Malmgren Quotes
Why You Should Listen to Harald Malmgren
Most people haven’t heard of Harald Malmgren. That’s by design. He wasn’t a public figure. He was a quiet node in the system—looped into the deepest parts of U.S. government without becoming part of the brand. He advised four presidents, defused the most dangerous general in American history, and handled UFO debris at Los Alamos.
And yet, even with that résumé, his most important insights came after retirement—spoken slowly, with no book deal, no press tour, no legacy management.
The question isn’t whether what he says is sensational. It is. The question is whether he’s the kind of person who would lie.
Start with credibility. Malmgren’s public career checks out. He appears in official logs, declassified memos, and oral histories. He worked directly under McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara. He helped implement the first economic outreach to China before Nixon’s visit. He advised on nuclear deterrence strategy during the most fragile years of the Cold War.
This isn’t thirdhand. It’s not fringe. It’s inside the machine.
Then there’s rationale. When he breaks silence on things like UFO material or anomalous craft reactions during nuclear tests, he doesn’t sound like someone pushing a theory. He sounds like someone connecting dots he was never allowed to speak about while in service.
He doesn’t offer conclusions—he offers fragments. And that’s what makes him credible. People who make things up tend to offer stories that are too neat. Malmgren’s stories are incomplete, tangled in context, occasionally unsure. That’s what truth looks like under classification.
As for truthfulness, look at the incentives. He made his most dramatic disclosures near the end of his life. No money changed hands. No media circus. In fact, the day after his final interview, he went to the hospital. Three days before he died, he called to say he had more to say. That’s not the behavior of a self-promoter. That’s the behavior of someone unburdening.
Which brings us to bias. Everyone has some. Malmgren is cautious. Institutionally loyal. But what’s unique is that he shows no ideological bias. He doesn’t call for disclosure. He doesn’t rail against secrecy. He doesn’t use these stories to attack or glorify any government.
His only bias, if anything, is toward complexity—toward understanding how systems of knowledge get built, hidden, and preserved.
Finally, there’s correctness. The things he says about Cold War diplomacy, nuclear policy, and internal government hierarchy all check out. When he moves into less documented areas—like recovered materials—he does so in a way that aligns with what other credible insiders have said, often independently.
You can think of belief as a kind of Bayesian updating. You start with a low prior: the idea of a presidential advisor handling UFO material sounds absurd. But then you update:
After enough of these updates, the prior doesn’t stay low. It starts to shift. You don’t go to 100%. But you start asking: if this isn’t real, why does it look exactly like what reality would look like under secrecy?
And that’s the Malmgren effect. Not that he gives you everything. But that he makes you realize the pieces have been lying around the whole time.
1- If You Hit Moscow
There’s something strange about who stopped World War III. It wasn’t a president or a general. It was a 27-year-old policy advisor named Harald Malmgren. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, sitting in the Situation Room, he challenged General Curtis LeMay—the most aggressive voice in the room—with a single line:
“If you hit Moscow, there’s no one to talk to.”
That sentence is deceptively simple. What it does is point out a downstream cost that renders the upstream decision irrational. LeMay wanted to strike first, but doing so would eliminate the ability to negotiate or de-escalate. Malmgren wasn’t arguing against escalation—he was pointing out that escalation would make future diplomacy impossible. That reframing shifted the logic of the room.
A lot of people think history is shaped by power. But often it’s shaped by time—who can slow things down, who can prevent action long enough for better options to appear. Malmgren wasn’t empowered to make decisions. But he was positioned to ask questions. McNamara had placed him there for that reason: not to argue, but to disrupt.
There’s a 2x2 that helps explain this dynamic. One axis is Rank (high vs low). The other is Temperament (measured vs aggressive). Most of the players in that room were either high-rank aggressive (LeMay), or high-rank cautious (JFK, McNamara). Malmgren was unusual: low-rank, but cautious, and inserted precisely because that combination made him useful. He was hard to dismiss but not a threat.
High Temperament (Slow) | Low Temperament (Aggressive) | |
High Rank | JFK, McNamara | Gen. Curtis LeMay |
Low Rank | Malmgren | Field officers |
This isn’t just a story about Cold War nuclear policy. It’s about how systems get hijacked by their own logic. The faster a system moves, the fewer questions it allows. That’s how LeMay thought: speed equals strength. But the speed also blinds you to consequences. Malmgren inserted just enough friction to keep the logic from closing in on itself.
This changes how you think about roles. We assume power comes from rank. But power in a fast system often comes from the ability to slow it. In moments of maximum escalation, the person who buys five minutes becomes more powerful than the one who holds the launch codes.
The scary thing is how rare this is. Most institutions aren’t set up to include someone like Malmgren. They rely on speed, loyalty, and obedience. But every fast system needs at least one slow thinker. Not to lead, just to buy time.
That may be the most underrated job in government: the person who slows things down just enough for sanity to re-enter the room.
2 -The President Doesn’t Know Everything
Most people assume the president has full access. That’s the myth. He’s Commander in Chief, after all. Surely, if aliens crash-landed in the desert, the president would be the first to know.
Except he isn’t.
In Harald Malmgren’s interview, he makes a quiet but explosive claim: JFK already knew about UFOs long before he was president. Not because of some official intelligence briefing, but because he’d grown up around people who were already in the loop. In other words, the knowledge was social before it was formal. The president wasn’t being read in—he was catching up.
This suggests something uncomfortable: authority doesn’t guarantee access. Even the president can be on a “need-to-know” leash.
There’s a simple 2x2 here: the vertical axis is Title (high to low), the horizontal is Access (full to partial). Most assume presidents sit in the top-right—high title, full access. But what if the real center of knowledge lies with people who have low formal power, but high access?
High Clearance | Low Clearance | |
High Office | Truman (partial), Eisenhower (some) | JFK (partial) |
Low Office | Malmgren, Bissell, Bush | Speechwriters, staffers |
This is where people get tripped up: the system isn’t organized around titles. It’s organized around compartments. Special Access Programs (SAPs) are designed to limit how many people know what, even inside the government. So the president might have the right to know, but not the clearance. Because clearance is controlled horizontally—by the agencies that guard the data.
You can start to see the contours of a hidden structure here. One where real knowledge is distributed through continuity, not elections. Malmgren worked for four presidents. He was part of that continuity. Not because he ran things, but because he persisted through changes in who appeared to.
This flips the whole question of “Who would know?” Instead of asking who’s elected, you ask who never leaves. Who moves between rooms and across administrations. These people don’t write laws or sign orders. They brief the people who do.
It also means the truth isn’t just classified—it’s filtered. What you know depends on who decides you need to. That makes the structure fragile. If knowledge can outlast presidents, it can also bypass them. That’s how secrets become institutional.
The lesson is this: don’t assume the top of the org chart has the best information. Often, the people who know the most aren’t public, and the people in public don’t know.
JFK didn’t walk into the Oval Office and discover the truth. He probably walked in already knowing part of it—and then learned that parts of it weren’t his to know.
3 - Testing for More Than Physics
When countries test nuclear weapons, they say it’s for deterrence. That’s the public reason. But what if the real reason was to see who’s watching?
In the interview, Harald Malmgren describes something strange during a nuclear test—Bluegill Triple Prime. After the missile launched, a second object appeared. It wasn’t part of the test. It came in from outside, tracked the missile’s descent, then vanished. They called it a “tagalong.” That’s the kind of name you give something when you don’t want to admit it’s impossible.
