Welcome back to Behind Greatness. We sat down with Matthew Roberts at his home on the East Coast and we were treated with a thoughtful talk on a fascinating subject. Matthew worked in the US Navy as a Cryptologist for 16 years where he spent many years working on encryption/decryption communication process to catch the bad guys the world round. He is also recognized as being featured in Episode 1 of the 2023 Netflix series Encounters.

Starting in 2015 he began to have a series of fascinating profound personal experiences after being on board the USS Roosevelt during the famous Gimbal and the Go Fast events. The Navy later described these events as incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena into military training ranges. These events completely changed the course of Matthew’s life, who had been a life-long atheist up to this point in his life. We learn about his journey of self-discovery, the subsequent opening up of his world view and his exploration of our place in the cosmos.

Amongst the several themes in this episode, we discuss his insight on humanity’s lack of insight on evolution beyond us, the dead-end nature of our materialistic western mindset, what he thinks non-human intelligence is trying to communicate and the significance of “picking at the edges of human perception”.

See episodes with Ryan Graves (ep 141) and Kevin Day (ep 171) to hear about more experiences from other former US Navy servicemen. See also the session we had with Dr. Steven J. Dick, Astrobiologist and former Chief Historian at NASA (ep 150).