The Why Files: w/ James Fox on UFO Disclosure, Varginha & More (Transcript)

And he’s like, “Oh, you’re doing this documentary.” He goes, “Go out and do this, this, this and this.” And he gave me this whole laundry list of stuff I had to do.

And he goes, “99.9% of the time when I told people to go do that, I’d never see them again. And I was happy about that. But son of a bitch, you came back a year later and you did everything I told you to do. So I felt obligated to help you.”

So he was sneaking me and Boris Zuboff into this production facility that was like hundreds of dollars an hour. We’d come in on Friday — “Yeah, we’re just going to do a couple of hours” — and then we’d stay up all Friday night, all Saturday, all Sunday, just coffee and grinding away. And then we had to leave before it opened back up on Monday morning. Boris, bless your heart, he really helped me make that film happen.

And I was using a non-linear editing system called a Toaster Flyer on the Amiga. I remember when I was setting that up, the guy at the store — Winner’s Circle in Berkeley, probably not around anymore — he goes, “Well, I tell you what, James, I’ve got these two four gig drives, or you can pull out all the stops and get the nine gig drives.” Nine gigs? How much is nine gigs?

AJ GENTILE: We’ll never fill it.

JAMES FOX: But it was $2,400 each for one nine gig drive, and I got two, and he let me pay in installments. So I was editing the movie in like 15 minute segments. And then I’d bring them into this post production house and we spliced the film together with Digibeta and all that. And anyway, so that was my first film.

AJ GENTILE: Well, hang on, did your dad get to see that?

A Turning Point: Gordon Cooper

JAMES FOX: Oh, sorry, yes. Getting back to that very good point — he did, and he was pretty damn impressed. But I’ll tell you what got him. He was very impressed. My whole family was. I mean, I sold it to Discovery. My first documentary took me about four years, and I sold it to Discovery. And I tell you, man, I felt like I climbed Mount Everest. It was really taxing and really difficult. Way more work than I ever anticipated making a documentary.

I had put out requests for interviews during the time of production with that doc that they never got back to me. And post doc and the release, I got accepted. I got invited to go to Russia, and I got invited to meet with Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper. Well, Gordon Cooper was an iconic figure of my dad’s generation.

AJ GENTILE: He was an amazing man.

JAMES FOX: Oh, yeah. Last American astronaut to orbit the planet alone in a little tin can. And I thought, well, normally I would travel with my father on assignment. This time I said, “Dad, how would you like to come with me and meet Gordon Cooper?” So he came with us. We got his wheelchair van, loaded it up, me and a couple of people got my camera gear. I did all my own audio and camera then.

And we did this interview, and my dad was looking in the eyes of Gordon Cooper and he was like, “Son of a bitch. Why would this guy lie?” He had a landing at Edwards Air Force Base that was filmed. He talked about processing the film footage. He’d seen the film footage. Of course, as with all film footage, two men in suits showed up in a courier jet from Washington D.C. and it was never to be seen or heard from ever again.

And then on top of that, he had these sightings of these discs in the 50s over Germany in these planes. And my dad just walked away from that going, “This guy’s not selling his story. He’s not selling a book. He’s an iconic figure of my generation. He’s a hero. He’s not crazy. Why on earth? What would motivate him to lie?” And that was a turning point for my father. That really got him going. “Shit, maybe my son’s right. Maybe there is something going on here.” When he died, he was one of my biggest fans.

AJ GENTILE: That’s amazing. That’s what justification for that.

The Phenomenon: Eight Years in the Making

JAMES FOX: Yeah, I know. Unfortunately, he wasn’t around to see the Phenomenon because I worked on that for eight years. I started the Phenomenon right when he died, and then it took me eight years. Maybe it took me longer than eight years because I started it concept at 43, filming at 44, finished and promoting at 52. Yeah, that’s a long time.

And it’s really funny. I had some editors come in with me because I edited for three or four years on that movie. It was a lot of work, cases all around the world, whatever. And there’s one editor, Ben Gallon, he goes, “Dude, who’s that? Who’s that guy over there on your film footage?” I was like, “That’s me.” He goes, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah, that’s when I first started, like nine years ago.” All brown hair, no wrinkles. You know what I mean? It was really funny. I was like, yeah, that took the wind out of my sails on that one.

But yeah, so that’s kind of how I got started. And I never anticipated that I was going to be the UFO guy making UFO docs.

The Spark of Curiosity

AJ GENTILE: Well, what was the click that made you suddenly get interested in that?

JAMES FOX: Well, so I had a friend of mine, this guy Renee Harris, from high school. And when we graduated from high school, I was like, “Hey, let’s fly to Europe and let’s drive across. Let’s get a car in London and drive to Portugal.” So we bought this — we flew to London together. He had way more money than I did at the time.

AJ GENTILE: Best friends to have.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, yeah. And we bought a Fiat 131 and we drove. We painted the doors red. We thought, let’s spice this car up. It was white. So we painted it red on the hood and the whatever. And then we drove it to Portugal and ended up having to ditch it. Came back. But we went across Europe together, really, really good friends.

And then he was like, “I’m just hungry all the time in Europe.” He’s this big guy, and he’s like, “The food portions are so small in Europe. I need more food. And everything’s so expensive.” And he wanted to go home. So he went home a little early. I stayed on. I ended up becoming an au pair. I went to London, sold clothing door to door — sleeve clothing, the stall that comes to you — had the door slammed in my face. And then I worked as an au pair in the French Alps, not speaking any French.

And then when I came back to the States quite a bit later, we kind of fell out. And then we reunited in our early 20s, and he was into UFOs. And I was like, what a shame.

AJ GENTILE: This guy’s nuts.

James Fox’s Journey into UFO Research

JAMES FOX: This guy’s lost his mind. He’s one of my best friends, and I’m going to have to cut him loose. He was talking about Roswell and this UFO. I mean, I was like, oh, my God, this is tragic.

So then I brought it up with one of my people that I was working with at this — I was apprenticing at this production facility in San Francisco — and this guy, Richard Van Sickle. And I looked up to him. He was 10 years my senior and very experienced in production. He was a great guy, very smart.

I said, “God, you’re not going to believe — my friend and Roswell.” And he goes, “Oh, James. Yeah. You didn’t hear about Roswell?” I’m like, “Well, yeah, I heard about it, but what do you know?” And then he started getting like, “Oh, yeah, the military actually announced the recovery of a flying saucer and UFOs.” And he was very well versed in everything, and I had a lot of respect for him. So I thought, well, I’ll look into it. And the more I dug, the more I realized, oh, my God, there’s something going on.

AJ GENTILE: And there was. The inspiration for the first doc came from that.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. I mean, not that exact meeting, but I decided, okay, I’m going to look into it. Just like Varginha — I reluctantly looked into that case.

I heard about that case in the 90s. I heard about Ruwa through Steven Spielberg. When I was making my first documentary on UFOs in the 90s, we had a mutual friend, Janet Yang. Janet Yang was friends with Spielberg, and I was making a UFO doc. And I thought, well, of course he’s going to grant me an interview because I’m making a UFO doc, and I’m James Fox.

And he got back to us and he’s like, “Yeah, not going to meet with James, but he’s doing a doc on UFOs. He should know about this Ariel School case that happened in Africa.” And that was in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, at Ariel School in ’94, I think. He told me about it in ’97, ’96. And I was like, “Yeah, I’m not going to waste any time. Yeah, sure. A UFO landed at a school, occupants got out and interacted with the school children telepathically.” I mean, not wasting a second on that case. And I didn’t.

And the same thing with Varginha. I heard about Varginha in the late 90s when I was making my second UFO documentary, and my British friend and co-producer at the time, Tim Coleman — very smart guy — he’s like, “Oh, yeah, mate, we’ve got to look into this.” Because we map out the film, generally speaking, it’s like, “Hey, let’s look at Bentwaters, 1980, Tehran, Iran in 1975. How about the Phoenix Lights case?” We kind of map the film out that way and then stitch it together with narrative.

AJ GENTILE: The Australia case I think you covered.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, that was in The Phenomenon. But in any case, at the time I was mapping it out and he was like, “Yeah, let’s put this one on the chalkboard — you hear about this UFO crash in Brazil and the live aliens walking through the town.” And I looked at him and I was like, I picked the wrong partner.

AJ GENTILE: It sounds nuts to me.

JAMES FOX: I was with my buddy Boris, and he looked at me kind of sideways and I was looking at him sideways. And then I looked at Tim and I said to myself quietly, “I think I picked the wrong partner. This guy’s nuts.”

Not only did I not look into the case for over 10 years — I finished Out of the Blue, then I did a director’s cut for Out of the Blue years later. Then I did a two-hour special called I Know What I Saw, which I ended up selling to A&E, broadcast on the History Channel. And I never looked into Varginha. I refused to.

And then I got invited to Brazil, a place called Peruíbe. And I met with this guy AJ Javard, who’s a Brazilian UFO researcher and magazine editor. But before I left, this guy named Jeff Sagansky — I think he used to be head of Sony Pictures — he was always very instrumental behind the scenes helping me get distribution for my UFO films. And I was always really grateful because he never wanted a penny or anything.

But he found out I was going to Brazil, and this was like 2010, maybe — I’d have to look at exactly, 2010, 2011, something like that. And he’s like, “Oh, James, you’re going to Brazil. You’ve got to look into that Varginha case.” And I cringed. I physically cringed.

But Jeff — I had so much respect for him. I was like, “You know what? I’m not going to sit there and tell Jeff he’s nuts because he’s been too influential, he’s too much of a nice guy.” But I said, “Yeah, yeah, sure, Jeff. Yeah, yeah, sure. No, I’ll definitely look into that. Yep, I’ll report back for sure. Yeah. Bye.” Click. And I was like, I’m not wasting a second on this case.

So just to give your audience some context — I understand, I see people online saying there’s no evidence, and I get it because I had that same reaction. And I’m not out here trying to prophesize and get people to join my cult of believers. I really mean that when I say it. All I say is: listen to the firsthand eyewitness testimony, because it’s very compelling.

Maintaining Credibility in the UFO Space

AJ GENTILE: Well, before we get into Varginha, which we’ll definitely cover in detail — how have you managed to stay sane? I don’t want to use the word “credible” because it’s not really the right word. But how have you managed to just — you have so much integrity and respect from not just the UFO community, but from everybody. How have you stayed that guy, probably the most trustworthy voice?

JAMES FOX: Well, I’ve made mistakes, and I try — I really try hard to — if I don’t believe something, I won’t put it in a film. And if I have any question, I’ll say so. Generally speaking, I do as much background research as I possibly can. I reach out to as many people within the intelligence community that I trust — people that can do full background checks. I call people up. I want to see their military records.

For instance, there was a controversial character named Jason Sands. And Jason had an account of an alleged close encounter of the third kind that happened at Nellis Test Range back in the 90s. Very compelling. And especially when you hear — we know about close encounters of the third kind, we know about — I’ve heard a number of reports of people that worked out at the base that claim there are entities out there. It’s a tall order. I don’t know.

But I checked his military records. I checked in with all the intel folks that I possibly could. I did background on the UFO footage that leaked from that period. I even contacted his ex-wife, and I had to pay her because she was like, “I’m not — I have to go up in the attic and dig through all these dusty boxes, and I’m not doing that.” She didn’t like him, obviously.

AJ GENTILE: The exes are like that.

JAMES FOX: I said, “I’ll give you $200 per picture.” I had those pictures three days later — bam — of him, exactly where he said he was, at the base. All the pictures, all of his military records. I talked to people in the Senate that sat in a SCIF with him. They’re like, “I know he’s got PTSD and he might say some off-the-wall stuff, but that guy was there. He named classified legacy program names that we got in trouble just for asking about. I know he’s got some issues, but he’s legit. He was where he says he was, and we think that encounter happened.”

So I decided to report on it. And I got lambasted by people out there — like, “You connect yourself with Jason Sands?” That was a tough call. I was the one that accidentally outed him. So I make mistakes. Would I do things differently? Maybe.

But this is tough because we’re now in an arena where we’re having these incredible allegations of crash retrieval — legacy UAP crash retrieval programs. These are really serious allegations. Where’s the proof? There’s no smoke without fire. We have people testifying under oath as to the existence of a crash retrieval legacy program. I’ve interviewed aerospace engineers and physicists that are directly involved — or claim to be directly involved — that would love to give us more information, but they need immunity. So I do the best I can. Sometimes I make mistakes, and I try to be kind to everybody, and I try to stay in my own lane.

The Whistleblowers: Real or Disinformation?

AJ GENTILE: Where are you with the whistleblowers and the current narrative? The folks coming out — Grusch, Elizondo, the guys that come from military intelligence that have clearance, they clear their talking points for DoD. Where are you with this? Is it real? Is it disinformation?

JAMES FOX: Well, here’s what I say to the people out there that criticize these whistleblowers. Fair enough — because they say, “I’m sick and tired of hearing these allegations, and where’s the proof?” Instead of criticizing them, why don’t we recognize the fact that they’re saying they want to tell us the classified details needed, but they are concerned about their personal safety? They’re concerned about the consequences. They’re concerned about their clearances. Those are legitimate concerns.

So instead of criticizing them, why don’t we figure out how to create a platform that will enable them to testify under oath to a bipartisan group of lawmakers publicly?

So that’s one of the questions that I’d ask aerospace engineer Dr. Eric Davis. He’s making some incredible allegations. And he’s like, “Look” — I said, “Yeah, but this is really frustrating because you’re telling me there’s crash retrieval and there’s pictures of aliens and all this other stuff, but where’s the—” He’s like, “Look, you get President Trump tomorrow to wave the magic wand and give me immunity. I’ll give you all the details you need.”

So instead of focusing our attention on attacking these people, why don’t we just call their bluff and say, “I’ll tell you what, let’s push members of Congress” — which is what I’ve been doing recently. I just met with members of Congress in the task force in Washington, D.C. about 10 days ago. And I’m trying to get them to look into the Varginha case. I’m trying to find out how can we get hearings on more witnesses. What sort of environment can we create as a platform for all these people that claim to have all this knowledge, that want to come forward but are terrified of the consequences?

Why don’t we focus on that? Because whether you believe Grusch or not, if it’s true what he’s saying, it’s the biggest story in the history of mankind. Of course, let’s call their bluff. Let’s focus on getting the president, the executive branch, to say, “Hey, wave the magic wand, give these guys immunity. They’re dying to testify. Let’s do it. What are we waiting for?”

AJ GENTILE: Even Eric Davis said he would — he’d say everything.

JAMES FOX: He said he would. He said it to me on camera, because I was really frustrated too. And people just sit on the sidelines and criticize. I’m like, why don’t we call their bluff? Why don’t we focus more on resolving this issue as opposed to, “That guy’s lying, he’s a deep psyop” — this, that, the other person. I don’t want to hear it.

All I know is that people are testifying under oath — under oath — saying that the crash retrieval program, biologics, all that stuff exists. What about the — what was his name? The ICIG, Intelligence Community Inspector General, that apparently David Grusch said he’d given all the classified details needed to verify his claims in a SCIF. Thomas Mon — Thomas Mannheim, I think it was. Why don’t we subpoena him and get him to give us those details? Why don’t we focus on that? There’s no talk of that. Do you see what I’m saying?

AJ GENTILE: Of course.

JAMES FOX: So it’s like we need to all get together. We need to stop bickering with one another, criticizing online, and focus on a common goal — to make this happen. And that’s what I was trying to do in D.C. That’s what I was trying to do with the press conference. What is it going to take?

Kirk McConnell was talking about it. He sat in on the SCIFs with firsthand witnesses. That was pretty extraordinary. Talked about the environment. There are some people, like Christopher Mellon, for instance, who is saying that Congress actually has the authority to do this.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: Not even, of course, the executive branch, for sure. The President of the United States can just wave his magic wand and what does he got? What’s he got to lose?

AJ GENTILE: Nothing.

JAMES FOX: There’d be statues of him all around the world there, not everywhere, but I agree. But if he, you know.

AJ GENTILE: But where’s the resistance? Where’s the resistance coming from? Who’s in charge?

The Pushback from the DoD and Intelligence Agencies

JAMES FOX: Well, so I talked to people in the task force. Just like 10 days ago, we had a closed door meeting, which actually Leslie Keane and Ralph Blumenthal just wrote about it today. That story came out in the debrief. I would highly recommend you viewers go check it out 100% because it’s got pictures and very detailed account of what happened.

But they said that the pushback they’re getting from the DoD is significant. The intelligence agencies significant. Like what’s happening and the — and some of the threats, you know, I mean, Grusch. I mean, I’ve heard — I can’t reveal what I’ve heard, but what I’ve heard was, if it’s true, that’s pretty scary. Basically coming in your house while you’re gone and leaving notes and other things. You know, just like, you know, “we can touch you anywhere” kind of stuff.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

AJ GENTILE: Well, I mean, wherever you stand on someone like Lazar, believe or not, the government made his life difficult for a good long time.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, for sure. So, George — I trust George Knapp’s reporting on that.

AJ GENTILE: I do as well. I trust him more than anyone.

JAMES FOX: I really do. I have tremendous respect for him.

AJ GENTILE: So what — why don’t they want us to know? There’s some advantage that they have.

Why They Don’t Want Us to Know

JAMES FOX: Okay. So let’s just live in an alternate reality for a moment. Okay. And let’s just imagine that this is all true. Let’s imagine that UFOs have crashed. Let’s imagine that we have biologics, we have captured some alive. Let’s imagine that we have this technology in a lab somewhere.

Let’s just say that the observed technology with UFOs — and it’s well documented for over 80 years, and someday it goes way back, but whatever, we’ll just talk about the modern UFO wave. These things exhibit a technology that’s light years advanced from anything we have in our possession even today. Listen to David Fravor. Listen to the various pilots over the years talk about how they fly rings around their fastest jets, and they got no wings and no tail and no visible means of propulsion. They can hover, accelerate from a standstill to out of sight, blink of an eye, right angle turns at high speed.

Kirk McConnell talked about the radar tapes — we have radar of these objects with no wings. These tic-tac shaped objects, they’re in space, they drop down to sea level faster than a second. 22,000 Gs, 80,000 feet in less than a second. Okay, so whatever these things are, and whoever’s piloting these things, if you could weaponize that technology, you’re going to control — and of course that’s how the military thinks.

So let’s again, in this alternate reality, let’s just imagine that that’s all true right now. Do you think that those in control of this technology — whether they’ve figured it out or not, there’s a lot of controversy on both sides. Some people say we have, some people say we haven’t, some people say we understand the technology, we don’t quite know how to replicate it because the power it would take to generate, blah blah blah. But what incentive would the Defense Department or the various agencies that are in control of the special access, super ultra secret programs — how would they benefit by sharing that technology with the rest of the world?

AJ GENTILE: They would not.

JAMES FOX: Okay, so — well, how about imagining if that technology got out to the Russians or the Chinese? And they weaponize it, they put a nuke on it — I could just see that being an issue of national security.

