2026 has been shaping up to be quite a year for “this thing of ours.” From Obama and Trump’s dueling comments, Mark Christopher Lee’s early rumors and B.A. Crisp’s messages with Robert Bigelow, through the rolling PURSUE releases, the continuing efforts of Congressman Eric Burlison and others, renewed scrutiny of Luis Elizondo’s background, Bigelow’s revelation that he briefed and encouraged Trump in the Oval Office in February, and mounting pressure for answers, perhaps the most surreal development has been the emergence of Dr. Phil McGraw as a public-facing White House intermediary and advocate for disclosure.
Dr. Phil’s involvement with the subject actually predates the current moment. He hosted Luis Elizondo and Bryce Zabel in 2025, but this year his role has become considerably stranger and more consequential. He has discussed the issue repeatedly across podcasts and television, was given advance access to at least one PURSUE release before it was made public and has since used his platform not to simply cover the releases but to openly criticize them as inadequate. In a recent appearance with Ross Coulthart, he has gone further, questioning whether the people controlling the files are fully leveling even with Trump.
On August 13, 2026, he returned to the subject with an interview with whistleblower David Grusch. In a landscape crowded with two and three-hour podcast interviews, he brought his television experience to bear; in under 56 minutes, commercials included, he moved between the personal, the political, and the profoundly bizarre. While familiar ground was covered, one of the more striking moments came when he followed up on Grusch’s comments on “the pilots.”
Partial transcript, edited for clarity:
Dr. Phil: Have any of these pilots or occupants of these craft, to your knowledge, been taken alive?
David Grusch: Yes. And I know people who have had direct interactions in a detainment situation, which sounds very Star Trek, and sounds very crazy, but it is true, and I talked to a cabinet member, a former cabinet member about that who directly worked the issue for a particular former Vice President. You can guess which one, Darth Vader.
Dr. Phil: And were they able to communicate?
David Grusch: Yes. Yes, and it is true that some sort of consciousness communication, you know, of course people call it telepathy. I cannot begin to tell you how it works, but there is some sort of communication like that. And even friends of mine that were on retrievals felt that kind of communication as they approached the vehicle when they were doing a, you know, cordoning it off, waiting for transport. How that works, what that means, I certainly don’t know. I’m as curious as the average viewer on your show on how that works, and it does feel very Star Trek to me. I have no personal experience with anything like that, that’s outside of my normal, you know, human experience, but that is indeed, you know, what people have experienced in the government with these things.
In the wake of this revelation, much attention has focused on the claim of a living occupant, the mysterious former cabinet member, and the reference to “consciousness communication.” But the combination is not entirely new. In December 2025, Jacques Vallée discussed a case involving a government facility on Weaponized, describing what he called a “very sophisticated process” of interaction with an entity under controlled conditions. Pressed by Jeremy Corbell, he said the entity had been presented in a secure facility where there was “structured interaction with it on a continuing basis by specialists from different areas.” A much fuller account appears in Forbidden Science 7, released June 2, 2026, where Vallée records the claims of a longtime contact he identifies only as “Gilbert.” Across this final volume in the series, the account expands from a vague officially facilitated encounter into something far more detailed.
Enter “Gilbert.”
The story begins on October 9, 2021, when Vallée records the unexpected return of an old friend he identifies only as “Gilbert.” He describes him not as a casual experiencer, but as “a discrete master remote viewer at the level of Uri Geller and Ingo Swann.” Gilbert, he writes, had contacted him again and suggested a meeting after what Vallée characterized as a remarkable encounter:
“He hinted at a fantastic experience of controlled personal exchange he performed, guided through official channels to a session with a supposed Alien.”
Gilbert, Vallée adds, needed help sorting out the results and was sending him what he called “explosive data.” At that point, that is about all Vallée gives us. No location, no description of the entity, and little indication of what the exchange actually involved.
