Mark Rodeghier

COPYRIGHT DAVID CHERNIACK PROD. LTD.

[00;00;07] WHY DON'T WE BEGIN TALKING ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE PHENOMENA IN RELATIONSHIP TO SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDES TOWARDS IT.

[00;00;16] The, you know, the phenomena began in 1947 really. And scientists initially didn't pay much attention to UFOs. The military was who was concerned with it and some newspapers and so forth and the public.

[00;00;30] But initially scientists - in fact literally it was out of their consciousness. The only scientist that might have paid attention to it were those connected with the military. There were a few including Allan Hynek who then was at Ohio State University who ah was tasked with looking at some cases and trying to basically find astronomical explanations.

RIGHT.

[00;00;49] Scientific interest of a serious note I think didn't begin until the early 1950s and almost all of it was sceptical. It was either sceptical -

[00;00;58] NOW WHY DO YOU THINK THAT?

[00;01;00] Well, why do you think that.

YEAH WHY?

[00;01;02] Um I think that scientists at the time, despite the interest that was there in possible life in outer space and knowledge of astronomy and what was possible in terms of solar systems and chemistry and the galaxy, scientists basically had literally no conception that aliens could potentially visit here because that's what the phenomena devolved into essentially at that time was it probably - if it's unusual if alien -

[00;01;32] BY '49 (UNCLEAR) MORE OR LESS.

[00;01;35] Well, the military was still thinking sometimes of potential Russian technology. There were still pockets of that for several years. Scientific interest, if you were connected with the military, would have still therefore possibly been in that area still.

[00;01;51] But the scientists outside the military or scientists tasked with looking into it, like the Robertson panel, they would have been thinking more alien technology or outer space intelligences or whatever you want to call them then.

[00;02;03] Well they really had no conception in their minds, despite all the science fiction that had been around for years, that aliens could get here. It just wasn't something that was in their purview.

[00;02;15] BLAME IT ON EINSTEIN?

[00;02;17] Ah not completely, but in part sure, because the light barrier makes it tough to travel. That's one reason.

[00;02;22] WASN'T IT THE PRINCIPLE THING THOUGH? I ALWAYS HAD THE FEELING THAT WAS THE ONLY REASON.

[00;02;28] I think those who though about it that was the only reason. See, I think there was almost, if I can call it a knee jerk reaction for the scientific community, was that it just isn't conceivable that they could be here. And the other problem with this, it's that philosophical thing with scientists. If I don't know about it it can't be true. (chuckles)

[00;02;45] We would know about it if they were here, the scientific community would know about it.

[00;02;52] NOW (LAUGH) OKAY, YOU JUST TOUCHED ON SOMETHING THAT I THINK IS VERY TRUE. THERE SEEMS TO BE AN INGRAINED KIND OF ARROGANCE TO SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY. PRECISELY WHAT YOU SAID, IF WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT IT DOESN'T EXIST OR IT'S NOT TRUE. THERE'S ANOTHER THING THAT GOES ALONG WITH IT IS THAT OUR PRESENT STATE OF KNOWLEDGE IS THE ULTIMATE STAGE OF KNOWLEDGE. THAT BASICALLY WE MORE OR LESS SOLVED ALL THE PROBLEMS OF HOW THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE WORKS AND WE JUST HAVE TO WRAP UP THE DETAILS. IT NEVER SEEMS TO OCCUR THAT OUR SCIENCES ARE EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY YOUNG. THAT WE REALLY HAVEN'T SOLVED THE MAJOR PROBLEM BETWEEN THE VERY LARGE AND THE VERY SMALL. WE HAVE NO UNIFIED … NOR ARE WE EVEN CLOSE, THAT I CAN SEE. AND YET THIS ATTITUDE SEEMS TO PERSIST THAT WE KNOW A HELL OF A LOT. THERE'S NO HUMILITY IN SCIENCE, IN OTHER WORDS. THAT'S WHERE I'M GOING TO. THERE'S VERY LITTLE HUMILITY IN SCIENCE.

[00;03;55] Certainly among physics - physicists and astronomers and people of that ilk, hard sciences there's very little admittedly. And the higher up you go on the chain, the food chain in science, the less humility there is.

[00;04;10] And I do think that the, that now there is more of this hubris which is that we know everything or almost everything. There was a little less of it back in the '50s and '60s, particularly when the '60s started we started finding all these elementary particles that no one knew anything about and they had to develop the standard model of quantum mechanics and go beyond that recently.

[00;04;30] So I think that's it. I also wanted to add one more comment about the light speed barrier. Because, you know, in Regal Firmie's famous question about where are they, which appears to have actually been - actually asked and it wasn't apocryphal. Why did he ask that question?

[00;04;45] Well it's because he calculated quickly that in fact even if they didn't travel any faster than light speed, that a civilization could colonize the galaxy in you know, 10 million years or something if they wanted to do it. So then again, where are they?

[00;04;58] So I really don't think it was only light speed. Again it was more sociological, psychological and philosophical reasoning that led scientists to reject UFO science and others. Another one there too, this is a corollary to the if we don't know it - if we aren't aware of it it can't be true.

[00;05;16] We will not, we the scientists will not use data that comes from the public, that comes from the great unwashed. And of course physicists and astronomers, well at least the physicists don't ever do this or chemists. Astronomers do a little bit with amateur astronomers. But, but other scientists don't and they're just not used to, to saying, well we could be getting some valuable evidence from people who are out there.

[00;05;39] This has held true for years. It isn't just with meteors, sprites and blue jets. Maybe not blue jets. I'm blanking on the name of that, but sprites and something else, some kind of jet. In astronomy we're seeing for years about thunderstorms. The atmospheric physicists just rejected this phenomena and now it's been shown to be true when they had high speed video cameras on it.

[00;06;03] But they could have discovered it 30 years ago if they basically just paid attention to reports of airline pilots and other people who were out looking at the atmosphere. So there's lots of examples of them rejecting data from the public.

[00;06;16] Well, UFO sightings par excellence are data from the public. And so this led to ah - that was kind of the fundamental underlying problem with things. In fact, when you look at it from these angles, it's kind of amazing that any scientist would look at it positively.

[00;06;36] I think that says a lot for Allan Hynek. In a way though he was very conflicted.

[00;06;41] AND HE WAS MUCH LATER BEFORE -

[00;06;42] That's right, that's right. But, even though he was much later with his more public role, he even then would try to make little forays toward a more positive view of the subject or at least the more let's say agnostic view.

[00;06;56] And he was shot down in various ways including directly with the Robertson panel.

[00;07;02] LET'S TAKE IT NOW - WE CAN GET INTO THE SPECIFIC HISTORY OF GOING TO THE ROBERTSON PANEL. SO YOU THINK BASICALLY WHAT YOU'VE OUTLINED IS … THE ROBERTSON FELLOWS DECIDED THAT THERE WAS NOTHING TO THIS PHENOMENA OR ARE YOU MORE OF A CONSPIRATORIAL BENT THAT IT WAS A CIA KIND OF SETUP.

[00;07;24] Ah I - I can imagine the Robertson panel being a setup. But I can also imagine it being an honest study that in either way would have ended up with the same conclusion. I tend to think that the scientists themselves were not particularly briefed on you have to find this conclusion.

[00;07;43] I think that instead, if it was a setup, by structuring it a certain way with certain types of evidence or lack of evidence, that it was clear which direction things would go. I also think that they were briefed, Robertson at least, on the idea that this was a national security issue.

[00;08;00] ROBERTSON MOST CERTAINLY.

[00;08;01] Right. And so we had to look at it from - they had to look at it in that vein, which meant first and foremost, yes of course we've got to figure out what it might be but don't worry so much about the science. Worry about how that would interact with again our national security systems and the Russians possibly using UFOs as in fact a decoy for launching attacks on the U.S. and so forth.

[00;08;25] So I think that either way, a setup conspiracy which I'm open to but haven't seen any definitive evidence, or simply a bumbling way to look at the phenomena. And bumbling because if it wasn't a setup it just was poorly organized. It's just a classic kind of thing.

[00;08;41] And I see - we've actually learned this recently with the war on terror. The intelligence community doesn't do everything right. And in particular when they (chuckle) - when they try to look at a phenomena that they don't have much background on and they look at it in a quick, brief study and they bring in some outside experts, why would we expect that they would necessarily do a good job?

[00;09;04] And this was I think another case of that. You bring in extremely bright people who have never thought about this before. You don't actually have the best data there for them. What are we expecting is going to occur from people who already are sceptical about things like this. So -

[00;09;21] OKAY GOOD. THAT'S A REASONABLE TAKE ON IT. I HAVEN'T SEEN ANY EVIDENCE THAT LEADS ME TO BELIEVE THAT IT WAS A SETUP TOO. ALTHOUGH YOU DO HAVE TO WONDER ABOUT ROBERTSON'S ROLE AND THE FACT THAT THE REPORT SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN OVERNIGHT. NOW EITHER ROBERTSON WAS AN EXTREMELY FAST WRITER OR IT WAS PREPARED IN ADVANCE.

[00;09;45] There's that possibility. It's also possible, for example, that besides being briefed on the fact by national security that Robertson was told that we're looking for something in this vein.

[00;09;56] I mean the same thing happened essentially with the Condon Project, the University of Colorado study.

[00;10;01] WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WE'LL GET TO THAT. DO YOU THINK IT WAS PRINCIPALLY WASHINGTON, THE '52 SUMMER OF WASHINGTON THAT BEGAT ALL THIS?

