Richard Dolan

COPYRIGHT DAVID CHERNIACK PROD. LTD.

[00:31:16] SO HOW DO YOU SEE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PHENOMENON IN TERMS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE.

[00:31:27] Well I look at the history of UFOs within the context of American history in particular as you can look at it culturally, you can look at it historically, but I do look at it in terms of how it affected what you might call the national security apparatus.

[00:31:42] So, for example, I consider that there are military reports, seemingly quite serious military reports from the 1940s through the 1950s that describe technology, that describe confrontational encounters that U.S. military personnel had with ah, with these things.

[00:32:02] What it looks like to me, just judging upon the official documents, the provable documents where you don't have to speculate at all is that this matter was taken very seriously and brought to very, very deep, secret levels early on.

[00:32:17] It seems to me reasonably that there's strong interest in acquiring technology which presumably would be of great value to those people that would have access to and I think that's exactly what they've been attempting to do all these years.

[00:32:30] What I would further argue is that the secrecy that has been necessitated by control over this information has done a kind of end run around the formal political process. And I think you can say has been a very subversive element of American and indeed just Western ah history.

[00:32:54] The history of any kind of democratic society I think could be affected when you consider that something this big, this important, the proverbial elephant in the dining room is not allowed to be acknowledged.

[00:33:06] I think it has probably involved a great amount of physical resources, I mean in terms of money and personnel, none of which, it seems to me, have any kind of true oversight by the public.

[00:33:18] So there's a lot of things going on here. You've got national security, you've got public policy and the whole effects of secrecy as a kind of cancer on the democratic institution.

[00:33:29] IN THE IMMEDIATE POST-WAR PERIOD ONE WOULD ASSUME THAT IT WAS A VERY DIFFERENT TIME THAN IT IS TODAY. TODAY I THINK VERY FEW PEOPLE HAVE CONFIDENCE THAT IN ANY OF THE WESTERN COUNTRIES THAT THEIR GOVERNMENT IS TELLING THEM COMPLETELY THE TRUTH. IT JUST BECOMES ALMOST AN UNSTATED MATTER OF FACT. THEY'RE LYING TO US ABOUT LOTS OF THINGS.

That's exactly right.

[00:33:57] BUT IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD IT WAS DIFFERENT WASN'T IT?

[00:34:00] Ah the post-war - the post-World War 2 period in terms of public attitude toward government was entirely different than what we experience here in the 21st century across the board.

[00:34:14] In the United States there is no question that people did - they loved their ah country, the political system America said that it had, this belief in progress, this belief that America was leading the world to a new and better form of life, a life of freedom and so on.

[00:34:34] And that, that corresponded with a very strong level of - of belief in the value of that system and of the government and that government officials did not lie.

[00:34:44] That didn't come out - that was - that took Vietnam and Watergate to break that down. So in 1947-48, ah I think there was - there was no competition to the word of the U.S. government regarding the so-called reality of UFOs. Air force and the government officials said there was nothing to this.

[00:35:07] There was really not much that a private citizen could do to kind of get around that. There were no public, rather there were no private organizations that were significant yet to challenge the authority and there was really not much of a public inclination I think to do so either. I think there was a great amount of faith that people had in that era that is absolutely not in evidence any longer today.

[00:35:30] WHERE DO YOU STAND ON WHAT THE GOVERNMENT KNEW AND WHEN THEY KNEW IT?

[00:35:35] When you're dealing with a topic like UFO secrecy, we have got to realize that there are things we know and there are things we don't exactly know. But there are things which look like a certain way, okay, and that' at this point maybe the best you can do. But that's a lot.

[00:35:53] What we know is that there were prominent members of the American National Security community who were pretty convinced - and I'm talking 1948-49-50 that the UFO phenomenon was involving technology that was not American, that was very advanced.

[00:36:14] Now the documents that we have available - we do not have, even with all the freedom of information act releases and so on, we do not have truly top secret documents. We've got documents that are several cuts below. So I think the good stuff is still beyond our purview.

[00:36:31] But there are lower levels of secrecy - secret documents that have been released, ah and what these indicate is a strong assessment of the situation that the UFOs are somebody's technology, they are not ours.