The more you think about it, the less accidental it seems. Why would an unidentified craft show up during a high-altitude nuclear test, in the middle of the Pacific? Why would it follow the missile down? Why would senior officials be rushed to Los Alamos afterward?
You start to wonder if the test had two audiences: one on Earth, and one not.
There’s a useful 2x2 here. The vertical axis is Intentionality—were the tests meant to attract attention or not? The horizontal axis is Visibility—did the public know or not?
Intentional Baiting | Unintentional Contact | |
Public View | “Routine testing” | Foo fighters, rumors |
Classified View | EMP-triggered bait events | Tagalongs, crash recoveries |
From the outside, it looks like science. From the inside, it might look more like fishing.
It’s hard to prove intent from history. But if you look at the timing, a pattern starts to emerge. High-altitude EMP tests. UFO activity spikes. Rapid classified response. Repeat. Over time, it starts to look less like coincidence and more like probing.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable: this would mean nuclear weapons weren’t just weapons. They were also instruments—tools for measuring reactions beyond human observation. A nuclear test becomes a kind of message: we’re here, and we’re trying to get your attention.
This reverses how we think about secrecy. Most assume secrets are about keeping information in. But some secrets are about watching who reacts. The most valuable thing about a nuclear test might not be the data—it might be what shows up.
That’s why the word “tagalong” matters. It’s too casual for what it probably was. But it reveals how institutions deal with the unexplainable. Give it a name, act like it’s known, and move on. That’s how you bury anomaly under routine.
But every buried anomaly is a signal. And once you see that, you start reading history sideways. Not just what they were testing—but who they were trying to test for.
4- It Felt Like Nothing
When people imagine touching alien technology, they think of glowing metals, levitating orbs, something cinematic. But Harald Malmgren describes it differently. When he was handed a fragment of recovered material at Los Alamos, it didn’t feel strange because it was hot or heavy or magnetic. It felt strange because it didn’t feel like anything at all.
That’s the quote:
“It felt weird… because it didn’t feel anything.”
This is a subtle kind of shock—an absence, not a presence. What he’s describing is not technology that overwhelms your senses, but something that bypasses them completely. No texture. No temperature. No weight. Just a fragment that refused to register.
We assume advanced tech will be more of everything—stronger, faster, louder. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the most advanced materials become less detectable, less interactive, more inert to the point of erasure? What if they’re not designed to be felt?
This gives us a useful 2x2. One axis is Sensory Response (Can you feel it?), the other is Physical Classification (Does it behave according to known materials?).
Feels Like Known Material | Feels Anomalous | |
Fits Physics | Steel, titanium, ceramics | Shape-memory alloys |
Breaks Physics | — | “Felt like nothing” debris |
What Malmgren encountered likely sits in the bottom right: a material that doesn’t register on our sensory instruments or expectations—and doesn’t behave according to our physics either.
That’s not just unusual—it’s disorienting. It challenges how we categorize matter. Most things are defined by their properties. But this thing had none. It was present without presence. That’s a hard concept to work with in engineering, but it fits eerily well in theoretical physics.
There’s another layer to this: how it was presented to him. Malmgren wasn’t told what it was. It was handed to him casually. No fanfare, no explanation. That’s how secrecy works at the highest levels—not by locking things away, but by reframing them as unimportant. You’re shown the future, but no one tells you it is.
This is why firsthand accounts matter. Because they sometimes reveal the gaps in the story. The parts where even the people in the room didn’t understand what they were touching. Not because they lacked intelligence—but because the context was missing on purpose.
A material that resists sensation, resists naming, and resists classification—that’s not just a mystery. That’s a message. You’re not equipped to understand this yet.
And maybe that’s what made it so weird: not that it was advanced, but that it was silent.
5- When the Material Speaks Back
It’s one thing to touch a piece of anomalous metal and find it strange. It’s another thing to feel like it’s thinking.
In the interview, Harald Malmgren describes a moment where he wasn’t just observing the object—the object was observing him. After being handed a piece of debris at Los Alamos, he reports something beyond weird:
“I felt like the pieces were speaking to me.”
It’s easy to dismiss this. We’re trained to file experiences like that under hallucination, metaphor, or exaggeration. But if you take it seriously—even as a possibility—it forces a shift in how we think about intelligence and interface.
There’s a kind of material that’s reactive. Smart materials. Memory metals. But what Malmgren describes isn’t a reaction—it’s an invitation. He was being watched, tested. And maybe not by people.
Here’s the matrix to think about this: one axis is Interactivity (does the material respond?), the other is Cognition (does the material show awareness?).
Interactive Material | Inert Material | |
Shows Awareness | Telepathic debris | — |
No Awareness | Shape-memory alloys | Plastic, steel |
Most materials live in the bottom row: inert or maybe smart, but not sentient. What Malmgren implies is a leap to the top left: a material that can respond to a mind, not just an instrument.
This is hard to accept. It’s not that the physics doesn’t allow it—it’s that the assumptions don’t. We don’t think of matter as capable of intention. But what if that’s a limitation of how we’ve defined matter?
This changes the frame: what if the technology isn’t just built for consciousness, but with it? What if interaction isn’t just mechanical, but mental?
This has massive implications. It would mean:
That would explain why Malmgren wasn’t told anything. The test wasn’t verbal. The point wasn’t to explain—it was to see what he would feel. To see if he was sensitive.
That suggests another unsettling idea: some people are more readable by the material than others. And if that’s true, then some people are chosen not by rank, but by cognitive compatibility. Not everyone is meant to see the same thing.
Most of the time, we assume intelligence is built into machines. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe intelligence is latent in structure, and the right observer can activate it. Like a switch that only flips under the right kind of attention.
If that’s true, then the boundary between user and tool disappears. You’re not handling the material. You’re being handled.
6- History Didn’t Start at Roswell
Most Americans think the UFO story begins in 1947. That’s the year of Roswell, the summer of flying saucers, the beginning of the cover-up narrative. But Harald Malmgren tells a different story. He says that in a private CIA briefing, Richard Bissell—one of the agency’s most powerful and secretive operators—told him about a crash in Magenta, Italy, in 1933.
That’s 14 years before Roswell. Before the CIA. Before nukes. Before almost anything modern.
“These are things that have come down,” Bissell said.
It wasn’t speculation. It wasn’t a theory. It was part of the file.
This changes everything. Not because the crash happened—maybe it did, maybe it didn’t—but because the people at the top believed it did. If Bissell, who ran U-2 operations, helped build Area 51, and was trusted with the deepest Cold War secrets, thought that something came down in Italy in 1933, you have to at least consider it.
Here’s the frame: on one axis, you’ve got Location (Domestic vs Foreign). On the other, Acknowledgment (Public vs Classified).
U.S. Events | Foreign Events | |
Public Knowledge | Roswell, barely | Foo fighter rumors |
Classified Access | Los Alamos, Bluegill, Area 51 | Magenta crash (Italy, 1933) |
We’ve been focused on the left side of the map. But the right side might be more important. The United States may have inherited the UAP problem from Europe—just as it inherited scientists, weapons programs, and intelligence networks after WWII.
This makes the history both older and more global. The idea that Italy—under Mussolini—had its own crash retrieval effort isn’t as outlandish as it sounds. Governments experiment with secrecy long before they master technology. What the U.S. might have done is take that secrecy global. It became the center not because it started the story, but because it consolidated it.