[00;10;11] Yeah there's no - whether it was a conspiracy or not there's no doubt about that. Ah UFO sightings had been at least not dormant but less in number and in kind of impact through '51 and early '52. And these sightings began not originally in D.C. They began in other parts of the country.

[00;10;30] But then of course the two famous incidents in D.C. in the summer which got tremendous headlines and understandably everybody there took notice including Truman. And they had to do something about it.

[00;10;43] In fact that's the point where everything went wrong in a way because Ruppelt was already in place as the head of Bluebook and he was -

[00;10;51] AND RUPPELT WAS SETTING UP WHAT WAS BASICALLY A SCIENTIFIC -

[00;10;53] Right. He was trying as best as possible to study things scientifically within his limitations and so forth. And the CIA and the air force intelligence and others then, you know, at higher levels were thinking about the problem in a way they hadn't been really. And it was really up to them. They're the ones in charge at the time to say, okay, we need to study this in a coordinated fashion, in a sophisticated fashion.

[00;11;16] We need to put enough money into this and that's what didn't happen. Rightly or what didn't happen was after - again a lot of dithering - is the Robertson panel was held in January and then we know what happened after that.

[00;11;31] It wasn't a straight line. You know, for example, since the Robertson panel was secret, its findings weren't disseminated widely to air force bases around the country because it was secret. So it took a while I think for it to have its effect. But eventually it did and certainly it had its effect of course initially at the highest levels, given its nature. And eventually that's going to then trickle down to all other policy decisions throughout the military intelligence, civilian intelligence and so forth.

[00;12;04] YEAH AND IT CERTAINLY DID. ALTHOUGH IT TOOK ITS TIME IT WOULD SEEM.

[00;12;07] It did take its time.

BUT IT CERTAINLY GOVERNED THE COURSE OF THE HISTORY FROM '53 THROUGH TO THE MID-60S.

[00;12;16] Yeah it did govern it. And yet we understand that from time to time sightings occurred that actually were investigated, particularly jumping ahead just a little bit, just briefly, is the minute man sightings.

OH YEAH.

[00;12;29] -of ah - are fascinating. And clearly someone took some of those seriously and did investigations though we don't know where the reports went which is another very frustrating thing.

[00;12;38] So just because Robertson said there's nothing to UFOs, you know, we should handle it this way. we should essentially debunk the whole phenomena, that didn't mean that from time to time someone in the government somewhere didn't take it seriously.

[00;12;55] EXACTLY. LET'S STAY BACK IN THE EARLY '50s. NOW YOU'VE WRITTEN THAT MENZEL WAS ESSENTIALLY AN HONEST BROKER. THAT HE WAS - IN HIS IDEAS.

[00;13;06] Did I write that?

[00;13;07] YES. I HAVE A QUOTATION.

[00;13;09] Fine, okay then I must have said it.

[00;13;10] HONESTLY MISTAKEN.

Okay.

[00;13;12] NOW WHY DO YOU NOT HOLD THIS -

[00;13;15] Well no, I can't remember where I wro-

[00;13;18] LET ME GET IT OUT. I HAVE CHEAT SHEET. I'LL READ YOU BACK WHAT YOU WROTE. IT DOESN'T MATTER.

[00;13;25] Don't worry about it.

[00;13;27] IT'S INTERESTING.

[00;13;30] Well the reason I reacted to that is simply that, you know, as you know, Mike Swords has looked into more than I have and of course the whole early debunking group. And he thinks, I think, that Menzel was more tasked with doing a certain - right?

[00;13;48] BY AH WHAT'S HIS NAME? HOWARD SHAPLY?

[00;00;00] Yeah was it Shaply?

(end)

[00;14;08] OKAY WE'RE BACK WITH DR. MENZEL. NOW ONE THING I'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO FIND - I THINK IT'S REFERENCED IN JERRY'S ENCYCLOPEDIA THAT MENZEL BLAMED NASH FORTENBERRY ON FIREFLIES CAUGHT BETWEEN THE PANES OF GLASS ON THE AIRPLANE WINDSHIELD. ANY OF YOU GUYS KNOW ANYTHING (OVERLAP)..

[00;14;29] Actually Frank - if anybody knows it it would be Frank actually. Do you remember that?

Frank:
[00;14;34] Menzel tried out a number of explanations in a paper dialogue with Charles Namy and I think that he did try out the fireflies, just sort of threw it out. He was more serious about the cigarettes.

Intvwee:
[00;14;52] Yeah the cigarettes is the one.

Frank:
[00;14;53] The cigarette at the thing there.

[00;14;54] CIGARETTES? I DON'T KNOW THIS.

Frank:
[00;14;58] And he was most serious about the idea that there was a searchlight which had something played on separate layers of mist or fog in the atmosphere.

I SEE.

[00;15;12] Because the geometry was roughly correct. It doesn't seem to really fit unless you had lasers in 1952 because the things were too bright. And ah I think it was ah Fortenberry who actually stood up and saw the things bounce.

Intvwee:
[00;15;34] And of course there wasn't even any evidence of searchlights anywhere.

Frank:
[00;15;37] Yeah. There wasn't evidence of search lights. It ah -

[00;15;41] WHAT'S THIS THING ABOUT CIGARETTES?

[00;15;43] The idea was that simply that somebody lit a cigarette. Maybe the stewardess, somebody and ah the multiple reflections.

[00;15;54] THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE BACK CABIN, RIGHT?

Intvwee:
[00;15;57] The door was open between them and the - we didn't say it was a god idea. We just -

Frank:
[00;16;03] It was … idea that they were reflections and then multiple back and forth reflections from somebody ah taking a big drag and then moving the hand around.

[00;16;15] ALRIGHT, OKAY. ALRIGHT. IN ANY CASE WHAT IS NICELY DOCUMENTED IS HIS VISITS TO THE PENTAGON TO GET FUNDING TO -

Intvwee:
Right.

[00;16;30] THAT'S WONDERFUL. AND RUPPELT'S LETTER -

[00;16;33] Yeah you've seen that, so yeah.

[00;16;36] GREAT STUFF. OKAY LET'S MOVE ON BECAUSE I THINK MIKE COVERED AH -

[00;16;43] Yeah Mike would really be - I'm sure was good for that so -

[00;16;47] A LOT OF THAT STUFF. CONDON. IT'S HARD FOR ME TO FATHOM HIS PERSONAL ANIMOSITY TOWARDS THE SUBJECT MATTER. I'M NOT SURE WHERE IT'S COMING FROM. DO YOU HAVE ANY - WHERE IT CAME FROM. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA?

[00;17;08] Well ah he certainly became very antagonistic eventually and after the project had started. He I think possibly just at the first glimmerings of the project was not of that mindset. Ah there certainly were no extremely negative statements from him at that point

[00;17;35] Why he would become antagonist there are very, you know, we can think of various possibilities including first of all and foremost is that he honestly saw the subject that way. In other words he looked into it, he read some more about sightings he hadn't done before. He thought it was all crap basically. And as a scientist of course he's not going to hide his feelings. And so that's how he ended up.

[00;17;57] So I think you always have to allow for someone, not a sceptic like Phil Klass who lived his scepticism. Condon is someone who, you know, was tasked with this late in life. And so okay, fine, it may have all been genuine.

[00;18;14] If it wasn't genuine then of course the other hypothesis is, is that he went into it negative even though he may not have said this openly initially. Why was that? He was tasked again with the job of making sure that the air force could in fact - and I think this is true - end its project, okay?

[00;18;33] THAT WE HAVE THE DOCUMENTATION FOR.

[00;18;36] So and he went overboard. He decided that, well I've got to really kill this thing and so that was his way of - crude, blunt, you know, really kind of despicable in a way when he talked about witnesses and so forth. But that was the way he acted let's say.

[00;18;54] And I must say that I don't know Condon the man. Personally I haven't read a Condon biography if there is such a thing and I don't think there is in fact. So I really have no good sense for him except through the project as a physicist and a few other tidbits we picked up over the years.

[00;19;13] Ah and so I really don't know how he was otherwise in his life except I can imagine what a high powered physicist might be like, but maybe that's wrong.

[00;19;22] And then after you have those two hypotheses, genuine, you know, behaviour, directed behaviour that kind of got out of control, then I would go more to the psychological explanations quite frankly. There's something about Condon that made him go in that direction. And partially it could be though because he - he wanted to treat it rationally. Found out he couldn't do that and he got frustrated.

[00;19;50] This is a little different than saying he looked at it and thought it was all crap. It's more a matter of - and we've discussed this several times over the years here at the centre is that he was a fellow who was used to doing physics.

[00;20;03] He encountered a problem that couldn't be studied just with physics and in fact might almost be impossible to study well because of the fact that the phenomena is fleeting and you can't be sure where to study it and all kinds of other things.

[00;20;16] And this somehow turned him against the whole thing. But because of his personality, you know, other people would have reacted differently. This is the way he reacted.

[00;20;25] So I can go on with hypotheses four and five but I mean ah, you know, so -

[00;20;30] YOU BETTER STOP AT THREE.

[00;20;31] Yeah, okay.

