PDB Afternoon Bulletin | November 14th, 2024: Whistleblowers Drop UFO Bombshells & Russia Escalates Attacks On Ukraine Post-Election
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Kickstart your day with the delicious taste of Blackout Coffee. Now, Blackout Coffee is a family-owned business and they are all about producing premium coffee. It's fresh roasted and it is shipped out within 48 hours of roasting. Go to blackoutcoffee.com, promo code PDB for 20% off your first time purchase. It's Thursday, 14 November. Welcome to the PDB Afternoon Bulletin. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. Let's

Let's get briefed. First, in the latest push for UFO transparency, ah, you did not see me starting off today's bulletin with UFOs, did you? But, in the latest push for UFO transparency on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., several former military and Pentagon officials testified Wednesday that the U.S. government is sitting on a trove of evidence that unidentified aerial phenomena are real and the craft have been operating in our skies for decades.

And by the way, when was the last time you heard anybody use the word trove? Then,

Then, Russia has unleashed a massive drone and missile attack on the Kyiv region as the Putin regime intensifies their assaults on Ukrainian territory ahead of Donald Trump's return to the White House in January. But first, our afternoon spotlight. Former government and military officials delivered, let's call it scintillating testimony to Congress on Wednesday, claiming that UFOs are real and the government is hiding the truth.

Or, well, something like that. Like all UFO hearings, the testimony was tantalizingly short on specifics. No smoking ray gun. The revelations came during a hearing by two House Oversight subcommittees, which is part of a larger effort by Congress to investigate unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, and to determine if elements inside the government are unlawfully hiding evidence of these phenomena to Congress and the American people.

That's according to a report from Fox News. Congress held its first hearings in more than 50 years on the subject of UFOs back in 2022. And since then, dozens of witnesses have alleged that they've seen these craft firsthand operating in ways that defy the conventional laws of physics.

and that the government has been monitoring this phenomena through highly classified compartmentalized programs. Witnesses have also described a culture of secrecy within the government that seeks to stifle public disclosure on this topic. What? A culture of secrecy within the government?

In testimony on Wednesday, retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet said, "We should not turn a blind eye, but boldly face this new reality and learn from it." Gallaudet said he first became aware of the UFO phenomena in 2015 after being sent a video over email by an officer from the U.S. Fleet Forces Command, which showed an inexplicable flying object spotted during naval training exercises

He'd been told there were several near-mid-air collisions and that the training exercise might have to be shut down due to the presence of this craft. He described the craft as, quote, unlike anything in our arsenal. But the very next day, Gallaudet said the email had mysteriously vanished from his and others' inboxes, and higher-ups never discussed the incident again.

Even more sensational was the testimony of Lou Elizondo, the former head of the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, known as AATIP, because, well, frankly, it's not a government program unless it has an acronym.

AATIP was tasked with investigating UAPs for the Pentagon. Now, Elizondo said point blank that the U.S., along with some of our adversaries, are in possession of UAPs and are covering it up to, quote, hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos, end quote.

He said, quote, Let me be clear. UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe, end quote. During questioning by Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who serves as chairwoman of one of the subcommittees,

Elizondo said the government had a secret UFO crash retrieval program that works to reverse engineer any craft that they discover. He also said elements inside the government aggressively work to silence and retaliate against whistleblowers.

Elizondo said, quote, a small cadre within our own government involving the UAP topic has created a culture of suppression and intimidation that I have personally been victim to, along with many of my former colleagues, end quote. He urged Congress to enact stronger whistleblower protections and for President-elect Donald Trump to foster transparency on the issue when he returns to office, saying, quote, Americans can handle the truth. Hmm.

Well, I don't know. Can they? A third witness, journalist Michael Schellenberger, testified Wednesday that multiple Pentagon sources have alleged the existence of what he described as an unacknowledged special access program known as Immaculate Constellation. He said the program coordinates and consolidates information on UIPs that's been collected by the military and fiercely guards access to this information.

He also claimed the executive branch has been managing the UAP issue for decades without the knowledge of Congress. Schellenberger said, quote,

Talking about it, he said, will put you in the danger zone, end quote. At one point during the hearing, Congresswoman Mace said unnamed people inside the government attempted to pressure them into not holding the hearing, saying they feared what may be disclosed. We should stress, a persistent issue with this topic, as you may have guessed over the years, is the lack of direct evidence to back up the sensational claims of whistleblowers.

The official line from the Pentagon, of course, is that there is no evidence that UFO sightings represent alien activity or that the government is hiding the evidence from alien crash sites. In a previous statement, a Pentagon spokesperson said they, quote, have not found any verifiable evidence that any UAP observation represented extraterrestrial activity.

nor has the department discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently. I wonder if the Pentagon spokesperson knows that that is an extreme run-on sentence. Now, not for nothing, but look, in the past, I have spent a fair amount of time, as you may be aware, investigating the UAP world for the Science Channel and Discovery Network.