This also suggests something else: crash retrievals may not be rare. If Magenta happened in 1933 and Roswell in 1947, the interval is short. That would imply a pattern, not an accident. And if Bissell was briefed on both, it means the U.S. government treated UAP recovery as a continuous international program, not isolated incidents.
Most people look for a single disclosure event—one moment where the truth breaks open. But that’s not how secrecy works. Real secrecy is layered, distributed, and built for decades. Each generation gets just enough to manage, but not enough to understand.
So Magenta isn’t just another crash site. It’s a crack in the story. A reminder that the official timeline is fictional. And if the timeline is wrong, everything downstream is misaligned: who had access, what was tested, and which governments really know what.
This is what Bissell confirmed. Not the details, but the structure. That long before the public even had a name for flying saucers, someone was already cleaning up the wreckage.
7- The Real Intelligence Hierarchy
When people think about intelligence agencies, they imagine a pyramid with the CIA at the top. That’s the branding. But in reality, intelligence isn’t centralized—it’s fragmented, compartmentalized, and, above a certain threshold, invisible even to itself.
Harald Malmgren makes a surprising claim: the U.S. Navy’s intelligence arm was more secure than the CIA, even during the height of Cold War secrecy. He says the Navy held things the CIA didn’t—and that even senior CIA figures weren’t always in the loop.
This forces a shift in how we imagine the hierarchy. Instead of a clean top-down structure, it starts to look more like parallel silos, each with partial access, each protecting its own domain.
Here’s a 2x2 to frame it. The vertical axis is Formal Power (official authority), the horizontal axis is Operational Control (who actually manages assets and knowledge).
High Formal Rank | Low Formal Rank | |
Actual Control | Navy Intel, DOE labs, SAP contractors | Unacknowledged compartments |
No Control | POTUS, CIA Director (at times) | FOIA reviewers, Congressional staffers |
The higher up you go, the more filtered the information becomes. Presidents come and go. CIA directors rotate. But the deep technical programs stay in place—guarded not by politicians, but by continuity personnel, career engineers, and legacy code systems.
This is the paradox: the more visible your power, the less you’re told. Visibility is vulnerability. If you’re too public, you’re too risky. The Navy can operate quietly, with less media attention and fewer public-facing mandates. It can bury things in oceanic defense budgets and experimental sub programs.
So why the Navy?
Because they deal with undersea domains, which are even less accessible than airspace. Because they’ve been involved in recovery operations going back to WWII. And because they don’t just track threats—they retrieve them. Crashed objects. Exotic debris. Unexplainable transmedium incursions.
And unlike the CIA, which exists to inform policy, the Navy exists to act operationally. That difference matters. The CIA might analyze a signal. The Navy might pick it up and never tell anyone.
If you follow this far, you realize the CIA may not have been in charge of the deepest UAP material—not because they weren’t capable, but because they weren’t trusted. Even within the government, not all compartments share data. Compartmentalization doesn’t just keep secrets from the public. It keeps secrets from other parts of the state.
This explains why someone like Malmgren—who worked across agencies and under multiple presidents—could say things the CIA never confirmed. Because he wasn’t loyal to a silo. He was threaded between them.
Once you see that, the map flips. The center of the system isn’t where the titles are. It’s where the data is hoarded and rarely disclosed. And sometimes that’s a Navy vault with no name on the door.
8 -Presidents Don’t Tour Bomb Labs
Most presidential visits are theater. Photo ops, press conferences, symbolic speeches. But every now and then, there’s a trip with no press, no ceremony, no transcript. That’s the kind that matters.
Harald Malmgren recalls one such moment: after the Bluegill Triple Prime test, where a mysterious “tagalong” object appeared during a nuclear launch, both JFK and LBJ went to Los Alamos. No public reason was given. No official record of what they were shown.
Presidents don’t casually visit weapons labs. Especially not two of them, and especially not right after a nuclear anomaly.
This isn’t the usual “what did they know and when” narrative. This is a different category: what did they see, and why was it kept quiet?
We can use a 2x2 to frame this. The vertical axis is Stated Purpose (what they said the trip was for), and the horizontal is Actual Purpose (what the trip may really have been about).
Stated Purpose | Hidden Purpose | |
Presidential Visit | National security, test monitoring | UFO debris, recovery briefing |
Public Record | Routine classified tour | Redacted or missing entirely |
When a president sees something off-script, the story doesn’t get published—it gets erased.
This creates a strange situation: the president is simultaneously the most powerful person in the government and the most constrained. He can be shown, but not necessarily allowed to act. If the crash retrieval or tagalong event was classified at a level beyond presidential authority—something that happens with waived Special Access Programs—then the president is briefed only at the discretion of the stewards.
That’s what the visit to Los Alamos might have been. Not a command. A courtesy.
This flips our assumption about disclosure. We tend to think the president could blow the whole thing open with a press conference. But what if the president doesn’t even have the documents? What if the programs are controlled by labs and intelligence compartments with deeper roots and fewer election cycles?
What Malmgren is suggesting is not just that something extraordinary happened. He’s pointing to a choreography—an urgent movement of heads of state to the site of a recovery event, under cover of a test briefing.
And what’s more telling than what they did is what they didn’t do after: no speech, no investigation, no inquiry. Just silence. As if something had been acknowledged that couldn’t be followed up on.
We assume presidents lead. But in the most sensitive programs, they might only be passengers—granted access for context, but not for control.
The real power might belong to those who invite them into the room—and decide what not to say.
9 - What Breaks the Unbreakable
Most people think if something is more advanced, it’s harder to break. That’s a comforting assumption. But sometimes the opposite is true.
Harald Malmgren describes something unusual in the aftermath of a nuclear test. A “tagalong” object—presumed to be non-human—entered the atmosphere during an EMP event, tracked the missile, and then failed. Not shot down. Disrupted.
He suggests that UFOs might be vulnerable to electromagnetic interference—that their mode of propulsion, possibly based on manipulating magnetic fields or inertial frames, could be jammed or destabilized by sudden surges in energy.
This reframes the whole problem. We’re not just talking about observing craft—we’re talking about interacting with their physics. Possibly even exploiting their weaknesses.
Let’s frame this as a 2x2. The vertical axis is Performance in Normal Conditions, the horizontal is Susceptibility to EMP or Magnetic Disruption.
Strong in Vacuum | Weak in EMP | |
Conventional Craft | Rockets, jets | Not designed for EMP, but survivable |
Anomalous Craft | Gravity field manipulation | Fails under nuke-like pulses |
The implication is startling. The more exotic the propulsion—if it’s based on warping space, nullifying inertia, or aligning with quantum fields—the more fragile it might be to brute-force pulses like an EMP. In other words, the future may be less robust than the past.
This flips the script on technological superiority. We think more advanced = more resilient. But the most sophisticated systems often have narrower tolerances. Think of a quantum computer: more powerful, but also more delicate. Hit it with radiation, and it collapses. An F-16 might survive a blast that shorts out a next-gen drone.
If UFOs are real—and if they’re truly “other”—then they likely use physics we don’t fully understand. But we might still stumble into accidental counters. Not because we’re smarter, but because we’re dumber in the right way. We build clunky things that smash the environment, and that smashing can interfere with things more elegant.
This idea—that brute-force nuclear technology might disable vehicles designed to bypass Newtonian mechanics—is both ironic and deeply strategic. It means that, even without knowing what they are, we might have found their weakness.