[00:36:45] That they appear to evince or to show incredible capabilities -zigzagging, stopping on a dime, instant acceleration and so on. You don't have to be that brilliant to realize that they're implying they're not American, they don't appear to be Soviet.

[00:37:03] There was a lot of work done on this, were the Soviets coming up with this and there was no affirmative conclusion to this. So you're running out of candidates very quickly.

[00:37:12] And what we know is that there have - as long as there have been official government UFO studies there have been strong factions that developed toward the E.T. hypothesis, that is that these were extraterrestrial or interplanetary, as they would say.

[00:37:26] And in every case that I can think of that faction was essentially squashed by the guys in charge. They said, no I don't want that, and you're gone. That happened more than one time.

[00:37:37] THIS IS THE ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION.

[00:37:41] We're referring to the legendary estimate of the situation from 1948.

THERE'S GOOD EVIDENCE THAT THE ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION EXISTED. I MEAN RUPPELT WRITES ABOUT IT.

[00:37:51] I think - I think that there is very excellent reason to accept ah the testimony of people like Captain Edward Ruppelt and Major ah - (overlap) Dewey Fournet, exactly, that this was a real document despite the fact that the original version has never - has never been found.

[00:38:09] AND YET THE AIR FORCE HAS DENIED ITS EXISTENCE AS FAR AS I KNOW.

[00:38:12] That is correct. The air force has - I'm not sure if I would go so far as to say that they've officially denied it, but they've never acknowledged that it was a real document, that is true.

[00:38:22] But you've got that. Then you've got the story of Project Blue Book itself in 1951-52 which also went through a sort of crescendo period where the E.T. hypothesis was becoming a very significant factor there and Blue Book basically got broken to pieces by 1953.

[00:38:42] BECAUSE?

[00:38:43] Well what happened at the end of Truman's administration was that in the summer of 1952, throughout that year - this is a forgotten bit of history that's really quite important - UFO sightings within the general public and also within the military, U.S. military reached a tremendous peak. I mean so much so that Captain Ruppelt who ran the Blue Book operation back then said, hey, if you had come into, right past an air force base where we were doing the Blue Book reports, you would have thought that an alien invasion was underway.

[00:39:16] The reports were coming in serious and Ruppelt in fact described high level discussions at the chief of staff of the air force, General John Sanford. This big argument broke out, why don't we just come out and say that this is E.T.? A big faction had done this.

[00:39:34] And what happened though was that you had the several weekends in a row of sightings over the White House. Got very big press and got downplayed to the public in an official statement. But that didn't solve the problem, you see.

[00:39:47] The CIA and air force intelligence realized that this problem in the classified world and in the military world had to be put to sleep. And I believe that they concluded that this had to be done before the end of the Truman administration which was due to end in January 1953.

[00:40:03] THEIR REASONING BEING?

[00:40:06] Well I'm speculating here, but I think it's reasonable to assume that since the UFO phenomenon became a public thing in the U.S. Harry Truman had always been president. The Democratic party had always been in charge of the White House.

[00:40:19] It was very clear to any intelligent observer in 1952 that Dwight Eisenhower, if he were to receive the Republican nomination he was going to win. And I think that was a given; that was a political reality.

[00:40:32] And so people who were in charge of dealing with this problem from that point of view, from a political point of view, it seems to me they recognized that there were going to be some changes. What would we do them to deal with these changes? Let's make sure, even though we may have reliable people coming in, ah I think it doesn't hurt to cover your bases here and to make sure that this problem is tidied up.

[00:40:59] What I look at is the so-called Robertson Panel which was a CIA convened panel in January '53. This was the last bit of housecleaning of the Truman administration and that's a point of fact. It took place during the last weekend of Harry Truman's presidency. Two days after that panel ended, Dwight Eisenhower became president.

[00:41:19] And what did the Robertson panel do? It - it ah ended up in severely downgrading the operation of Project Blue Book, removed most of the staff and issued a kind of directive to force UFO cases to be explained. The rate had been something like 20% up until then and almost immediately after that directives came down to get that number down. And within two years the numbers were down like 3 and 2% a year.

[00:41:50] Methods of investigation did not change at all. Simply other explanations were trotted out and brought in.

[00:41:56] THE FASCINATING THING ABOUT THE ROBERTSON PANEL IS THAT HIS REPORT SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN IN ADVANCE.