So the so-called biologics — they call them biologics — the non-human intelligent beings. That should not be an issue of national security. So we’re kind of pivoting to that. We’ve talked about that at the event. But they would have to admit that Earth is under some sort of observation. We have definitive proof that we’re not alone. We have biologics. We’ve been lying to you guys for 80 plus years. Roswell was real. Magenta was real. The ’30s in Italy. We don’t know who they are, where they come from, or what their agenda is. I don’t see an incentive to disclose that either.

AJ GENTILE: Okay, that’s a fair answer.

The Case for Disclosure

JAMES FOX: Yeah. And I don’t agree with that. And a lot of people don’t agree with that. People have a fundamental right. And what we’re talking about — that’s happening in the United States — it’s a global issue. This is going to impact the whole world.

I remember when I met with — this is probably one of the first times that I actually thought about the implications. And I’m all for disclosure. I don’t care. The truth is the truth and people should know. And if the technology has to stay a national security issue for all the reasons we just discussed, then fair enough. But at least confess that you have it.

AJ GENTILE: So say, “We have it. Look, we’re not sharing it. We can’t let our enemies have it. But we do have it.”

JAMES FOX: Yeah, I think that there should be an admission of that. I really do.

I met with Robert Bigelow because right after I did I Know What I Saw, I got an email from his secretary — I still have the email — and she’s like, “Oh, Mr. Bigelow wants to congratulate you on a job well done,” on my film I Know What I Saw. And I was like, oh my God, Robert Bigelow. This guy could fund my next, you know.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

JAMES FOX: And so we ended up having lunch in Las Vegas and at his house, and he’s like, “You know, kid” — because I was probably in my late 30s, or maybe I was 40 — he’s like, “You know, kid, we looked into it. I probably poured more money into the phenomenon. I had intellectual heavyweights in the scientific community and NIDS and this.” And little did I know he was working on AAWSAP and AATIP at the time. He was tracked from Harry Reid.

AJ GENTILE: He was.

JAMES FOX: But he didn’t tell me about that. But he’s like, “Do you understand the impact that disclosure would have?” And I was thinking to myself, like, no — Kumbaya, group hug.

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

JAMES FOX: “We’re not alone.” He said it’s going to disunify global — you know. That’s why I always looked at it. I thought it’d be really cool. We’d see ourselves for who we really are as one race, one species, one planet. How cool would that be, right?

And he looked at me and he’s like, “Man, we did a study on this, and the impacts would be significant.” And I don’t know — I’m starting to think that maybe he’s right, or maybe it’s just the thing that the world needs right now. Because I think it would have a unifying effect. It might be initially quite shocking — ontological shock. Or maybe religions might have some issues with it.

AJ GENTILE: They might. But I think the Vatican is a little more open to this idea now.

The Vatican and the Varginha Case

JAMES FOX: It’s really funny you should say that because we reached out to someone to speak at our event — I probably won’t mention her name — but she’s like, “It’s really funny that you reached out and made a request for me to present at your event in D.C. Because high level people at the Vatican are just telling me about this new witness that you found on the Varginha case. They think it’s really significant.” And they said, “You’ve got to watch this. You’ve got to watch this video. Because if true, it’s the most significant development in the history of the phenomenon.” And I have to say, I think it is. So anyway, I agree.

AJ GENTILE: Where do you stand? My favorite landing video is the Holloman Air Force Base video.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, I mean, the video that we don’t have.

AJ GENTILE: We don’t have — which we do. We do have it, but we don’t. What do you think about that? What happened there?

The Holloman Air Force Base Landing Case

JAMES FOX: Oh, just like every other case that I’ve ever investigated, including Socorro and Ruwa and Varginha — I don’t know. I always think, like, “That’s impossible.”

And I remember the first time — it was the first real serious time that I’d heard about the Holloman Landing case — I laughed it off pretty quickly. And then I started investigating Socorro. And Socorro is very close, a stone’s throw. I started reading articles from a woman named Carol Lorenzen of the UFO Bulletin. And she had described some media, and she was apparently a pretty reputable source during her time. She had described some interviews that she’d done with people at Holloman Air Force Base that had described this incident — one from the air, one from the ground, some other people. Very good articles.

And I thought, “That’s interesting.” Continued my investigation with Socorro and I ended up stumbling upon that documentary UFOs: Past, Present and Future with Emenegger and Sandler. And I’ll make this story quick, but I met with both of them, and Emenegger was absolutely convinced that it happened.

AJ GENTILE: And —

The Holloman Landing Footage

JAMES FOX: They were producing their documentary in the early 70s and they were working with a guy at the Pentagon named Colonel William T. Coleman, who I interviewed. And he was basically giving them carte blanche to do this UFO doc in the early 70s and giving them unprecedented access to all these bases and NORAD. And it was incredible what happened back in the 70s.

And apparently this is one of the reasons why I believe this happened. And I was sticking my teeth into it kind of as a side project. I didn’t even report on it because I was just like, whoa, let me check this out. As I was doing other stuff, making The Phenomenon, and I got to know Alan Sandler. I went to his house. I was going after some footage that he actually still has of an incident that happened at Vandenberg in the 1960s of an Atlas rocket and a UFO going around. And he had that.

He actually made a deal with me to buy it. I was going to give him like 25 grand and then he was going to show it to me. I had to put the money in an escrow account and he was going to show it to me. And if I liked it, it was everything he said it was going to be, he kept the money, I took the thing. Off I go, and the last one, I got the money and the last minute he pulled the carpet out and he’s like, “I talked to my lawyers and it’s really risky. And this had the other thing and I’m really well off and I don’t need the risk.” I was like, dude, really?

So during this time I was also interviewing Coleman and Emenegger, which I’m going to release all those interviews pretty soon for free on the Internet. And Alan’s like, “Oh, I saw that footage.” And I was driving my car when he told me this. I was like, “Excuse me. What, you saw the footage from Vandenberg?” “No, no, I saw the landing at Holloman.”

I said, “Okay, hold on a second.” Pull the car over. Stopped, engine off. “Okay, you’re telling me, Alan Sandler, that you saw the landing at Holloman?” He goes, “Yeah, I sure did. It was shown to me by a guy named Paul Shartle at Norton Air Force Base.” Okay, so why is it that Emenegger doesn’t know that? That’s weird.

So I closed my eyes and I got him to give me the description. Now he was like, this was clearly not fake. It was a real film footage of a real flying saucer that really flew and really landed. And he goes, “James, just like in a sci-fi movie. The door opened. It didn’t have any seams or anything. It just opened up.” And he was like, “I think it was, our technology back in the 70s. We have a flying saucer and we set it up as like a training video, as to what we do if we made contact.” I don’t agree with him. And neither did Emenegger, neither did Paul Shartle. But I don’t know if he knew. And he was just trying to, who knows? But that’s what he said.

So I said, “So you’re telling me it’s not a special effect?” He goes, “No, man, this is real footage. It was shown to me by Paul Shartle. Emenegger happened to not be at the base that day. And the very next morning, two men in suits showed up.” “You never saw this,” like, da, da, da. And it took the footage and it was gone.

And so for whatever reason, Alan didn’t tell Emenegger. And I actually got on the phone — I got the interview somewhere — and I was like, “Alright, Emmett, I’m here with Alan.” Or maybe I was with Emenegger and had Alan on the phone. I was with Emenegger and I was like, “Do you know that Alan saw the footage? Why didn’t you tell me?” So Alan saw that footage and described to me in vivid detail. And if you want me to tell you what he described, of course, happy to tell you.

AJ GENTILE: I’ve seen the landing, but I haven’t seen the doors open.

JAMES FOX: Okay. I have not seen the landing, so I haven’t seen any of it. But in any case, this is what he told me.

AJ GENTILE: It’s gorgeous. Oh, man.

Describing the Holloman Landing

JAMES FOX: He said that there were three discs coming over, escorted by military jets, coming over Holloman Air Force Base. It was daytime, but I can’t remember if it was afternoon or morning. I’m sorry, I just can’t remember.

AJ GENTILE: But it was daytime.

JAMES FOX: No question about that. So there are three discs coming in at rather high altitude, and when it got to a certain proximity of the base, two of them peeled away and one came down. And he said it came down almost like a leaf, like it was unstable and maybe had some issues. I was like, yeah, that’s kind of how they fly.

Came down and he goes, landed on some pods. I said, “Well, was the camera like on a tripod? Did they anticipate it coming?” And I believe he said there were cameras on a tripod. So they were expecting it.

And he goes, “James, the most incredible part — this is what I never forget. There was no door, no seam. It just opened.” And just dropped down. Two entities came out. He didn’t really describe what those ones looked like, because I should have asked. But he did describe what the other one looked like. And it had like an Egyptian head thing, Egyptian tight-fitting suit, I think he said, big eyes with the vertical slits, very small nose, very insignificant mouth. And it had what appeared to be some sort of communication device in his hand.

And that one came off, met with some base people at the base with a jeep. That one got in the jeep and off they went. And I said, “Well, what happened?” And he said, “Well, the film footage stayed for a minute and then it just cut. And the disc was still sitting there when it cut. And they were on the steps out and it cut. That was it.”

And I was like, maybe this footage does exist. And then I started talking to other people about it — Hal Puthoff, Eric Davis, Christopher Mellon. And to this day, Allen’s in his 90s and he’s like, “If you know where to look, it’s probably still in the archives.” I don’t know if AARO found it. Did Eric Davis say he saw it or he knew someone that did see it? President George W. Bush apparently was aware of that footage and they had a conversation about it. So I actually believe that footage exists. Obviously I can’t prove that, but that’s my background on that story.

AJ GENTILE: Have you come across anyone who could describe what the reason for that meeting was?

JAMES FOX: Absolutely no idea.

Project Serpo and Disinformation

AJ GENTILE: It’s connected to the Project Serpo story, but it’s just so wrapped up in disinformation, it’s really hard to know why they were there.

JAMES FOX: Well, the information that I just discussed with you I feel is pretty damn solid, like really solid. That is enough for me to go — am I positive the film footage exists? I don’t know. One can never be positive unless you see it for yourself. But I would say there’s a high level of probability that footage is real.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

JAMES FOX: And it does exist. And they almost got to use it. And I think — I don’t know how it got out. And Paul Shartle had gotten a call from Colonel Coleman. He was like, “Hey, these guys are coming to the base. Make everything available.” And I guess he had just processed it and he was like, this was real. Like this is not an act. Paul Shartle was convinced of it.

He ended up dying in a head-on collision with his wife. Both died. But he did go on one TV show and talk about it with Emenegger. And Emenegger was absolutely convinced that the footage existed. He was absolutely convinced. They almost got to use it in their film. And the recreations were based on exactly what that footage shows.

AJ GENTILE: So the military there was clearly anticipating that meeting. How long, how far back do you think that goes? The communication, the coordination with the military. Does this go back to Roswell?

JAMES FOX: I just have no idea. It’s all speculation. All I can tell you is what I know, what I personally investigated.

AJ GENTILE: Well, that’s why we all trust you.

JAMES FOX: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: Because you say, “I don’t know.”

Transitioning to the Varginha Case

JAMES FOX: Yeah, I don’t. And it’s just like people go with the Varginha case. “Well, this happened here. And there was seven days later, the girls…” I’m like, yeah, I know, that’s odd. Were there multiple crashes? Did the creatures hang out? Did they have an escape pod? Did they travel through the water? How did they get there? It’s a few miles away, several miles away. I don’t know. The girls describe this creature and I believe those girls. And this is one of the reasons why I really started digging into the Varginha case.

AJ GENTILE: We’re still teasing that one.

JAMES FOX: Sorry, we’re still teasing that.

AJ GENTILE: And actually when we get into that case — because you’re such a magical storyteller — if I step on any punch lines, if you’re building the story, let me know and I’ll let you do that. For this segment, which we’re only going to do for another five, ten minutes — so what’s the earliest case that you believe? Do you believe Roswell? Do you believe the multiple crash theory?

Roswell and Jesse Marcel

JAMES FOX: I could tell you why I believe Roswell. Okay. So first of all, I really believe Jesse Marcel.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

JAMES FOX: I was friends with his son who handled the debris — Jesse Marcel Jr., who was a medic in the military, and he had the

AJ GENTILE: debris that had markings on it, didn’t he?

The Roswell Debris and Alien Bodies

JAMES FOX: Yeah, the dad came back from the ranch with Mac Brazel, and one other military guy. He woke his kid up in the middle of the night, like, “You got to see this stuff. I’m waking you up. You got to see this.” And he showed him the material, the paper, the I-beams with the symbols, blah, blah, blah. And I knew him, so I knew someone who handled the debris.

There are still pieces out there, by the way, because I knew other people that when I would go to Socorro, there were the Plains of San Agustin and Magdalena and Dal and that whole area. Talk about remote, high desert plains. Beautiful. But I talked to a gentleman out there, and he’s like, “Yeah, there’s still some of those pieces of Roswell out here.” I said, “How do you know?” He goes, “Because I know the ranchers that have it. In fact, I got to touch one of them.” I was like, “Really? Do you think they’d talk to me?” He goes, “I don’t think so. They don’t talk to outsiders, and they don’t talk to anybody about that.”

So I had a lead on that. I don’t have the guy’s name, but that’s a side story. Roswell, of course, you look into it. They announced, they make the announcement that they recovered this thing, then they recant. How many hours later they have that press conference. They throw debris down on the ground. The balloon. Well, two out of the three — Raimi, Dubose, and Marcel. Raimi kept shut, but Dubose and Marcel both went on the record later. That was a cover story for what really crashed. It was not of this earth. I cover it in The Phenomenon quite extensively.

But I was making — probably out of the blue — my first UFO doc in San Francisco I was telling you about, and my partner at the time, Boris Zuboff, lived in this apartment complex on the top floor with a view of Dolores Park. Really nice. And one day he goes, “My landlady, she’s in her 80s, wants to have tea with you.” And it was in the 90s. I said, “What about?” He goes, “I don’t know. She found out we were doing a documentary on UFOs, and she wanted to have tea.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll have tea with her. Sure. I love tea. I’m English.”

My dad used to drink 20 or 30 cups a day. I used to jokingly see how many cups of tea I could bring my dad before he’d say he didn’t want any more. One day I just brought him cup after cup after cup because he’s always asking. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to make him a tea. And I got to like 25, and he’s like, “I’m good.” Wow.

So anyway, we have tea and she says, “I don’t want to go public or anything. I just found out you’re doing this documentary on UFOs, and I want you to know…” I think it was her husband that was deeply involved — he was a high-level scientific researcher for the government. And back in 1950, he told her — and she goes, “I haven’t talked to anybody about this.” She was in her 80s telling me this. She didn’t want any money. She didn’t want to go on the record. She just wanted me to know.

She said he told her that a UFO, a flying saucer, crashed in the desert of New Mexico and there were aliens recovered. He told her that in 1950. Nobody was talking about that. She goes, “I’ve held it in all this time.” And this guy was so solid and so credible and so honest, and he told her that like it happened. And I thought, why would she make that up?

AJ GENTILE: No reason to make it up.

Insider Knowledge and the Bigger Picture

JAMES FOX: You take that with all the rest of the stuff that’s going on and all the military — I had the distinct advantage of going to the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash. And at the time it was 1997, July. There were a lot of people still alive because if you’re in your 20s or 30s then, you’re in your 70s and 80s now. A lot of people that I got to meet — I was so glad I got to go — firsthand witnesses of all different walks of life, witnesses of the debris and whatever.

So that’s primarily why I’m totally convinced. Of course I’ve talked to intel folks. I even know where — I was told where the alien bodies were from Roswell. And the individual that told me where they were said Southern California. That’s where they went. That’s what was said to me. I understand. And I said to this individual — I can’t reveal this individual’s name — but we were at dinner having wine, and it slipped out. And I was like, well, I was thinking they’d be on the East Coast. Really?

AJ GENTILE: You should always bring wine to interviews.

JAMES FOX: Totally. And then the next day I brought it up, and the individual was like, “No, I didn’t.” I said, “You did. Actually, I heard it loud and clear.” “No, it didn’t.” “You did.” “No, no, I didn’t.” Isn’t that funny? It just flipped out. So apparently there’s somebody — at least one body from Roswell — in Southern California. Not sure exactly where, but I heard Southern California.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, I heard one went to Los Alamos.

JAMES FOX: I thought they would have gone to the East Coast. Because I was told recently — I don’t know if it was alive entities or the entities in general — on the East Coast. I got that much out of this individual. It’s like, well, where? Because I want to know where the damn bodies from Virginia went.

AJ GENTILE: Right?

JAMES FOX: And — “Oh, you know, I think I know.” And I was like, “Can you tell me more?” “East Coast.” And then the individual’s like, “That’s all I’m giving you. I’m not saying anything more.” Oh, God. Because I’m curious too. Even if I can’t report on it publicly, I still want to know.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

JAMES FOX: Right. So I was asking.

AJ GENTILE: And then we give you wine.

The Age of Disclosure Premiere Encounter

JAMES FOX: Yeah, we were together at the Age of Disclosure premiere in New York City. We watched the movie, and there was a Q&A. And then afterwards, there were drinks at a bar and light food or whatever. And I saw this person I’d been really wanting to talk to. I had talked to him once before. Standing over the bar with a drink — I was like, good sign. Went over there, got myself a little whiskey. Hey. We start chatting it up, and I didn’t want to be too forceful because I can be a little overwhelming sometimes because I’m so curious and I get so excited.

But I was like, “You know, I heard that there’s not really that many people in the real know — like, with the percentage of how many people really know the bigger picture.” He goes, “Say about 10. 10 people on the planet know the bigger picture.”

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

JAMES FOX: “Well, what would you consider, like, where you’re at?” He’s like, “Probably one of 30.”

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

JAMES FOX: And I was like, “Okay, what about Hal Puthoff?” Because Hal Puthoff told me, “You know, James, this is how much I know. This is how much I’ve shared with you.” He’s like, “Hal’s probably one of 50.” My God.

AJ GENTILE: Hal shows up in all these stories.

JAMES FOX: There are other things about Hal that I can’t really discuss with you, but I had some weird telepathic stuff with him.

AJ GENTILE: You, like, mind-melded with Hal Puthoff?

JAMES FOX: Let me stay on point with this one, because I can’t really. So I said — I didn’t want to pry too much because people clam up when you’re too aggressive.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: But I was really dying to know. And I actually saw Leslie Kean on the other side of the room, and she was hanging out with people from either the CIA or the FBI — I can’t remember. People’s task force. I’ll tell you that story a little later because that was funny.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, the guy serving drinks for the CIA. Yeah.

JAMES FOX: No, they were knowingly out, like, “We’re here.” And I see Leslie look at me, and she saw that look on my face. Leslie’s known me for a while — probably almost 30 years, a little under. She looked at me and she goes, “I know that look,” because I was really focused. I really wanted to hear from this person.

So I said, “I heard that some people say the bigger picture is a little scary.”

AJ GENTILE: A little scary.

JAMES FOX: A little scary. He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I could see that.” I’m thinking, you can see that? Like, why can you see that? So I paused and tried to be measured and calm. And I said, “Well, like, how scary?” “Well, you don’t need to be worried.” “Okay, well, what do you mean by scary?” “Well, intent.”

