Jesse Mitchells is a YouTube-based commentator on the Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) subject who has said he attended the Monroe Institute prior to 2024-11-13.1 His channel featured coverage of David Grush’s testimony before the US Congress on 2023-07-26 as a UFO whistleblower,2 and after a video featuring Grush was taken down, the channel received a strike.3 Mitchells has said that the US government has been conducting covert reverse-engineering programmes on UFOs for approximately 70 to 80 years.4 Sean, a co-host in one recorded discussion, described Mitchells as the most important voice in the UFO domain, more thorough in research and more multidisciplinary than others in the field.5
Mitchells and his editor travelled to Aztec, New Mexico, to investigate a reported crash there.6 He has said he went in sceptical and came away fairly sure a crash had occurred,7 having previously suspected a conflation between an anti-gravity exotic-propulsion lineage possibly created in Nazi Germany or during the Second World War and reports of alien craft.8 After investigating several such cases, he has said he concluded that the crashes are real,9 and that because the US Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seem always to be involved, crash retrieval and reverse engineering of recovered material must be taking place.10 He has pointed out that the publicly known Pentagon UFO programmes carried a budget of about 22 million US dollars,11 against the 85 million dollar cost of a single F-35 Lightning II fighter jet12 and the over one billion dollar cost of a single B-2 Spirit stealth bomber,13 and has said he considers that budget nonsensical as funding for reverse-engineering a recovered craft.14 He has said he believes the legacy programme described by whistleblower David Grush probably involves hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of US dollars spent on reverse engineering recovered craft.15
Mitchells is interested in Thomas Townsend Brown and his anti-gravity propulsion research.16 Agnew Bahnson funded the top theoretical physicists of his time, including Brown, who was working on anti-gravity experiments,17 and Mitchells has said he assesses that Bahnson appeared to be in contact with the phenomenon himself.18 General William Neal McCasland ran the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the laboratory where the Roswell wreckage was rumoured to have been taken,19 and Sekret Machines was inspired by conversations with him.20 Mitchells has said McCasland later went missing from his home in New Mexico,21 disappearing without a trace, leaving behind his phone and everything that could be used to track him, and taking a gun.22 Tom DeLonge is the frontman of the band Blink-182,23 and Mitchells has said he has very little doubt about DeLonge’s sincerity, intelligence and long-standing organic interest in the UFO topic.24 Mitchells has said that Ben Rich, president of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in the 1990s and responsible for modern stealth aircraft,25 wrote about an international corporate board of directors that deals with the UFO issue.26 Brown separately encountered the Caroline Group, an international group of industrialists that appeared to absorb exotic technology.27
Mitchells regards Richard Nixon as a political outsider, citing his origins in Whittier, California, his “chip on his shoulder”, and his wish to force a reduction in the CIA.28 He has said the CIA was always against Nixon and that Nixon was ousted “in a very artificial way”.29 He has related an account in which Eric Henry Wang, who ran special projects at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,30 was said by his widow Maria Wang to have worked on UFOs with Henry Kissinger as his boss.31 Mitchells has said he believes Kissinger might have been tied in with the UFO subject,32 and considers Kissinger to have been more beholden to Nelson Rockefeller than to Nixon throughout his tenure as Secretary of State.33 He has cited Carroll Quigley’s book The Anglo-American Establishment, which describes US intelligence agencies as having emerged from a round-table culture between secret societies in the US and Britain associated with Cecil Rhodes and Lord Alfred Milner,34 and has said he assesses that the informal intelligence networks that existed before 1947 persisted in some form after the CIA was created and earlier bodies formally disbanded.35 In the same discussion he noted that the Congress of Vienna took place in 1815,36 overseen by Klemens von Metternich.37 He has said the Vatican confiscated a written prophecy given to the children who witnessed the 1917 Fatima Marian apparitions, and that he believes the prophecy was more complex than the historical portrayal of a sun or Virgin Mary appearance.38 He has said he considers the Majestic 12 documents probably a counter-intelligence ploy, while holding that part of the material in them is real.39 He has said the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) recurs throughout UFO lore, arriving after sightings at nuclear bases to seize radar data, silence witnesses and require non-disclosure agreements.40
On contemporary disclosure politics, Mitchells has said he wants Donald Trump to release UFO documents because the second-order effects would move the Overton window, let young people ask these questions, and allow the subject to be taught in academic settings.41 He has said that in a recent podcast appearance, Trump said aliens are real, and that the interviewer did not follow up on the statement.42 He has said that on James Corden’s programme, Barack Obama said there are things in the sky that cannot be identified and are not understood,43 and has said he views this as a deliberately phrased and staged litmus test of public reaction, conducted with a friendly left-wing interviewer in a rapid-fire question format.44 He has said that Shawn Ryan and Tucker Carlson describe the UFO phenomenon as spiritual and demonic.45 Mitchells has said he regards disclosure as a personal process an individual goes through rather than a line in the sand, viewing the expectation that released government documents will provide meaning as a ceding of one’s own spiritual authority.46
Mitchells has connected the psychology of cult formation to the wider UFO field, saying that cult creation around a single contactee, typically involving a prophecy of an event within the next few years, is a recurring pattern in ufology.47 He has noted that Louis Jolyon West was one of the architects of Project MKUltra48 and head of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Psychiatry,49 and was strongly interested in cult creation.50 He has said there are theories that West might have brainwashed Charles Manson.51 Mitchells has said he considers that psychology research of the MKUltra era, much of it probably state-funded, was extremely interested in the creation of cults because cults are inherently subversive organisations.52 He has drawn on the traditional attributes of angels and demons, noting that these have existed as concepts for thousands of years and traditionally include playing tricks on people and smelling of sulphur,53 and has said some of these attributes appear to him to match attributes of the UFO phenomenon.54 Citing the Lindy effect - the idea that how long an idea has survived indicates its value to society and determines its expected future age55 - he has said he considers the works of Plato and the Bible probably more valuable than recent contemporary works.56 He has said that Jacques Vallée advises constant experiencers and people who report alien abduction that they should want to get rid of the phenomenon contacting them,57 and that Vallée often talks about fallen angels in connection with the UFO phenomenon.58 Mitchells has described a figure he associates with the Lone Stars group - a well-known remote viewer involved in the government’s Stargate Project remote-viewing programme59 who has spoken about working with Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein60 - as holding an outlook that is eschatology at its core, believing that Jesus will arrive on a flying saucer.61 He has said he believes Jesus was a real historical figure.62 He has framed a broader division within the UFO field as one between a crowd seeking to immanentise the eschaton and a crowd seeking to restrain it and keep institutions intact.63 On human-alien hybridization, he has noted that the anecdotal hybridisation material comes from people who were very senior in the CIA, such as Jim Semivan.64