There’s nothing quite like a former high-ranking official giving credence to conspiracy theories to kick off a work week.

Over the weekend, Paul Hellyer, former Canadian defense minister, went on television and declared that not only do aliens exist but that they walk amongst us and are responsible for some of our modern technology. Among these tech gifts are the microchip, LED light and Kevlar vest.

Hellyer, who served as Canada’s Minister of National Defence in the 1960s, went on Russia Today’s program SophieCo to speak more about extraterrestrials. The interview, seen below, is a little on the long side but it’s totally worth it, particularly because he’s the first high ranking politician to publicly state that aliens are real.

Honestly, watching this is an exercise in feeling conflicting emotions. For starters, I too believe that aliens exist. Our universe is so massive that it would almost be statistically impossible for Earth to be the only planet to have intelligent life.

It’s also incredibly easy to get behind statements like:

“We spend too much time fighting each other, we spend too much money on military expenditures, and not enough on feeding the poor and looking after the homeless and the sick, and that we are polluting our waters and our air and that we’re playing around with these exotic weapons, thermonuclear weapons and atomic weapons, which have such devastating effects both on Earth and other areas of Cosmos.”

That’s straight up true, and Hellyer’s claim that we don’t have more alien technology because we treat each other poorly is believable. It’s a scientific fact that we can’t have nice things.

But then Hellyer gets into the specifics, and that’s when he begins to lose me.

“[I’ve] been getting from various sources [that] there are about 80 different species and some of them look just like us and they could walk down the street and you wouldn’t know if you walked past one.”

Eighty different races and a good handful of them are humanoids?!

The segment then ventures into the incredulous when Hellyer begins to list where they’re coming from. It turns out that our alien visitors come from near (one of the Saturn moons) and far (the Pleiades and Zeta Reticuli star systems). Oh yeah, and they get here via a portal in the Andes mountains in Peru.

So there you have it, folks. Aliens are real, according to a nonagenarian man who at one point had access to highly classified information during the height of the Cold War.