[00:42:02] That's exactly right The Robertson Panel report, historical work done by other people who have gone into these records have concluded with high certitude that the panel's conclusions were written before the panel even convened.

[00:42:16] And indeed, one of the primary members, Louis Alvarez, I believe it was Alvares - yes - did not arrive until the day before the panel even ended.

[00:42:29] AND SEEMED VERY BORED BY THE PROCEEDINGS.

[00:42:30] Absolutely.

FROM WHAT I'VE READ.

[00:42:33] The whole, the whole panel itself had something like 12 official hours to review some reports and we have a fair amount of information to be able to judge what happened. We've got the report itself and we've got testimony of our participants.

[00:42:48] And it's very clear, and this includes Thornton Page who was one of the members of the panel and he himself said, you know, I don't think that the panel did a very thorough job in looking into this phenomenon.

[00:43:01] So they did a - they did a slipshod job at best, despite the fact that these were Nobel calibre scientists. You've got to really wonder what's going on here? Why would such brilliant qualified men do such a horrible job in investigating this phenomenon? And I think when you consider the report conclusions were pre ah - pre-ordained, you've got your answer.

[00:43:23] SO WHY WERE THESE PARTICULAR CONCLUSIONS PREORDAINED DO YOU THINK?

[00:43:26] This was a rubber stamp, okay? The Robertson panel, ah men, scientists were brought in, I believe to rubber stamp a policy that was already in - that was already decided upon and that is to put the UFO problem to sleep within most of the classified world.

[00:43:43] It was already ah handled as far as the public was concerned, but it was not handled sufficiently within military channels and intelligence channels. And the Robertson panel actually rectified this from a control point of view. Btu in order to make such a major policy change, it seems to me it helps to have fancy scientists coming in to rubber stamp this policy.

[00:44:05] GOOD, VERY GOOD. ALRIGHT, SO THAT'S ESSENTIALLY OPERATIVE UNTIL WE HIT THE GREAT WAVE OF '63 TO '67.

[00:44:15] Absolutely. What happened was that through the 1950s and early '60s there was one civilian organization known as NICAP led by retired Marine Corps Major Donald Kehoe and actually tried to work through the system to get congressional hearings. Every year this NICAP's plan.

[00:44:32] We're going to get Congressmen to bring this up in public and we're going to do it. And every year at the eleventh hour something happened to prevent that from taking place.

[00:44:39] The culmination was in 1962 when former CIA director Roscoe Hillincoter was going to go before Congress. This was planned for April of '62. Two months prior to that, Hillincoter backed out, resigned from NICAP. Told Kehoe, no we need to get off the air force's back here. They're doing everything they can.

[00:44:56] So it looked like the UFO issue was kind of dead in the water. And then came those crazy 1960s. And I say crazy because not only was society in a tumult. In the 1960s, hey, it looked like everything was possible. But the UFO phenomenon went into a major crescendo in the U.S. and in Canada and worldwide. '65, '66, '67 in particular this was huge.

[00:45:23] It was so big that in U.S. Congress by 1966 this was being widely discussed. Future president Gerald Ford discussed the fact that his constituents has a need to know what was going on and -

[00:45:36] I WAS DOWN IN MICHIGAN - JUST TO INTERRUPT - I WAS DOWN IN MICHIGAN A WEEK AND A HALF AGO AT HILLSDALE COLLEGE FOR FOUR DAYS.

Neat.

[00:45:43] FILMING (OVERLAP)

[00:45:43] It's an interesting place too.

[00:45:45] ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING STORY.

[00:45:46] Indeed. Ah, what happened as a result of the wave of 1966 is the U.S. air force which had never wanted to maintain Project Blue Book - really analogous really to the Canadian situation in which the UFO reports just got bounced around all these different departments. No one wanted it in the U.S. The air force was stuck with it and they could not unload it.

[00:46:08] And now the case was that the air force was really losing credibility. There were jokes being made about the ridiculous air force explanations which were ridiculous. Everyone knew it.

[00:46:20] So I think what you have is a case in which the air force very deftly handled the situation. Rather than have Congress deal with this through open investigations, which is a real danger, the air force said, don't worry, we've got a handle. We've selected on a university, the University of Colorado, which will do an objective, independent scientific analysis and whatever Colorado decides we will abide by, okay?

