his account and speculating that the 1981 conversation may have been a test or initiation.

Key takeaways

• 1Brent Friedman claims that in summer 1981 Herrington told him he had a higher clearance than the president, had been briefed for months in an underground West Virginia facility, and that 'aliens are real, they're here.' Herrington calls this 'total and complete BS.'
• 2Herrington confirms touring the Greenbrier continuity-of-government bunker around 1986-87 and says he was 16th in the presidential line of evacuation.
• 3Herrington says a nuclear-powered airplane, never flown, sits in a hangar in Idaho Falls, and that the F-117 stealth fighter was hidden in the DOE budget and based on Energy Department land in Nevada.
• 4Jesse describes Harold Malmgren's claim that UFO debris fell during the Bluegill Triple Prime high-altitude nuclear test and passed through AEC official Lawrence Preston Gise.
• 5Stanford professor Garry Nolan's mass spectrometry of the Ubatuba, Brazil magnesium fragment reportedly showed anomalous isotope ratios. Palomar Observatory transients were reportedly correlated with 1950s nuclear tests.
• 6Friedman says David Grusch contacted him seeking insight into Herrington as a source of oral history. Former DOE intelligence chief Rolf Mowatt-Larssen described a DOE Roswell 'hazing' ritual. Books cited include 'UFOs and Nukes,' Chase Brandon's 'The Crypto Conundrum,' and John P. Craven's 'The Silent War.'

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Today, we make American Alchemist history. I have seen laser technology that could bring down almost anything. We get to interview a former Secretary of Energy. That's right, the guy that ran the entire Department of Energy. All of our nuclear programs, the national labs, and if I'm right, probably a lot of stuff around UFOs. If you actually read the Atomic Energy Act, if something is not a nuke, but it has radiological energy coming off it, you know, alpha, beta decay, whatever. Whatever, same secrecy. Same secrecy. I believe nuclear secrecy was used as a Trojan horse for UFO secrecy. The Manhattan Project would have custody of it, and then it would go into the Atomic Energy Commission, and then it would go into the Department of Energy, which has its own line of clearances. And that makes sense. UFOs have shown up at nuclear weapons installations and civilian energy grids for the last 80 years. Countless witnesses have reported UFOs hovering around nuclear sites since the '40s, before we had drones or reconnaissance planes. And thousands of military and intelligence reports have documented this connection. From Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, the site of the largest nuclear stockpile to date, to Fukushima, Japan, to Chernobyl in Ukraine, the connection between nuclear and UFOs is global and ubiquitous. But the person we're about to interview isn't just any Secretary of Energy. He was one of Ronald Reagan's closest advisers throughout his career. And the reason I really wanted to interview him is that there has been a story circulating about him by a friend of the show and former American Alchemist, Brent Friedman. Here's how that story goes. ...

Excerpt from American Alchemy, Oct 7, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.