[00;20;33] IT'S GOOD. IN EVALUATING WHAT HAPPENED SUBSEQUENT TO THE COLORADO REPORT IT SEEMED TO HAVE BEEN A WATERSHED, PARTICULARLY IN THE MAJOR MEDIA. THE MAJOR MEDIA SEIZED IT AND SAID, OKAY, THIS IS THE FINAL SOLUTION AND BASICALLY STOPPED REPORTING THESE THINGS OR STOPPED REPORTING - ASIDE FROM THAT ONE WAVE IN '73 BASICALLY THE PHENOMENA HAS BEEN IN TERMS OF THE MAJOR MEDIA EVER SINCE DEAD.

[00;21;06] Pretty much. The ah the media, particularly the elite media, ah works best when they can use official reports of some type or official sources. That's just what they're attuned to. And this was an official source because it was sponsored by the air force.

[00;21;27] And so the report though done by a university and by people who weren't connected with the government, was still that. And so it said what it said which of course was also consonant with what the media would believe about UFOs. And so sure, they were - they ran with it, as it were, or didn't run with it, because they stopped.

[00;21;44] Even there have been political science professors who did a paper on the New York Times coverage of UFOs and have discovered that every decade since the '50s it dropped and dropped and dropped and dropped right on into the '90s.

[00;21;58] So of course coverage didn't cease completely. There were little blips here and there. But essentially sure, the serious media stopped paying attention to it, as did scientists as well because at least some scientists - it turns out it was bifurcated actually because scientists had been considering UFOs more seriously in the late '60s because there were so many sightings, strictly that.

[00;22;21] There were so many sightings you couldn't ignore them. So some scientists were thinking about UFOs. Then what happened is that the - I think they turned on the air conditioning.

[00;22;35] WE'LL STOP.
[00;22;42] Now I - let me just pick up as close as I can to where I was?

SURE.

[00;22;47] Right. So the ah the Colorado Project Report ended up kind of bifurcating the scientific community because some scientists who got interested in the subject in the '60s then decided there was nothing to it.

[00;23;02] Other scientists, Peter Sturak is one, David Saunders of course was part of the project and was stimulated by his being fired and other things. And then other people, Bruce MacAvy who got involved just after that. Several people said, you know, I've read the report and the data in the report aren't consistent with the conclusions so - and I was already kind of interested in UFOs - so I think I should look into this thing further.

[00;23;31] THAT'S TRUE. THAT BIFURCATION - THOSE PEOPLE IN MANY WAYS THEY BECAME ASSOCIATED WITH UFOLOGY, EVEN STURROCK RIGHT? AND THEREFORE IT BECAME MARGINALIZED IN THE MINDS OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA PEOPLE. AND EVEN PETER'S PANEL DIDN'T REALLY ATTRACT A WHOLE GREAT DEAL OF PRESS.

[00;23;55] The ah, you know what I - the fact that some scientists got interested in the '70s doesn't mean that the media got interested. Just that it had - it was that effect. But no, the media has been - at least again the elite media has been the same ever since.

[00;24;10] ANY SPECULATION AS TO WHY?

[00;24;12] Ah well, you know, Terry Hansen probably -

[00;24;14] WE'LL BE (OVERLAP) …

[00;24;16] Okay. I don't, you know - and I never had great faith in the media even when I was growing up.

[00;24;23] YEAH.

[00;24;23] And I have less faith now after all these years have passed and I've seen their behaviour. Some journalists of course are bright and you know, dedicated and all that, but I think as a whole, particularly stories about science because first and foremost - or intelligence matters, I want to add that - the journalists defer to official sources. They defer to the consensus and on intelligence sources obviously they defer to the government.

[00;24;55] And under those conditions they're going to end up just kind of parroting in their own way what the government thinks about things. Again, obviously there are exceptions to this. But it's difficult to ah, on your own to go out and talk to all these individual members of the public who have sightings and one scientist here and one scientist there.

[00;25;18] Because if you say to them, well what's the proof you have that there's something going on, the honest answer is we don't have any proof that there's something going on. We have a lot of, of ah ambiguous data but it's very interesting data.

[00;25;30] (overlap)… DATA.

[00;25;31] But it's not definitive. It's not something we can, you know, go to a court of law or write a scientific paper for the National Academy. So, so when a reporter looks at that and then they talk to a sceptic or a debunker in the scientific community - Karl Sagan, of that stature, and they have to weigh those two and then they end up almost invariably coming to the side of the - the higher-ups, the authorities in science.

[00;25;56] MY OWN FEELING IS BASICALLY ESSENTIALLY THEY'RE SHORT OF TIME

[00;26;00] Yeah well that's why, yeah.

[00;26;03] JUST SHORT OF TIME TO ACTUALLY DO - … DO RESEARCH.

[00;26;06] When do they do any study, right. I mean investigative reporting has declined over the years, right? So -

IT'S EXPENSIVE.

[00;26;14] Yes. I bet it is.

[00;26;16] IT'S VERY EXPENSIVE. WHERE ARE WE RIGHT NOW WITH SCIENCE? BECAUSE I SEEM TO DETECT - SEEM TO DETECT - IT WAS INTERESTING THAT JENNINGS DECIDED TO END ON MISHIO KA… AS A VOICE. BUT I SEEM TO DETECT A NEW GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS WHO ARE TRAINED IN M THEORY AND STUFF LIKE THAT, WHERE THE IDEA OF THEY CAN'T GET HERE FROM THERE AH ISN'T AS LIMITING AS IT WAS AMONG THE GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS RAISED ON RELATIVITY AND I SEEM TO DETECT SOMETHING LIKE THAT HAPPENING. BUT IS IT MORE JUST A BLIP OR IS IT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW WAVE?

[00;26;56] I don't think that science as a whole is paying attention to the UFO phenomena itself much. I do think though that there are scientists who are thinking very deeply about the role of intelligence in the universe because of the anthropic principle, about the idea that in fact if there are aliens out there that yeah, maybe they can get here easier because they're maybe in another dimension or they can get here just - they're like a millimetre away from us even as we speak or because of some other black hole things and singularities that they can travel here without having to break the light speed barrier.

[00;27;33] Those ideas have definitely been in the forefront. They are really interesting. In fact, I think Ufology hasn't paid enough attention to them because they're on our side. They're actually our friends and allies with those kinds of ideas.

[00;27;45] But - but those scientists they may not pooh-pooh UFO sightings but none of them are anxious asking for UFO data or doing anything like that. It's too dangerous. And quite frankly, there's another reason, by the way, why scientists in general don't pay attention to UFOs. It's because of this rational calculation of where they should spend their time and where they're likely to make progress in their own career.

[00;28;12] And I can tell you this, they can't make much progress in UFOs. So -

[00;28;18] WELL MAYBE YOU COULD. THEY JUST DON'T SEEM TO … THE POSSIBILITIES. THEY COULD PROBABLY MAKE A LOT OF CAREER PROGRESS IF THEY REALLY, REALLY HIT ON SOMETHING GOOD. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES WITH PASSIVE RADAR? WHEN I READ ABOUT IT AND THINK ABOUT IT IT SEEMS TO HOLD A LOT OF PROMISE BECAUSE IT TAKES IT OUT OF THE - TAKES IT OUT OF ACADEMIA, TAKES IT OUT OF THE GOVERNMENTS. PUTS IT IN THE HANDS OF PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS AND PRIVATE SCIENTISTS OR PEOPLE WITH - PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS WITH SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND WHO CAN DO A SCIENTIFIC STUDY.

[00;28;51] My feeling about trying to detect - I'll get to the passive radar - but my feeling about trying to detect UFOs through various means of measurement of all types is that there's no reason why it shouldn't work.

[00;29;07] While some UFOs are invisible - these witnesses actually say it just popped out of existence. I was looking at it and it went out of existence. And other UFOs definitely don't get picked up on radar. On the other hand, some UFOs do get picked up on radar.

[00;29;19] Some UFOs can be photographed, etc. etc. etc. So I don't think that there's any reason to believe that a UFO can't be detected, at least some of them some of the time. So I'm for any possible means of detecting them.

[00;29;32] I do think we have to be both subtle and sure we're not in control of the resources to be able to, you know, get our own radar dishes set around the country. So if we can find ways to be clever by using passive radar and using radar signals that are already out there to triangulate things, I think that's fantastic.

[00;29;50] People have thought before and in fact executed it. I was part of the study helping a guy named Joe Aseta who was a physicist at Los Alamos back in the '70s. And ah Joe said, okay, if UFOs are around what if they affect the measurements that are being taken on a regular basis by the geological survey people, meaning magnetic field, electric field and so forth.

[00;30;16] So he went out - in those days it was quite a chore - and gathered the data for about a hundred high quality UFO cases that were in the U.S. where we had more recording instruments. And he simply looked for correlations between the UFO being here and the measurements being made, some change in the measurement. And he found some actually.

[00;30;36] He didn't find enough to be again definitive and all the rest but he found a few, in fact including one really intriguing correlation with something called the sporadic E layer in the ionosphere which is one of the layers in the ionosphere of charged particles.

[00;30;51] And this is a layer that is a little mysterious in its own right. That is at the time at least in the late '70s, scientists weren't quite sure how it formed and it wasn't a large layer. The intriguing thing particularly laws this.

[00;31;04] The best theory of how it formed was that meteors enter the atmosphere and they through their ionization trail actually caused most of the ionization in the sporadic E layer. Well if you started reading meteor, read UFO. You know, if UFOs enter the atmosphere, exciting the molecules out there and causing some of the sporadic E layer sightings and that would cause the same correlation Aseta found.

