Pilot’s Shocking UAP Sightings & What This Means For Aviation - w/ Mark Hulsey | Merged

This channel is going to reach escape-velocity really fast. Ryan, you are an amazing host. A genuine multitalent

This is absolutely top quality content. Brilliant conversation. Two believable guys. No trash talk no bull shit. Just insightful talk.

Blown away by how substantive this conversation was. Mark is a man of courage & integrity who has broken the silence for airline pilots and is now engaged with nothing less than reforming how the aviation world handles the many sightings of anomalous phenomena. It is typical practice, for instance, for a pilot making a UAP report to be put on periodic psychological evaluations. Few pilots want this on their record so they simply don't talk about what they saw. How does this help aviation safety? Ryan, kudos for a rock-solid podcast!

My dad was a Marine Corps pilot (1943 - 1959) and corporate (1960 - 1983). I had to drag a couple of stories out of him, there could have been more. One in the 70s, involved a silver disc flying across his front (Fairchild F-27) to his starboard side and then flying below and to his right briefly before shooting away. The second occurred when he was over DC in a Lockheed Jetstar flying north at night. They saw a bright light, like a fireball at their altitude (don't know) going west from the New York airspace, lighting up the clouds as it went. He heard radio chatter from pilots all over the Northeast basically saying "look at that thing! and what the heck is that?" When they got to their destination in New York (don't know which airport) he called the tower and they said no one would make a report. I'm sure he didn't either. He told me this before he died in '88 so I'll never know if there were more incidents, but I've always felt that many pilots have the same experiences.

The Merged podcast is crucial to the ongoing discussion. This is the type of information and professional analysis that has generally been lacking in the current sphere of ufology. I’ll be following the work of the AIAA with great interest. Keep the heat on, Ryan!

This is how a UAP podcast is done. Excellent work Ryan.

I was a flight medic in the USAF; never a pilot. There is something extremely compelling about hearing two trained military aviation safety officers have this conversation. The level of credibility is just so high... You cannot ignore people like this. Great podcast. Thank you, Ryan.

Back in 1994, this happened to me and the Captain in a USAir Express part 121 Commuter flight at night. I was the First Officer. We were over the Adirondacks at night, on Top of an overcast. No Moon. We had an encounter with a craft/orb that lasted about 12-15 minutes. This was a scheduled airline flight. It was not on Boston Center’s Radar. There was no traffic in front of us for 300 miles yet we signaled to it back and forth with our wing landing lights. We were in a Beechcraft 1900. A Twin Turboprop 19 seat airplane. Pratt&Whitney PT6 engines. 2680 hp. The light it used was not a high intensity landing light. It was more like a soft warm LED light that instantly turned off and on opposite to ours. It wasn’t a reflection. We even turned off all of the interior lights. The object then moved off the right/starboard wing paused and then left quickly. The object when we first saw it was at about 1 o’clock and 2 to 3 miles at our altitude which scared me because that’s close ! The next crew on that route that next week encountered the same thing. It never showed up in TCAS and was never a primary target. So far in my life I have had 5 encounters. 2 up close. I left Aviation with 13,383 flight hours. All civilian flight time. I flew the B1990C/D, DC-9/10-30’s, B-717’s and a year for a Cargo Company. I have been within 100 feet of a flying -silent Black Triangle. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. I have been in some precarious circumstances in my life. Possible life ending moments. This Black Triangle, the fear that welled up inside me was beyond malevolent dark fear. I have never felt that ever with a terrestrial fear. It is hard to describe. If you have ever FELT the Fear sound which is called infrasound, it would have been that fear vibration of below 20hz. 15-18hz. We never reported it. Boston Center asked if we wanted to. We declined because of the fear for our jobs. We didn’t want anything in our employee files and you never wanted the FAA to revoke your First Class Medical. You lose that, your career is over. I am really glad that times are changing and flight crew can speak freely. There was a stigma of you were crazy if you encountered something back 2012 and earlier. Great Interview. Awesome guest.

This is exactly the type of fact-based discussion that the UAP topic needs. Thank you Ryan both for your service as well as starting this podcast. Can't wait for future episodes!

This is the content we were hoping Ryan would be able to bring. Really looking forward to it.

I am a retired Army helicopter pilot with FAA commercial ratings in helicopters and fixed wing aircraft with over 6000 flying hours. In 1967/68 I was in Viet Nam on the first of my combat tours. Our aviation company was A Co, 9th Aviation Battalion based in Bearcat located about 30 miles East of Saigon. We had a 10 aircraft first light launch mission scheduled from the second base at Dong Tam along the Mekong River that was a 45 minute flight distant. We flew down in several hours before sunrise, refueled and parked along the runway to wait in the late night dark. Sitting in the pilots seats my copilot and I saw a light moving lower in our view about 70 degrees above the horizon and at first thought it was a satellite- I had seen Sputnik and others. We called out to several other crews standing nearby to "Hey, check this out". Then the light stopped moving... and after a while the light moved laterally. By then many were watching and suddenly it changed direction again and moved off very quickly disappearing in a few seconds. The entire event lasted about 12 minutes. Many of the pilots and crew discussed this and the general consensus was we had witnessed the same thing but had no explanation for it. I have mentioned this to only a few over the years but feel compelled to share this here. The event remains very clearly etched in my memory.

We could not ask for two more stable, sane, professional, accomplished people to bring this subject out into the light. Thank you both very much. Fantastic podcast.

What an incredible interview, Ryan. Thank you both for bringing this conversation to the public.

Excellent podcast! It's wonderful that pilots and aviation professionals have a place to come to report and discuss events openly. Ryan is such a class act.. a great host with integrity (and so handsome ;) Thank you both for sharing this. Much success ahead!

My uncle, in WWII, never mentioned it when a craft flew beside him for almost 30 min on one side then flew over him and followed him some short distance off the other wing tip for another lengthy stretch. But he told me, a 15-year-old, because I was in the astronomy club, the rocket club, and was reading Project Bluebook. He was in the FAA into his 80s. And never told.

This is the real deal. No unfounded speculation, just observations and practical talk from the most credible sources. Well done Ryan, please keep it up.

Great conversation, sober, considered, relevant. Thankyou gents, gives me hope.

This is the Lex Fridman podcast for pilots and UFOs …. Thanks Ryan !!!

I had a very similar encounter to his at the end of January this year, 2024. We were flying from DCA to SDF and had just reached top of climb at 32000 feet when I noticed an orange light at our 1 o clock, about 10 degrees above us, that appeared then disappeared. It seemed to be sweeping right to left. And it kept doing it. Then a second light appeared a few degrees above it, sweeping right to left. We flew 300 miles, making slight turns for our route, and the lights stayed in the same sector of the sky repeatedly sweeping right to left, never getting closer. Both of us in the cockpit saw it. Someone on 121.5 (guard) even asked “Hey, does anyone else see those lights?” We lost sight of them once we started our descent and passed through a cloud layer.

Ryan, this topic needs your pragmatic, measured, and careful questioning which unfolds over the hour-plus video. And all the while, you're educating folks like me with zero experience in flying and physics. This deep dive into the particulars of instrumentation helps keep this topic laser-focused. My favorite thing: You never said, "So. Mark, do you think this is alien tech?" It would have been an easy move but would have completely changed the entire exchange and undermined your own credibility as a person truly concerned with out nation's response to anomalies. So deep appreciation for that! Much much luck, Ryan!!!