Malmgren hints that this may not have been accidental. That tests like Bluegill Triple Prime weren’t just about missile performance. They were lures. Triggers. Baits.
Which means there’s a possibility the U.S. learned early that some UFOs could be brought down—not with lasers or dogfights, but with a well-timed electromagnetic pulse.
It’s a strange thought: that the future might be here already—but it’s allergic to the past.
10 - What You’re Allowed to Know
Harald Malmgren held something he couldn’t describe, felt something he couldn’t explain, and was told almost nothing about either. That’s how the system works.
You assume the briefing comes with the access. But sometimes, the access is the test. You’re shown something—not to learn from it, but to see how you react.
Malmgren was handed UFO debris at Los Alamos. Not in a sealed container or with a file folder. Just handed it. No explanation, no follow-up. And that’s the point. What’s dangerous isn’t what you’re told. It’s what you intuit.
There’s a 2x2 to frame this. The vertical axis is Formal Access Level. The horizontal axis is Acknowledged Understanding.
Acknowledged as Real | Denied/Obscured | |
High Access | Malmgren, AEC insiders | McNamara, Dulles (possible partial briefings) |
Low Access | Whistleblowers, private contractors | Congress, press, FOIA requestors |
This matrix explains a lot about how secrecy survives. People assume classified programs are hidden behind locks. But often, they’re hidden in the ambiguity between what’s shown and what’s confirmed.
Malmgren’s experience was not “here’s the truth.” It was “Here’s something. See what you make of it.” That’s more effective. It turns secrecy into a filter: the only people who pass are the ones who don’t ask too many questions—or who ask the right ones and stay quiet.
This is how advanced secrecy works. You don’t have to lie. You just don’t explain. The silence becomes the security.
But there’s something else. He wasn’t debriefed. That’s strange. In a system built around control, every anomaly usually creates a reaction. But here, there was none. Which means either:
This implies that some materials are operationally exotic but procedurally normal. They pass through labs, hands, maybe even committees—without anyone writing it down. That’s not a cover-up. That’s systemic diffusion. No one’s lying. No one’s telling the truth. Everyone’s just doing their part of the job.
This is what makes the program so resilient. Not that it’s airtight, but that it’s distributed just enough to be deniable everywhere.
The scary part isn’t what’s in the vaults. It’s what’s not in the reports.
Malmgren’s final message isn’t about aliens or propulsion or even telepathy. It’s about how knowledge is filtered, fragmented, and quietly enforced by omission.
You don’t need to suppress the truth. You just have to make sure it never lines up in one place.
The Four Kinds of People
When you introduce a new idea to the world—especially a dangerous one—the first thing that breaks isn’t consensus. It’s classification.
That’s what we’re seeing now with the UAP (or UFO) phenomenon. It’s not just a mystery about strange craft. It’s a mystery about belief. Not who’s right or wrong, but how people organize their thinking when the problem doesn’t fit their map.
Some people think the topic is still fringe. But in 2023, a senior presidential advisor, Harald Malmgren, said he handled recovered non-human material. A former intelligence officer testified to Congress under oath about crash retrieval programs. Navy pilots and Pentagon insiders have confirmed structured, intelligently controlled phenomena with no known origin.
And yet, most people either haven’t heard about it—or don’t know what to do with it. Because “knowing” something that breaks the frame is different from knowing something that fits inside it.
So let’s make the belief landscape more useful. Not by arguing who’s right, but by clarifying how people are thinking. You can break the world into four types of minds on this topic:
What matters is that these four groups are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. That’s rare. It means you can’t belong to more than one group, and everyone fits somewhere.
You can also rank their likelihood of being closest to the truth. Not based on volume, but on reasoning.
The Acknowledgers probably win. They’re cautious, falsifiable, and compatible with almost every future outcome. They align with scientists, career intelligence professionals, and people like Malmgren, who say: “I know something’s happening, but I won’t claim more than I can support.”
Concluders might be right, but they overfit. Rejecters are too rigid. Unawares are still loading.
The pattern applies far beyond UFOs. Every time society confronts a new paradigm—AI, quantum biology, consciousness, simulation theory—people sort themselves into the same four bins: those who haven’t heard, those who refuse to believe, those who watch with quiet awe, and those who think they already know how it ends.
What you want to be is not the loudest, or the most certain. You want to be in the group that can update—without panicking.
Especially when the truth might not arrive all at once.
It might whisper.
How to Spot a Genius with a Paint Bucket
Most people think geniuses get discovered in classrooms. Harald Malmgren was discovered sanding walnut panels in a Boston mansion.
At 13, he was helping his father restore woodwork during the summer. In walks a stranger—tall, distinguished, and curious. He asks young Malmgren to sit down and talk. Two hours later, he tells the boy’s father:
“I want to take this boy out of your school. I want him to come in September and matriculate at MIT.”
The man was Carl Compton, president of MIT and a key figure in U.S. wartime science policy. He wasn’t looking for a student. He found a mind.
The conversation wasn’t about grades. It was about photons.
Malmgren, self-taught from Atomic Energy Commission documents he’d requested by mail, casually began discussing entanglement, a concept Einstein described in 1935—but which hadn’t yet been proven experimentally.
“What is a photon? Why can’t we see it?” he asked Compton.
Then, without realizing it, he described the core insight behind what would later be called Bell’s Theorem:
“It’s not something by itself. It exists in interaction. Probably with another photon. Probably in pulses. It doesn’t matter how far apart—they’re still one thing.”
This wasn’t parroting textbook knowledge. It was predictive reasoning, before the physics community arrived.
So how does a kid like this emerge from nowhere?
He didn’t. He emerged from cold water and ration cards. Malmgren’s parents were Swedish immigrants. At age 7, he was sent out every day after school to fish and trap shellfish for dinner.
“My mother said, ‘This is the day you start working.’”
By 14, he’d written to nuclear labs asking for reading material. What he got back were not primers—but internal papers on radiation genetics and Hiroshima photos. Most 14-year-olds were reading comic books. He was reading fallout reports.
This kind of hunger—untrained but deeply focused—is what often precedes genius. But it takes something else to foster it: proximity to someone who sees it early.
Compton saw it. So did McGeorge Bundy. So did Robert McNamara. These weren’t teachers. They were gatekeepers. And each of them pulled Malmgren through a different door.
At 27, he was no longer sanding wood panels. He was sitting in the war room during the Cuban Missile Crisis, acting as the liaison between the Joint Chiefs and the President.
“I look back and ask myself—how the heck did I end up there?”
The answer is a chain reaction: an early signal, an open door, a prepared mind.
It’s easy to mythologize genius as innate. But often, it’s situational. A kid reads government files most adults ignore. A world-class physicist happens to walk into the room. One talks; the other listens.
Then everything changes.
What Geopolitics Really Looks Like
Most people think geopolitics is about nations. Malmgren thought it was about people in rooms.
He served four U.S. presidents—not as a politician, but as a kind of systems interpreter. His job was to look at the world not in terms of headlines, but incentives. What matters isn’t what a country says, he believed. What matters is what it’s afraid of.
In the interview, he describes Cold War brinkmanship not as ideological—but as probabilistic. “We knew we had to design things to give presidents time,” he said. Time wasn’t just a commodity. It was a weapon. The faster the system moved, the more likely it was to collapse into conflict.
That’s the first insight: pace shapes outcome.
If you want to understand why countries behave the way they do, ask how fast their options are closing. You’ll often find escalation isn’t the result of aggression—it’s the result of panic under time pressure. Malmgren was placed in the Situation Room to slow things down, not to win arguments.