[00;31;28] So I, so I think this is the - this it the unexplored area in UFOs. You know, we actually know a fair amount about abductees, for example, and some about witnesses and we know something about where UFOs appear and the times of day and it's all boring because it's the same thing all the time.

[00;31;45] But we haven't done this - using available systems that won't cost a lot of money but are - it's going to take a lot of effort. And you know, we basically failed in that.

[00;31;59] SO FAR.

[00;32;00] So far. Alright, we'll look positively.

[00;32;04] WE HAVE TO. THE PRESENT STATE OF THINGS CAN'T CONTINUE INDEFINITELY. CHILDHOOD HAS GOT TO COME TO AN END SOMETIME RIGHT?

[00;32;15] Yes but sometimes it doesn't come the way that you hoped it would end.

[00;32;20] YEAH THAT'S TRUE. SHALL WE MOVE ON TO ABDUCTIONS. YOU'VE STUDIED THE SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF EXPERIENCES RIGHT?

Mhm.

[00;32;28] WHAT'S YOUR PRESENT FEELING ABOUT THE ABDUCTION PHENOMENA? WHERE ARE WE WITH THE ABDUCTION PHENOMENA RIGHT NOW AFTER ALMOST REALLY, WELL 20 YEARS OF (OVERLAP)

[00;32;38] Yeah really intense -

[00;32;38] … INTENSIVE YEAH.

[00;32;40] Um the abduction phenomena is still a mystery first of all and foremost to me. It is more puzzling than the UFO phenomena in the sense that here we've had more attention paid to it. And I thought that eventually by now we would have at least had some - more of a better clue as to what's happening. And we're still floundering.

[00;33;04] But it's definitely multi-causal, okay, in the sense that someone can report an experience, someone else can report an experience very similar and yet one could really be cause by sleep paralysis and then the other is though, is more mysterious.

[00;33;21] And-or one could be caused by the old hag phenomena which is a little different than sleep paralysis and so forth and so on and a whole range of things or just a - People seem to have, certain type of people seem to just have anomalous things happen to them.

[00;33;35] ALL THE TIME?

[00;33;36] That if you and I were in the room with them we wouldn't even experience but they're really experiencing something and so they report it as such.

[00;33;45] I don't think there are nearly as many abductions as some people claim. It doesn't make any kind of logical sense. It doesn't make practical sense. It just doesn't make any, you know -

[00;33;55] UNLESS YOU SUBSCRIBE TO THE JACOBS THEORY OF ABDUCTIONS.

[00;34;01] Yes they're preparing us for - right. But I'm also thinking of how many people they have to abduct. It's quite an operation. And, but I, I certainly believe from investigations I've done and of course things I've read about that there are instances where people really do seem to be abducted meaning - but the best evidence is missing time.

[00;34;23] It's not scars on people's bodies which have not been well documented. It's certainly not implants. It's not a vague feeling. I mean that's fine. But it's got to be something that can make you say - well something mysterious happened here you know.

[00;34;39] And the most mysterious thing is someone should have been here and they're not there and they're actually gone. And while we don't have photos of a car with someone not in it by the side of the road we do have, at least in my judgement, some pretty solid testimony about those kinds of missing time lapses.

[00;34;56] WHAT WOULD BE THE MOST COMPELLING ONE THAT YOU SEE.

[00;34;59] Well actually the most compelling one, to be honest, and this is partly because I was involved with the case. And most of us feel, right, stronger about cases we're involved with because we tend to believe the investigation was done properly. So this was a woman who at the time was a teenager, 19 years old or so - in broad daylight this happened in too.

[00;35;19] She was on Saturday morning going to go out, get to her girlfriend's and they were going to go to the mall and go shopping. And she had a period of missing time, all consciously remembered in this sense. She showed up an hour and a half late for - And her girlfriend - this is before cell phones - was like, you know, where are you? Are you blowing me off? What's going on here?

[00;35;41] And she said, I'm late, what? Because she didn't realize until she got there. So, so there's very clear other witnesses to testify she was late. This was a drive - of course she took all the time. It was about a 25 or so minute drive. Up in Wisconsin this was, central Wisconsin.

[00;35;59] So there's your mystery, okay? Now you can posit fugue states. We can all of course, there's always ways this can happen. Under hypnosis which I think was done by a very competent hypnotherapist without any leading or anything, what she said was basically the following.

[00;36;14] She was driving along - again broad daylight - but on a rural road. No other cars around. And she sees in front of her what appears to be a crew of highway workers at the crest of a hill. And one of them is motioning for her to stop.

[00;36;28] She stops. And then she realizes they're not highway workers, at least not - the highway workers of Wisconsin don't look - they're not four foot tall, they're not grey. And from this goes on - it turns out there's a UFO in the field. She's taken to the UFO and kind of a classic abduction experience occurs.

[00;36;47] So there are a couple of other cases I've come across. But that to me with that missing time part there is pretty powerful evidence that something unusual happened. Ah now what else do we know about abduction? What else do I feel about them.

[00;37;03] I've said that I don't think they're as frequent as other people believe. For the most part the majority of people definitely are normal. They're just like you and I in most respects. Not quite. Susan Clancy in her book on abductees picked up on a little of this in the sense that they tend to be people who are more open to anomalous experiences in general.

[00;37;25] They're more feelers in life than they are rational people like I would be. I've never been abducted, don't ever expect to be for that reason, quite honestly. But ah and - but that isn't anything wrong with them, that's just their style, their psychological style.

[00;37;44] And in fact it might be admirable. Otherwise with a few exceptions, they're not fantasy prone, they're not prone to psychopathology. You know, they're just basically normal and they've had these anomalous experiences.

[00;37;58] Bottom line though is that I can't say that aliens are abducting people because for that you really do need hard evidence. And we don't have it, you know.

[00;38;10] AT LEAST NOT YET. BUT HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE JACOBS IDEA BECAUSE IT DOES SOLVE A FEW PROBLEMS IN TERMS OF THE FREQUENCY AND NUMBERS. AND WHILE YOU SAID YOU DON'T ACCEPT THAT THE REAL NUMBERS ARE ANYWHERE NEAR - WHAT PEOPLE ARE REPORTING ARE WHAT, IN THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS IF NOT MILLIONS …

[00;38;31] Well there's a couple of reasons why. Let me tell you. I'll tell you about Dave and what I think about that, but one of the - there's at least two reasons why I think abductions aren't as frequent.

[00;38;41] In part, abductions are kind of - they were faddish in the '90s. But not faddish like hoola hoops or something. They were faddish in a way like they gave people a script they could use to explain anomalous experiences they already had anyway in their life.

[00;38;57] So two Roper polls have been done on abductions. The first and then the second in the late '90s. And there's a vast difference between the estimates about the number of abductees between the two polls, i.e. the abduction incidence dropped by, you know, 50 or 60 or 70% in only 4 or 5 years. Well that makes no sense, okay? Unless of course there's other factors involved with being an abductee.

[00;39;22] So that's one thing I think about. But the other is that, that in the late '90, in the late '90s and in the early noughts or O's, whatever we call the decade we're in, ah we were - we being the UFO Coalition - were working on an abduction research project where we were actually placing devices in the home of abductees and ah attempting to measure physical phenomena there.

[00;39;48] In the course of that I literally had to interview hundreds of people around the country to find subjects for the study. So I talked to many, many, many people fairly recently about their experiences. And what I found is is that when you questioned them closely about the frequency of occurrence ah which we had to because we wanted to find people who were abducted at least, you know, more than once in their lifetime, it turns out that everything is very vague except a few things.

[00;40;18] In other words, yes they've had one or two experiences, whatever they were. But everything else is more along the lines of, you know, I woke up this morning and I think I saw a spot of blood in my nose and I think last night was one of those nights again.

[00;40;33] Now it may well be. But it's vague. And so I can't - and those two things are things I grasp. The Roper Poll I understand. I've talked to hundreds of potential abductees or real abductees and I just don't see these large numbers there okay?

[00;40;50] Now Dave Jacobs has been very assiduous about working with ah a small, you know, group of people and interviewing them repeatedly. And I'll grant whatever he's learned with them. But Dave has to extrapolate to the vast numbers. You know, he extrapolates based on what he hears from his group about what's going on and all this and then he extrapolates on the Roper poll.

[00;41;16] . Well I'm not a great fan of the Roper poll in terms of being able to estimate the number of abductees. So it's that reasoning that leads me to say that I just don't think they're as frequent rather than just I hope not a knee jerk reaction.

[00;41;29] LET ME TOSS ANOTHER IDEA OUT AT YOU JUST IN TERMS OF THE METHODOLOGY AND THE THOUGH TO RAISE IT … WHEN YOU MENTIONED THE CASE AND THE HYPNOSIS AND THE NON-LEADING QUESTIONS. I HAVE PROBLEMS WITH THE USE OF HYPNOSIS WITH ABDUCTIONS UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES BECAUSE OF THE SETUP SITUATION. YOU KNOW YOU'RE GOING TO BE HYPNOTIZED BY SOMEBODY WHO'S INTERESTED IN UFO ABDUCTIONS. THAT TO ME POLLUTES THE WHOLE THING RIGHT THERE, RIGHT FROM THE GET GO BECAUSE ALREADY THERE IS THE IMPETUS TO COME UP WITH - UNCONSCIOUSLY - TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING VAGUELY RELATED TO UFO ABDUCTIONS, YOU KNOW. WHY THE EXPERIENCES SHOULD BE ALL THE SAME OR SIMILAR, SOME OF THE CHARACTERISTICS, AGAIN THE SCRIPT IS OUT THERE AND HAS BEEN OUT THERE SINCE THE LATE '80s, EARLY '90s. AND IF PEOPLE AREN'T AWARE OF IT I'D BE REALLY, REALLY SURPRISED. SO I HAVE PROBLEMS WITH THE USE OF HYPNOSIS, PERIOD. THIS IS MY PERSONAL THING.