So, are there compartmentalized secret programs within the Pentagon and intel community? Well, yes, absolutely. Are there efforts to identify and catalog UAPs, sightings by military and private sector aviators in particular, that can't be explained or identified? Well, again, yes, the answer is absolutely.

That's just logical, frankly, from a national security perspective. It's important to be proactive, to understand what nations hostile to the U.S. and the West may be doing in terms of advanced aircraft or material science or propulsion systems.

But is there evidence being secretly held by the government of aliens or alien craft and materials as the individuals at this latest hearing are testifying to and or implying in their statements? Well, not that you'd be able to determine from testimony, but.

It's always, well, there's stuff. I mean, I know there's stuff. I just can't tell you about it because, you know, it's hidden and secret stuff. Now, that doesn't mean that I think we're alone somehow in the vastness of space. It would be, I think, fairly arrogant to say that we, meaning humans, are all that there is. Nothing but this life on Earth spinning around in space.

So I don't think we're alone, but I'm not convinced that we've been visited or are being watched. I mean, maybe so. Maybe they've stopped by and were disappointed in what they found and they moved on. But a trove of evidence that the U.S. government has been sitting on for decades? Okay, well, never say never. But for now, there's a distinct lack of evidence. So here at the PDB, we'll keep digging.

Coming up, Russia has unleashed a massive drone and missile attack on the Kiev region as the Putin regime intensifies their assaults on Ukrainian territory ahead of Donald Trump's return to the White House in January. I'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Afternoon Bulletin. Russia unleashed a massive missile and drone assault on the Kyiv region Wednesday, marking the third consecutive day of escalated attacks on Ukraine. The early morning attack on Kyiv followed days of intensifying attacks across Ukraine.

Air raid sirens blared around 6.30 a.m. as drones and missiles targeted Kyiv. Now, this attack ends a rare 73-day period of relative calm over Kyiv, during which Russia had largely relied on just drone warfare instead of large-scale missile strikes.

Ukrainian President Zelensky seized on this latest assault to emphasize the urgent need for Western defense support, posting on X, quote, around 90 strike drones attacked Ukraine and stressing that defense aid is, quote, life-saving. Zelensky reiterated the critical role of Western-backed air defense systems, stating, quote, it is crucial that our forces have the necessary means to defend the country from Russian terror.

During the two-hour assault, the Ukrainian Air Force tracked a total of 96 aerial threats, including ballistic and cruise missiles. Ukrainian air defenses intercepted most of these. One person was injured, however, and firefighters quickly contained a warehouse blaze ignited by the wreckage. According to Ukrainian reports, the assault involved approximately 90 Iranian-manufactured Shahed drones, and that's one of the largest deployment of Shahed drones yet.

As we've been tracking on the PDB, Kiev's bombardment follows a deadly Russian drone strike near the Black Sea on Monday, which left five dead and injured one other. And this came a day after Russia launched its largest drone strike of the war, sending 145 drones across Ukraine.

The week following President-elect Donald Trump's victory has coincided with a 44% increase in Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian cities. That's according to an ABC News report. Russia has leaned heavily on Iranian-manufactured Shahed drones, launching an average of 91 of these daily. That's an uptick from the 64 drones averaged in early October.

For three of the seven days following Trump's election, the daily drone total exceeded 100, a threshold reached only five times in the previous five weeks. Ukraine's Air Force recorded over 640 Russian strike drones deployed over the past week. In the coming months leading up to Trump's inauguration, Ukraine and Russia are likely to intensify military maneuvers.

Former Security Service of Ukraine officer Ivan Stupak noted that Russian drone launches surged from roughly 800 in August to over 2,000 in October. Stupak anticipates Russia to ramp up its attacks, aiming to push Ukraine into a vulnerable position ahead of Trump's proposed peace talks. With Trump pledging to swiftly end the conflict, both nations are racing to strengthen their footholds.

The White House, meanwhile, is still holding back on requests from Ukraine to use U.S. long-range munitions to strike Russian military facilities, including drone and missile launch sites that are within Russia. And at the same time, Russia has massed upwards of 50,000 troops, including an estimated 10,000 North Korean troops, in Kursk in what is anticipated to be an effort to push Ukrainian forces out of Russian territory.

And that, my friends, is the PDB Afternoon Bulletin for Thursday, 14 November.

Now, if you have any questions or you have any comments, please reach out to me at pdbatthefirsttv.com. And of course, to listen to the show ad-free, well, become a premium member of the President's Daily Brief by simply visiting pdbpremium.com. And as we approach another weekend, you can count on the PDB team to be busy preparing another outstanding episode of our extended weekend show that would be the PDB Situation Report.

Every Friday evening at 10 p.m. on the first TV, we take to the airwaves with excellent guests and insight and news on the key global issues. It is a trove of information. There's that word again. It's a buffet line of insight without the sneeze guards. It's also available on our YouTube channel at President's Daily Brief and all podcast platforms where you get your podcast stuff. I'm Mike Baker. I'll be back tomorrow. Until then, stay informed.

Stay safe, stay cool.