His second big insight was about indirection. He noted that many of the most important geopolitical decisions didn’t happen through confrontation—they happened through misdirection, leaks, whispers, symbolic gestures.
“Most of the time, what’s presented publicly is the opposite of the actual negotiation,” he said.
This doesn’t mean everything’s a lie. It means public diplomacy is a show layered on top of a game. Understanding geopolitics requires peeling back the official line and asking: what would they say if they had no press?
That brings us to the third lesson: threat perception is always asymmetric.
Malmgren often had to interpret not what Russia was, but what the U.S. thought Russia believed it was. A double mirror. He learned early that much of international policy is built on projected paranoia—the fear of how one side’s move will be interpreted, which loops back into the next move.
So instead of thinking of geopolitics like chess, he treated it like poker.
This is why he never trusted pure economic models. They assume rational actors with full data. But in statecraft, what’s unknown is often more powerful than what’s known.
His final insight is the one that explains everything else: systems drift without trust. Treaties, alliances, deterrents—they all function on belief in shared logic. But if actors stop trusting that the system itself is interpretable—if they believe the game is rigged or out of control—that’s when bad decisions get made fast.
This is why, even in his last years, Malmgren warned about structural decay in diplomacy. Not from malice. From erosion of signal.
Geopolitics, he believed, isn’t the clash of civilizations. It’s the collision of uncertainty—managed by a few people trying to stay sane in a room full of panic.
That might be the most valuable lesson of all: when everything speeds up, the most powerful person in the room is the one who slows down the logic.
How to Take Down a UFO
If UFOs are real, the natural next question is: can we bring them down?
People imagine this like an action movie—jets chasing saucers, lasers vs. shields. But that’s not how advanced systems fail. According to Harald Malmgren, the key isn’t weapons. It’s physics.
In one of his accounts, he describes an unidentified object—“a tagalong”—appearing during a nuclear missile test. It wasn’t shot. It just… fell.
“There had been some object that had appeared on the screen and tagged along… and then it dropped.”
Why? Likely not damage—but destabilization.
This points to a first principle: the more sophisticated the technology, the more specific the environment it assumes. UFOs, if they use field propulsion or manipulate spacetime, might rely on stability in the Earth’s magnetic field or gravitational coherence. Introduce distortion—an EMP, a sudden pulse—and you don’t destroy the craft. You just make it stop working.
Here’s a 2x2 to think about that. The vertical axis is System Complexity, the horizontal is Resilience to Energy Surges.
Simple System | Complex System | |
High Resilience | Trucks, tanks | Hardened drones |
Low Resilience | Radios, circuits | UFOs? Quantum sensors? |
What sits in the bottom right? Things that are powerful but fragile. Not because they’re weak, but because they depend on fine-tuned assumptions about their environment.
This turns the problem on its head. You don’t need to hit the UFO. You just need to hit the field it depends on.
During the Cold War, the U.S. ran high-altitude nuclear tests like Starfish Prime and Bluegill Triple Prime. These weren’t just about ICBM survivability. They produced massive electromagnetic pulses and temporarily altered the ionosphere. UFOs showed up more frequently around these events. Some were observed following missile trails. Others reportedly failed mid-flight.
The implication: nukes weren’t just tests—they were traps.
So how do you bring one down?
You don’t use guns. You use environmental interference:
In short: you don’t aim at the object. You jam the medium it operates in.
This aligns with a general truth about high-tier systems: they’re optimized, not armored. Quantum sensors, neural nets, and field propulsion may outperform jet engines—but they break faster under the wrong conditions. That’s their trade-off.
And this creates a weird asymmetry: you don’t need better tech to disable higher tech. You just need to understand the dependencies.
That’s what makes this topic interesting. If Malmgren is right, we may already have taken down UFOs—not with better weapons, but by punching holes in the environment they need to function.
If that’s the case, the biggest secret isn’t what the UFOs are.
It’s how simple it was to make one fall.
Time, Gravity, and the Feeling of Knowing
Most people experience time as a river: forward-flowing, irreversible, linear. But Harald Malmgren, advisor to presidents and handler of unspeakable materials, didn’t see time that way. Or at least, he wasn’t sure it worked like that anymore.
What makes his reflections unique isn’t that he speculated about time travel—it’s that he avoided it until he couldn’t. He was more comfortable talking about nuclear policy than temporal physics. But when pushed, he offered something more unsettling than theory: experience.
At one point in the interview, Jesse Michels asked him: “Do you think time and gravity are connected? Did Townsend Brown really believe in time travel?”
Malmgren didn’t dodge.
“Yes. Brown believed gravity was linked with time… and that he had found the missing puzzle piece for time travel.”
This wasn’t coming from science fiction. This was coming from someone who had seen propulsion systems that behaved as if inertia didn’t exist, materials that reacted to consciousness, and briefings that hinted at technologies centuries ahead of public science.
He wasn’t saying we have time travel. He was saying we might already be brushing against the mechanics of it, even if we don’t understand how—or why.
But then came the more personal moment. Jesse asked him, with no preamble: “Do you feel like your life is somehow connected to time travel?”
Most people would laugh. Malmgren didn’t.
“I’ve thought about this many, many times. And my answer is yes.”
He described memories from childhood where he talked about photons, atomic structure, and relativistic phenomena like someone who had lived it—not learned it.
“I didn’t have the slightest inhibition. I was talking as if I knew something. And the question became… how did I know this?”
This wasn’t ego. It was confusion. A lifelong one.
That’s the part people miss. The real mystery isn’t the tech. It’s the feeling. The sense that certain knowledge didn’t come from books or mentors—but from somewhere else. Something outside of time, delivered not as data but as imprint.
Even stranger was his silence.
When asked directly whether certain groups might be manipulating timelines, Malmgren—who had just spent hours detailing CIA briefings, nuclear close calls, and exotic materials—went silent.
A man with clearance to everything… chose to say nothing.
That silence says more than speculation ever could. Because it wasn’t fear. It was the weight of knowing something you can’t say without undoing the listener’s reality.
Time, as Einstein said, is not absolute. And Malmgren seems to have lived inside that relativity—not as a physicist, but as a witness. A man surrounded by systems that collapsed time: war rooms where seconds mattered more than years, technologies that responded faster than thought, and perhaps… materials that remembered futures we hadn’t lived yet.
We want time travel to be a machine. Malmgren suggests it might be something else: a sensitivity, a trajectory, or maybe even a calling.
If so, the most profound technology isn’t the craft. It’s the knower. The person who looks at a future no one else sees—and recognizes it.
Because somehow, they’ve already been there.
The Silence Between Dimensions
There’s a kind of idea that feels wrong not because it’s false, but because we don’t have the right place to put it.
That’s how Harald Malmgren talked about non-human intelligence. He didn’t call it alien. He didn’t call it divine. He just said it didn’t fit. “They’re not extraterrestrial,” he told Jesse Michels. “They’re either under the water or subterranean.”
Most people assume the mystery is where they came from. Malmgren implied the mystery is why we keep asking that. The better question might be: why do they keep showing up here?
When asked if he thought they were interdimensional, he said, “Yes,” then paused. “But is that just semantics?” It probably is. Interdimensional sounds like science fiction, but what it really means is: they’re not from somewhere else in space. They’re from somewhere else in structure.