[00;42;41] Sure. I have a lot of sympathy for that. In fact, I've stopped using hypnosis years ago. So ah - yeah. And the real problem is the content of - in other words there's missing time where things happen to people, there's no doubt about that.

[00;42;55] The actual what does on during the abduction experience, I'm very uneasy about being too ah confident that we really know.

[00;43;08] LET'S TALK ABOUT ELECTROMAGNETIC AND ELECTRICAL EFFECTS.

[00;43;14] Yes. Allegedly I studied once.

[00;43;14] ALLEGEDLY YOU STUDIED…. THERE'S REPORTS OF THAT IN THE YUKON?

[00;43;21] Well there was a great case in the Yukon that occurred back in the late '90s where ah a really large UFO appeared and more than one car was affected. But ah but in particular - let me start again. I'm actually mixing two cases because there's the giant UFO in the Yukon and then there's another case where there's vehicle interference, okay?

[00;43;50] I THOUGHT THEY WERE THE SAME CASE.

[00;43;51] No they're not the same case. No, the other case just is your standard vehicle interference case.

[00;43;55] I SEE.

[00;43;56] The UFO comes by, the truck is affected, the headlights I think and the radio and so forth.

[00;44;02] The giant UFO in the Yukon is just this fantastic case with this unbelievably large UFO seen by multiple groups of witnesses. So -

[00;44;10] WITH NO METEOR REPORT WHATSOEVER -

Absolutely. Right,

[00;44;16] … DO YOU KNOW WHAT'S BEHIND THAT? I LOOKED AT THE NAMES. THEY'RE ALL NATIVES.

[00;44;21] Oh really? You think, so there's that prejudice.

[00;44;25] IT'S THE PREJUDICE. IN MANY WAYS ALMOST IT'S AH, BECAUSE I'VE DONE A LOT OF FILMS ON NATIVE SUBJECTS AND I ACTUALLY DID A FILM WHERE I LIVED ON A RESERVE FOR YEAR, OR OFF AND ON FOR A YEAR AND SHOT A FILM OF THAT RESERVE LIFE. AND THERE IS A MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS THAT RUNS THROUGH THAT COMMUNITY THAT IS EXTREMELY STRONG.
[00;44;49] UFO BELIEF IS ALMOST UNIVERSAL. I WAS TAKEN UP TO BE SHOWN SOME CROP CIRCLES, YOU KNOW …. AND PEOPLE SEE THINGS ALL THE TIME. SO WITH MY EXPERIENCE WHEN I HEAR THAT IT'S NATIVES SEEING IT I'M GOING TO BE A LITTLE BIT MORE WARY. ALTHOUGH I SUSPECT THAT THE REASON WHY THE MAINSTREAM DIDN'T REPORT IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT. I SUSPECT IT WAS KIND OF A PREJUDICE, PERIOD.

Yeah right.
[00;45;23] I mean I'm not even sure how much they heard about it even.

[00;45;26] NO I DON'T THINK THEY - IT WAS THERE. THE REPORTS WERE THERE. THEY WOULD HAVE - THE CBC HAS A STRONG PRESENCE OUT THERE.

[00;45;34] It's really no different to me. Putting aside the fact it was native American to the Tinley Park sightings we were talking about earlier in Chicago. Right here in Chicago. Lots of witnesses, on video. Did the TV stations cover it in Chicago? Of course they didn't cover it in Chicago, you know.

[00;45;51] Did the newspapers cover it? The South Suburban newspaper did cover it. Actually has covered it. But they ended with, you know, sceptical quotes from somebody from the … Planetarium. And then I think the Tribune or Sun Times had one brief story at one point and that was it, even though thousands of witnesses and just almost no coverage, right in their backyard.

[00;46;13] So you know, but that just gets back to the -

[00;46;17] YEAH. HISTORICALLY WHAT'S THE FIRST MAJOR VEHICLE INTERFERENCE CASE?

[00;46;23] Hm.

…

[00;46;25] Well the first major would be - I mean there were cases before. No, the first major series of cases was in France in 1954 and during the French, famous French Wave then. There's no one case that stands out as being, you know, amazing and mind-boggling but the - the number was because there might have been 6 or 8 which is a lot given that they were sporadic before then.

[00;46;48] There certainly had been cases going back actually to before 1947. But even so, you know, 1, 2, 3 a year and then all of a sudden in '54 there were two things unusual about that wave by the way.

[00;47;00] One was the vehicle interference and the other was that humanoids were seen for the first time in large numbers by UFOs. Then in the U.S., certainly Levelin, the Levelin incident. That wave was the key here to draw the, you know, U.S. public and air force attention to the subject.

[00;47;17] Before that, they got just a few. They could have ignored it. It wasn't a big deal. But levelin was - you couldn't ignore it. There were many witnesses, concentrated period of time and ah and so in fact they spent a lot of time looking into it and sceptics also spent a lot of time thinking about what it could be.

[00;47;34] THE FILM "CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND" MAKES VERY HEAVY USE, VERY EFFECTIVE USE OF A VEHICLE INTERFERENCE INCIDENT WHEN HE'S -

[00;47;46] Yeah at the railroad tracks and -

[00;47;48] RAILROAD TRACKS. DID THEY CONSULT WITH YOU ON THAT?

[00;47;49] They came to the centre and did look in the files and things. So they got background information. It's dramatized but it's realistic enough. I don't remember any ah railroad crossing sign actually going back and forth, you know.

[00;48;06] But the stuff in the car and all that - how it failed, I mean that's very authentic. It's been reported many times before. UFO comes down the tracks was another, you know, movie maker's license but I liked it.

[00;48;19] AS A SOCIOLOGIST YOU ARE (OVERLAP)…

[00;48;22] Yes I guess I have to admit to that.

[00;48;24] YES, YES. I'M VERY INTERESTED IN HOW THE MYTHOLOGY, HOW IT'S WORKED IN THE CULTURE. THE REFERENCE TO CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A THIRD KIND IMMEDIATELY BROUGHT IT TO MIND. I KEEP SEEING THIS HOPE-FEAR KIND OF DYNAMIC GOING ON IN THE MYTHOLOGY. THE HOPE OF SALVATION SOMEHOW WITH THE EARLY ABDUCTEES AND IN THE '90s, THERE'S AN INTERESTING PARALLEL THAT I SEE IN THE ABDUCTION PHENOMENA STARTING TO APPEAR IN THE LATE '80s, EARLY '90s AND REALLY TAKING OFF.
[00;49;00] AND FOR ME WHEN I LOOK AT THE ABDUCTION PHENOMENA, THE DOMINANT THEME THAT RUNS THROUGH IT IS POWERLESSNESS. ONE IS POWERLESS, COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY POWERLESS.

[00;49;09] Yeah that's true.

[00;49;09] … AND YOU START TO LOOK AT WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE CULTURE AROUND THAT TIME WITH GLOBALIZATION AND MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND A REAL SENSE OF POWERLESSNESS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL TO AFFECT CHANGE IN THE CULTURE. IT'S AN INTERESTING PARALLEL. I DON' KNOW WHETHER THERE'S ANY CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE TOTALLY SPECULATIVE. BUT IT IS OUT THERE.
[00;49;36] SO THAT'S THE FEAR DYNAMIC. AND YOU SEE EVEN SPIELBERG NOW WHO MADE A LOT OF MONEY OFF THE HOAX THEORY WITH CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND AND E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL … HE'S DOING WHAT, HE'S DOING THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.
[00;49;54] BUT DO YOU HAVE ANY COMMENTS ON THAT DYNAMIC?

[00;49;57] Well you answered it better than I could but I'll still try.

YEAH, YEAH, NO I DON'T …

[00;50;02] Well the ah, I'm just going to move around here because - You know, abductions, I see abductions in part first and foremost as a growth out of the '80s mindset of there are hidden forces in society that we're not aware of.

[00;50;21] This is Satanic ritual abuse, this is abuse at children's daycare centres and then there's alien abductions and all of them, to be fair to that, by therapists using hypnosis in fact or other focused memory techniques.

[00;50;34] It was consonant probably with something else going on in the public's mindset which could have been something like powerlessness and all of that. Though I think I felt more of that in the '70s when we had the oil crises and other shocks like that to our system. There were still things going on in the '80s but maybe not quite as severe.

.[00;50;54] And then that - it was fed into, you know, Woodley Stre… we all … Artists pick up on the, the dynamic in society. Even a guy like Streeber, he's not exactly an artist as I think of like a gallery artist but he's a novelist and all that and he realized something was there. And I'm not suggesting what he wrote was fiction even.

[00;51;15] But I'm saying that somehow he knew that was the right time to write a book and it definitely was. But Hopkins happened to follow on just inadvertently at the same time without a plan and one thing led to another and I guess abductions got hot. You know, mythology in general in UFOs or you know, the cultural - how is the culture interact with the phenomena, there's no doubt it has.