[00:46:47] And everyone is thinking, great. And of course this was a rigged game also. And indeed many people have looked into the Colorado study.

[00:46:57] What we know just to make a long story short, you had a massive mutiny midway into the project and once again a pro E.T. faction was fired. These scientists were kicked right off by Edward Condon whose position - public position on UFOs had been well known. He thought the whole thing was a joke.

[00:47:16] Condon in fact had said to one member privately that even if he were proven during the course of the study that UFOs were real, he would not make that fact public. He said, I will take this in a brief case to the president; I would not tell the public.

[00:47:30] So you have from one of the members of the committee that this position was so. Clearly it's not realistic to expect this is an independent study and indeed it was not. The report itself, despite the tendencies of Condon and his number 2, Robert Lowe, who I believe was an intelligence asset himself, ah despite that -

[00:47:52] DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO JUSTIFY THAT?

[00:47:54] Yeah well there's ah - Robert Lowe who was number 2 at the Condon committee (clears throat), the Colorado study, was the project administrator of this. We do know that there was a - that Robert Lowe ah - ah was in the U.S. military during World War 2. Came out, studied at Columbia, I believe it was, where he did graduate work and was not in the U.S. during a certain period of time.

[00:48:22] There was a Robert Lowe I came across in another book dealing with the history of the CIA who was involved in an Albanian operation in I believe it was 1948, a failed Albanian operation run by CIA and British intelligence, and in fact Kim Philby, the famous British double a- double agent was involved in this failed operation.

[00:48:43] But there was a - there was a CIA intelligence officer named Robert Lowe who was involved in this. I don't know that it was the same one, but I really have to wonder. Certainly what we can say is that the leadership of the Colorado study was biased from the get-go and ended up in the firing of the pro-UFO faction, which nevertheless there were approximately 30% of the cases in that study were unknowns. Maybe 5 to 10% were utterly extraordinary cases.

[00:49:16] A couple just even in the opinion of the investigators were within a hair's breadth of coming out and admitting that this is E.T. But Condon doesn't even seem to have read that and all Condon wrote in his conclusion is this is not a scientific problem, nothing to it, really no need for further investigation. And that's really all that mainstream media looked at. They didn't really read the report.

[00:49:39] HAVE YOU DONE ANY THINKING ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA IN ALL THIS?

[00:49:45] I think about the role of the media a lot when I think about UFO reality. Ah you know, my - I've been researching this now for about ten years. I got into this as a very - I would say an open-minded sceptic. I was not a believer. I was not a debunker.

[00:50:01] I truly had the idea that I didn't know enough information and I was going to look into it with an open mind and see. I quickly - it didn't take a lot for me to start reading official military documents to recognize that whether this was a real phenomenon or not that it was taken seriously enough that it should be in history books.

[00:50:22] And my first question actually was why is this not in history books. It seemed very odd to me. Even as a mistake, let us say, you know, in the late 1940s they thought aliens were here. Why is this in no truly university based academic treatment? You really have to wonder. Because these people did take it seriously.

[00:50:40] But I got into it further and further and you read a hundred documents, you read 200 documents, military documents that are serious and you have to wonder, where is the media? Where was the media in the late 1970s when through the Freedom of Information Act suddenly thousands of pages of documents come out. This was big news. And yet where -

[00:50:59] AND REVEALED SOME EXTRAORDINARY SIGHTINGS.

[00:51:02] Clearly revealed amazing things. Where was Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings during this, okay? Where were these guys? Where was the New York Times and the Washington Post and other mainstream media? Sitting on their duffs not doing anything about it or continuing to laugh about it when in fact -

[00:51:19] So you have to wonder why - why is this attitude the case? And I think you have to go and it's a two-pronged answer, as I see it. One is straight forward kind of culture. What is culture? What is organizational culture about?

[00:51:36] For example, let's say I work at - at the New York Times and I want to get ahead within that organization. You know, in all organizations you - you want to get ahead, you look at your boss. How does your boss think and dress and talk and act and look. And how does he or she look at his or her boss. And so that culture in organizations there's always a top down phenomenon, at least for those who succeed.