Malmgren wasn’t speculating. He had touched the debris. Held it. Said it felt like nothing. Not just lightweight—absent. Then he said something even stranger: he felt like it was talking to him. Not in words. In thoughts. He couldn’t remember the message. But he remembered that there was one.
You can dismiss that. But if you do, you have to explain why someone with Q-clearance, who advised four U.S. presidents and helped prevent nuclear war, would suddenly start making up telepathic metal at the end of his life. What would be the point?
At one moment in the interview, Jesse asked if Malmgren thought there was a group trying to manipulate timelines. Malmgren—who had been open, articulate, even cheerful—went silent. Not deflecting. Just silent.
That’s not what you do when something’s ridiculous. That’s what you do when it’s real, and you’re not sure what saying it out loud will do.
Malmgren’s view, if you can call it that, was that we don’t know what we’re dealing with. But that it’s not just technology. It’s not just biology. It’s something else. Something that doesn’t obey our distinctions.
Maybe not even a “they.” Maybe not something that arrives, but something that’s always been adjacent. A file just outside the window. Not outside the Earth. Outside the model.
This is the part we’re not ready for. Not that the universe contains other minds. But that our categories for understanding minds, materials, and time may already be out of date.
If he’s right, the real question isn’t how we stop them.
It’s how we even start to describe them.
When Matter Becomes a Message
We treat the periodic table like gospel. Fixed, closed, universal. But Harald Malmgren suggests something radical: matter can be rewritten.
Not theoretically. Not metaphorically. Literally—atoms repositioned, elements transformed.
He wasn’t speculating. He was remembering.
In one of the quieter moments of the interview, Malmgren talks about conversations involving Tesla, Townes, and Brown, and the idea that electrons could be manipulated to reposition the very structure of matter.
“Tesla anyway was on this track… The movement of electrons allowed repositioning of just about everything.”
Jesse asks, “That’s called transmutation, right?”
Malmgren answers without hesitation:
“Yeah. Transmutation… of elements.”
This isn’t Cold War science fiction. It’s a buried frontier of physics—one Malmgren believes was explored, then suppressed, because of its implications. Not for energy. For control.
He explains that some materials recovered—possibly from crash retrievals—had no analog in known elements. Not even unknown alloys. Just… unclassifiable.
“It felt weird… because it didn’t feel anything.”
When someone like Malmgren—who held Q-clearance and advised four presidents—tells you a material was “programmed” rather than forged, you start to question where our materials come from. And who else might be designing them.
He describes today’s breakthroughs in similar terms—not through UFOs, but through AI-designed materials:
“We now have recipes for creating new materials atom by atom. Not just modeling behavior, but specifying outcome… That’s a revolution in human history.”
This flips the way we think about matter. We don’t build from the periodic table up. We build from desired function—and let the AI figure out what molecular structure to write.
“You can specify the behavior of a material… and use materials as a data transmission mechanism.”
That’s the key: materials aren’t just passive. They’re active, expressive, maybe even interactive. Some of the exotic pieces Malmgren encountered didn’t just exist. They responded. He felt as if the material was “speaking” to him, though he couldn’t explain how.
Why does this matter?
Because it means our understanding of matter is functional, not foundational. We’ve been using tools we assumed were fundamental—metals, crystals, polymers. But what if those are just training wheels? What if the next stage of civilization builds with materials that act like code?
Malmgren warns that this knowledge was suppressed. Not because it’s dangerous in the usual way. But because it undoes the assumptions on which our economic, energy, and security systems are built.
“More dangerous implications around transmutation than anti-gravity.”
Why? Because anti-gravity threatens physics. Transmutation threatens economics. If you can make copper from anything, gold from seawater, uranium from carbon, you collapse value structures—and destabilize everything.
That’s why Malmgren paid attention to materials that emerged with “no onramp.” No R&D trail. No prototypes. Just sudden emergence.
“Look for the technologies where there’s no onramp. Those are the ones to pay attention to.”
It’s not just about what we’ve found. It’s about what we’ve hidden. Or worse—what we’ve reverse-engineered without understanding.
If Malmgren is right, then we’re entering a new era. One where matter is designed, not mined. Where AI doesn’t just write code. It writes the stuff code runs on.
And the scariest part?
“We’re not ready to know what we already have.”
Why Intelligence Officials Read Sci-Fi
Most people think science fiction is for imagining the future. But sometimes it’s for surviving the present.
In 2008, Liu Cixin wrote The Three-Body Problem, a novel about an alien civilization trapped in a chaotic solar system. In 2023, Harald Malmgren—a presidential advisor who once handled UFO debris—said that U.S. officials, including those advising George W. Bush, used that novel to model how to think about non-human intelligence. Not because it predicted anything, but because it captured a pattern they were already seeing and didn’t have words for.
That’s what makes good science fiction useful. It gives you a structure for things you can’t yet explain.
The problem with trying to understand UFOs—or what the military now calls UAPs—isn’t just a lack of evidence. It’s that we don’t know what kind of evidence would even count. The craft are seen, tracked, sometimes filmed. The patterns are there. But they don’t behave like technology. Or biology. Or anything in between. They defy the categories we use to explain what’s real.
Malmgren didn’t say aliens were coming from space. He said, “They’re already here—underwater, subterranean.” He didn’t describe an invasion. He described something closer to a presence. Not arriving, but revealing. And the thing being revealed wasn’t just them. It was us—our limits, our assumptions, our mental defaults.
This is exactly the dynamic in The Three-Body Problem. The alien threat doesn’t arrive with weapons. It arrives as destabilization. Scientists begin to doubt their experiments. Institutions lose trust. Information is manipulated not to hide a secret, but to erode coherence. The main character says it clearly: “You’re not trying to beat us in war. You’re trying to break our minds.”
That’s what Malmgren and people like Hal Puthoff saw. They weren’t modeling a military threat. They were modeling an ontological one. Something that breaks your picture of the world—not by crashing through it, but by being something you can’t model inside it.
That’s what the three-body problem is, after all. In physics, it’s the unsolvable math of three gravitational bodies pulling on each other. No stable solution. No closed-form equation. Chaos, no matter how good your data is.
Now substitute: humans, government secrecy, non-human intelligence. You’re the third body—pulled by competing fields, none of which you fully understand. It doesn’t matter how much you know. The system stays unpredictable. The orbit always breaks.
This is why the U.S. government—at least the people on the inside who took the phenomenon seriously—reached for a sci-fi novel. Because it gave them an honest model for a problem with no equilibrium.
One of the most unsettling parts of the book is that collapse begins long before contact. The aliens don’t land. They don’t attack. They don’t even speak. But the knowledge that they’re out there—and the feeling that they’re watching—starts to rot the human systems from the inside.
You don’t need a war to destabilize a civilization. You just need it to doubt the frame it’s built on.
That’s the real danger of non-human intelligence. Not lasers. Not implants. Just the realization that we are not the top of the pyramid. That we don’t know who’s here. That we may never understand what they are—or what we are to them.
In other words, it’s not an event. It’s a cognitive shift. And it starts the moment you realize you’re orbiting something that isn’t orbiting you back.
So yes, Malmgren said they used The Three-Body Problem as a model. Because it’s one of the few stories that understands: sometimes the threat isn’t a being. It’s the impossibility of prediction. The moment when belief breaks, not from confrontation—but from gravitational imbalance in your worldview.
And when that moment comes, you don’t need a general.
You need a map. Even if it’s fiction.