[00;51;39] Ah but back in the '50s and '60s there was the idea of the Cold War. So there was not only just salvation from aliens that could save us in general. You know, that we could learn things about the universe and all that. Clearly the Cold War to me was the biggest effect on our attitude toward the UFO phenomena because it wasn't just the mythology. It was also the government being concerned about how the Cold War would interact with the phenomena, how it might affect their prosecution of the Cold War. So that entered into it.

[00;52;11] And of course the government may have used the Cold War to create their own UFO mythology, creating sightings to confuse us and so forth. And then the other thing about the UFO mythology thought is that I think it would be - I think it would be a stronger, more definite one if the UFO storyline wasn't as confused as it is.

[00;52;31] If you read about UFOs and you read the cases, what you find out is is that the, the aliens don't always act like they should if they're aliens or what people think they should act. And so if there is a mythology there, you know, it's like with abductions. Well are they here to save us, as some people claim, or here to take us over?

[00;52;51] We can argue for both scenarios. And you can also do the same thing with sightings in general. Are they observing us? Are they here having fun at our expense? Are they here planning for an invasion? Why are they - what - And we can move in any direction.

[00;53;09] YOU JUST RAISED A FASCINATING POINT. EARTH MAY BE JUST A COMEDY ACT.

[00;53;14] Yeah absolutely. The universe is really old compared to our age. Not super old because you know you can imagine one a trillion years old and we're not nearly close to that. But it's pretty old.

[00;53;25] And what that means is and particularly with recent astronomical discoveries is that in fact the average civilization in the galaxy - how can I even speak of that - because just pick the average age of a planet like Earth. In other words in a solar system what would be the average age of a solar system or like a sun-like solar system. The answer is a billion years older than ours.

[00;53;48] . So when you start imagining what a billion year old civilization would be like the answer is I can't imagine it. So I can imagine almost anything including, yes, the Earth is just a, a place to come and enjoy the local natives or what have you.

[00;54;04] But it really means that almost anything is possible, to be honest. So I find it difficult. My mind does begin to reel actually when I think about a billion year civilizations.

[00;54;15] IS THAT BILLION YEAR FIGURE - HAVE YOU THOUGH T A LOT ABOUT THAT? BECAUSE I'VE BEEN MUSING THAT OVER TOO AND I WAS THINKING IT'S PROBABLY WHAT WE HAVE TO DO - WHAT IS IT NOW? 13.7 BILLION YEARS (OVERLAP)

… Right.

[00;54;26] ONE GENERATION OF STARS TO CREATE HEAVY ELEMENTS. THAT'S 3 TO 7 BILLION YEARS MIGHT BE AN AVERAGE.

[00;54;34] Well actually it's quicker than that. What it turns - there have to be several generations to build up enough to - right - and then there's some other problems with initially there are very violent events while galaxies are merging. And it turns out that the Earth actually is in a really good spot. We're not too far out, we're not too - it's like Goldilocks. You know, we're just right.

[00;54;53] . So because there are habitable zones around stars and of course we're in the habitable zone around the sun. It turns out that astronomers think there might be habitable zones in galaxies that are places and worse places to be.

[00;55;06] So, so the upshot is that it's more than one generation of stars. But yeah it takes a while but you're still - the 3 to 5 is about right. So then there's the first generation of stars where there could be planets with enough metals and other, and a settled enough environment that life could form and probably persist. And the billion year figure is coming from that.

[00;55;27] There would be early … and later … and there's a distribution. But in our galaxy we're actually more toward the tail end. In other words there certainly on the average should be many more places where life could have evolved.

[00;55;41] So another reason in fact why astronomy is on the UFOlogist side.

[00;55;46] (UNCLEAR)

[00;55;46] Yeah and that we just haven't exploited it enough.

[00;55;49] NOT YET. ALLAN Hynek. YOU WORKED WITH HIM.

[00;55;55] Knew him. Yes, worked with him.

[00;56;00] KEY FIGURE, A VERY KEY FIGURE IN THE HISTORY OF THE PHENOMENA. WHERE DID HE FIRST START TO SHIFT DO YOU THINK?

[00;56;09] Well ah you could talk to Allan at breakfast and you could talk to him at dinner and get two different answers.

[00;56;14] WAS HE A GEMINI OR -

[00;56;16] (chuckle) Let's see, when was he born? I don't remember. April. Halle's Comet but when did Halle's Comet come in 1910? Because he was born when Halle's Comet - I think it was the spring. But in any case -

[00;56;30] COULD BE GEMINI.

[00;56;31] Allan was a guy who definitely believed that, you know, consistency was the hobgoblin of small minds. And so you could talk to him about the history of himself in the field and get a different answer depending on how you approach the subject and what he was thinking that day. And partly because he was complicated too. He would like, well this time he would remember this aspect of it and that time he'd remember that aspect.

[00;56;59] Partly though just because in fact I think sometimes he did - his memory shifted in the way he viewed his own position in the field and how that day he was thinking about the phenomena. I think in his heart of hearts certainly at times he must have been almost ashamed of how he reacted about UFOs in the early days.

[00;57;17] But of course at other times he looked at himself as the Galileo of UFOs. (laugh) You know, so, or at least the - what was it, the Keppler - or the Keppler … (Tyko Bry) or something. But they had the data and he was going to, you know.

[00;57;32] . So in his own mind he was going to be shifting back and forth like a quantum state between the two.

[00;57;40] NICE ANALOGY.

(background talk)

[00;57;44] So but, but he - So I think early on he - and what's early on? I mean '49, you know, I think he saw there were things that weren't easily explained. But there was no motivation for him to get heavily involved. And in fact, he got involved to study sightings and help write the Grudge Report and then he actually left the field, working with the air force for a year and a half or so or two years until Rupel brought him back.

[00;58;17] That's when he really got serious I think, about it and that's when his first chance to be positive when he wrote a paper for the Journal of the Optical Society of America basically saying - it's pretty astounding because it is the first positive scientific paper on UFOs. And -

[00;58;36] THIS IS WHAT YEAR?

[00;58;37] Early '50- January of '53. Just by chance it came out right around the time of the Robertson Panel but of course it was submitted long before. He basically talks about these nocturnal meandering lights and nocturnal lights.

[00;58;49] And he just basically says essentially that, you know, there might be something here. Nothing about aliens. I'm not even sure he was thinking aliens. I think he was just thinking natural phenomena or something. But there might be something here that science shouldn't ignore.

[00;59;05] But again not aliens, not visiting us. He's a long way away from that. And then during the '50s and into the early '60s he's vacillating back and forth and in the sense that at some point he'll try to push the air force to try to take the subject more seriously, get hearings before Congress or do something.

[00;59;26] Other times he'll pull back and act very hard nose debunking almost. And then he'll contact the CSI New York group with Ted Blosher and others and he'll try to - he'll actually talk to them secretly and not tell his air force masters he's doing this. But then he - but he won't go in the public. He won't say anything publicly even though privately he'll evince great interest.

.[00;59;51] So I - the thing is it's very hard to find the moment at which - because there is no moment at which he shifted during those years. He went back and forth. Finally of course swamp gas, right, then he openly, publicly finally said, yes there is something to this.

[01;00;07] AFTER SWAMP GAS.

Yeah

[01;00;08] IN FRONT OF THE CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE.

[01;00;10] Right.

[01;00;12] BUT I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT SECORO HAD A HUGE EFFECT …

[01;00;16] Absolutely. That's part, that's part of the evolution right? Sure, he went there. He talked to Zamora. We've got a huge file on it here with his notes. And yeah he - he knew Zamora saw something. And the only question was what did he see.

[01;00;33] HE MINIMIZES HIS ROLE IN FRONT OF THE ROBERTSON PANEL IN STUFF THAT I'VE SEEN. BUT I'VE ALSO SEEN OTHER THINGS THAT SEEM TO CONTRADICT THAT.

[01;00;43] . Well, ah he was a junior scientist there, i.e. he was 43 years old or 42, one or the other. And ah he was just another professor at Ohio State who wasn't at all famous or special. And he was here before some of the top physicists in the whole country. And there's a real pecking order in physics.

[01;01;07] And so - and Allan was not a courageous man. There's no secret for me to say that. So unlike some brash physicists who say, well I don't care whether Robertson is sitting there. I'm just going to tell him what I think, that wasn't Allan's style.

[01;01;22] And ah so - but he made his presentations there. I mean he - but I don't think he was heavily involved. I mean I think it's safe to say that Alan Hynek did not have even a semi-major role to play in presenting the evidence or anything.

[01;01;36] He does minimize his role. I don't know exactly - in fact we should talk off camera on to Frank. Frank does know - has thought about this a lot recently for various reasons. But ah but I don't think he had even a semi-major role to play, as I've said. I think that basically his role was to be relegated to, okay Hynek, tell us what you've seen in the data. Tell us what you think about it and thank you, go away, essentially.

[01;02;00] OKAY GOOD. WHAT ABOUT CONDON? DID HE NOT MAKE ANY ATTEMPT TO PARTICIPATE IN THAT PROJECT?

[01;02;07] Robertson or Condon?

[01;02;08] NO NO, I'M TALKING ABOUT ALLAN IN RELATION TO -

[01;02;11] Oh absolutely. No they went and talked to Condon, he and Dean(?) Villay. Villay and Allan talked to Condon on the project. They did brief them. But Condon's - and I actually think correctly so, his idea was don't bring in people who looked at the problem before.

[01;02;27] Keep it clean, you know.

KEEP IT FRESH.