[00:52:00] So I believe that that's part of it, so that people - they're afraid. You know the ridicule is just too much to overcome and they're afraid of ruining their careers.

[00:52:10] . But the other thing is when you look at media it - it is undeniable. In fact, this is more - no need to speculate, that intelligence agencies including CIA have had not merely cosy relationships with major international media but literally paid relationships on very intimate levels.

[00:52:33] Now does this mean that the CIA can control all media? Well no, of course. What it does mean though is that let's say what could I personally do if I had 400 mainstream journalists covertly working for me at Associated Press and Reuters and the Washington Post and so on.

[00:52:50] Maybe I couldn't control every story but could I influence editorial policy? Could I maybe ask someone to play a certain story down or play another story up? Yeah I think so, and this is exactly what happened. There have been a number of studies on this.

[00:53:04] So what you've got is a national security manipulation of media when it matters. Now the Canadian researcher, Terry Hansen, has done a magnificent study on media relationships to all this. He calls his book The Missing Times. And what Terry has described in his research is that media - you have to look at media through a series of choke points.

[00:53:30] When looking at UFO phenomenon he found that a lot of local news coverage did occur. But this always got choked off at the wire service level, so that local stories never achieved a national resonance.

[00:53:48] HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT THERE HAS NOT BEEN A MAJOR WAVE SINCE 1973?

Well there -

[00:53:54] AND I REALLY WONDER ABOUT THE WIRE SERVICE -

[00:53:57] There have been major waves as far as the publicity. There was a major wave in 1978. I'd almost call it a global pandemic. There was a major wave in 1989-1990 throughout the U.S. and especially Europe. So they do occur but they do not get the play that say 1973 got clearly.

[00:54:16] (OVERLAP) 1973, 1966, 1964 THROUGH '67.

[00:54:22] And what has happened, I would submit, there's an old quote from Napoleon Bonaparte. And what Bonaparte said was - I'm paraphrasing here but this is accurate - He said ah - democratic types of governments are obliged to lie constantly because they have to be in communication with the people and you can't possibly tell people the truth so you must lie. He said authoritarian regimes have the luxury of silence.

[00:54:48] And what I would submit has happened over the last let's say 50 years is an evolution has occurred and we have seen Western society move from this - more of a democratic base where the government really did have to lie about UFOs on a regular basis to a situation today where they don't have to say a damn thing. They say nothing!

[00:55:11] It doesn't matter what the public thinks. It doesn't matter how many UFO conferences there are, how much local television, press coverage there may be on something. The government can stonewall; they do and they're realized that they can get away with it. They do not have to be responsive.

[00:55:29] Because they have ah I believe preponderant influence over enough of the media - not all but enough - to have their way.

[00:55:41] ONE ONLY HAS TO LOOK AT THE SCIENCE OF PUBLIC RELATIONS AND ITS EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OVER THE LAST 50 …(OVERLAP)

[00:55:49] Indeed. The contribution of Edward Bernase, a very overlooked development that of P.R. And this is another area in which we see greater, greater sophistication today than 50 years ago.

[00:56:05] I'm a - I recently reviewed the 1953 movie, War of the Worlds, okay? And one of the fascinating things about this movie is when the object crashes in California - lands, crashes.

[00:56:21] You get first the locals out looking at it. Then you get the military and the press together. And one of the most amazing scenes in this movie is this newspaper guy is talking to a colonel at the scene. And he's like: Say Colonel, what's the scoop on the saucer? And the Colonel says: Well it appears to be an interplanetary craft of some sort.

[00:56:42] And I think, unbelievable. Now that would never have happened in 1953 either. But the fact is that Americans could tell themselves this thing and believe it. (laugh) They could believe it. Whereas today, I mean there's just no chance. I mean no one is that dumb as to think that if a UFO crashed somewhere you've got that area cordoned off.

[00:57:06] The press, the media is controlled, blackout, the whole thing. That's some of the interesting cultural changes I think that we've gone through.

[00:57:14] ESPECIALLY IN THE AREA OF PRESS CONTROL. IT'S ASTONISHING TO WATCH. IN MY LIFETIME - I WAS BORN IN 1946 - JUST TO WATCH WHAT'S HAPPENING IN MY (OVERLAP)

[00:57:24] You look much younger. I thought you were a lot younger than that, if I may say. Yeah.