The Message Malmgren Died Trying to Deliver
There’s a kind of truth that doesn’t emerge in policy memos or headlines. It surfaces when someone who’s seen too much, said too little, and feels time running out decides to talk.
That’s what Harald Malmgren did.
At the end of his life, he wasn’t looking for attention. He wasn’t writing a book. What he wanted was clarity. Not for him—he had already lived through it—but for us. For the people who never got to be in the rooms he was in, who would inherit the consequences without knowing the origins.
So what did he want us to understand?
First, that secrecy isn’t what we think it is. It’s not just about hiding facts. It’s about structuring reality in layers. At the top: the narrative. Beneath that: the strategy. Beneath that: the contingency plans. And at the bottom, often sealed in rooms without names, are the things we don’t yet have a language for.
Malmgren touched that last layer. Not metaphorically—literally. He was handed a piece of material that didn’t behave like material. He was shown things without explanation. He was included not to understand, but to observe.
“It felt weird… because it didn’t feel anything.”
Second, he wanted people to know that power is not where we think it is. Presidents are symbols. Agencies are silos. The real decisions, the real knowledge, flow through compartmentalized continuity—people who serve across administrations, who outlast elections, who don’t tweet.
That’s why he told the story of JFK and LBJ rushing to Los Alamos. It wasn’t about scandal. It was about the choreography. About how even presidents are sometimes pulled into the loop—not as commanders, but as guests.
Third, and most personally, Malmgren wanted to show that systems are made of people, and that sometimes a single person, in the right place, at the right time, with the right question, can change everything.
He was 27 when he asked General LeMay, during the Cuban Missile Crisis:
“If you hit Moscow, there’s no one to talk to.”
That line might have stopped World War III.
But it also illustrates his deepest insight: the most dangerous logic is the kind that closes too fast. Systems that escalate without pause. Institutions that automate their own destruction.
In geopolitics. In intelligence. In science.
Malmgren’s message wasn’t that we’re doomed. It was that we’re layered, and those layers create blindness. Not by conspiracy, but by design. And the only way to break through them isn’t with exposure—but with questions that don’t fit the model.
He ended his life trying to deliver a final question: What have we already learned—but refused to connect?
He didn’t claim to know everything. But he knew this: the world we live in is built on foundations most people have never seen, and if you’re not asking where those foundations came from, you’re living in someone else’s assumption.
That was his warning. And his gift.
The Other Man in the Room
Everyone knows Kissinger. Few know Malmgren. That’s no accident.
Henry Kissinger liked being the voice. The strategist. The exclusive conduit between the United States and the world’s most difficult regimes. In the Nixon White House, he built an empire of access—insulating decision-making behind layers of complexity that only he claimed to navigate.
But Nixon was smarter than that.
He knew Kissinger’s ego was a feature and a bug. So he installed a counterweight. Someone who could be in the same rooms, talk to the same people, but return with a different read.
That man was Harald Malmgren.
He didn’t wear the title. He didn’t need the spotlight. He was the off-the-books advisor—the person Nixon used to test whether Kissinger’s version of reality was actually the truth.
Malmgren wasn’t there to argue. He was there to calibrate. To check the drift.
You see this most clearly in Nixon’s Russia strategy. While Kissinger centralized foreign policy through carefully stage-managed diplomacy, Nixon sent Malmgren to meet quietly with senior Russian figures like Yevgeny Primakov and Vladimir Putin (then rising through the ranks). No cameras. No State Department clearance. Just conversations. And sometimes, results.
Kissinger noticed. He once walked into a room to see Putin being introduced to Malmgren instead of him. His reaction?
“How the hell did you get into that?”
That line says everything. Kissinger assumed he was the system. But Nixon had quietly built a parallel track, one with less ego and more listening.
This wasn’t rivalry. It was redundancy by design.
Nixon didn’t distrust Kissinger entirely. He just knew that any system where one man controls the message is inherently brittle. Malmgren gave him optionality. A second opinion. A slower thinker in rooms that moved too fast.
The genius of Malmgren’s role was its subtlety. He wasn’t trying to steer. He was trying to sense. What are they afraid of? What are they hiding? What do they think we think?
In some cases, what Malmgren reported contradicted Kissinger’s assessments. In others, it validated them—but with different framing. That framing mattered. Because it gave Nixon room to reconsider outcomes that seemed inevitable.
The bigger point is this: power doesn’t come from being the loudest person in the room. It comes from being the one the president calls when the loudest person leaves.
Malmgren was that person. Not because he wanted the job. But because the system needed someone without an agenda to keep the agenda honest.
He didn’t challenge Kissinger in public. He challenged the assumptions that Kissinger fed into the machine. And in doing so, he gave Nixon a rare thing in government: a way to see the map without the tour guide’s bias.
When the Backchannel Matters More T
There’s a certain kind of person who never shows up on the organizational chart—but without whom, the chart doesn’t work. Harald Malmgren was one of those people.
In 1992, in a quiet corner of a changing Russia, Yevgeny Primakov—KGB veteran, future Foreign Minister—introduced him to a little-known Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg named Vladimir Putin.
Primakov didn’t just make an introduction. He gave a prediction:
“This man is rising. He will soon be very important to Russia. You should know him.”
That wasn’t a guess. It was a signal.
Primakov didn’t think in PR. He thought in contingency. His move suggests that Putin’s ascent was already backed by intelligence infrastructure, and that Malmgren was seen as someone who could engage him without triggering alarms.
This wasn’t a handshake. It was a test.
Malmgren passed.
Over the years, he and Putin had private dinners. Not press conferences. Not panels. Just two people—one from the U.S. nuclear-intelligence architecture, one from Russia’s. What did they talk about? Nuclear strategy. Post–Cold War fragility. The psychology of escalation.
“I was created not as partisan of anything but as someone who could be trusted to carry an idea, explore it, and get an answer back.”
That’s what a backchannel is. Not a conspiracy. A low-friction logic loop, where ideas can move faster than bureaucracy and slower than panic.
What’s striking is how long this line stayed open. Decades later, when Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, Malmgren wrote two essays. They weren’t op-eds. They were attempts to map Putin’s internal logic—to explain how a strategist, not a madman, might view survival.
Putin read them. And reportedly liked them.
This means something. Not because it was approval, but because it was recognition. In geopolitics, that’s rare. Most communication happens in abstractions—sanctions, troop movements, treaties. But every once in a while, someone actually understands the opponent’s mind, and sends back a message with no threats, just pattern recognition.
That’s what Malmgren offered: a mirror. Not to endorse. Not to shame. Just to clarify.
He didn’t say Putin was right. He said, here’s how the man plays the game. If you want to win, start there.
In an era obsessed with transparency, Malmgren’s relationship with Putin is a reminder that secrecy is not always sinister. Sometimes it’s the only space where understanding can occur without posturing.
You don’t need to trust the motives of the man across the table. You just need to understand his incentives better than he understands yours.
And in that moment, the most powerful person in the room is often not the president.
It’s the person both presidents trust to say what they can’t afford to say themselves.
How to Advise a Country Without an Office
Harald Malmgren never served as Ambassador to Japan. But he influenced Japan’s highest levels of power longer than most ambassadors ever stay posted.
His role? Unofficial, unacknowledged, and irreplaceable.
It started in the 1960s. The U.S. was under pressure from domestic textile producers to curb Japanese imports. The State Department wanted a formal negotiation. But Lyndon Johnson knew that would cause public backlash—and risk derailing a key alliance.
So he sent Malmgren.