AJ GENTILE: Intent is scary.

JAMES FOX: That’s what he said.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, you’ve got to give more.

JAMES FOX: I’m right on the cusp of, “All right, what’s the intent?” That was my next question, of course. But then a person with a cocktail came up and slipped in between the two of us — “Oh, my God, I’ve been wanting to talk to you!” — and da, da, da, da. Ah. So now that’s on hold.

AJ GENTILE: I told you, you can’t trust those bartenders, man.

JAMES FOX: I just want to know what the hell’s going on. We all do. I want to know what’s going on.

AJ GENTILE: Well, let’s take a break.

JAMES FOX: I don’t know if I’ll ever know what’s going on.

AJ GENTILE: I don’t know if we ever will, if anyone will. You’ll get to it. We’ll take a quick break, we’ll come back, we’ll talk about Varginha. Fascinating.

JAMES FOX: Perfect.

The Varginha Case

AJ GENTILE: All right. Back with James Fox. When I first heard about the Varginha case in Brazil, I thought, “There’s no way there’s anything to this. It’s a brown slippery alien — there’s nothing to it.” And then I started doing some research. Of course, my primary source was Moment of Contact. And I was like, this happened. This story happened. I know that your newest doc is sort of an addendum to the first one. Do you want to tell the original story? Would you rather us cut it in?

JAMES FOX: Well, yeah, I’ve got some clips too. I’ll show those in a little bit.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: But first of all, I want to say I completely acknowledge and respect that position. I see it online, I get attacked all the time. George Knapp told me, “Don’t read the comments.” Generally speaking, I try not to read the comments. And every now and again you read them — and kind of don’t do it — because some people are just really rude. Like, you can have a spirited debate and you can be skeptical, that’s fine. But don’t be an, you know…

AJ GENTILE: If you’re on Reddit, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

JAMES FOX: Just really rude. It’s like, how many times have you been to Varginha?

AJ GENTILE: So many.

JAMES FOX: Four times in the last 12 months. Four times.

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

The Varginha Case: Investigating Brazil’s Most Compelling UFO Incident

JAMES FOX: The last 12 months. I was just there a couple days ago. And that’s why I look like shit. But I totally respect that opinion and I’ll say I myself was there. And again, I’m not putting this out as the gospel. I am clearly saying that as someone who’s investigated UFOs for over 30 years, investigated this particular case on and off for over 16 years, I feel that at the very least, even those most skeptical can look at this firsthand eyewitness testimony.

Even Michael Shermer said to me, “Well, that’s pretty compelling stuff.” Michael Shermer, Skeptic magazine — “pretty compelling stuff.” Why can’t we agree to say, “Hey, something significant happened”? People saw UFOs, people saw a UFO crash, people saw a UFO in distress. People saw strange creatures that were intelligent beings with large heads, big almond-shaped eyes. The doctor described one of the creatures as being more white, with the same eyes, same big teardrop-shaped head, same telepathic communication to the eyes. The girls described something more brown, suffering in hot heat. The other one was in an air-conditioned environment in the ICU. Are they chameleons? Are there different species on one craft? I don’t know.

AJ GENTILE: Now I know this story well, so if you find me stepping on any of your reveals, let me know. Because you’re a storyteller and I think that’s why your documentaries are so good — you clearly are a storyteller. It doesn’t feel like journalism. It feels like you unwrapping this story and the mystery for us, which I love.

JAMES FOX: I think it’s really important, and it’s beautiful. David West, who’s my DP, he’s as into the photography and the B-roll as I am the topic and the subject matter. It was a really nice combination. Film should be entertaining, it should be beautiful, it should be an experience. But it also should be educational, with a serious tone. And I like to have fun too, because without humor, come on — we make some funny jokes in the outtakes and stuff.

AJ GENTILE: The outtakes at the end. Yeah, great.

Moment of Contact: Taking the Risk

JAMES FOX: But I also think about the skeptic in the room, and that’s great. There should be skeptics. Nobody should just believe me because I’m saying a UFO crashed in Varginha. I don’t expect you to. And I remember when I got back from the last trip when I made Moment of Contact — it was late 2021, or maybe early 2022, something like that — and I had CNN at my house in Vermont with Leslie Kean. They were going to do a little piece on me for the show they were doing, and they were like, “Oh, you just got back from Brazil, it’s so exciting. We heard that you’re investigating — we’d love to talk to you about this on camera.”

And I said, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” They asked why, and I said, “I’m happy to talk about the phenomenon, I’m happy to talk about other things. But no, because you guys are going to look at me like I need to up the dosage of medication that I’m not even on.” I said I’d wait for the film to come out, and if they wanted to cover it then, that would be fine.

And I’ll remind you — when the first cut of Moment of Contact dropped, people were looking at me like… I mean, people that I was really close to. I had a reputation for covering the phenomenon the right way — interviewing high-level intelligence officials. I was the only one to get Harry Reid on camera before he was diagnosed with cancer. I had a level of access and success that I’d never really had before. That film really transcended the UFO community into a much broader, more mainstream audience, which was one of my objectives.

AJ GENTILE: That was a top 10 doc when it came out, I believe.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, it was number two or number three in all genres.

AJ GENTILE: Wasn’t Varginha supposed to be in that? So you looked into it and said, “Oh, I’ve got to look into this more”?

JAMES FOX: I filmed it for years and then cut it all out.

AJ GENTILE: You said, “I need to do a whole —”

JAMES FOX: I need more. I said, “We need to find the crash witness. We need to find more witnesses.” And my counterparts in Brazil were devastated when they found out. I remember the work we’d done already. And I said, “Marco, sit tight. I promise you we’re going to go back to the drawing board. This film needs an entire dedication — just this case needs to be a film on its own. We need to go back and do more research.” And we’ve been investigating ever since.

The film dropped at a time when we hadn’t had congressional hearings, we hadn’t had David Grusch talk about this.

AJ GENTILE: Was it ’23 when it dropped?

JAMES FOX: No, I dropped this in 2022. I can’t remember the exact date, but I dropped it in 2022, which —

AJ GENTILE: — is an eternity in this field.

Congressional Hearings and the Joe Rogan Moment

JAMES FOX: And we had the first congressional hearings either earlier that year, but there was no mention of crash retrieval. It was Representative André Carson. There were no witnesses in the audience. It was really sterile, but it was still a hearing. And then we hadn’t had David Grusch. We hadn’t had all these crash retrieval allegations — bodies, all of it.

I remember when I wasn’t even done with the film yet, Lou Elizondo was contacting me and he was like, “I need a copy.” I was like, “Lou, I’m not done yet.” He said, “I don’t care. I need a copy. I need it now.” I was like, “Okay.” I was telling my partner Boris, “Hey, can you do an export with a security watermark?” And he’s like, “Yeah — what’s going on?” I was like, “I don’t know. Apparently it’s really urgent.”

He goes, “You have no idea who’s watching this right now.” What Lou was doing was trying to demonstrate America’s involvement. He was particularly interested in the second half of the film, just to show various people: “Hey, this is real. This is serious. This is happening. Look at this case in particular.” Not that he was basing everything on that one case, but he was using it as evidence. And then, little did I know, there was a build to that huge congressional hearing with David Grusch. That was a pivotal moment.

I had people telling me, “You’re really going to jeopardize the reputation that you’ve spent so long building, and your access, to report on this alleged crash and these live aliens walking through the town? Really?” And I said, “I’m telling you, I’ve been going there for years. I’ve been knocking on doors, I’ve been meeting with firsthand witnesses. I’m telling you, there’s something to this. Just hear me out.”

I put my neck out and dropped that film. It did moderately well and was brought up on a number of occasions. Joe Rogan had had me on for the program before, and I know we sent him this other film, but he didn’t watch it because he felt the same way most people did — “This is bullshit.” And then a couple of people on his show started mentioning it. I was watching it happen in real time — people were like, “James Fox’s new film…” One mention, then another, then another.

A couple of weeks go by and I’m in a workout class — a bunch of older guys who get together, put music on, work out really hard, have a good laugh. Every now and again I’ll check my phone in case my son’s got an issue at school. I check my phone, and it’s Rogan. He’s like, “Bro. Oh my God. I just watched Moment of Contact. Holy sh.” I was like, “Oh, thanks so much. I’m really glad you liked it.” He goes, “You want to come on my podcast next week?” And I was like, “Does the Pope — is the Pope Catholic?” And he puts “lol.” He was really funny.

That really catapulted it. And then, of course, the congressional hearings started happening and it all started going down. I remember watching the congressional hearing — it was one of the first times my son wanted to go play, and I sat there in my chair watching it live from my phone. I just had tears flowing down my face, a constant flow like a waterfall, the whole time watching it, thinking: all the ridicule, all the laughter, all the being made fun of — and now this is starting to come out. I can’t tell you what that felt like for someone who’s just been ridiculed and laughed at.

And that’s why, today, when I’m getting heckled and people are complaining about the lack of photographic evidence — okay, so what are you doing? Are you going to Brazil four times in the last 12 months? Are you knocking on doors? Are you meeting with neurologists, neurosurgeons, forensic pathologists, firsthand witnesses, tracking down military? I understand the skepticism. You don’t think I want the photographic evidence? You don’t think I’m going after that with everything I’ve got?

The Investigation Explodes in Brazil

I’m going on every big podcast across Brazil. We’re getting mentioned right now on the biggest platforms in all of Brazil. The events we just did at the National Press Club, the film, and Italo’s testimony — it’s exploding across Brazil right now. 23 million followers. 20 million followers. It’s happening.

We have one of the biggest platforms in all of Brazil — they invited me on, but I couldn’t be there because I was here with you, and I need to go home because my kid hasn’t seen me in forever. But Lou Elizondo and other members of my team are going, so it’s exploding across Brazil.

We did this big event at the National Press Club where we flew in witnesses. We also had that closed-door meeting I told you about earlier with members of Congress, people in the task force, just saying, “Hey, you don’t have to believe these witnesses.” They were very impressed — a neurosurgeon, a forensic pathologist. It’s like, “Okay, what did you see? Launch an investigation.”

AJ GENTILE: Anyone who watches — stick around for the last scenes of your second cut, because they’re so touching. They really drive home that these folks are telling the truth.

Tracking Down the Video Evidence

JAMES FOX: People are like, “Well, Dr. Italo, in a video statement, said that he only saw the video.” I was like, “Yeah, that was us.” We were going after him two years ago because someone told us, “You need to talk to this doctor.” So we’ve been doing that. My partner Marco, who’s really boots on the ground, finally got an interview — just a meeting — with Dr. Italo. It was on a Zoom call. We’d heard that he’d seen the video, so that was what we were going after: “Who showed you the video? Where’s the video today?” That was my sole purpose during that meeting.

And he confesses that he did see the video. We found out the name of the person who shot it. Unfortunately, that person died of a heart attack. But that person had a widow, and he had a mistress who had a child with him. We befriended them. We befriended the widow. We were digging through her deceased husband’s affairs in his office, brought his computer home. People have no idea what we’re doing behind the scenes. There are other operations running right now that I can’t even talk about. But I have a laser-like focus now.

After that meeting with Italo, I didn’t even think to ask him if he saw the creature. I didn’t.

The Varginha Incident: January 1996

AJ GENTILE: Well, but take us back to 96 first.

JAMES FOX: I will. I’ll just wrap this up quick. And Dr. Italo said, yeah, I saw the creature. And then he sat down very briefly with my partner and he said, I didn’t see the… He was out. Did you see the being? He goes, no. But then he had a heart attack and he had cancer, health issues. And that’s when he decided, a year later, I’m going full public and went out. But yeah, let’s back up.

AJ GENTILE: So what is it, January 96?

JAMES FOX: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: If I remember, there’s a farmer and his wife see a cigar shaped, school bus shaped object floating over their field.

JAMES FOX: Enrico and Orelina de Freitas.

AJ GENTILE: Yes. De Freitas. And so that happens. And then we get very believable. And then there’s Carlos de Souza.

JAMES FOX: Right, Carlos de Souza. And the new witness, Fabio. Fabio Furtado that we just got. And for the first time ever, we got Google Maps. Now you don’t know how things are going to line up. Google Maps, like, that’s impressive because it was like, well, this person, where do they live? Where did these guys… And where does Rodino and where did Carlos say. And for the first time ever in this new cut, we got Google Maps. And we were like, oh my God. Boom, boom, boom. Right here. Like it’s right there.

I get goosebumps because, and the same thing for… I mean, yeah, I did the drone shots and I would get locations for different various interviews. Oh, you saw the blockade here. You’re the media that had the blockade. Okay. Was here. The girls had the encounter here. That makes perfectly good sense why they’d have the blockade.

AJ GENTILE: Sure. And that’s three blocks away.

JAMES FOX: Yep, just a couple blocks away. And then the capture. Guess what? Just a couple blocks away. Then the family of doctors that we interviewed, we got a full aerial view with the drone just a few blocks away. The family that night saw an operation of a disc flying slow and low over the area.

This is the first time we put it together. Like, holy s*. Was this an extraterrestrial rescue operation? Like, I’m sorry, I know this is really hard to swallow, but if the accounts would be believed, that’s exactly what it was. And we actually have footage of a disc taken at night. It’s one of the best night disc footage. It’s in the documentary and we repackage it because I was like, well, hold on a second. That was shot here. How far away is that? Two months after 1996. Oh, wow. Could be connected, don’t know.

But this family describing this disc flying, they were like always looking for something. I said, how do you know it was looking for something? The whole family. Because it was super slow and it was going to the end, stopping, coming back, going in, stopping. I’m like, wow, that’s true. That was an extraterrestrial search and rescue operation. And guess what? It was right over where the girls saw the being. It’s exact. If it was going to be looking for anything, that’s the spot where it would be looking.

Carlos de Souza: The Ultralight Pilot’s Encounter

AJ GENTILE: So take us through de Souza, the girls, the blockade, and then the capture.

JAMES FOX: Yes. So January 1996. There are sightings of a cylindrical shaped object. People described it as a big school bus or like a cigar shaped. And it was like a metallic, kind of polished aluminum, whatever, and had very little to no sound at all. And it didn’t have any visible means of propulsion. Almost all the witnesses described a gash in the back of it.

One guy, the new witness, Furtado, Fabio Furtado, he said that it was clearly in trouble. And it was making some kind of weird noise. It seemed to be in trouble. But he looked at it from above, so he didn’t see the gash. But they see this thing in distress. They’re all expecting it to crash.

Carlos de Souza, who’s an ultralight pilot and a geography teacher, is driving up to the north from Sao Paulo, going up to Tres Coracoes, I believe it was. It’s in the state of Minas Gerais. And very early in the morning he’s going to go meet his buddies, going to go flying ultralights early in the morning, 5 o’clock or something. And he’s driving on Fernando Diaz, I think it was, freeway. And he sees, just outside Varginha, this farm called the Maiolini farm. He sees this cigar shaped object just… He’s like, “What the hell is that?” Like, it’s struggling. He’s like, whatever it is, it’s barely staying in the sky. Like it’s coming, looks like it’s coming down. He thought maybe this is some sort of experimental military thing or maybe it’s a blimp or like, what the hell?

And then it staggers and then it just goes boom and hits this field. He goes off the freeway, drives up this dirt road, gets to the impact site. He’s like, “Oh my God, whoever’s flying this thing, they need help.” That’s what he was thinking.

AJ GENTILE: He’s a pilot.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. He gets out of the car and he said, “James, the first thing I noticed, which I wasn’t expecting, is normally with a plane crash, you’d smell like kerosene or jet A fuel or whatever. That’s the kind of anticipated smell you’d get from a plane crash.” He goes, “This wasn’t like that. This was like ammonia and really strong rotten eggs or something.” He goes, “James, it was so strong and my eyes were watering. I had grabbed my shirt and I pulled my shirt over my mouth, my nose, like, Jesus Christ, what the hell?”

And he’s looking around, he’s looking at it, and he picks up a piece. What he said was like just aluminum looking, and shaped kind of like this. And he picks it up and he goes, “James, it was light as a feather. It was like, barely feel it in my hands.” And just when that was happening, he was going to put it in his pocket. The military trucks came in from the opposite direction. But he said he crumpled it and then when he released it, it went right back to its shape. Which reminds me very much of Roswell.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

JAMES FOX: So this happens, he gets threatened at gunpoint. He leaves terrified, like really threatened, seriously threatened. I mean, those guys threatened everybody. Everybody that we interviewed, either the blockade or even the media for asking questions. “You ask one more question, you go to jail. This is a national security issue.” They said that across the board to everybody.

He leaves. He’s totally freaked out. At the time, he was still thinking like some sort of experiment he saw that somebody shouldn’t have seen, obviously, but he wasn’t thinking extraterrestrial. He just wasn’t. He stopped at a gas station a few miles down the road just to calm down, get a coffee. He goes in, he orders a coffee, and then this black, kind of dark blue or whatever, car pulls up, two men in suits get out, tall suits, and they knew his name, they knew where he lived, they knew his wife’s name. All this stuff. “You didn’t see what you saw. You talk about this, you’re going to have some serious problems with your life.” And threatened him and then left.

And one of the witnesses at the gas station apparently said, “You can’t let those people talk to you like that. You need to get their license plate number. Here, take this piece of paper and go get their license plate number and report them.” He goes out there and there’s no license plate on the car and it’s gone.

So he starts hearing reports in the media about these girls who saw this strange creature. And that’s when he was like, “S*, maybe that’s connected to what I saw, this UFO crash. Oh my God, maybe it was not of this earth.” So he meets with a researcher named Claudio Kovio. Claudio Kovio gets one on-camera statement from him, then he vanishes for 26 years.

And that was one of the things. When I was talking to my partner, Marco Leal, co-producer, I said, “We got to find Carlos.” And they did. We ultimately did find him after 26 years. And I don’t know how long it took him to finally meet with me in Sao Paulo. And then I said, “Would you be willing to go on camera back to the site for the first time in 26 years?” And he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll come with you guys.”

AJ GENTILE: Convincing.

The Varginha Encounter: The Creatures, The Captures & The Cover-Up

JAMES FOX: Oh well. We massaged the friendship for a while. Hell yes. Are you kidding me? The guy didn’t have. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose. But Marco developed a friendship. We slowly just like, hey, we’re taking this investigation seriously. We really want to talk to you. I’d have to talk to Marco, but it was months and months and months.

And then I came there in 2021, and that’s when I said, hey, well, maybe you’ll come meet us in Sao Paulo. We stayed at a hotel in Sao Paulo. He met with us, we talked, got to know each other a little bit. And then I asked him, hey, we really love to take you out to the site. To the site. And we did.

So anyway, fast forward January 20th, which was like almost a full week later. And these girls, Katya, Valkyria and Liliani, ages 14, 16 and 21, were walking through, taking a shortcut, walking through this field. It was like 3:20 in the afternoon. January 20th is hot. That’s their summertime, really hot day.