[01;02;30] . Right. Keep it fresh. You know, fine, have them brief us and tell us what they think is important. NICAP of course worked with them and -

(end)

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[00;00;08] So a general point about the UFO phenomena is that it first occurred in large numbers in 1947 and that turns out to have been a terrible choice on someone's part because that fed into the concerns over the Cold War and specifically six years later with the Robertson Panel.

[00;00;26] If UFOs had appeared in large numbers first in the '90s after the Cold War was over and we had the go-go '90s and the dot com revolution, I don't know whether the government would have looked into it but I know there wouldn't have been a Robertson Panel equivalent. It would have been handled vastly differently than it was in the '40s and '50s.

[00;00;46] ONE OF THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE ROBERTSON PANEL WAS TO DEBUNK IT USING POPULAR MEDIA AND IN FACT THEY SUGGESTED CONTACTING THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY FOR HELP ON THIS. WERE YOU AWARE THAT THERE WAS EVER ACTUALLY ANY OVERTURES MADE TO THE DISNEY COMPANY?

[00;01;02] Well there have been - On the fringe of Ufology there have been stories about people actually going to visit people at Walt Disney, like a topnotch animator there. And they were shown films of UFOs as if Disney had things that they could use to develop what they needed in a debunking campaign.

[00;01;25] That's how I interpreted that story. It's not that somehow Disney is the repository of secret UFO films. It's more a matter of they had something they were given to maybe convince them this is serious or what have you.

[00;01;36] Those are fringe stories that, you know, float around. Otherwise no, there is no direct reliable evidence that says that there was an official approach to Disney and that they then created a propaganda film like the crazy Reefer film for marijuana back in the '30s. So ah -

[00;01;55] THERE'S ALSO THE TALE - I DON'T KNOW WHERE IT ORIGINATED. I ASSUME IT ORIGINATED FROM JAMIE SHANDERA ABOUT HIS CONVERSATION WITH SPIELBERG AND AFTER THE SCREENING OF EITHER E.T. OR - FOR RONALD REAGAN?

[00;02;10] Reagan was supposed to have, right, he turned to someone and said ah -

TO SPIELBERG.

[00;02;16] To Spielberg, I'm sorry, to Spielberg and said something about ah, I know the incident you're talking about. I can't remember the details right now.

[00;02;23] I WONDER WHETHER WE CAN TRACK DOWN JAMIE SHANDERA.

[00;02;26] He is still alive and maybe you can. I wouldn't have a lot of faith in what he says of course, you know. But it's possible I suppose yeah, you know.

[00;02;36] WELL STORIES ARE STORIES. SOMETIMES THEY'RE ALL WE'VE GOT. BUT YEAH, I'D LOVE TO TRACK DOWN - WELL LET'S MOVE ON TO MJ12 SPEAKING OF SAME. I'D LOVE TO TRACK DOWN BOTH AND GET BILL MOORE ON CAMERA TOO AND JUST ASK, DID YOU HAPPEN TO ….

[00;02;55] That would be cool if you can get him on camera let alone ah -

[00;02;59] EXACTLY. WELL WE'LL GIVE IT A SHOT. I DON'T KNOW HOW SUCCESSFUL WE'LL BE. WHAT'S THE OFFICIAL CUFOS POSITION ON MJ12.

[00;03;08] CUFOS doesn't have too many official positions. Maybe I'm … we don't have one either. But I think on MJ12 my position is that the documents are a hoax. They were a relatively sophisticated hoax. Maybe actually a little less sophisticated I thought over the years but more sophisticated than just your average going to the garage and get a typewriter and start typing hoax and they had a lot of things right.

[00;03;33] They had some details wrong eventually that have shown up like Truman's signature being, you know, copied. But I do think that they - they were targeted at the UFO community and not necessarily, at least from our own community, meaning fellow Ufologists.

[00;03;50] Fellow Ufologists may have known more than they let on about what the source of the documents was but I tend not to think that anyone wrote the documents, created the documents. And I actually attribute that more to some kind of government action but … could be rogue action.

[00;04;08] Just because you're in the government doesn't mean that somebody from on high has told you to do it. And if it was Richard Doty or others of his circle, yes they were technically in the government but I don't necessarily think they had orders. Maybe yes, maybe no. So - but definitely a hoax.

[00;04;24] MAYBE WE CAN GET RICHARD DOTY AND ASK HIM.

[00;04;27] Yeah you can. Of course he was interviewed about a year and a half ago on Coast to Coast. Yeah so -

[00;04;36] HIS PRICE WOULD BE TOO HIGH. NO …

George Neuring now yeah.

[00;04;44] THE PRICE WOULD BE TOO HIGH. THAT'S WHAT I FELT.

[00;04;52] The sad thing is that, and even here at the centre it did take up too much of our time. It was hard to ignore it because you had at the time credible people - Friedman, Moore and so forth at least - saying we got these things from sources. And we don't know if they're real but as far as we know they came from a government source or could be at least. And they were consistent with what we felt we knew about Roswell and so forth. And it's kind of hard to ignore that. And it's not that it occupied gobs of our time here but we certainly pondered it often as to what it could mean.

[00;05;25] And then when we ourselves got involved in the Roswell investigation we would then say well is it consistent with what we've learned about Roswell. And so this dragged on for several years here that probably could have been spent doing something better.

[00;05;37] WHAT ABOUT ROSWELL? HOW DOES THAT RATE NOW IN TERMS OF THAT COULD WE HAVE SPENT OUR TIME DOING …

[00;05;44] We spent a lot of time on Roswell but I still think it was worth it even though I don't expect a resolution in my lifetime actually. I was hopeful of such when we started because who would know better. And I'm convinced that Roswell is a real mystery still.

[00;06;00] I know that there have been people associated with it who were charlatans. I know that - and liars and hoaxers and you know, the whole run of things there. But I also know including people that I've talked to directly, that there's a true mystery there, that something unusual did crash there and it's not any of the explanations that anybody has suggested, whether it's the government's explanations or the sceptics' explanations or what have you. There's just nothing that explains the core of the event.

[00;06;29] However, the problem is that the - all we have is testimony. There are basically no documents at all, no notes. And it's old testimony of course from years after the fact. So I find it compelling but I freely admit that it wouldn't convince necessarily, maybe somebody who's just on the fence. And how can we learn more about it? Well the only way to learn more about it is to actually get access to government archives. What else could we do?

[00;06;58] And that's not going to happen anytime soon because of course that was tried. And even though I think there are lots of places that we could look that the GO didn't look ah still we're not likely to find anything. So ah - and a whistle blower could come forward obviously but I think that's not likely.

[00;07;16] They haven't come forward on UFOs really except for some isolated incidents like the Japan Airlines case and so forth.

[00;07;22] YOU KNOW, I WOULD SAY THAT THE ONLY EFFECTIVE WHISTLE BLOWER FOR ANYTHING LIKE IN TERMS OF SOMETHING SUBSTANTIAL AND COMPLETELY CERTAIN WOULD BE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND EVEN THEN I'M NOT CONVINCED THAT IT WOULDN'T BE DENIED AND HE WOULDN'T BE SHIPPED OFF AND WELL HE JUST HAD A PSYCHOTIC EPISODE.

[00;07;43] Oh yeah, I mean if a person comes forward, a scientist comes forward now and says, I looked into alien debris, certainly the people - well what's your evidence for that? Well I couldn't keep my notes. You know, they don't let you keep your notes, right? Yeah.

[00;08;00] IT'S AN ONGOING PROBLEM IN TERMS OF - HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE WHOLE DISCLOSURE MOVEMENT?

[00;08;08] I'm not convinced it's helping us at all. I do think that if you thought that there was a way to make progress on UFOs since we seem stymied because of science - we don't have the resources to do the work that needs to be done. And despite my feelings about how the subject has gone over the years and how the deck has been stacked against us, ah nevertheless if we had enough money you can do science on UFOs and we've done some already. But you can do a lot more with more money.

[00;08;38] But even then I wouldn't expect that we're going to somehow solve the problem. It's just that we've learned some more things about it. If we do believe that there are government documents somewhere and the government knows something more about UFOs that is the quickest way to find out about it.

[00;08;53] Why spend $100 million on a long term project. Just get them to admit what they already know with a lobbying campaign or something. So in that sense I don't think those efforts are misguided. But in every other sense I think they are because they're not likely to succeed. I don't think they're being run by people who have a good sense of the way to go about such actions. And also particularly now it's not the right time to be asking the government to release secrets.

[00;09;20] RIGHT. … WORST TIME.

[00;09;24] Oh it's the worst time. The government has jet chases of UFOs around D.C. and they won't even admit their jets were up in the air which happened a few years ago. We had an article in IUR on that.

[00;09;35] I WASN'T AWARE.

[00;09;36] Yeah, yeah, I'll give you the article. But there was a - we have multiple witnesses even. It was a cloudy day and that's important because of what - so it's a cloudy day. A guy goes out in his backyard or something and he ah - one guy heard the jets take off or saw them take off. But another guy sees the UFO and there's the jet chasing the UFO. It's a blue ball. And there's a jet chasing it across the sky. This is the southern D.C. suburbs in Maryland.

[00;10;06] And then another guy some distance away sees these jets take off from the local - from like Bowling Air Force base and go on after burner and go into the clouds and he sees them manoeuvring over in the same area where this other guy was. I think there was even a third witness that again saw the jet chase.