[00:57:29] If you think of the treatment of Peter Arnett in the first Gulf War in 1991 and how Peter Arnett in the United States was - I think he's still persona non grata. I don't think he's been back, because he had the audacity to stay in Baghdad when the U.S. military asked all the journalists to leave. How dare he say. (laugh) It's amazing

[00:57:47] AND THEN IN THE SECOND GULF WAR THE WHOLE IDEA OF EMBEDDING. WHAT A BRILLIANT STROKE FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF SOMEBODY WHO WANTS TO MANIPULATE HOW A STORY IS PORTRAYED.

[00:58:00] Absolutely.

INCREDIBLE.

[00:58:01] The sophistication has gone way - it's off the charts. These guys really know what they're doing.

[00:58:06] YEAH. WELL (LAUGHTER) THEY GOT GEORGE BUSH ELECTED TWICE.

That's right, yeah. Them and Dybold. Let's not forget.

[00:58:17] ALRIGHT, SO THAT TAKE CARE OF THE MEDIA. WHERE ARE WE NOW? WHAT DO YOU THINK? YOU SEEM LIKE A GUY WHO'S GOT A VERY GOOD HANDLE ON TRENDS.

Thanks.

[00:58:29] WHERE DO YOU THINK WE'RE GOING WITH THE WHOLE PHENOMENON?

[00:58:31] Yeah. We have - what has happened -

[00:58:33] WHAT'S HAPPENED IN THE '90s WHICH IS VERY INTERESTING WITH THE WHOLE DARK SIDE STUFF COMING IN.

[00:58:37] Right. I'm very interested in that.

[00:58:38] AND WHERE ARE WE GOING NOW?

[00:58:41] What you had, especially like in the '90s were the video hounds hanging around outside places like Area 51 and Edwards Air Force base, the whole aerospace valley down in southern California.

[00:58:56] And hey, guess what? A lot of these people were seeing some very unusual aero- aircraft doing non-aerodynamic things. That combined with numerous rumours -you go out that way and man, they're all over the place. Rumours of reverse engineered alien technology.

[00:59:14] You do not have to scratch very hard to find these. The field - the UFO field, the research aspect of it in a lot of ways has fractured, exploded really since around that time. It's almost impossible to speak of any kind of unity at all. Now that may not be a bad thing.

[00:59:32] What has happened on top of that though is the development of what I have come to call invisible fascism and I called it invisible because generally speaking mainstream media is just not going to acknowledge this, although anyone with a brain can see a lot of bad things happening.

[00:59:50] So we've had this kind of transformation of the political system over the last half century. But we're also - we're not approaching - we're in a state of crisis right now. What I've discovered in my own historical research is that it is in a period of social crisis that UFO revelations come out.

[01:00:10] For example the crisis of the 1960s, a big, big thing. Then the aftermath of that and the crisis of the late '70s in America with the release of Freedom of Information Act documents was a major event.

[01:00:23] When Francisco Franco died in Spain in 1975 within a year hundreds of Spanish military documents came out. The same in China when Mao die in '76. Same when the collapse of the Soviet Union in '89 and '90.

[01:00:36] I'M GOING TO STOP YOU BECAUSE WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO CHANGE TAPE…

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

M011 Richard Dolan part 2
[00:00:08] And indeed the collapse of the Soviet Union was a spectacular example of new UFO information that came out. So my - my assessment when I look at the next couple of years coming down the road, I think a true societal crisis I think is likely. This is my own opinion. I hope I'm wrong. But I see a lot of - a lot of bad things brewing right now, not stemming from the UFO phenomenon per se.

[00:00:37] But what I think can happen is that as a residual of social unrest and social crisis within the United States, I think that's a real possibility. Ah I'm of the opinion that some big revelation can come out.

[00:00:53] And now here's the problem though. You've got 60 now years of lying to make up. This is like the Soviet Union. You remember Gorbachev comes in in 1985 and he's talking about Glasnost and perestroika - openness and restructuring And six years later there's no Soviet Union anymore.

[00:01:14] Everyone thought this was great at first but the country collapsed. Why? Well I think a big reason, frankly, was that the process of reform spiralled out of Gorbachev's control. So that he thinks we're going to open things up and suddenly you've got nationalities in that country saying, hey great. You know what, we don't want to be here anymore.