When Gilbert turns up again in the journal nearly two years later, on September 28, 2023, Vallée had considerably more information: five closely typed pages from Gilbert describing prior contact experiences and experiments. Gilbert described a trip to a U.S. laboratory “sheltered within rock,” accessible only through the project, where military guides brought him into the presence of what they specifically identified as a living nonhuman being:
“I will have to find a way to verify the data, including the location where the military guides exposed this long-term researcher to the presence of what they specifically told him was a live Alien entity.”
Vallée said he trusted Gilbert, recalling that they’d crossed paths in Central America and elsewhere over the years, but immediately added that he needed much more information and asked whether the account was “fully veridical data.”
By December 18, 2024, it was no longer just an account of the contact. Gilbert had organized his experiments with what Vallée now explicitly called a “captured entity” into a table describing the interactions. We also begin to get a better sense of why a remote viewer had been brought into the room:
“For a few of the questions he’d been instructed to pose psychically, he did not get any clear answer. For others, he did receive an impression that he couldn’t decipher, but he noted it for the record, very much in the manner Ingo Swann had taught me at SRI decades ago.”
Gilbert was instructed to ask specific questions and record the results, distinguishing between clear responses, ambiguous impressions, and no response at all. Vallée also began drawing larger conclusions from the material, although he acknowledged that the tests did not clearly distinguish between psychic and physical modes of control.
March 2025 brings news. On March 6, Vallée wrote that he had now seen “the long list of technical questions” posed to the entity by Gilbert and the attending group, as well as Gilbert’s own report of psychic impressions, which Gilbert carefully labeled “indications only.” Not every question produced something useful. Some got no answer at all, while others left Gilbert with impressions he could not confidently interpret. Vallée said the circumstances of the capture and the exact location remained classified. His primary interest, he wrote, was no longer the background of the alleged capture, but “the nature of the communication.”
Then, six days later, Vallée finally gives us a much clearer picture of the visit itself. Gilbert clarified that he’d never been part of the formal program investigating the entity and didn’t know whether other captured, or perhaps voluntary, beings existed. He knew only approximately where he had been taken. He couldn’t see outside the vehicle during the final approach and was driven into a small mountain to an underground facility staffed by men and women in uniforms without visible rank or unit markings. Vallée described the room simply: “The room was a big lab. This was serious and well-run.”
Gilbert was brought before an entity more than six feet tall. It had few visible features and appeared to emit light from different parts of its body. Gilbert initially wondered whether he was actually looking at the being itself:
“He was led to the presence of an entity, over six feet tall, with very few features except for light emission from various parts of its ‘body’ so that Gilbert thought what he saw might be covered by a test article, a wired uniform or a safety container for the being rather than the body of an actual Alien. At least, that was the general impression I received from what he said.
That impression changed when Gilbert engaged the entity with question-and-answer sequences, where he was left to interpret answers that came in the form of light combinations. The trials, whose results I have in detail, are remarkable.”
Vallée added that some trials were inconsistent or incomplete, while others matched earlier results. Gilbert was also given permission to inquire about “psychic functioning,” which Vallée said produced results as well:
“Gilbert got permission to enquire about psychic functioning, also with success.”
Vallée said little more about that portion of the session, which lasted several hours, leaving it to Gilbert to disclose more if and when he could speak publicly.
That leaves almost everything we would need to independently check the story out of reach. Vallée doesn’t name Gilbert, the location, when the exchanges occurred, the program, or the circumstances of the capture. He says some of that information was classified, and he repeatedly stops short of claiming personal verification of the entity itself. But he also makes clear that this wasn’t a single anecdote passed along in conversation; over a period of years, Vallée says he reviewed written accounts, tables, technical questions and detailed results. For now, the obvious thing is to watch for whether Grusch, Vallée, or others add detail about the detainment, the nature of the communication, or the people and programs behind either account.
Of course, there’s an obvious question around Vallée’s account: who is Gilbert? Vallée concealed him effectively, but the clues he left point toward the shadowy world that emerged from SRI and related programs. Curious readers may also want to look at Stephan A. Schwartz’s 2017 novel Awakening: A Novel of Aliens and Consciousness.
Reviewed here by Russell Targ:
