#1612 - Robert Bigelow

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Hello, good morning. Good afternoon.

Robert Bigelow (0:16)

Yeah, pleasure to meet you, pleasure to get to talk to you, and I really appreciate you coming on here.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

My pleasure.

Robert Bigelow (0:21)

It means a lot to me.

You and I have some shared interests, clearly, in the world of UFOs, but I want to talk, most people know of you because of Bigelow Aerospace. They know that you're this billionaire investor and you're a very successful businessman, but you have a deep fascination with UFOs.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

Yeah, yeah, sure do.

Robert Bigelow (0:45)

How did this all get started?

Joe Rogan (0:50)

Back when I was about three years old, which would be about 1947, and actually of May of that year, my grandparents had a very close encounter that was dramatic.

And they were taking an afternoon evening drive in the late afternoon up into the mountains and coming on back down to Las Vegas. And they saw what appeared to be at first an airplane on fire.

And the object became closer and closer to them and they pulled off to the side of the road and at one point then it filled up the windshield and they thought they were going to die. And at the last second, it shot off and disappeared. And I learned of this story when I was probably 10 years old, because I was three at the time. And my mother had told me this story. So I approached my grandfather, and he wouldn't talk about it. Now after all these years, like seven years have gone by, because I was intrigued with it. And so I went to my grandmother, and she only would say a few words, but she wouldn't talk. So I got the story from my mom, and they had, my grandfather had to sit on the side of the road there in the car for a while to recompose himself, and because they thought they were going to die, and then finally he finally was able to drive on back to Las Vegas. So that was the beginning for me.

Robert Bigelow (2:30)

Did he ever describe what, he said it looked like a plane on fire, but like what was the shape of it as it got closer?

Joe Rogan (2:36)

I don't recall any kind of shape that was described. My mother described, I don't recall that.

Robert Bigelow (2:43)

But they just knew it wasn't a plane.

Joe Rogan (2:46)

They knew it was something crazy. So in the family, the family had an event.

And I lived right next door to my grandparents. And the family had an event that kind of started things at that date. For me, other personal things came later. But for the family, that was a big deal.

Robert Bigelow (3:06)

So this was, you said 47?

Joe Rogan (3:08)

47

Robert Bigelow (3:08)

And 47 was the time of the Roswell crash. 47 was the time there was a lot of UFO activity being observed worldwide.

And the speculation is that this had to do with the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the tests that the United States had done and Russia had done, and that there was a lot of interest in, obviously, in that, well, actually Russia hadn't dropped any bombs by that time, right?

Joe Rogan (3:35)

Right.

Robert Bigelow (3:35)

It was after that. But that there was interest in our species by extraterrestrials because they were like, oh, these crazy assholes are detonating nukes.

Like, let's go take a look at them.

Joe Rogan (3:47)

Right. Well, you had so-called Foo Fighters during the war, these lights that were following bombers, and the tail gunners were the ones that saw them most often, of course.

And then that happened through the war. And then, of course, Roswell, but before that was Kent Arnold, right? In about June, June-ish, and then in July 8th was Roswell.

Robert Bigelow (4:15)

And there's a direct uptick, though, from the Trinity experiments, right?

Joe Rogan (4:20)

I think, yeah, I gather my feeling simply is that without any kind of other evidence or proof that that was a huge stimulus.

Robert Bigelow (4:32)

So this was around that time, and you had heard about this as a part of family discussions.

And so that sort of ignited the fire initially. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (4:43)

And I started asking my friends, as I say, when I was about 10, you know, have you, any reports in your family of anything? And by golly, a couple of my close friends told me things that they had never told me before.