[00:01:30] You took us over in 1940 and we never wanted to be here in the first place. Unexpected eventualities.

[00:01:36] The same problem would occur with the UFO reality. This is a problem far beyond ah you know, any public policy issue that I can think of. The president of the United States comes in front of the public and can you imagine this, says ladies and gentlemen, it's come to my attention that UFOs apparently are real and they are apparently alien. Then he says, you know, goodnight everyone, I'm going.

[00:02:04] Not really. No. You've got a lot of follow-up questions here, alright, like -

[00:02:07] A LOT OF FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS TO WHICH HE'S NOT GOING TO HAVE ANSWERS?

[00:02:10] He would have - that's right - not good answers, such as what does that say, golly, about abductions. You know, suddenly, right, you acknowledge that there are other beings here. Hey guess what? Maybe some of these people claim they've been abducted, maybe they're telling the truth! And that's a big problem.

[00:02:27] Or what about Mr. President claims that there are underground alien bases. Aah, what about that? You've got a population getting worked up big time over this.

[00:02:41] Or what I see as significant is what about allegations that you ah - that major industry has been reverse engineering this technology at immense profit. And what's been funding the research and where is all this money going and - right?

[00:02:56] So it's like you can't be half pregnant. You really can't half disclose this because once this becomes an official thing there are a lot of questions that are going to come up and I'm sure I haven't thought of most of them. And they're going to come up within a month, within a year. Some time they're going to come up and heads are going to roll.

[00:03:15] And as a result of this there would be utter major political upheaval. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, by the way. I think that could be a very good thing. Because we're at a point right now where a kind of - I think a lot of people see this - a globalized, centralized control is, is truly working its way over people everywhere. And I think a lot of people are very uncomfortable with this - with the loss of privacy, with the loss of freedom.

[00:03:43] We could be looking - this is not hype, this is real possibility of a micro chi imbedded population within another generation or less. Could easily happen, I could see it happening. And a lot of other equally bad things.

[00:03:56] So that this is the ah the crossroads I believe of our civilization right now in terms of political freedom, liberty and it intersects in a big way I think with the UFO phenomenon.

[00:04:12] There are a lot of factors involved here in the loss of our individual freedoms, in our political freedoms. But the point that I try to make always is that the UFO cover-up is a part of this problem. And I think what we need is a lot of these very intelligent writers who are talking about all the difficulties that are going on today, yeah they're right. But they need to understand that there is this other thing going on.

[00:04:37] For example, this is not just a lights in the sky, what if they're out there problem. We're talking about money. What do I mean? For example, there are (clears throat) excuse me.

[00:04:48] There are what appear to be trillions - not billions - trillions of U.S. dollars flowing through the federal government. No one knows where this money is coming from; no one knows where it's going.

[00:05:00] Shortly before 9-11, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was in U.S. Congress trying to answer some questions that they were asking. The general accounting office said, sir, for the Pentagon's fiscal year 2000 and which your budget was $350 billion, there appear to be $1.1 trillion of what the general accounting office called undocumentable expenditures. Say what? That's three times the official Pentagon budget.

[00:05:31] The question is where did this money come from? Where did it go? And Rumsfeld said, well I'll have to look into this and get back to you. Then came 9-11 and that question is off the table now.

[00:05:40] But here's the question. You've got money galore going through the U.S. federal system. This is absolute undeniable corruption.

[00:05:51] Is it drug trafficking money? Is it securities fraud money? Probably. Where is it going? Is any of it going into UFO infrastructure? That is underground bases, that is unofficial research groups and the like.

[00:06:05] I've got to think yes. Why? Because if you study the U.S. federal budget, you'd have a hard time finding where any UFO research money is.

[00:06:13] And I think if you study the history of intelligence agencies worldwide, you find obvious connections with all kinds of illegal activities as a way to raise private money that doesn't have to be vouchered, that doesn't have to be accounted for in any way.

[00:06:30] Why is the U.S. any different? It isn't of course. And so ah these trillions of unaccounted for dollars.

[00:06:37] I can only assume that some portion of this is going to ah look into the UFO phenomenon in some way.