And they said that I was just at the cinder block wall. They said that there was some graffiti on the cinder block wall in this field they were going through. And that kind of caught their eye. They’re looking at this graffiti and then they look, they’re like, that, a statue, like, what the hell is that? And there was like this creature, like kind of slumped over and just looking, not really moving, just kind of sitting there up against the wall. The wall is here and they’re right here, right there. 10 feet away, maybe 8 feet away.

And all of a sudden I think Liliani, who’s 16, she screams like, “Oh my God, what is that thing?” And it turns and it looks at them. Lock eyes. And there was communication with the eyes. Liliani is 16, she’s got a younger sister, Valkyria. She grabs her younger sister. She said there was communication. This thing was stressed, it was terrified, it was suffering, it was really wanting help, but they thought it might be the devil. It had red eyes, it was oily and suffering in the heat. This thing was suffering.

She grabs her younger sister, Valkyria, leaves Katya who’s 21. They hightail it out of there. She gets, I don’t know how far, 100 feet, 150 feet. She’s like, we left Katya. So she’s like, “You stay here, Valkyria.” And she left her 14 year old sister there and she ran back. And Katya had just locked eyes with this being for a prolonged period. She grabs Katya, yanks her out of there.

And Katya, to this day, I was just with her a couple days ago. Katya is like, “I was going to help it because it was saying to me, either help me or leave me be. Don’t hurt me, help me or leave me be.” She’s like, “I wanted to help it, and I didn’t, and I ran away from it, and then it got captured, and I feel so bad. I don’t know what happened to it.” She really said that. She’s like, “I think about it all the time.”

So anyway, the girls are hightailing out of there. At about 5, 5:30, two military police officers, one by the name of Eric Lopes. People pronounce his name differently. Lopes. Lopes. L-O-P-E-S. They’re on patrol for something unusual. I don’t think they said an ET is roaming around, but it was definitely some kind of strange creature, some whatever. Just on patrol. And his friend and fellow military police officer, Marco Shareez, was off that night. But he called him up and he said, “Hey, I got this crazy assignment, I’m supposed to be looking. You want to come with me?” Sure. Gets in the car.

And two or three blocks away from where the girls had seen it, a couple hours later, that creature goes right across the road in front of him. Screeches the brakes. Marco Shareez, without a moment’s hesitation, leaps out of the car and he grabs it with his bare hands and puts it in the car. And they take it to — I just learned the exact hotel. I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name of the hospital, the first one. Apparently some person came out, some doctor came out and took a look at the creature, like, “Get that thing out of here. I don’t know what that thing is.” And so they go to Regional Hospital. Yes, they drop it off at Regional Hospital.

And then Marco — now there’s speculation because the autopsy report — Marco got a scratch under his arm. They weren’t sure if it was a previous existing abscess and that maybe the bacteria that killed him came from the creature’s nail, or came from whatever open cut, or that he got scratched by the nail of the ET in the process. It wasn’t aggressive, it didn’t put up hardly any bit of a fight, but he got this infection. He was hospitalized within a week or two and he was dead within about three weeks, something like that.

And we’ve interviewed his sister. We interviewed her just recently in the new cut of Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters. It’s the first time I’ve ever really put that kind of blatant thing in a title, but it really is alien in the sense that we’ve got now this neurosurgeon describing face to face contact, all the girls with a creature that was alien to them and alien to everything they’d ever seen.

But we have the two forensic pathologists, one that did the autopsy and then the other one, Dr. Janini, who owned the company IPD Labs, that did the analysis on the tissue samples. And he’s like, “It’s a rare bacteria on Earth. But this had evolved in a way that was super resilient to any kind of antibiotics or any kind of treatment. I’ve never seen it behave in that fashion anywhere on Earth. And I’ve done over 50,000 autopsies.” He says it on the record, and then he gives a statement which you can provide your audience with. So that’s pretty unprecedented.

And then — well, I don’t know if you want to go into it. We got the capture and then now, for the first time, because we didn’t really know what had happened to the creature that was dropped off — and there were multiple, at least two. And now we’re thinking there’s possibly more because more reports are coming in, more details. We got the chief of police, Pedro Aguiar, we got his testimony for the first time ever, and he died just months later. Thank God we got that, and we’re working with his family.

AJ GENTILE: And he didn’t testify in the first cut, did he?

JAMES FOX: No, no, no, no, no. He kept — he was like a bar of soap in the bathtub, right? Because we had heard that he had a photograph, and that’s why we were going after him. Honestly, I had enough. In my opinion, there was enough credible firsthand eyewitness testimony in the first cut for me to go, all right, now the only thing missing is that photograph or that video piece. So that’s what I had, like a laser focus. I still do. But that led us to a bunch of people, a whole bunch of people, some of which I’d still need to remain nameless because it’s ongoing and I don’t want the military to get there before I do. So I’m having to be kind of somewhat secretive.

But I can assure your audience, there’s no one on the planet that wants that more than I do. Trust me. And if I sat there and explained to you the lengths that I’m going to, that our team is going to — Aline Cross, by the way, is a new producer on the new cut. Throw a shout out to her because she’s amazing. I’m working with someone who’s actually completely bilingual now. With Marco, I love him to death, but his English is not great. So it’s really frustrating. But now I’m getting crystal clear communication with all the people. It’s like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

But we were led to him, the chief of police, by photographic evidence. And then, as it turns out, we find out that he too participated in the event and saw the creature. So more and more comes out, and we’re now starting to think that the creature that Dr. Italo, the neurosurgeon at Regional Hospital, saw was the first capture, because he saw it during the morning of the 20th. And there was the capture by the two — there was the fire department. And when you’re in the fire department or the police department, you’re with the military. It’s all connected to the military.

And so we now have details of the chief of police, Pedro Aguiar, both from three of his children, his wife and his lawyer, all on camera for the first time. And now we have vivid details of what he saw in that first capture. And we think that possibly the one that the girls saw was not the same creature as what neurosurgeon Italo saw. Because I was like, well, wait a minute. When were you at the hospital? He was like, “I saw that thing in the late morning.” Well, that capture happened in the morning and that was also alive. So now they’re both alive, right? They’re both alive. Yeah, yeah, they’re both alive.

So now we’re thinking — but there’s also reports of a dead one. We got the guy at Regional Hospital that did the X-rays, that wanted to be anonymous. Marco went after him for five, six years when he was still working at the hospital. No, no, no, it was just no, no, confirmed. “Yeah, yeah, I participated, I took X-rays of it, it was in a bag,” blah, blah, blah. But we finally got him to go on the record, thank God. And he’s vanished ever since then. And then we got military acts, so we knew.

AJ GENTILE: Didn’t they steal, or grab, or confiscate all of it?

JAMES FOX: All of it. He said, first time in history. And they were like, “Thank you very much, shut your pie hole.” Yeah. So anyway, sorry, I’m rambling because there’s so many little bits of details that I’m learning. But I’m thinking now that we have that first morning capture on the 20th that took place with the firemen — now we have vivid details of that for the first time as of three days ago — that that’s probably the ET that Italo saw.

Now, were they different races or species? Slightly different variations? Do they all have the big teardrop shaped head, or are they like chameleons? Can they change when they’re suffering? Do they smell when they’re scared and suffering in the hot heat? Maybe they excrete. I really don’t know. It’s all speculation.

AJ GENTILE: Right. Can you describe what the creatures look like? Because these weren’t typical grays.

Describing the Creatures

JAMES FOX: Yeah, so what the girls came within a few steps of, in broad daylight — all three of them — was about three and a half feet tall, a creature with spindly arms, spindly legs. Some people say that it had toes like this, with another one that maybe came out the side for stability.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

JAMES FOX: Maybe for when they’re walking. And it had big teardrop shaped red eyes, big head, tiny mouth, slit for a nose. No real ears to speak of. And the girls described it as like an organ, like almost like a heart. Like the skin was like a heart. Oily. Like that. But no hair.

AJ GENTILE: The oiliness is the strangest detail to me.

JAMES FOX: I wonder — they all said it was suffering in the heat. It was a really hot day in the summer, all sunshine. It was suffering, cowering, afraid. Did it exude that? Did it change color? I don’t know.

AJ GENTILE: But one of your witnesses made a really interesting statement about that, that I hadn’t considered. He said it looked like latex or silicon.

JAMES FOX: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: So maybe it was a suit of some kind.

JAMES FOX: No, it definitely was a skin, because we interviewed military acts who’d seen it in the hospital. That one was dead, and that was at Humanitas Hospital. There are other — we have names of other doctors at Humanitas that are aware of it and are not talking. According to my contacts, I’m really in with the medical community now. I mean, we just — I just flew them to D.C. We’re like family now. We go to the local restaurants, we hang out with all these top neurologists and forensic pathologists. And they know what’s going on, believe me. And I’m knocking on their doors. And I think they’re seeing that Dr. Italo, who by the way has everything to lose and nothing to gain — and if he’s lying — he was

AJ GENTILE: in the room with this thing, face

JAMES FOX: to face contact for three or four minutes with a live being of non-human intelligence, communication through the eyes, limited. But he said that despite being in captivity, it had control of the room.

AJ GENTILE: His testimony is so riveting. Riveting.

Dr. Italo’s Testimony and the ICU Revelation

JAMES FOX: And you said that he, you know, I was like, all right, well, let’s just say he wasn’t ready to fully. The fact that he admitted seeing the video a year or so earlier was incredible. He wasn’t ready to come out. I mean, the implications of a neurosurgeon who runs the department at this, at this are significant for a number of reasons.

AJ GENTILE: And Virginia is a military town.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. And his like, okay, you just have to look for a motive. Right. He’s not selling a book, he’s not selling a doc, he’s not selling his story. He would have to be lying because I’m friends with all of them now. His wife, he’d have to be lying to his wife. He has to be lying to his kids, both his daughter and his son, who just became a father a couple days ago. His co workers, his colleagues of 45 years in the medical community, cardiologists, neurosurgeons, forensic pathologists, lying to all of them.

In fact, I have a video that I’d like to show for you because I brought the doctors together just a few weeks ago. First time the known doctors, the ones known involved with the case. Dr. Cesario, who worked on the military police officer Marco Shuiz before he died. He’s like, “I threw the kitchen sink in a man. I’ve never seen bacteria not respond to any of the antibiotics we gave him. It just doesn’t happen.”

AJ GENTILE: I confirmed it independently. They shut down that hospital for those days.

JAMES FOX: That was another. That was, yeah, that’s where they did the X rays. Yeah, but so we got Dr. Cesario, we got Dr. Italo, the neurosurgeon. Dr. Cesario, I think is a cardiologist. Dr. Giannini, who founded IPD Labs, who studied the tissue samples, who said that he’s never seen a variant of this bacteria in his life. He gave a statement on that. You can feature that. Then the guy that did the autopsy of the deceased, Malej, brought them all together for the first time.

“How long have you known, Italo? How long have you known?” Just like 35 years, 45 years. “Do you believe him?” And they’re all just like, “Yeah, why? Where’s the motive?” He’s not asking for a dime. He’s lying to the whole community. He’s still doing brain surgery at the hospital. All of his staff, his wife, his daughter, his son, his co workers, his colleagues. Not asking for a dime, not selling anything.

AJ GENTILE: The most compelling.

JAMES FOX: What’s his motive? And if it’s true, and I’m pretty damn convinced it is, because it lines up with everything. If it’s true, it’s the most significant development in the history of the phenomenon. We’ve never had it before. Where you’ve had face to face contact with a captured alien. No testimony particularly of his stature, it doesn’t exist.

It’s like people that pooh-pooh this case. If you look into it, there’s never been this much firsthand eyewitness testimony in the history of any UFO crash cases ever before.

The Encounter: What Dr. Italo Witnessed

AJ GENTILE: Didn’t Dr. Italo hear it in his mind? Didn’t it communicate with that?

JAMES FOX: He said there’s a lot to learn from the eyes of that being. That it had the most tranquil, peaceful, compassionate, non-judgmental stare that he’s ever seen from anything. And then he kept describing it as a higher level of intelligence.

He also revealed some details because I really went through it before. We did this event at the National Press Club, which you guys can watch on — I think it’s News Nation covered it live. It’s out there for free. You can just watch it on YouTube, whatever. But I really hammered him hard on, because I wanted to get every possible detail I could in the short period of time at the National Press Club.

And he was like, “My first time I looked at it…” Because he was like, “Well, first of all, my partner, Marcos Venises, did a little procedure. I think it was like a suture, whatever, a little stitch or something.” And he goes, “I was in there for an unrelated issue in the hospital, and my partner, Marcos Venises, fellow neurosurgeon, grabbed me.” And normally he goes, normally when he grabs me in the hallway, it’s like, “Someone’s dying. I need your help immediately.” He goes, it was urgent. Grabs him and takes him into the ICU.

And there was a makeshift ICU with like a makeshift curtain kind of thing. And then before that, he’s got a video that he’s showing him on this screen of some procedure he just did. And he’s like, “What the hell am I looking at? What is that?” And he described, maybe children get this really weird thing where their heads can really swell up and weird deformities, whatever. He’s looking at it, it goes, “It doesn’t look like it’s from… What the hell is that?” And Dr. Marcos Venises goes, “It’s right there.” So he draws the curtains or goes around the other side.

And he goes, “I said, how long was it before you knew it wasn’t from this earth, non-human?” He goes, “The second I looked at it, I was like, holy shit.” And he looked at it and he goes, “My medical profession was initially like, okay, I look at a patient, is it in distress? Is it breathing?” And he did a quick evaluation, and he determined that it was okay, it was stable, whatever.

He’s looking at it. And then the creature looks out the window, and it was a blue sky, and looked out the window longingly, like it wanted to be out there. And then it looked back at him in the eyes. And that’s when he said the real communication happened. He was no longer looking at it as a patient, he was looking at it as an entity, as a higher level advanced intelligence entity.

And he said it just had… Like, it was looking at him as though he was a child. And here we got a neurosurgeon who’s like, running the whole department, operates on people’s brains, plays piano like Mozart. And he goes, “It was looking at me almost like a child. Not condescendingly, but like it was so advanced, so much higher.” Like an angel. So he described it as an angel.

AJ GENTILE: He did.

Tracking Down Dr. Italo

JAMES FOX: And I just say to people out there, you have to look — first of all, we tracked him down and we wore him down. And then he had a heart attack. And he was lying in the ICU, staring at the ceiling after we’d already confronted him on the video. Because that’s what I was after — the video. And he’s like, “If I come through this, I’m not…” Because Marcos Venises had died of a heart attack in 2018. He goes, “I’m not going to let the story go to the grave. The younger generation needs to know this happened. And I’m a firsthand witness.”

And so we went back in January of 2025. Was that a year ago? Yeah, we went back and that’s when we interviewed the two forensic pathologists. And we’d been trying to get a hold of Italo because we knew, like, the video — didn’t know that he had a heart attack. Didn’t know that he had prostate cancer and surgery and all this other stuff. And we got the other — he would respond and then he would disappear. And it was like, I jokingly said it was like grabbing a bar of soap in the bathtub because he was like, poof, poof, poof. He was just there and then gone.

Dr. Armando — credit to you, mate — who did the autopsy on the deceased military officer and provided the tissue samples to Dr. Giannini. He’s like, “Yeah, you know why we’re here? We really want to talk to Dr. Italo. And he keeps kind of responding then disappearing, like he wants to, or he seems conflicted.” And then right there in the middle of the interview, just walking and talking, he’s like, “Tomorrow morning, go to the hospital. He wants to meet you around the backside. 10 o’clock.” It was the backside of the hospital. Okay, what’s he going to… We’re like, get all the camera crew ready.

Inside the ICU: The Confession

And that’s when he snuck us through the maternity ward, down the corridors, through the hospital, all cameras rolling, put on some gear. I’m like, “What’s happening? Why am I putting this gear on?” Takes us into the ICU. That’s where it happened.

AJ GENTILE: In that room.

JAMES FOX: In that room. Oh, my goodness. All on film. We captured it as it happened. Honestly, I don’t even think he was prepared to go full monty until that morning of. And our partner, Aline, production partner, she’s been amazing. She has a really wonderful, non-threatening presence about her. You just look her in the eyes and you just go, “Okay, I’m in good hands here.” And I know that he grabbed her hand and she was looking at me like, “Okay, I’m just, you know, here I go.”

Took us through various corridors. Then all of a sudden I’m putting on a medical mask and I’m like, “What am I doing? I don’t understand.” Everything’s happening so quickly. Takes us into the ICU. And it was like, “This is where the video… No, this is where the creature I saw.” And it all came out. And then the staff and the managers came and started screaming at him. And he was like, “F*, I think I might have just lost my job.”

And it was like, oh, my God. I’m just trying to process what just happened. Holy shit. We have a neurosurgeon who just confessed that he had direct contact with one of the beings in captivity for three or four minutes in that bed right there.

AJ GENTILE: Yep. I don’t think he was prepared for how emotional he was going to get.

The Aftermath: Processing the Moment

JAMES FOX: So then we get kicked out. He’s like, “I think I might have just lost my job.” We go out, we’re like, “Well, let’s carry on this conversation. Where are we going to go?” We walk out, we’re on the sidewalk. “How about this cafe?” Boom. Walk into a cafe, we take over the cafe, we all sit up, set up shop.

And I was trying to get more out of him and I was just trying to process. We all were. At one point, I think it was David — no, I don’t know who — maybe it was me. I grabbed a camera. I actually grabbed the camera from Dave West, my DP, and I just panned it across because I was like, “I need to see everybody’s faces right now, because this is incredible.” And you look carefully — even the sound guy, who was somewhat skeptical when he started on this journey with us. And now he’s like, “Holy shit.” And you see Marco wipe his forehead. We’re all processing.

And then I said to him, “What does it feel like after 29 years to come to talk about this?” And he’s like, “I feel like I want to cry.” And he started to cry, and then the camera turned on me, and I was trying to talk. The words weren’t coming out, and I really didn’t want to — I didn’t want to cry because I wanted to keep it together and stay composed. But I couldn’t talk. I was like, “I wouldn’t be doing this for all these years, all the laughter, all the ridicule, all the hecklers if I didn’t really believe this. Life is too short.”

AJ GENTILE: It was the most touching part of the whole film.

JAMES FOX: Life’s too short for bullshit. And I’m not saying you have to believe this case. Don’t. Don’t believe it. Check it out. Listen to the testimony. If it’s true, and I’m putting my career on the line here, but if it’s true, this is the case that’s going to prove it once and for all.

AJ GENTILE: Remember Carlos’s reaction when you took him to the scene?

JAMES FOX: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: How emotional he got. You can’t fake that.

JAMES FOX: You don’t need Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt anymore.

AJ GENTILE: No.

JAMES FOX: And then I get choked up. And then it’s like, I’ve known this doctor — I mean, we met on the phone. He jokingly calls me… Oh, my God. Because when he confessed to seeing the video, he was — I was like, “Oh, my God.” Because — yeah, so, well, we could talk about that in a minute.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: He hugs me right there on camera, and he holds me, like, holding my hands, really. We bonded right there in that moment. Imagine the weight off his shoulders, and the risk. He’s got everything to lose. And again, I’ll tell your audience, this guy’s not selling anything. He hasn’t asked for a dime for a story. He’s still doing brain surgery. He’s like, “I’ll take a public lie detector test tomorrow with my hand on a Bible, whatever you want. I saw this thing. And the younger generation need to know they’re real.”