[00;10;22] And it's more than one aspect to it. Like the jet chases the UFO and like ten minutes later it comes back again and this UFO is keeping ahead of it. So we look into it and we ask about whether there were jets in the air and the answer is well yeah, there were jets that took off, you know, from Bowling but it wasn't the time you say it was and no they didn't do anything except do like a routine, you know, whatever.

[00;10;43] And you try to get the radar records and you can't get the radar records and you talk - in other words just a complete - not cover-up, just kind of a blanket we will not give you information and what we give you doesn't match what our witnesses say essentially.

[00;10;58] But the - and of course the media doesn't pay any attention to it. Including people called into the radio - One of the witnesses called into WTOP, the leading talk station in Washington, a news station and said, you know, I just was watching - (laugh). So there's your vaunted radar jet coverage over the Capitol.

[00;11;21] RIGHT. OKAY. ANYTHING ELSE WE HAVEN'T COVERED THAT WE PROBABLY SHOULD? LET ME JUST CHECK …

[00;11;47] You know I could go on forever so I don't want to start -

[00;11;50] THAT'S TRUE.

(BACKGROUND TALK)

[00;12;30] I know you asked me about whether Allan got involved with the Colorado Project and the answer is that Condon realized correctly that - or thought correctly that we wanted to start afresh. Not bring in anybody who had investigated before, pro or con, which it was consistent with. So he allowed other people like Allan to brief the project and NICAP supplied cases and also talked to them. But no one could participate actively in it.

[00;12;56] And in fact I think that - because I don't think Allan had too many secret sources in the project that he was probably just as surprised about some of the developments there as everybody was, like Saunders getting fired and so forth.

[00;13;08] THE LOW MEMO. ANOTHER SCIENTIST WHO ACTUALLY PLAYS VERY IMPORTANT IN THE HISTORY OF THE PHENOMENA IS JAMES MACDONALD.

[00;13;21] Yeah, yeah. Things would have been different if he'd lived, possibly, you know, possibly. Maybe not.

[00;13;29] HE BROOKED NO QUARTER.

[00;13;31] Yeah he was … He was 3 or 4 years on the scene and unfortunately went away.

(end)

[00;13;39] MacDonald did some of the best science that's ever been done on it and it was partic- he was really, really competent and skilled at looking at an individual case and just tearing it apart from every possible angle and doing the science on it and showing why it was a mystery, you know, with really hard science.

[00;14;02] He wasn't the kind of guy that probably would have written a book on UFOs. He wasn't the kind of guy that looked for patterns in sightings. He was the guy that would say, here's this RV47 case or here's this case. And gee, I looked at it and it can't be explained. And here's the physics and here's the science - and you need somebody like that.

[00;14;20] Because we really didn't have any - Allan Hynek was not that kind of scientist and Vellay was not. And so you had - in that sense he would have been great and it really is too bad we lost him.

[00;14;32] Actually I can say something about the evolution of scientific interest in the subject because we talked about that earlier with Condon stimulating some people to get involved and other people not to get involved and in fact dropped their interest.

[00;14;45] The leading era and the absolutely shining light of Ufology in terms of progress was the 1970s and it was because of this efflorescence that occurred post-Condon and just a whole range of people got involved and all types and did some reasonable work.

[00;15;03] It kind of bled into the early '80s but what happened was, is that those scientists who were good but realized that their career came first, not UFOs found out two things. There really is no money in this. That's what they told me and it's true. And I can't make progress. I'm a real bright guy but you know, I can't make progress on this thing.

[00;15;27] So they went back to - Saunders did that. He went back to his regular stuff. A few people who were crazy or just persistently dedicated - Bruce Macabee comes to mind of course and a few others, Sturak, they stuck with it over the years.

[00;15;42] But the vast majority of scientists who got involved in that period dropped out. They haven't been replaced much. People have trickled into the field. Mike Sorens himself wasn't really active in the '70s so he came into the field in the '80s I think after he established himself as a professor and you know, and had a little more time.

[00;16;04] But I don't see any renaissance occurring anytime soon because that - in other words that was a unique period. Condon stimulates people. There's still a lot of sightings around 73 Wave. So people do this.

[00;16;18] Nowadays what would cause the scientific community to all of a sudden have a large number of young scientists or even middle-aged people, somewhat established in their careers to get interested in the subject and start to make - and I - to be honest, with the exception of some massive sighting that would get everybody interested, I can't think of anything.

[00;16;35] So I've become a little pessimistic about ah the ability to make progress because, you know, if you don't have people doing it you won't make progress.

[00;16;43] LAST QUESTION. WHY DON'T THEY LAND ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN AND SAY HELLO?

[00;16;52] No reason to. The ah, in my ah, in my dissertation which was on the sociology of UFOs, among other things, and Seti, I asked scientists, real scientists whether or not if UFOs got here, if aliens got here were they likely to make open contact. That's essentially how I phrased it. And over a quarter of them said no. So over a quarter said no.

[00;17;21] So right away you realize there's no scientific consensus on this. That's the key. Okay so -

[00;17;26] HOW MANY SAID YES?

[00;17;28] About 50% and then there were the 25 that probably said, I have no clue, okay. So it was, it was more to the yes side but there was still the - a good fraction, 25%, who said no. And why did they say no?

[00;17;42] Well of course I couldn't ask them everything so I don't know that. But my idea would be simply that - and not being facetiously - there really is no good reason to. There's almost nothing I can think of good that would come from landing and making contact with another civilization that is not either comparable to yours in development or is so sophisticated that they could handle it.

[00;18;09] . And when you think about the scenarios we could all dream of in science fiction about contacting - in other words we're the aliens and we have this ability to travel, we develop this technology, we start flying around the galaxy, we encounter another civilization that's less advanced than us, would we land?

[00;18;28] And the answer is I certainly would not.

[00;18;31] I CERTAINLY WOULDN'T EITHER.

[00;18;32] Yeah. And I won't go through the long, long list of bad things that can happen but it is a long list. And so, it by the way raises the question of when could contact even occur. And when you think about it that way and you realize that despite all the science fiction stuff, in fact I think that societies would pull back from contact and not do it. When does it happen actually? And that to me is the more profound question. And I don't have an answer to that.

[00;18;58] WHAT ABOUT ANY SPECULATION?

[00;19;01] Well I - this becomes more just trite which is that you're ready for it. I mean you're really ready for it, meaning that you are at such a level that it will not affect your social mores, it will not affect your technological underpinnings. Because in fact, the best way for aliens to completely screw us up is to land here and say, here's the box for free energy, go use it, you know,. And all of a sudden everything here just falls apart, you know.

[00;19;26] Why do there have to be gasoline stations? Oh gee, all those people just lost their jobs. You just go on and on and on and it just, the whole place becomes a nightmare of you know -

[00;19;35] So ah so you have to have a society that can handle this contact, whatever that means, you know. And I can just conceive of it in my 21st century, you know, small human mind here which I don't think is big enough necessarily to get our arms around it. But I do think we're a long way away from it for what would be the appropriate moment for contact.

[00;19;59] And so ah that's another reason why. … pessimistic … I think I'm realistic about whether or not we can expect contact and my realism says no actually.

[00;20;12] WE'VE GOT A CONVERSATION IN THE OTHER ROOM. THAT WAS MY LAST QUESTION SO -

(END)

[00;20;37] So the phenomenology of the subject is really fascinating because it's something that, while we don't know why, has changed enormously over the years in many, many ways. So I'll just list a few.

[00;20;52] We started out with discs in 1947. In fact they were daylight discs even though the phrase wasn't around yet because Allan Hynek hadn't invented it. And then as time went on the mix of objects changed.

[00;21;04] Now all types of objects have always been there. You could see triangles and ovals and other odd shapes.

[00;21;09] CIGAR SHAPES.

[00;21;10] Cigar shapes back then. But most of them were discs it's really true. That's why flying saucer stuck so well. But we got into the late '70s and early '80s and things began to shift into these triangles. And also larger triangles, bigger than the discs used to be, again on the average.

[00;21;26] These days here, you know, in the first part of the 21st century, it's almost exclusively triangles compared to discs. And I would estimate that UFOs now are about 5% disc at most. So that's a huge change that's occurred.

[00;21;41] Concomitant with that was a change in the time of day when UFOs were seen in the sense that they're still seen most often in the evening, early evening hours. But the percentage of daylight sightings has just plummeted. It was probably 50-50 back in, you know, the late '40s, early '50s. Now it's down to again maybe 5% in the day, 95% at night.

[00;22;07] Other changes are UFO waves or flaps, call them what you will, these periods when lots and lots of reports occur over a somewhat large geographical area. In fact, it has to be somewhat large. It isn't just a city or a county. It's over several states. They occurred regularly, if you can use that word, up until the early '70s. '73 was the last one in the States.

[00;22;30] And then since then, nothing since 1973. On the other hand, it's been replaced by ah lower si- UFOs that were lower, closer to the ground. Didn't land. Hovered more slowly and were more concentrated geographically so that it would be near New York City and Westchester county, just literally a few counties north of New York city or it would be in Belgium in the equivalent of a few counties in Belgium or in a few other places scattered about the globe.

[00;23;03] So that's another really dramatic change in the sightings. Since we know so little about UFOs all we can do is speculate about why these changes have occurred because of course nobody is here telling us, you know, why they changed. If there's aliens out there they don't drop us missives and tell us, well by the way we changed, switching over to triangles in 1980 and here's why so -

[00;23;25] … ANYTHING ELSE WE WANTED TO COVER?



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