Alone. With no staff. No title. No announcement.
He met Prime Minister Eisaku Sato privately and delivered a simple message: the U.S. needed Japan to voluntarily restrain textile exports. Not through sanctions. Through trust.
Sato agreed. A handshake, not a headline. And just like that, the first voluntary export restraint (VER) was born—quietly guiding the global trade system for decades to come.
That meeting became a pattern. Japan began treating Malmgren not as a bureaucrat, but as a personal counselor to the Prime Minister, someone who could speak candidly where diplomats had to posture.
He would eventually advise every Japanese Prime Minister from the 1970s onward. Not because of his résumé. Because they trusted him to help them understand America—without translation.
At one point, he told a Japanese leader to go on Good Morning America and deliver a message straight to U.S. voters. The Prime Minister did. It worked. Trade tensions softened overnight.
“Suddenly, he was everybody’s friend.”
Malmgren didn’t need a formal office. He understood that influence flows through relationships, not roles. He never told Japan what to do. He told them what would happen if they didn’t understand how the U.S. was thinking.
That was his power: he made the foreign feel familiar—to both sides.
We think diplomacy is all treaties and embassies. But often, it’s one trusted voice who can translate between mental models. A guy who can explain Japan to Washington—and explain Washington to Japan—without anyone losing face.
That’s why his influence lasted. Not because of his title. Because of his calibration—he always knew where the center of gravity was shifting.
When the U.S. got more protectionist, he warned Tokyo early. When Japan worried about American overreach, he softened the messaging. Not by spinning, but by explaining.
That’s what backchannel trust looks like. It’s not secret—it’s sacred. Built through quiet action, not grandstanding. A whisper that moves policy faster than a treaty.
Malmgren didn’t just help the U.S. avoid trade wars. He helped Japan remain a close ally through five decades of geopolitical whiplash.
No title could capture that. But every Prime Minister remembered it.
supporting tidbit stories from Jesse Michels
Supporting tidbit stories from Jesse Michels
Supporting Story:
Jesse confirms that Malmgren helped defuse not just the Cuban Missile Crisis, but potentially another nuclear standoff later in his life involving Russia. Multiple intel insiders told Jesse, “Your dad is good,” referencing his behind-the-scenes interventions across administrations .
Supporting Story:
Jesse recounts FOIA-obtained letters from JFK to CIA Director John McCone, demanding full coordination on “unknowns in sensitive airspace” to prevent misidentification by Soviets. JFK’s initiative to share UFO data with Russia alarmed parts of the CIA, suggesting he knew far more than the public realized .
Supporting Story:
An eyewitness, Navy sailor David Noble, told Jesse that during Bluegill Triple Prime, he saw a cigar-shaped UFO appear after the nuclear launch. The senior Navy officer onboard suddenly left the mission shortly after, possibly due to the shootdown—a sign something classified had occurred .
Supporting Story:
Jesse confirms similar accounts across the UFO research field: material that emits no sensation is a recurring trope. The “it felt like nothing” description matches stories from other handlers who described these pieces as non-reactive to touch or temperature, but potentially reactive to thought .
Supporting Story:
Jesse notes that Malmgren’s telepathic experience is consistent with others who handled non-human materials—describing mental “downloads” or emotional impressions. He cites intelligence-linked figures who believe some materials are semi-sentient or interact with human cognition under specific conditions .
Supporting Story:
Jesse extensively documents the 1933 Magenta UFO crash, drawing from whistleblowers like David Grusch and Italian documents. He links it to OSS and Vatican involvement, showing that the U.S. retrieved the craft post-WWII and brought it to Wright-Patterson AFB—just as Bissell told Malmgren .
Supporting Story:
Jesse highlights a statement from a Department of Energy FOIA response that references “subject matter experts on UFOs,” implying internal compartments even within nuclear oversight. He notes that Navy Intel “lives in their own world” and is often more compartmentalized than CIA itself .
Supporting Story:
In Jesse’s retelling, the Navy’s immediate recovery of the tagalong UFO, followed by sudden movements of high-ranking officials (including JFK and LBJ), suggests the trip was about the recovery, not the nuclear test. The timing aligns perfectly with Malmgren’s observation of post-test secrecy .
Supporting Story:
Jesse explains that UFOs may use quantum magnetoreception, similar to birds. EMPs from nuclear blasts can disrupt the Earth’s local magnetic field, causing UFOs to lose navigation and fall, especially if they rely on exotic nuclear power sources—matching the Bluegill shootdown mechanics .
Supporting Story:
Jesse notes how even Malmgren—despite holding Q clearance for all nuclear and presidential-level data—was blocked from deeper knowledge, confirming how atomic secrecy structures overlap with UFO secrecy. This shows how knowledge can be structurally withheld, not just suppressed by decision .
appendix: key figures and books
Name | Role / Significance | Connection |
Carl Compton | President of MIT, National Defense Research Council | Discovered Malmgren as a prodigy at age 13 |
Robert McNamara | U.S. Secretary of Defense | Malmgren’s direct boss during Cuban Missile Crisis |
JFK & LBJ | U.S. Presidents | Allegedly briefed on UFO events, visited Los Alamos |
Richard Bissell | Deputy Director, CIA; founder of Area 51 | Briefed Malmgren on crash retrievals, including Magenta |
Allen Dulles | CIA Director | Managed clandestine UFO retrieval efforts, linked to Magenta craft |
John Foster Dulles | Secretary of State | OSS leadership, connected to Vatican backchanneling |
James Jesus Angleton | CIA Counterintelligence Chief | Linked to Knights of Malta and Magenta crash secrecy |
David Grusch | Whistleblower | Independently verified 1933 Magenta crash and retrieval |
Philip J. Corso | Pentagon officer, Knight of Malta | Author of The Day After Roswell; claimed UFO reverse engineering |
General Douglas MacArthur | Supreme Allied Commander | Gave speech on “interplanetary war” at West Point |
Hal Puthoff | Physicist and UAP researcher | Confirmed Bush-era discussions of disclosure |
Ben Rich | Head of Lockheed Skunk Works | Linked via son (Michael Rich) and interest in exotic propulsion |
John Trump | MIT scientist, uncle of Donald Trump | Investigated Tesla’s papers for U.S. intelligence |
Myron Taylor | FDR’s Vatican envoy | Informed Allies of Magenta crash location |
William Donovan (“Wild Bill”) | OSS founder | Allegedly involved in crash retrieval protocol creation |
Pope Pius XII | Vatican head | Involved in backchannel intelligence about UFOs |
Deta Bronc | Rockefeller Foundation & Johns Hopkins President | Allegedly involved in Majestic-12 and autopsy programs |
John Warner IV | Son of U.S. Senator | Shared story of Dulles standing on a saucer in Czechoslovakia |
Title | Author/Source | Relevance |
The Day After Roswell | Col. Philip J. Corso | Memoir on reverse-engineering alien tech |
The Three-Body Problem | Liu Cixin | Described as the best metaphor for the UFO phenomenon; allegedly required reading for national security officials |
Novel by Chase Brandon | CIA agent turned author | Fictional book about time-travel and extraterrestrial intelligence communicating telepathically; considered partly revelatory by Malmgren |
UFO Letters JFK to CIA | FOIA-released document | JFK demands full disclosure of “unknowns in sensitive airspace” to avoid misinterpretation by Soviets |
1952 Look Magazine Article | Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt (Air Force UFO Program) | States UFOs commonly seen around atomic facilities |