AJ GENTILE: That coffee shop conversation was the lie detector test. Incredible. Unbelievable.

The Varginha Witnesses and Visa Denials

JAMES FOX: How do you — so, again, I understand the skepticism, and I know the need for videotape, photographic evidence. There’s nobody in the world trying harder than I am. I promise you that. And I can tell you that the military is following me, following this case. No question about it. We’re just trying to get to the people first.

And I have a proton email which I’d actually like to provide to you because I’m telling you, any witnesses — because before, people were getting in touch with me on regular email. And I’m thinking, that’s not a good idea. I’m under surveillance, so we got a proton email now. And I’ll provide that to you.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, we’ll put it on screen, flash —

JAMES FOX: — it on the screen. People can reach out to me because we’re looking for folks on the American side. We’re looking for videotaped evidence. We’ve announced a very large reward for said evidence. I’ve done it on huge podcasts all across Brazil. We’re doing more podcasts right now, TV episodes. And we’re stronger together and courage is contagious. And I’ve been saying that to people: “We’re stronger together and courage is contagious.” And believe me, there are other doctors and there are people that are watching very carefully what’s happening right now.

AJ GENTILE: Are there any videos you want to show us? We have about 15, maybe 20 before the next break.

JAMES FOX: Okay. I think this is important. Sorry, I’m going to wipe my nose here. This is just a couple weeks ago — I happened to be with Amar from Yes Theory. His team actually filmed this in Varginha, Brazil. And we’re at Dr. Armando’s house, who was the guy that did the autopsy on the deceased military officer. And it was the first time in history we brought all the known doctors together. So I just wanted you to share this little video and I’ll play it for you.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Question I’d like to ask Janine, how long —

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

AJ GENTILE: And I thought we had subtitles, boys.

JAMES FOX: No.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, there we go.

JAMES FOX: It’s all in English. Oh, yeah, some of it’s not. So basically —

AJ GENTILE: And where did you shoot this for?

JAMES FOX: I shot this at the doctor’s house in Varginha, Brazil, just a few weeks ago. That’s Dr. Janini, who studied the tissue samples analysis — friends of pathologists. The guy to the right did the autopsy, and then Dr. Italo’s right there grabbing his arm. He had face-to-face contact with a living entity at regional hospital on January 20, 1996.

And I’m asking these guys, “How long do you believe him?” And everyone’s like, “I’ve known him 45 years.” “I’ve known him 35 years.” He’s still doing brain surgery. I just think it’s important — their wives are there, their children are there. This is real. I just can’t imagine why, or how, he would benefit from lying.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, right.

JAMES FOX: Okay. Yeah. So that’s — anyway, I don’t have to go through all of these, but I want you to — if you’re seeing this or not — but we don’t need to watch this.

AJ GENTILE: But whatever you play, we’ll see.

Firsthand Witnesses and the Mechanic Shop Discovery

JAMES FOX: Yeah. So this is — I’ll just describe this. I took video statements from firsthand witnesses. Children, wives. That’s one of the sons of a firsthand witness that was in military police. This is his daughter, this is his wife — all saying, “Yeah, my husband was a firsthand witness. He saw the creature.”

And it’s important because he said he was a firsthand witness. His name is Pedro Aguiar. He was the former chief of police, and he’s the one that participated in our film and then died. He told us on film that he did see the creature, he did participate in the event, but he didn’t go into any specifics. But it’s one thing to go on camera and say that. But then when he tells his wife and he tells his children, “Yeah, man, this happened. This is real. I participated.” And then we talked to his lawyer. It just changes everything.

And this is the actual site. So, you know the cinder block wall where the girls came within 8 to 10 feet of that creature in broad daylight? On the other side of that wall, just like that far away, is a mechanic shop. So we went over to the mechanic shop, and we actually got one of the witnesses who was on the other side of the wall while the ET was there. And he talked about how he got there right after the girls had seen it, and saw the imprint where it was. He smelled the smell — like the ammonia, the sulfur. Yeah, he smelled it.

Yeah, there he is right there in the blue shirt. Exact location, saw the creature. And this guy’s a mechanic. That’s the cinder block wall, and right on the other side of that wall was a mechanic shop. Isn’t that crazy? Unbelievable military activity. He’s like, “Oh, yeah, I walked right over here. I saw the thing on the ground. I smelled it.” So he was working on a car when the girls were looking at an ET right there. It’s so crazy.

Anyway, there are a bunch of other statements. So we had Liliani Valkyria and Katya apply for visas. We had the military actor who drove the creature — all of his military records, all of his photographs of the truck that he was in during the operation, driving the creature. We had Marta, the sister of the deceased military officer. We had —

AJ GENTILE: What about Marco’s wife, the officer who died? It was Marco, right?

The Visa Denials

JAMES FOX: Yeah. Well, I’ll get to that one second. I hired an immigration lawyer. They were going to come. The military guy who drove the creature was going to come. And he said, “Look, I’ll meet with members of Congress behind the scenes, full identity, show them who I am, I drove the creature.” But he also said, “I’ll go up to the podium, but I’m going to go up there with a mask.” And I was like, “Yeah, great.”

AJ GENTILE: And I told the audience before — I was able to track down who that guy was. He’s a legitimate —

JAMES FOX: — he’s a legitimate. I’ve seen all the photographs. I actually got a statement from him showing me all the photographs. I’ll probably be releasing that soon for free, so people can see. But I’ll have to blur certain things out and change his voice.

But all their visas, unfortunately, got denied. There were like six as we go through all the different names. Devastating. And I even had Congressman Burleson’s office working on getting their approval. One was approved — Katya was approved on the spot. They all went together. Liliani was denied, Marco was denied. And then there was Military X, Marta, and Katya — they were under additional review. So it was like two denied, three under additional review, and one approved. So that was a pretty good ratio.

AJ GENTILE: But denied on what grounds?

JAMES FOX: Who knows, man? They don’t really say anything. Just ask a couple questions. So anyway, we got Congress involved, immigration lawyer, and we’re going back and forth. And then they kept waiting. Like, “Where are you guys? I’m doing this event, can you —” And then, long story short, they waited and waited until the last possible moment — towards the end of December. In fact, I got back on Christmas Day. My son’s like, “Where do you get me for Christmas?” I said, “Me.”

And so, maybe the 15th or 20th of December — even the one that was approved — all done. So we flew back to Brazil and I did statements. Those are some of the statements. If you want, I provided them to you. You guys can show the various statements inside a podium. The city of Varginha, with help from the mayor, gave us this official space with the Brazilian flags. It’s a great backdrop. And we did short 90-second statements from the various people that had their visas denied, and other people as well. Anyway, you should play some of those.

AJ GENTILE: We’ll put those in. We’ll put in the autopsy photos. But I want to know about Eric Lopez. Did you ever get a hold of him? Because his scene in the first — “We threatened to shoot you guys if you didn’t leave the property.”

Eric Lopez and the Threat

JAMES FOX: Well, I got a new development just a couple days ago. There was another security guy that met with him, and he said, “I wasn’t — I don’t think I would have shot James, but I was seconds away from taking my gun out.” Because he did have a gun, as we suspected. But he was going to shoot a couple in the sky first. That’s what he said. But we did get a hold of his wife now.

AJ GENTILE: His wife.

JAMES FOX: Funny story — his wife is the sister of Marco Sharice, the deceased military officer.

AJ GENTILE: Marta.

JAMES FOX: No — oh, Marta. Sorry. Yeah. Marta is Marco’s — yeah. So sorry. Marco Sharice, who handled the creature and died, had two sisters.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: Marta and his other sister — I’m sorry, I don’t remember her name. But she married Eric Lopes after his death. They were really good friends and had known each other. And so I contacted her through Marta. Somehow I got her number. We went through either Marco or somebody else.

And this is after he threatened to shoot us. I asked, “What is it going to take to get your husband to come forward?” She said, “Bring my brother back to life and he’ll come forward.”

But we’re still working on him. Other people are working on him. The mayor sent a police officer around to his house a week ago to talk to him. And he didn’t want to talk, but he might. He might talk at some point.

AJ GENTILE: If he sees what Dr. Italo did.

JAMES FOX: He might. It’s getting more attention now than ever before. And again, I just say that this — we’ve had this debate for decades. Crash retrieval, Roswell, all this stuff, all the congressional hearings, all the allegations from top aerospace engineers and physicists that we have a crash retrieval legacy program. And this case could really settle the debate once and for all.

The US Air Force Connection

AJ GENTILE: It really could. We’ll take another quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about whatever you want, but I would like to get into how suddenly the United States Air Force shows up on this case.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

AJ GENTILE: All right, we’ll be right back. Back with James Fox.

JAMES FOX: Has a nice ring to it, does it?

AJ GENTILE: A big turning point for me in Moment of Contact — because I was riveted — and then we get to, I don’t know, about two thirds through, and suddenly you’re interviewing someone who was an aircraft controller.

JAMES FOX: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

AJ GENTILE: And now the US Air Force enters the picture.

JAMES FOX: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: So it seems like we’ve got Varginha, Campinas, ESA, and USAF — as they call it, USAF — yeah.

JAMES FOX: Did you see the FOIA request that we did in 2022, and we got a response from the CIA?

AJ GENTILE: Yes. And the response was —

The Varginha Investigation: Flight Records and Congressional Efforts

JAMES FOX: Yeah, access or we can neither confirm nor deny. Due to the National Security Act of 1949, your request is denied. It’s like, CIA. What the hell was the CIA would say? What? Really weird. Yes.

So I think it was 2021 when I was shooting for the whatever umpteen time. And that’s when we finished shooting for Moment of Contact. The first version of. Has been going on for 16, almost 17 years. My God.

And the flight control officer, Marcos Freires Feres — F-E-R-E-S — came forward on podcast. He’s like, yeah. And he’s friends with this other flight control officer. They were their friends. And he said, yeah, this, you know, on or around the 20th of January, this USAF flight was coming in. I was like, USAF, United States Air Force. USAF, excuse me.

And he goes, it didn’t have — all planes coming in from outside the country have to have Brazilian government authorization to land — this plane didn’t have that. And he goes, I have to deny a plane without this authorization. A high level Brazilian military official came in the room and said, let the plane land. And it landed at an airport in Campinas. I have the name of the airport when we talk about the movie, but.

And either one helicopter or two helicopters came out of it. It was probably a C-17, according to all the Air Force people that I’ve talked to. It was a cargo plane, helicopter went to Brazil, came back — it was two helicopters — came back, loaded some stuff. Excuse me, loaded some stuff on the plane and, buying border is what he said, went back to America, undisclosed location.

So we filed a FOIA for all incoming flights from the US into Campinas in January. I think I put like maybe January 10th or something to the end of the month.

AJ GENTILE: It was all like two weeks or something.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. For a two, three week window. We covered our bases, went like a week extra on both sides. And honestly, the response came so late I forgot that we even sent the FOIA. And then in 2025 we get a response from the CIA, and that’s when they denied. So now we actually made this plea at the National Press Club last week — was it last week, ten days ago, whatever.

A United States Air Force colonel spoke — retired, also a fighter pilot — had a really dramatic encounter with a UFO in 1980 over Europe, Northern Europe. It’s an incredible story. But he’s like, look, let me just tell you the — and he talked to members of Congress too. He’s like, let me just tell you, if that flight happened, and I suspect it did, there’s going to be paper trails.

And he went through all the different scenarios. Like, the flight distance on full tanks is 2,500 miles. The distance is 4,500 miles. Therefore it had to have air support — that’s going to be a paper trail. When it landed, had to refuel, there’s a receipt, who paid for the fuel, that’s going to have a record. And I don’t care if it’s a classified mission, it’s got to have a flight plan going back — there’s another paper trail. And he went through all the various things.

And we did that primarily for members of Congress, or ourselves. Like, hey, you don’t have to believe this case. You can find it compelling enough to dig a little deeper. So now we have members of Congress that are willing, part of the task force — hey, let’s go find those flight records. Let’s see what we can turn up.

So now it’s just like, hopefully they’re not — they probably are, of course they are — aware of the fact that we’re going after these records. So hopefully they’re not getting rid of them.

AJ GENTILE: Did you say you have tail numbers or any identifying information on those?

JAMES FOX: We, yeah, so we — the colonel identified every single C-17 in the fleet at that time, and there were, I don’t know, there were a handful of them from various bases, and got every single tail number. Because we have photographs of what could have been one of the flights, because there was somebody in 1996 — but it wasn’t at Campinas, it landed somewhere else to refuel. And some Amazon researcher told me about it. So we want to see if we can read that picture carefully enough that we could make out a couple of numbers.

So the Air Force colonel has been finding all the tail numbers now. He’s getting flight records for all those. This is all happening right now. So we’re trying to find that specific plane, flight, landing, where it landed, because we could find out, like, where it landed. We could find out potentially who the crew were, how many people are on board, where those people are today. Right?

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: He estimates that 30 to 40 people, at minimum Americans, would know about that flight, were involved with that flight directly or indirectly. So that’s where we’re making a plea to anybody on the American side, because wouldn’t that be great?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. What do you think was loaded on that plane?

JAMES FOX: The body, ET, and two bodies. I don’t know how many bodies. I would say at least two. At least two. And probably some of the debris, I would imagine.

AJ GENTILE: I don’t know what gives the United States military jurisdiction over that.

JAMES FOX: A reporter asked that very question a couple years ago to an intelligence official. You know what they said? “Because we can write a check, or we’re coming in, we’re going to get it.”

AJ GENTILE: We’re coming in the easy way or the hard way.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. I mean, we just took out a president in Venezuela. True.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, true.

JAMES FOX: So we got a UFO crash. My understanding is that the Americans were aware of this UFO coming in and alerted the military officials in Brazil. And I’ve heard that from a number of researchers. In fact, I’ve even gotten close to getting a name of who provided that. But anyway, I’ve heard that from a number of pretty credible sources.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, I was able to track down some information about craft being seen in that area over that time, and then it kind of goes dark. So my suspicion is that there were some radar hits about those craft in that area, or at least one of them. And then someone got involved and said, “Stop tracking it. We got it. You guys don’t need to worry about it.” That’s my suspicion.

Congressional Meetings and the Push for Transparency

JAMES FOX: Yeah, I’m optimistic. I mean, you know, it only takes one courageous American to come forward and reveal that. We get the flight numbers. Maybe they don’t come forward publicly. Maybe they come forward in a SCIF with certain members of Congress, part of the UAP task force.

There are a handful of Congress people that I actually trust, that I think really do want to get this information out to the public, that are really seriously and authentically interested in knowing more and being more transparent, because they feel like everybody has a right to know about this stuff. So I’m optimistic on that front.

And like I said, we had meetings — Leslie Kane’s article that people should look up. Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal in The Debrief gives a very detailed account of our meetings, our closed door meetings on the Hill with firsthand witnesses on the case, and our plea to them. Like, hey, you don’t have to believe these guys. They found their testimony very compelling, and they were very, very interested in what the doctor had to say, I can assure you, and really asking very detailed questions to him.

When is it you have a neurosurgeon describing face to face contact with a live entity from non-human intelligence? Right.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: Never before in history. So there seemed to be a genuine concern, a genuine willingness to do some digging behind the scenes. And then Congressman Berthelsen attended the conference and spoke, as did a senator from Brazil. So, you know, this could be the beginning of the beginning. It could be, could be the beginning of the beginning.

Brazil’s History of UFO Encounters

AJ GENTILE: What is it about Brazil? Because we have compelling cases going back to at least the 70s. Like the Colares case.

JAMES FOX: 50s. To the 50s. Ubatuba.

AJ GENTILE: Ubatuba. That’s right.

JAMES FOX: Yep. There’s actually metal material.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

JAMES FOX: High level, 100% magnesium. I can’t remember what the — but it’s very unusual. And it would be — I’m told, I’m not a metallurgist, but I’m told by, I think it was Gary Nolan and Jacques Vallée who’ve studied the metal samples — isotope, isotope, they look down into the microscopic level — that it would be extremely expensive to replicate what they found on that beach. In 1957, it was reported something exploded and it rained down all this debris on a beach in Ubatuba. That was 1957.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right, it was. It was witnessed by a fisherman. It actually rained onto his boat and killed his dog.

JAMES FOX: Oh, really? I didn’t hear that part.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, yeah. And some of that metal was tested, and they found using an electron microscope that it was arranged in a lattice that could serve as a waveguide for electromagnetic spectrum in the terahertz range, which is something that we couldn’t do in the 50s.

JAMES FOX: I just remember Gary Nolan telling me that it would cost so much money to replicate even today.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

JAMES FOX: So that was impressive. But then you have Colares in the 70s. Very fascinating case. First case I’ve ever heard of where there seemed to be some level of hostility.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right. Well, tell us about the case. Tell us what you know.

JAMES FOX: Well, what I know is I haven’t done a deep dive into this case. Jacques Vallée has. I think Jacques Vallée has probably written a book about it. There were — this went on for a while. It might have been the whole year of 1977, it might have been longer. But there were UFOs seen, there were beams coming down from some of the UFOs attacking some of the people in the village, burning their skin. Or maybe they’re taking skin samples or blood samples, I don’t know. That’s what was reported.

There’s other testimony. The Americans got involved and they came, and there was film footage of an object the size of a football field, shape of a triangle, coming out of the Amazon. That footage apparently exists. There are a bunch of photographs that I actually feature in the first cut of Moment of Contact — original photographs that were released by the Brazilian Air Force.

AJ GENTILE: Yep. Over a thousand photographs.

JAMES FOX: There was also — exactly — and all kinds of documentation. All kinds of stuff came out of that case.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, if you guys want to look this up, this is Operation Prato.

JAMES FOX: Which means —

AJ GENTILE: Which means saucer.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Operation Prato. Yeah, it’s a plate or whatever, a disc. And there was a military gentleman who I actually featured his testimony in the first cut of Moment of Contact. And he went on camera, and he had died under extremely mysterious conditions. He apparently had a close encounter of the third kind. He actually saw the entities. And that was in the 70s. He hanged himself in this hotel or something crazy. You have to look it up. But hung himself from the —

AJ GENTILE: Almost the base of his bed. It’s very strange. And I think that was just about two or three weeks after he gave testimony —

JAMES FOX: — on camera.

AJ GENTILE: Testimony to Javerit.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, yeah, really. I mean, thank God. I know, it’s terrible. So that’s that case. Then you had UFOs over Brazil in 1986.

AJ GENTILE: Was that the Year of the Saucer?

JAMES FOX: It’s called UFOs over Brazil. So it’s kind of what it’s known as. 1986. And they had a press conference, they had the pilots. I mean, quite honestly, it was very similar to the two consecutive weekends in Washington D.C. in 1952.

AJ GENTILE: The Ruppelt case. Right.

JAMES FOX: It was like — it’s almost like an invasion. And they engaged with them in the airplanes. Again, I feature some of that in the first cut of Moment of Contact, if you guys want to check it out.

And then of course, you’ve got Varginha, which, quite honestly, I think — I can’t think of a better crash retrieval case, particularly involving the Americans, known in the world. I think it’s the best, most well documented, and it’s getting better by the day.

AJ GENTILE: It is. There’s something about the Amazon that intrigues me, you know.

The Taxonomy of Non-Human Intelligence

JAMES FOX: Yeah. And I apologize to your audience for this. I mean, the only case that I know extremely well, and I’ve done sort of a glance at the other cases, but the one I put a laser-like focus on is Varginha. I know that case pretty well. I’ve been really digging in. And I learned new stuff every day. I’m trying to find more pieces of the puzzle and there’s still missing pieces. But like I said earlier, I think this is a case that could settle the debate for sure.

AJ GENTILE: How long did it take the US Air Force to get involved in that?

JAMES FOX: Almost immediately.

AJ GENTILE: Really?

JAMES FOX: Yeah. Because according to the flight controller, it was on around the 20th.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: So it would have been the same day or maybe the next day after the girls saw the creature. Like all that activity and hoopla. I don’t know the exact date, but it was on or around the 20th of January. And the flight came in. And all the military people I talked to, everybody involved in the case all say, I can’t say this for sure, but rumor has it the Americans came. The Americans came. The Americans came. The Americans came.

They came to Campinas. And we have the very gentleman that was one of the people in operation of the transport of one of the beings, possibly two of the beings, from Humanitas Hospital. And went to a military base. Apparently they backed the trucks up to the wall for a few hours of the night. And then they continued their journey on Dom Pedro, I think it’s called, freeway, all the way down to Espacex military base in Campinas. And that’s when the Americans landed.

And actually, it’s so funny too, because you hear all the accounts of the people that we talk to. It’s like, yeah, they all, even including the military chief of police, he said the same thing. Campinas. And that’s when the Americans came in. So it’s like everything makes sense. The accounts of the plane came in here. This is where I dropped it off. It all went here. Like, it’s just a big cargo transport plane, helicopter come out the back, going to Virginia. It’s like what the hell else were they doing there?

AJ GENTILE: Was that Dr. Italo’s patient? Was that being still alive? Yes, it still was alive.

JAMES FOX: Fully alive? Well, yeah, I mean, I don’t know how long it stayed alive, but it was fully alive and fully doing well on the 20th.

AJ GENTILE: Wow. So when you spoke to Eric Davis, he talked about alien species. He talked about the grays, the Nordics, a lot of these. So what’s the taxonomy of this particular alien that was in Varginha? I mean, how many species? I know we’re speculating. This is a storytelling show.

Jacques Vallee on Different Types of Beings

JAMES FOX: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so there’s a segment with Jacques Vallee because he was unable to attend the press club meeting that we had. And it was January 20th, the 30th anniversary of the incident. And that’s when we held it in Washington D.C. and we presented. Because Jacques couldn’t be there. And Jacques goes out on a limb and describes various cases and different types of creatures or beings or non-human intelligence, whatever you want to call them. And I think that you should show your audience that clip because it’s very interesting. He talks about exactly what you’re mentioning now.

AJ GENTILE: Do you get a sense of — are these beings from other planets, or are they here? What do they want?

JAMES FOX: I wish I knew.

AJ GENTILE: Speculate.

Different Races, Different Agendas

JAMES FOX: I mean, from all the different people that I’ve talked to and all the different alleged firsthand witnesses to close encounters of the third kind, there seems to be different races, different agendas. Because you’ve got the quintessential almond-shaped eyes, black eyes, gray, spindly arms, spindly legs — that seems to be the worker bee or whatever. Some of them think that they’re biologically engineered entities with an intelligence. What do I know?

That seems to be consistent. Some people describe brown skin or white skin or gray skin, but the big eyes, the big teardrop-shaped head, the three digits — I think three fingers and a thumb — seems to be fairly consistent. But then you’ve got people like Travis Walton describing human-looking creatures, beautiful blonde, blue eyes, humans, very attractive. I guess they call them the Nordics.

AJ GENTILE: The Nordics, the tall whites. Yeah.

JAMES FOX: You’ve got those types. And then you’ve got, if the account is to be believed, Jason Sands and his convoy in 1994. He talks about this, and he was really odd in that he was dressed in a military outfit. And Jason said they were all looking at his boots, and he’d been walking through the dry, dusty desert. His boots were immaculate, like spotless. But he described the big eyes, but they weren’t almond-shaped. They were just really big, dark, and no real ears. No ears. And that’s a different type.

And was that entity, if it’s true, capable of projecting how it wanted to be seen? Sometimes you wonder about that. Like, why was his military outfit spotless right in the desert, according to the witness?

So we could be dealing with all of the above. We could be dealing with interplanetary. Maybe there’s some that live under the oceans. Maybe they live on the backside of the moon, who knows? Maybe they’re right here. Maybe they’re interdimensional. They come in and out, just like changing the frequency a little bit.

I really don’t know. I’d love to know how many different species or races. I’d love to know what their agenda is. I’d love to know why they don’t make their presence more overtly known.

The Lonnie Zamora Incident

Because I’ve studied a number of different landing cases. Like, okay, I’ll just go into a little bit. April 24, 1964 — there was a police officer by the name of Lonnie Zamora. He was in hot pursuit of a speeding car. It was like late afternoon, coming up on 5 o’clock, and he saw this egg-shaped, white egg-shaped thing whiz across the road in front of him. Like maybe off in the distance, some kind of flash. He thought maybe it was like the dynamite shack. Something he needed to go investigate. So he terminates his police chase, takes a right, and he goes up this dirt road, and down in an arroyo he sees an egg. Basically, it could be a Tic Tac, right? An egg-shaped object. It had a little symbol on it, and two small childlike creatures stepping around at the bottom, just outside on the ground.

He’s like looking, he’s like, “God damn, is that like a car crash? Two kids? What the hell am I looking at?” And one of them looks him right in the eyes, and he’s startled. The creature was startled. Lonnie was startled. So Lonnie breaks contact and he drives. The road wraps around. He’s here and he sees the landed craft and the entities and he gets face contact. By the time he got around to get a closer look, the craft was still sitting on the ground, spooling up, but the hatch had closed because he heard a thump, and the creatures were gone, and the craft departed.

Now, if you look at where the craft landed, just on the outskirts of town — I don’t know if it had a problem, if they were gathering soil samples, God only knows — but they did it in a spot that would minimize any potential exposure. They landed in this little recessed arroyo, so they would minimize the chance of being seen. And where they were spotted, they were evasive and they got in and left. They could have established some level of communication.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

The Travis Walton Case

JAMES FOX: They could have driven over there. They didn’t do that. They left. Now, if you look at the Travis Walton case, which I consider a very credible case because there were like seven witnesses — seven witnesses of the craft and his alleged abduction. I would say I don’t think it was an abduction. I think that he got into the way of the propulsion of the craft and it affected him somehow, and they came back and got him, brought him back to life, and then dropped him off.

Now, if you look at where they dropped him off — where they took him was a very remote area in Snowflake, Arizona, up in the mountains. I’ve been there several times. It’s remote. He would have died if they would have dropped him off where they picked him up. They didn’t do that. They dropped him off on the outskirts, five days later, on the outskirts of town, if the accounts are to be believed. They dropped him off close enough to a payphone, where he could get help. But they did it at night, and they did it in an area that was a dip down where they could drop him off and then get the hell out of there, to minimize any potential exposure.

So they cared enough for his well-being, but they also didn’t want their presence widely known. Do you know what I mean?

AJ GENTILE: I do.

What They Do and What They Don’t Do

JAMES FOX: So you look at cases like that and you go, all right, you look at what they do, and then you look at what they don’t do. And sometimes what they don’t do is evidence of potentially their objectives or their agenda. Because if they wanted to make themselves overtly known, they just hover over the next football game or the Super Bowl, whatever. Game over.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, take me to your leader.

JAMES FOX: But they don’t do that. They did some pretty bold maneuvers. I call it like the show of force during the 1940s and 50s, when there were fleets of them flying over America. I mean, all the newspapers — especially ’52, the ’52 wave was phenomenal. And you look at the White House buzzing, the Capitol building in 1952, two consecutive weekends, scrambling military jets. That’s pretty provocative.

You look at the case in — what was it? March 13, 1997, in Phoenix. That craft, even according to the governor, Fife Symington.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, this is the Phoenix Lights.

JAMES FOX: Phoenix Lights. I investigated that on and off for 10 years. And I interviewed families that said they were lying on their front lawns watching this colossal, mammoth, like a floating city, float over the top. Big boomerang-shaped thing where they could look up and see metal compartments, blah, blah, blah.

AJ GENTILE: For hours. This thing was up.

JAMES FOX: Oh, yeah, it went from the north all the way down to the south. Ended up like Tucson. Flew over Interstate 10. I mean, it was witnessed by so many people, including the governor.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

JAMES FOX: And that’s pretty provocative, like flying low and slow. And it was done at a time when everyone was out under the night sky trying to get a glimpse of the Hale-Bopp comet. So that’s provocative. I mean, that’s something, right?

And you’ve got Hudson Valley sightings, you’ve got the Belgian sightings in the late 80s, early 90s. Provocative. I mean, I interviewed a police officer who was involved in the Hudson Valley in the 70s. I don’t know the exact year, but he said this massive triangular-shaped, size-of-a-football-field object was floating over the top of him. I talked to the police officer myself. He goes, “I was kind of curious. I took my flashlight out and flashed it at the object.” This is in the 70s. And he goes, “Son of a b. That thing responded.”

AJ GENTILE: Bam.

JAMES FOX: Laser beam, light down at my feet.

AJ GENTILE: Wow.

JAMES FOX: Like, I wasn’t sure if that was like a friendly gesture or if that was like a shot across the bow. So there’s been some very provocative behavior. But they don’t make themselves overtly known. Which also makes me wonder. Like I said, you look at what they do and you look at what they don’t do.

AJ GENTILE: We’ve clearly got something happening. Clearly the military or someone knows what’s going on. Do you ever find yourself frustrated that you’re almost playing a cat and mouse game?

The Varginha Video and the Calvine UFO Photograph

JAMES FOX: Very much so, yeah. The Varginha case, I’m all in on that right now. And there’s nobody on planet Earth that would like to find that photograph, find that piece of video footage more than me. We have names and people that had it, from people that have seen it. I just got a new name a couple days ago from a doctor, a neurosurgeon, and we were texting back and forth. He said, “I’ll talk about whatever, but I don’t want to talk about Varginha.” But this individual confessed that he was shown the video. Marcus Vinicius was there. But not on the record yet. We’re going to continue working on him.

So we have names. We’re hoping that people are watching all the attention this case is getting, and that people are going to decide, “Hey, man, if I’m ever going to come forward, now’s the time.” Because people in their 40s are now in their 70s, and people in their 50s are now in their 80s. Now’s the time. It would have been 30 years ago. So how old would Dr. Italo have been? He’s 74. So he would have been 44 when it happened.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

JAMES FOX: About 44 when it happened. He’s 74 now. So someone in their 40s, they’re on the cusp of retirement, probably a lot less to lose, wanting their grandchildren to know the truth. So I’m encouraged. I think it’s ripe. Now is the time that this stuff could come out. And it is coming out, but we need more. We just need a few more doctors, we need the video, and we need the American side to come forward. And then we’ve got a slam dunk.

AJ GENTILE: That’s the American side. I think that’s the bottleneck there.

JAMES FOX: We’re working on it.

AJ GENTILE: I hope that video still exists, because a lot of people are invested in making sure it never sees the light of day.

JAMES FOX: That’s for damn sure. We were in contact with people after the first cut came out. We were contacted by a number of people. You can kind of tell, because I’ve been contacted for years by witnesses — you can just kind of tell when you get one that raises an eyebrow. And that’s when someone will reach out. It’s very short. It’ll be like, “I’ve got what you’re looking for,” kind of thing, as opposed to writing me like a novel. And they could have been joking, but you get back in touch with them and they’re just gone. It’s like, why did they reach out? And so it makes me paranoidly think, am I being watched again?

We did a Proton email, which we’re going to put on the screen for people to get in touch with us, particularly anybody on the American side, anybody witnessing the Varginha case. And not to be rude, but if you have a whole UFO story that’s unrelated, please save it for another time. I just want to put a laser-like focus on the Varginha video or any participation in the flight from Campinas back to the States.

I did get contacted by one individual via email who said, “It’s been weighing on me and my family for decades.” I was like, “Oh my God, we did it.” And then — I’ll show you the email — conversations terminated. So I did everything he told me to do. Waited about 36 hours after he sent me the first email. It was like, “Oh, this isn’t who you think it is. My email got hacked and I don’t know anything. Goodbye.”

So I waited like six months and then I sent a separate email, not part of that thread, based on the email address. “Hey, this is so-and-so tree service. I’m coming to cut your hedges.” Because I was hoping maybe he’d respond. “I just need to meet with you to give you an estimate.” And then I finally got some little response, and then it was just gone.

AJ GENTILE: How do you vet your stories?

JAMES FOX: You’ve got to go meet the people. I tell people — because I had people telling me just last year, “I’ve got the video. You need to come. I’m giving it away for free. I just can’t. This is a burden. I don’t want this in my life anymore. I want it out of my life.” Something about a husband or something. And I said, “I’ll come, but I can’t just drop everything in the middle of editing a movie, fly all the way to south Brazil without any kind of proof. I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

We went back and forth for a long time and I said, “Just show me two frames, just one picture, and I’m on a plane tomorrow.” And then after months of back and forth, it was, “If you don’t come down,” — and that was it. That person’s gone. Did she have it? Was she bluffing? I don’t know. But I wasn’t willing to fly to Brazil just because someone said they had it.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

JAMES FOX: Maybe she did have it, I don’t know. But why wouldn’t you show me one screenshot? Send me one screenshot and I’m there.

The Calvine UFO Photograph

AJ GENTILE: What pictures have you seen that you were convinced — like, this is legit?

JAMES FOX: I would say one of the best photographs ever. It’s in my film The Program, which you can watch for free on YouTube Movies. And it’s bloody good, man. Taken in 1990, Calvine, Scotland. And David Clark is the researcher that uncovered it.

It’s a long story, but I’d heard about this case because I interviewed Nick Pope, who was part of the MOD UFO desk in the 90s. I probably interviewed him in the early 2000s. I was like, “Oh, you were at the UFO desk. What was the best case? What did you see?” Nick Pope goes, “Oh, there were two hikers in Scotland.” He didn’t say Calvine, he just said Scotland. “Broad daylight, six prints. Beautiful, like diamond-shaped craft hovering in the sky with a military jet going around.” I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

AJ GENTILE: You can see this online if you guys want to look it up. Yeah, the Calvine UFO.

JAMES FOX: I pestered him and I pestered him and I pestered him. He goes, “We had a big poster of it on the wall at the UFO desk.” He goes, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” And I said, “Nick, no one threw that picture away. It’s still somewhere. What about the names of the guys that you worked with? They’re retired. Where are they now?” I pestered and pestered and pestered, but I could never get it out of him.

And then this researcher, David Clark, finds some FOIA documents, release documents from the British Ministry of Defense. One of them was redacted — it was like “the Royal Air Force press officer” blacked out, “in blah, blah, blah, Scotland.” He’s like, “Who is the Royal Air Force press officer in Scotland? Oh, Craig Lindsay.” So he contacts Craig Lindsay, and long story short, Craig Lindsay had gotten a call from a local newspaper. They said, “We’re here trying to get a quote from the RAF about this UFO photograph.” And he’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” They said, “Well, there are these two mates, these two guys that are going to publish this story, and we just want a comment on what this could possibly be. It’s got a military jet.” He goes, “Well, I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So they said, “We’ll send you a print.”

So they sent him a print. He’s like, “Holy —” This is good. And so he immediately contacts the MOD, and then the MOD contacts him and he starts to investigate. He meets with the witnesses at a hotel. They tell him their account. They said it was hovering, it was silent, they were terrified. They were cowering beneath a tree when it was hovering there. They were like, “What are we looking at?” They had a camera. And they said a military jet came in, and at that point they got enough courage. The military jet did a full pass. It went all the way around the entire object. And the six — I think it was six or seven prints — every picture shows relatively the same object, same spot, same tree, same ground, everything, with the jet in a different position.

Craig was like, “What kind of noise did it make?” And the witnesses were like, “It didn’t make any noise at all. It was completely silent.” He’s like, “I don’t know any planes, anything without any visible wings…” And then as he’s in the middle of this investigation, he gets a call from the MOD and they were like, “We’ll take it from here, thanks.” And that was the end of that.

Well, he keeps that print in a book and kind of forgets about it. Then he retires, and it’s whatever — 33, 34 years later — and he finds the damn thing and gives it to David Clark. That’s the only reason why we have that photograph.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: Thank God for Craig Lindsay, because they buried that story. And I interviewed Nick Pope, and he’s like, “They wanted to bury it, and they did.”

And then at the last possible minute of production on The Program, the documentary I was just talking about, there was a guy — I always get his name wrong — Greaves, Richard Greaves. He called me. He’s like, “You’re mispronouncing my name.” “Is it Greaves?” He’s like, “No, it’s Greaves.” And he describes what happened. He goes, “I knew those blokes.” He was up there, and he said they were on a cigarette break. A couple of days after, they’re about to go public, a black car rolls up. There are these men in black again — heard about them a thousand times.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: He said they came up, they got out of the car. The way he describes the guy smoking behind the wheel — it’s the funniest thing. Richard Greaves should be a comedian, because the way he described this guy smoking, inhaling so hard it lit up the whole cabin on the inside of the car, just really sucking the cigarette down. The driver stays in. There’s a Mercedes, two guys get out. Cigarette break’s over.

They take the two witnesses outside in the pissing rain, talking to them. All the other workers that were not participating in the event itself — didn’t take the pictures, didn’t witness it — they were looking through the window, watching this whole thing. It was raining so hard, and they were just standing in the pissing rain getting drilled by these two men in dark suits, long overcoats.

He said they came back in, and I’ll never forget this. He’s like, they were white as a ghost, just scared the schiza out of these two witnesses. They started drinking heavily, sleeping in their cars at night at the hotel. And then they vanished after a couple of weeks. To this day, they’ve never been seen again.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, that story.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. That is such a good case. Now, the pilot — it was the Harrier jump jet. What I was told is that it’s in the picture, most likely. They said it’s pretty likely to be a Harrier jump jet. That pilot would have been — that was 1990, so that would be like, what, 36 years ago? Let’s say the pilot was in his mid-30s, could have been up to 40. Maybe 35. Well, he’d be 65 now, maybe 70. If you’re out there listening, you’ve got my Proton email. Give us a call. Because I can guarantee you he got a hell of a view of that thing. He flew all the way around it. And he probably had gun cam rolling.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

JAMES FOX: They buried that picture. Vanished. The witnesses — those guys wanted to come forward. They were at the local newspaper.

AJ GENTILE: They were.

Being Watched: Inside a SCIF and the UAP Task Force

JAMES FOX: They were getting their story out with all those prints. Really good story. And that’s another Men in Black story. I’m like, oh, my God, how many times I gotta hear this?

AJ GENTILE: It’s why it’s so hard to even reach out to you because could be the last email you ever send.

JAMES FOX: Well, yeah, yeah. You know, I’m being watched. There’s no question about that. For sure. You are. No question.

Funny, because I was at — this is really funny — I was at the premiere for Age of Disclosure and Leslie was — Leslie Kane, she was hanging out with — met a bunch of dudes in suits, just as typical looking. I think they said they’re from the agency. I’m pretty sure that’s what they said. And I was like, hey, nice to meet you. Hello. Blah, blah. We’re talking. I’m like, whatever, I’ll talk to anybody. People are people. I’m not hiding anything. They know what I’m up to. So I’m talking to the guy and we’re chatting it up. And I was like, yeah, because I did this film on this UFO crash in Brazil. They’re all, “We know exactly who you are.”

AJ GENTILE: Sure they do.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. I was like, oh, my God. It was a little creepy, but it was funny too. And when I did the event at the National Press Club just a couple days ago — I’ve been to Brazil and all over the damn place, not that long ago. This is the 20th of January. So I see three dudes in suits come in, and I knew two of them because I’ve been in touch with some of the people within the task force.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

JAMES FOX: I went into a SCIF with John Koslowski and people from the Air Force Office of Special Investigation.

AJ GENTILE: They let you into a SCIF?

JAMES FOX: Took me into a SCIF, yes.

AJ GENTILE: What did you see in there?

JAMES FOX: I’ll talk about that in a second.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

Inside the SCIF: What James Fox Witnessed

JAMES FOX: These guys showed up at the event, and I saw them come in, and I was like, hey. And they just kind of looked at me and kept going. So about 15 minutes later, things are getting going, everyone’s settling down and getting ready to present. And I was with my sister Kelly, and I was like, “Hey, Kelly, get a picture of me with these.” So I walked up and he was like, “No, no, no, no, no. No photo, dude. Not now. But we’re here,” and yeah, we went back.

But the other thing was, I was invited — I probably won’t reveal who made the arrangements, because I don’t know if that’s okay or not — but I was invited into a SCIF, which is super weird. They did a 48-hour background check, and then all the security. And I was flying back to Vermont from Washington, D.C. and I checked out of my hotel when I had the appointment.

I went into — it was not far from the Pentagon — I went into this building, met in a parking lot and walked through this building. Had to go through security, took all my stuff. Oh, my God. And I go through, and then there were these glass tubes. One side opened and you stepped in, that closed, another side opened. It was just like something out of a movie. And then went down these corridors, and we got to an area where he goes, “All right, now you need to get rid of all your electronics. Put them in this locker.” I said, “Can I use the bathroom real quick?” Because I want to take pictures of the pass. Which I did.

AJ GENTILE: You did?

JAMES FOX: Yeah, I took a picture of the pass I got.

AJ GENTILE: Where can we see that?

JAMES FOX: I’ll show it to you.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: I’ll share it with you. You can show it on the thing.

AJ GENTILE: Okay. Yeah.

JAMES FOX: It says “court required.” Just like that. I’ll show you.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: I took it in the bathroom. They’re probably going to find out about that. Whatever. Sorry.

AJ GENTILE: Last gift.

JAMES FOX: Had to do it. I’ll send it to you for sure. So then they take all my electronics — everything I had, electronic, gone. Then this vault-looking door, just exactly the door you’d expect, opens up — big thick thing. Go inside. I’m like, “F, I’m in a SCIF.” Oh, s. But it was a big room. Like, it was big — cubicles and all kinds of hallways and s*. He’s like, “Yeah, this entire area is a SCIF.” It was all part of the task force. The head of the UAP task force, John Koslowski. So we walked down this hall.

AJ GENTILE: What building are you in? Where are you?

JAMES FOX: Near the Pentagon. Yeah, okay, the Pentagon. I thought it was actually at the Pentagon. It was just really, really close. He takes me down the hallway — I can’t give you this guy’s name, I would gladly, but he wouldn’t appreciate it — and there’s an open door on my left and a closed door on my right. And he’s like, “I’ll be right back,” and he leaves me there.

I’m standing there and I see a table, maybe about the size of this — I think it was more oval-shaped, or maybe it was round, can’t remember. But there were probably a couple of girls and a couple of guys, all in suits, and they’re talking. And I’m tuning in because I’m like, might as well. The brain has an incredible capacity to filter out anything else and just really hone in on something.

AJ GENTILE: I could see you sidling over.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. So I’m listening to the conversation. Like, I’ll give you an example — if you ever take a tape recorder to a restaurant dinner, it’s not recording what you heard. It’s recording everything, because it doesn’t filter it out. But we can do that. We can filter out surround noise and really focus on what we want to hear. I’m tuning into these guys, like, “Oh, what are they on about?” Then one of them abruptly gets up, comes over to the door, and closes it.

So then one guy who met me outside, in a suit, comes and opens up the door, and then John Koslowski comes in. They wanted to show me some footage that they were going to possibly release. I said, “Don’t release that. That’s ridiculous. It’s not going to gain you any credibility. You guys cannot do that.”

And then we talked about Rua, I talked about Varginha, I talked about Socorro. I was just like, “You know, ultimately what we’re dealing with is that a certain percentage of these things is non-human intelligence. What’s the plan to tell the public? We’re not going anywhere. This story’s not going away. What’s the plan?”

And John Koslowski, the head of AARO right now, goes, “James, I can’t part my hair without approval from the DoD. And you can quote me on that.”

So basically what he was saying is his hands are tied, and it doesn’t matter what he ultimately finds or uncovers or learns. I’m convinced that they clearly found the legacy — God, I could tell you another story — the legacy UAP Crash Retrieval Program.

AJ GENTILE: Now you’ve got to tell the other story.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, well, I just, you know.

AJ GENTILE: What is the plan, do you think? Before you get into that?

The Path Forward: Disclosure, Whistleblowers, and Public Pressure

JAMES FOX: I think there are some people that want it out and some people that don’t want it out, and the people that are in possession of the goods don’t want it out for the most part.

But I really think it’s important that the people in the UFO community — I mean, we don’t need the government against us. Everybody’s bickering among each other, which is absurd. We should focus on a common goal. But I’m really pivoting to the point where I want to say to people, “Look, you don’t have to believe Grush or Lou or Chris or whoever. How about we call their bluff and we help support Congress?”

Congress really needs to hear from you. They’ve made that abundantly clear. We need to know that our constituents and other people — that we have your support in putting our necks out. But to figure out a way how we can get immunity to the witnesses that want to come forward and how we can provide additional whistleblower protections — that’s very, very important, because there are threats.

People feel, even if it’s just their security clearance — they lose that, they have no job. The threats have taken away their security clearance. Some people are concerned about their personal safety. They lose their job. They can’t support their family, they can’t feed their family. So now they’re talking about a fund that we could put in place, so if they do lose everything, they get financial compensation.

And people are like, “Oh, well, that’s not really fair. They’re getting taxpayer dollars.” It’s like, well, if what they’re saying is true, that’s the biggest story ever. I don’t think people would have that big of a problem with getting some compensation to some of these — potentially the most significant witnesses in the history of mankind.

So anyway, these are all initiatives and things that I feel strongly that we should support and put pressure on, whether you believe it or not. Like, you might say, “What does this guy have to gain by coming forward? What does David Grush have to gain?” Quite honestly, I don’t really see anything. He had to retire early. He didn’t get any of his pension. He’s got all these threats. I mean, I don’t know. Call his bluff.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, I think the Pentagon walked back a lot of even what he said.

JAMES FOX: Oh, of course they did. That’s what they do.

AJ GENTILE: Do you feel like they’re preparing us for an actual disclosure? Is this a limited hangout — like, “We’ll give them a little here, we’ll give them a little there”?

JAMES FOX: I think it has to come from we, the people. We have to continue the pressure. It’s one of the reasons why — I told you earlier — I had to move mountains and walk on water to do that event at the National Press Club. And I’d love to see the government do something like that. They’re doing exactly the opposite.

But it was really hard. We hired a PR firm, we had a former White House press secretary — assistant press secretary — all sending out the press conference to all the various news outlets. And we had really good attendance. We had a lot of cameras. There were influencers there, but only a handful of news outlets. I mean, we did the best we could. Like I said at the time, it was a very solid base hit.

But we had a story that was going to go out in a very big news organization. It would have been really historic. And that got squashed at the last second, to the point where we couldn’t pivot to somebody else. And there’s about closed-door hearings. But again, I’ll remind your audience — there’s a great story out in The Debrief by Leslie Kane and Ralph Blumenthal. Go check it out. It’s free. It’s online. It’s got photographs, details of the meetings. It’s good. Yeah.

Going Directly to the People

AJ GENTILE: Well, I think you’re doing the right thing by doing the podcast circuit, because these shows have a larger audience than the major news outlets. You’re speaking directly to people now.

JAMES FOX: It’s amazing.

AJ GENTILE: You’re speaking directly to people now.

JAMES FOX: You know, I started thinking about it, and I was like, we don’t even really need the mainstream media anymore. We’re just going straight to the people.

AJ GENTILE: James, this is the mainstream media.

JAMES FOX: I know. It’s crazy, right? It’s nuts. I was hanging out with this guy the other day, and he’s like, “Yeah, man, I got 10 million followers.” I was like, you have 10 million followers?

AJ GENTILE: I know. Eat your heart out, Sandy.

The Legacy Program & Media Suppression

JAMES FOX: Yeah. Unbelievable. And then there’s podcast coverage that’s happening right now in Brazil. Right now in Brazil. 22.8 million followers. Another one. 30 million followers. Like, that’s a significant amount of people that you have outreach to. You know, look at Rogan.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: You know, you guys. Yep. It’s extremely impressive. And that we’re doing it organically, we’re doing it grassroots. We’re doing it. We. The people. You know, that’s why I was telling you earlier. I really appreciate. You know, I appreciate the support, and I’m not asking anyone to categorically believe this happened, but. But, hey, how about support for additional investigation? How about. Wow, there’s a lot of really compelling eyewitness testimony. Let’s dig a little further.

AJ GENTILE: There is. You’re a very important person. I have two things I want to get to before we let you go, but. When you were talking about the skiff, you said, “Oh, I can tell you another story.” Do you remember what that was?

JAMES FOX: Yeah, well, it was such a tease. Okay, well, so how can I tell you without revealing this person’s identity.

AJ GENTILE: Their position, what. Their role?

JAMES FOX: No, if I do that, that’ll. That’ll give a dead giveaway.

AJ GENTILE: Then just tell the story.

Lonnie Zamora’s Truck & A Whispered Confession

JAMES FOX: Okay, well, so when I investigated the Socorro, New Mexico case, I was. You know, I really. I do a deep dive. Like, I. You know, you look at someone like Richard Dolan or. Or Stanton Friedman or, you know, some of these really serious, you know, researchers and authors of very detailed books, and their historical perspective was like a walking encyclopedia. And these guys are incredible.

I am extremely familiar with a handful of cases that I personally have investigated. Boots on the ground in Africa or China or wherever the hell I am. South America. And I. And I stick my teeth into a case, minimum five years, sometimes 10, sometimes 20. Whatever.

And I was investigating the Socorro case, and I got to know his wife Mary, his daughter Diane, his son Michael, his co-workers. It’s all over a five year period. And every time I came to Socorro, and particularly to Mary Zamora’s house, I’d see this beautiful white Ford pickup truck parked out in front. Flat tires, hood popped ajar. Whole cabin filled with garbage. Bullet hole through the cab back. They had a beautiful truck, though. It was a step side. 1972, I think. 72, wooden bed. It was kind of rotted out, but nice. I mean, the body was in pretty good shape. It didn’t have any really rust because it was in a dry desert environment. I kept looking at that truck, I’m like, damn, that thing is gorgeous. Needs work, but wow. Long story short, I bought the truck off Mary.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: Slowly fixing it up and it runs great. I. After five years, I put it. I had the engine rebuilt, but it’s the same engine. 360, big block, 72.

AJ GENTILE: What?

JAMES FOX: Oh, 100.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: And I got all the wood for the bed and I. I was under that thing for like weeks with the Sawzall because I was working on it, you know, as much time as I had during the production of The Phenomenon. And I was under the truck with the Sawzall, cutting all the little nuts off. They were all frozen and it was raining down like. I should have had goggles on. And I put new wood in the bed with a buddy of mine, Mike Aiken.

And it was funny because I ordered the kit and then I put it all. It was a huge undertaking. My God, that was difficult. We had to paint it with like marine based, you know, like lacquer, whatever. Anyway, and the metal strips in between the wood started rusting out within a week or two. And so I was like, what the hell, man? I just thought, oh, okay, it’s a truck and it’s outside. But I just did this like, come on. So I contact the company, they’re like, “Wow, you know, you didn’t ask for the stainless.” I was like, “Well, you guys didn’t even give me an option. Like, how was I supposed to know?”

So anyway, so I’m slowly fixing the truck up. I had the original seat reupholstered. The guy was like, “This was really, really challenging. I had to rebuild all the springs.” And I got a new dashboard because you could poke your finger through the dashboard from the hot sun. Seriously, just poke your finger right through. I did the headliner and the floor carpeting myself, and I did a terrible job. But overall, had the engine rebuilt. It’s a beautiful truck.

So I had an individual come that investigated UFOs in an official capacity for the United States government from 2017 to 2020, whatever the hell. And we took my truck out to dinner because, I don’t know, for some reason, I didn’t have the other car. My partner Rebecca might have taken it. I was like, “Hey, I just got this truck.” He’s like, “Oh, I love old trucks,” you know, and this is great. It was really cool because just like, this is Lonnie’s Zamora’s truck. You know, we’re driving this old 72 truck out on these country roads, and we go out to a lovely dinner, we have some drinks, and afterwards, you know, we kind of loosen up a little bit.

We go back to drop this individual off at his hotel. And we get to the hotel, and it’s dark. I don’t have a cabin light. I don’t have. It does work, but the doors are closed. It’s dark. We park in front of the hotel, and the door guy, the valet, comes out. He’s like, “Hey, can I get you.” I said, “Oh, no, I’m just dropping him off.” And he left. The engine’s off, lights are out. It’s pretty dark. A little bit of light coming from the hotel, but we were pretty far away, so it was like almost just silhouetted a little bit inside the cabin. It was dark.

We had a whispered conversation, and it was like that moment when maybe you’re on a date and you drop, you know, you drop the girl off or the one guy, whatever, and there’s an awkward moment where you’re not sure, like, you know, where we should. Do I go, you know, you invited me in, or whatever. Worst moment ever, you know, like that awkward little moment, you know, but it was kind of like that. I’m going, “All right, well, are you getting out, or do I.” You know? And just silhouettes. It was like a scene out of a movie. I’ll never forget it so long as I live. Just silhouettes in the truck. Dark. And it was like, “We found a legacy program. Yeah, we found it.” And then some more details. And I just sat there quietly going, can’t.

AJ GENTILE: Tell us the details.

JAMES FOX: No, I can’t. I just can’t.

AJ GENTILE: Why do we call that a legacy program? Did that end, or did you. Legacy.

JAMES FOX: Legacy program, I guess, because it’s been going on for such a long period of time, I guess.

AJ GENTILE: But is that a still ongoing program?

JAMES FOX: I guess it would be, I’m assuming. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Senator Rubio, he talks about. I mean, you know, you read between the lines. I mean, the latest cut of Moment of Contact. We have Senator Rubio on News Nation saying that, you know, extremely credible people, firsthand, you know, claim to be firsthand working on the stuff. The legacy program are like. I mean, very. Like, wow. You know what I mean? It’s happening. It’s amazing how many people are not paying attention, you know, all the congressional hearings. How many people even know. Very few congressional hearings.

AJ GENTILE: No, very few.

Media Silence & The Biggest Story in History

JAMES FOX: It’s just so. It’s so incredible to me, you know, that more people aren’t like. I know that life’s tough and, you know, we’re working, paying bills, you know, I get all that, but this. I can’t believe more news outlets aren’t focusing on this. Like, you got, you know, president. You know, sexual. Excuse me, peccadillos like, you know, they put so many resources into it. Like, you know, whether it’s Trump or Clinton or whatever, like, they’re just fixated and, like, millions of dollars, like, you know.

AJ GENTILE: I mean, I think it’s intentional.

JAMES FOX: You’ve got, like, what could be the biggest story in history, and. No, and they’re not doing anything.

AJ GENTILE: I think they want us fighting about politics because that way we don’t see what’s going over here.

JAMES FOX: 60 Minutes finally does a little thing on UFOs. I’m told it was the most popular thing they’ve ever done. I’m pretty sure if it’s not number one, it was number two, most popular thing they’ve ever done. Okay. New York Times, 2017, one of the most popular stories they’ve ever gone to print. Yep. Do you not recognize that? New York Times and CBS. Hello. Like, what are you guys doing? Do some digging. Is it take people like me to do your guys’s work? Like, really? Could you imagine if we had the full force of, like, you know, media to take this seriously and really stick their teeth into it? And all the financial. Like, come on, man.

I used to be not convinced about the connection between mainstream and, like, DoD intelligence, the influence there. But now I’m like, that’s all.

AJ GENTILE: It’s all wrapped up.

JAMES FOX: It’s got to be connected.

AJ GENTILE: Of course.

JAMES FOX: It just kind of has to be. I mean, I don’t want to. You know, it just. It feels that way.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. It has to come from out here.

JAMES FOX: It feels that way. And it might be just as simple as, like, “Hey, you know, all those connections and stories that we’re feeding you. Yeah. You just go ahead and leave this to the side. Otherwise, we’re done,” you know, and someone needs to grow a pair and just start and do it. Just do it. The support would be incredible.

AJ GENTILE: But they’d have to do it really publicly because these people do disagree.

JAMES FOX: Well, they would be doing well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. That’s kind of. That’s kind of freaky, too.

Gary McKinnon & The NASA Hack

AJ GENTILE: Tell me about. About Gary McKinnon, his story, what you think about him.

JAMES FOX: I love that guy.

AJ GENTILE: He’s amazing.

JAMES FOX: He was great. I finally got to meet him, and he’s in the program as well. Did you see the program?

AJ GENTILE: I did.

JAMES FOX: Well, you can also watch that for free on YouTube Movies.

AJ GENTILE: Stop saying for free. Go.

JAMES FOX: Well, no, no. Support your work. It’s a great platform. They’ve got 300 million, whatever, followers, and it’s a great platform.

AJ GENTILE: Your work needs support.

JAMES FOX: Anyway, so somebody got in touch. Somebody I knew knew him. So I wish I could remember who that person was, but. Give us a quick recap on what Gary did with NASA.

Only one second. Because it catapulted in the mainstream. Late 90s, early 2000s, I think it was. Oh, my God. It was everywhere. He was in the news. The presidents were talking about him.

AJ GENTILE: All the prime ministers.

JAMES FOX: Prime ministers talking about him, and always. But he was way too inundated at the time. They were making songs about him. He was working with all these famous musicians. It was incredible. “Free Gary McKinnon.” So somebody reached out to him. He hears my name, and he’s like, gets right in touch with me, and he’s like, “Oh, my God, my hero.” I’m like, “Dude, me? What? You like, you know.”

AJ GENTILE: Right.

JAMES FOX: We’re both super stoked, you know. So Gary McKinnon, based on probably one of the claims from an alleged NASA employee. I can’t remember the woman’s name. But she had testified at a 2001 press conference that Dr. Steven Greer had done. And she basically gave a specific location where photographs are, you know, manipulated from NASA that show, you know, UFOs.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: Excuse me. So he was like, you know, “I’m going to go find out.” So he started hacking. Excuse me.

AJ GENTILE: Hold on. He didn’t. He just found computers that with. Accidentally. He didn’t, like, illegally. I’m trying to. I’m trying to help Gary out. I’m trying to help Gary out.

JAMES FOX: He’ll admit this now.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. It’s water out of the moon.

AJ GENTILE: Is he in the clear? He’s in the clear now because Obama wanted his neck.

Gary McKinnon’s Hack & The Buzz Aldrin Encounter

JAMES FOX: I know. They couldn’t have. They could not have. Okay, well, let me get into the story real quick and I’ll just go into it. It’s one of the biggest computer hacks allegedly in history. And he said that. I think it went on for a while. I don’t know if it was a year or two years. I can’t remember. It was a while.

And he goes, you know, I was going to. I would go. And he talks about it like, it’s like, oh, yeah. It’s like, you know, walk in the park. He was like, of course. You just, you know, I was like. I was like, yeah, maybe easy to use somebody like me. I don’t know what that. You’re talking gibberish.

AJ GENTILE: I don’t know.

JAMES FOX: But he would go through these servers in the States from different, you know, maybe a library or maybe whatever, right? And he would. So that would be the signals and that would. It would end there. So. And then he’d go from there and he’d go into like NASA, NSA, CIA, whatever.

And he goes. He started getting lazy and just going around and going straight. And he got into something. It’s Johnson Space Center, I think it was, kind of where the woman said that these things, these things would be. And he was on dial up and he hit pay dirt.

And he said there was this cylindrical, interestingly enough, cigar shape craft. Yeah, cylindrical shape craft in like outer space. He goes, it could have been the Earth. I think it was the Earth, but I couldn’t say for sure. It was clouds, blah, blah, blah. But it was coming down, coming down. And he’s just sitting there with bated breath going, “Oh, my God, this is like, oh, this is my Eureka.” We called it his Eureka moment.

And he goes. I was like, oh, my gosh. And it’s just like this cylindrical shaped thing. He goes, it clearly had no. He’s like, it was other world, you know? And then I think it was going down, going down, going down, going down. And then the cursor moved.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

JAMES FOX: And the screen went blank. It was my Eureka moment. And also my “s*, what have I just done?” Like, I don’t know how long it was that he woke up to men in suits over his bed in London. Over his bed, over his bed.

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know that. Wow. Yeah.

JAMES FOX: And then it was like. And they took him into custody. Didn’t they. Oh yeah, are you kidding me? They wanted to extradite him and lock him up for 70 years. Yeah, 60 or 70 years.

Now I think, and this is speculation and Gary might agree with this. I don’t know. I think that ultimately, because the British and the Americans go along generally together, I think that ultimately the Americans, they wanted to extradite him publicly, but had that happened, he would have had due process, it would have been a big spectacle and the deep. The re. There would have been a revelation of everything that he saw. He has a very public court case

AJ GENTILE: to tell his side.

JAMES FOX: So this is just, again, this is me speculating here.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

JAMES FOX: That, you know, the Americans said to the British, “Hey, look, we’re going to push for his extradition. You’re going to deny it? Because we don’t want a big public court hearing because that’s what it’ll be.” He was everywhere in the news. Anybody just Google Gary McKinnon. Oh yeah, yeah. So they ultimately denied him, but he said he was ready to take his own life. He did. Yes, he did. He’s like, “I’m not going to go rot in a prison for the next 65 years.” He was already, I think he had, he had, he knew how he was going to do it. He’s like, “Yeah, I was going to take my own life. I’m not going to go sit in prison for 60 years. Hell no.”

AJ GENTILE: Did he talk to you about the list that he found about the off-world fleet?

JAMES FOX: Yeah, he talked about they were non-terrestrial officers.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

JAMES FOX: And it’s funny actually because again, speculation here. I started thinking about the alleged encounter at Nellis Test Range in 1994 of this non-terrestrial officer. He’s in officer gear, he’s clearly not of this planet, so called. It did make me think of him. It did make me think of him. Do you know what I mean?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

JAMES FOX: Because I don’t know, I was like, is that what they’re referring to, non-terrestrial officers? Or are they talking about astronauts?

AJ GENTILE: Well, they had names.

JAMES FOX: Yeah. You did. Yeah. I don’t think he remembered those names, but yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know if he remembered all that.

But anyway, it’s a fascinating, fascinating case. And it goes along with like all the people that have been talking about this cadre of high resolution, some cases 4K super clear photos of UFOs, of craft that are just. God knows, we have sensors everywhere, right. All these drones with high res cameras and everything like that. It’s like, yeah, of course they would be. We got phones and cell phones and pictures show up all the time on the Internet. But how do you know what’s real and what’s fake and who’s got the time to go through it all? Do you know what I mean?

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

JAMES FOX: But the military, they’ve got the sensors, they’ve got the cameras. I mean, if anyone’s going to have that kind of data, it would be the military. And everyone says they have it. And Gary McKinnon found some of it.

AJ GENTILE: He sure did.

JAMES FOX: He got to see it.

The Buzz Aldrin Story

AJ GENTILE: What was your. What was your. I guess it’s now infamous interaction with Buzz Aldrin.

JAMES FOX: Oh, God. Excuse me. Jesus.

AJ GENTILE: You don’t have to fold your arms. You can relax. This is a place for sharing.

JAMES FOX: I’ll give you the short version.

AJ GENTILE: He didn’t punch you in the mouth.

JAMES FOX: I know, right? Put your head in the Bible. Okay. So I worked on a movie set called The Legend of Obie Taggart. And it would have been probably mid-90s, my guess. Yeah, I was working on my first UFO doc. I don’t think I was working on. Yeah, and Mickey Rooney, his wife Jan Rooney. And there was another actor. Is it Ned Beatty that got. That was in. “Now you going to do some praying, boy, and you better pray good.” You remember that one?

AJ GENTILE: Was that Deliverance?

JAMES FOX: Yes, sir. Okay. He was there and I had just seen Deliverance like a year or two earlier. So I couldn’t help but think about. I was like, dude, I just saw you.

AJ GENTILE: You didn’t squeal like a pig.

JAMES FOX: Oh, God. God, that scene was like brutal. No, please don’t Google. I remember the first. I had no idea what that was. One of the. I watched it in England. Oh. In the 90s. And they’re like, “We’re going to watch Deliverance.” I was like, “Deliverance, like.” And it got to that scene. I was like, “Oh, Jesus, no, God, please.”

Anyway, so I was an extra on this movie. I was a prison guard for Mickey for Chant and one of the Rooneys. And as usual, they’re like, “Oh, so what else are you up to?” And I was like, “I’m doing a UFO documentary.” And they were like, oh. I was kind of expecting the typical, you know, laughter and ridicule, whatever. But he’s like, “Oh, you know, my wife and I are really good friends with Buzz Aldrin. And yeah, he told us some pretty crazy stuff. Like he’s seen some stuff.” I was like, “Really?” They’re like, “Yeah, you know what? We’ll get you in touch with them.”

So that happened. And then a friend of mine in Kentfield, California, was bartending an event. It was an art sale, an art dealer sale, whatever. And there was a woman named Fayan Potter there, and she was Buzz Aldrin’s sister. So between her, and I met her at a place called the West Bank. The Left Bank, sorry. And then Jan Rooney. And Jan Rooney’s dad was a general in the, I think it was the Air Force. And he talked about Roswell a little bit to her. But in any case, between those two, they set up an interview with me with Buzz Aldrin.

And he ultimately agrees to give me an interview about his UFO sighting. And he goes, “But I’m going to be on book tour. I’m going to be in the south of France.” So I borrowed some money, got a little crew. He was like, “This is where I’ll be. Come down and I’ll meet with you.”

So I arrived there in Monte Carlo, and Monte Carlo is probably the most expensive place on Earth. And I had a small budget and I was chewing up that money every day. And I kept, you know, getting in touch with them. It’s like, “You know, traveled all this way, blah, blah, blah.” “Oh, yeah, you know, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.”

So I finally got to, like, I don’t know, whatever, the fourth day. And I said, “Mr. Aldrin, I can’t. You’re too busy because, you know, I said, Mr. Aldrin, with all due respect, I traveled all this way. You did agree to an interview. And I can’t stay here forever. This place is really expensive. I traveled all the way down here.” He goes, “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Meet me in my hotel lobby tomorrow morning, whatever, nine o’clock, whatever time it was. No cameras rolling.” I said, “No, no, no. Won’t have any cameras rolling.”

So the next morning, we go there a little early and we’re having like a croissant, this really fancy hotel. And it was like a $10 cup of coffee back then. And the concierge comes up to me. He says, “Mr. Fox?” I said, “Yes.” “You have a telephone call.” Go over there. And it’s Buzz. He’s like, “I can’t do it.”

He goes, “Paul Allen has just invested in SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Very conservative. Those guys are looking for stuff all the way across that, you know. And I can’t jeopardize. I’m trying to develop a rocket to get citizens into space, yada, yada, yada. I’m working with Congress. I can’t do it. And how is my story going to change anything anyway?”

AJ GENTILE: Oh, come on.

JAMES FOX: And I said, “Well, with all due respect, sir, it takes people of your stature to come forward and help elevate this topic.” Blah, blah, blah, blah.

AJ GENTILE: Edgar Mitchell did it.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, but Edgar Mitchell wasn’t a firsthand witness. But he met with firsthand witnesses and he knew about Roswell. But there’s another reason why I believe Roswell. But you know, he didn’t deny any, like, you know, he didn’t say, “Hey, I had a sighting on the way to the moon.” But the sister told me that he had a chase. A disc, I think it was in the 50s, yeah, probably late 50s.

AJ GENTILE: Chase.

JAMES FOX: The discs rattled apparently. The sister said he was rattled. He chased this thing up to as high as his plane would go. Couldn’t catch it. And then they saw something a little less, a little more ambiguous, or something that followed them to the moon, something like that. But I never got a story.

And then I went on Larry King with him in like 2007, maybe 2006, 2007. And it was like, I don’t know, eight years later, something like that. Couldn’t tell you exactly, but I had to look at my records. And I went on with Fife Symington, the former governor of Arizona. And to my unbelievable shock, I went into the green room and there he was getting his makeup put on. I was like, “Holy s*, I’m about to go live with Buzz Aldrin and the former governor.”

So I take a picture of him. Probably did it with my phone. Yeah, 2007. Yeah, sure, I did it with my phone. I have the picture. I got it somewhere on my computer. And she’s like, “Sir, you’re not supposed to take pictures in the green room.” I was like, “Oh, I’m sorry,” kept it. Yeah. And he’s like, looks at me, he’s kind of like.

And then he goes on. And I was like, I’m going to, I’m going to really get this guy. Because I was still pissed about what happened. And Fife was like, “You know, this guy’s very respected. He landed on the moon with Neil Armstrong. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Really be careful.” Yeah, I know. Allegedly. I know people. I know. There’s that whole debate.

My really good friend. One of my best friends. And he was my neighbor. We were so tight and he’s like, “We didn’t go to the moon,” and we would always have these debates. And we loved each other. We didn’t care. It was like, you know, cool, you know. But he just sat there and he lied.

AJ GENTILE: He just sat there and lied.

Wrapping Up & Final Thoughts

JAMES FOX: Just sat there and lied. And I just sat there and just watched him lie.

AJ GENTILE: You couldn’t say it poked a little bit.

JAMES FOX: There’s a guy, Darcy Weird, who did a film that covered it. He found it, amazingly enough. He found the clips of me on the show. And yeah, I know Darcy interviewed me about it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, that’s my story.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, what a shame.

JAMES FOX: I know. Can you imagine that was in the 90s?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. Any other astronauts?

JAMES FOX: Edgar Mitchell?

AJ GENTILE: Any firsthand witnesses?

JAMES FOX: Yeah, there was. Was that Mercury astronaut guy that took a picture of a UFO that was pretty incredible. Trying to remember his name. Sorry, I’m exhausted. I’ve been up. I’ve just barely been getting sleep lately. I mean, I always been. I had the National Press Club event and I flew to Brazil and I was sick in Brazil and I was. All that stuff. Then I flew back here like boom, boom, boom. So I’m sorry if I seem a little tired.

AJ GENTILE: No, no, you’re good.

JAMES FOX: But yeah, there is a guy. It was in the 60s, it was part of the Mercury program. And he took a pretty damn good picture of a UFO. And I think it might have been him. Some filmed footage too. Dosh. Garnett. Dar.

AJ GENTILE: That’s okay. We’ll find him.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, you guys will find it. It was a Mercury Mission and I know his name, but I just. I’m at a loss right now. Anyway.

UFO Photos: What James Believes and What He Doesn’t

AJ GENTILE: Then the last thing, we’ll let you go. Are there any UFO photos, stories or anything that’s out there that people tend to believe that you don’t? That you say that’s not it.

JAMES FOX: Yes, Billy, he’s in Switzerland. And I’m always told. Billy Meier.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

JAMES FOX: And you know, some people can criticize me. It’s fair to have a. You know, look, we can have opinions and we can agree to disagree.

AJ GENTILE: That’s all I’m asking.

JAMES FOX: I’m not going to be disrespectful to anybody.

AJ GENTILE: Everyone can make up their own mind.

JAMES FOX: My personal opinion, based on what I’ve seen. I haven’t met the guy, so I have to add that to the story. But my personal opinion is that he has definitely presented some fake photographs. Now, some people say, well, yeah, because some of the earlier stuff was legit. But then it dried up, and so he wanted to keep getting attention, so he faked some stuff. And I was like, well, if you faked one, you fake two. It’s kind of tough for me to go, well, was he telling the truth? Yeah, I don’t know.

But I’m also told that there’s a certain force field, because a lot of people go, why is it always blurry? It’s a little fuzzy. There’s a field around that that kind of affects the environment.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

JAMES FOX: Gravity field or something. I’m not a physicist. I don’t tell you. But in Age of Disclosure, Hal Puthoff talks about the nature of propulsion and how it bends, warps, folds the space around it, which causes it to be a little blurry. And I was told that a long time ago that if there’s a crystal clear, defined edge around the craft, generally that’s considered to be fake.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, because they’re warping.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, a little fuzzy, because you see

AJ GENTILE: a lot of discs where the surface is almost moving.

JAMES FOX: Yeah, those I tend to believe. You’ll see that too. But even like, you know, 1950, McMinnville, Oregon. The Trents. You look at that photograph, and boy, that’s pretty damn good. But people that had some of the original prints and zoomed in on it, you can see it’s blurred around the edge. So it’s pretty authentic. And you got two witnesses, broad daylight, multiple angles, points of reference. Very good photograph.

Where to Find James Fox & Closing Remarks

AJ GENTILE: Is there anything that we didn’t cover today about Varginha or any of your other work you want to get out there?

JAMES FOX: If you support my work, please go watch Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters. I worked so hard to get that out there in timely fashion. Included a very quick snapshot of some of the relevant aspects that’s been happening in transparency, pushing for transparency in the US government. The first 20 minutes is all new. And then some of the most compelling firsthand eyewitness testimony in the history of the phenomenon, if you believe it.

I tend to. I believe Dr. Itala, because I can’t find a motive. He’s not selling a doc. He’s not selling a book. He’s not asking for money for a story. He’s still the lead neurosurgeon at the hospital, still to this day. And I’m sitting there going, I’ve met his wife. I met his kids, I met his co-workers. I went and had a whole tour at the hospital, all the people he’s been working with. So he’d have to be lying to everybody.

AJ GENTILE: There’s no way. He was too. He was so affected by it.

JAMES FOX: I don’t see why he would do that. And he goes, “I’ll take a public lie detector test tomorrow with my hand on a Bible.” Like, what does this guy have to win by? Why would he do that in his twilight years? I just gotta look him in the eyes, man. The tears holding on to me. He’s like, “I’m telling the truth, man. I’m coming forward because younger generations need to know this is real.”

AJ GENTILE: Moment of Contact. Definitely want to watch that. I bought it on Apple TV.

JAMES FOX: It’s on Amazon, Apple, Google, Fandango. Yeah, I think I gave you a link that hopefully will be in the video. We’ll put all the. It’s a genius link and you just click on it. It’ll take you to various platforms. So I appreciate you having me on. I really appreciate it.

AJ GENTILE: We’ve got your Proton email. Anywhere else that we can find you?

JAMES FOX: Oh, yeah, good idea. Thank you. Find me on X, formerly known as Twitter. It’s James. It’s Ames. C as in Charlie Fox. AmesCFox. And I post everything relevant that I do there. I do have an Instagram account but I’ve got a couple of 20-year-olds running that one so I don’t update it as often as I should.

AJ GENTILE: I’m in the same boat. James, thanks so much for coming in. This has been a joy.

JAMES FOX: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Host’s Closing Summary

AJ GENTILE: All right, bye everybody.

So that’s James Fox’s investigation into Varginha. Now here’s what we can verify. The incident happened in January 1996. Multiple witnesses, civilian and military, reported seeing both a craft in distress and strange creatures in and around the town. A military police officer named Marco Cherrez died about three weeks after allegedly capturing one of the beings. His official cause of death was listed as sepsis and pneumonia and what doctors called benign bacteria, though they never identified its source, and that’s documented in the autopsy.

The big claim here is Dr. Italo Ventarelli’s testimony. He’s a practicing neurosurgeon at the regional hospital in Varginha. 45 years in medicine, still performing brain surgery. He says he had three to four minutes of face-to-face contact with a live non-human entity in the ICU on January 20, 1996. He’s not selling a book, he’s not asking for money. His colleagues, other doctors who’ve known him for decades, all went on camera and vouched for him.

Now, what I keep coming back to is what James said about motive. If Dr. Italo is lying, he’s lying to his wife, his children, his colleagues, his entire community. Why would he do that? There’s no upside. And he’s offered to take a public lie detector test with his hand on a Bible. Something he doesn’t take lightly.

This is either the most significant testimony in the history of UFO research, or it’s an elaborate hoax with no motive. But I think it deserves serious investigation.

Either way, you can watch James’s documentary Moment of Contact: New Revelations. It just dropped. And his National Press Club event from January 2026 is on YouTube for free. And if you have any information about the Varginha case, James has set up a secure Proton Mail for tips.

Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

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