[00:06:46] A COUPLE OF INTERESTING SIDE POINTS JUST IN TERMS OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH FRINGE GROUPS. THEY'VE ALWAYS, ALWAYS BEEN … WITH FRINGE GROUPS.

Yes indeed.

[00:06:58] AS WAYS OF PASSING DISINFORMATION TO THEIR ENEMIES.

Right.

[00:07:02] AND MANIPULATING OTHER THINGS.

[00:07:03] WE also have a long history of intelligence community interaction with UFO culture. Ah there have been ah, I mean back in the Robertson panel of 1953 it was a given for these scientists that, oh yes, well of course these UFO groups, these little disparate groups, these will clearly be monitored. Ah well more than that. There's outstanding evidence from members of those groups back then that intelligence assets were infiltrating their groups.

[00:07:38] Ah too much to go into, but absolutely this is a very strong case. I myself just yesterday in the Ottawa archives, National Archives, came across a letter written by - in 1980 - by the arch debunker of UFOs at that time, Philip Klass, who recently died.

[00:07:59] I don't know if anyone else has seen this letter yet. I think not. And Klass wrote to the National Research Council here in Canada warning them about a new UFO researcher who was coming to live in Canada, one Stanton Friedman.

[00:08:16] And ah just a heads up, fellas. You may want to keep your guard up against this guy because he's a real showman, snake oil salesman etc. etc. And what Klass did was a Klassic just trashing of - character witness trashing basically.

[00:08:34] And in fact the funny thing was that I think what Klass's tactic probably was as I read his letter and as I read the internal memo that was generated was that these guys wanted to - at the NRC they wanted to just drop the whole UFO topic. They were afraid and they thought, oh this is going to give us bad publicity.

[00:08:54] We need to give this UFO stuff to another Canadian agency that doesn't do any science at all. We can't do - you know - and they were not able to do that. They maintained all that. But ah - but Klass I think is a very -

[00:09:09] No one's proven this but it certainly looks like, it tastes like, it smells like like he was a CIA asset in his activities and he was very much involved in UFO culture and debunking and all this stuff.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[00:09:59] I THINK IF YOU TRACE THE DEVELOPMENT OF UFO HISTORY. ESPECIALLY AS IT IS - AS IT'S PERCEIVED CULTURALLY, YOU SEE THOSE THINGS HAPPENING. IT'S THE MYTHIC OVERLAY ON TOP OF, YOU KNOW, THE EVIDENTIAL AND EXPERIENTIAL (OVERLAP)..

[00:10:15] Yes. I always have a hard time trying to distinguish what is actual culture anymore. I'm really coming to the opinion truthfully that there is no culture. And I know that sounds like an extreme statement but I believe this because I live in the United States and I think, what is American culture, alright? We'll leave the Canadians out of it for a moment okay?

[00:10:39] Well it's basically - a lot of it is TV. TV dominated. Who controls TV? Well we kind of get an idea about that. You've got centralized corporate control over that. And so where do cultural initiatives truly come from?

[00:10:55] A hundred and fifty years ago there was a very great Swiss historian, Jacob Burkhart. And one thing that Burkhart wrote about was this book - I have his old book called Force and Freedom and it was an analysis between - between the state, society, ah the state, society and religion.

[00:11:15] And he looked at society and culture as this independent entity. And I think I look at this today and I think how independent is culture truly? I think not very, not as independent as it would have been 150 years ago.

[00:11:30] INDEPENDENT FROM WHAT?

[00:11:31] From media control.

[00:11:33] SAME THING.

[00:11:34] You've got kids growing up and their culture consists of Britney Spears and N'Sync and you know, what is this? Is this culture really? I don't think so. Where's - culture to me always includes some kind of intellectual component. And that's going away - ah in my opinion.

[00:11:57] So when I think of, you know, where is - are there realms of cultural independence, yeah there are but they're like these little islands in this big, big sea.

[00:12:10] So, but I have a hard time separating the ah - you know, when we think of UFO culture, pop culture, TV shows like the X Files and what impact they have had, a show like the X Files it seems to me has had this kind of symbiotic relationship. A lot of that information in that show clearly came out of genuine UFO reports and lore and this type of thing.

[00:12:33] … MJ12.

[00:12:34] Absolutely yes. Out of MJ12. But also the X Files has, has ah - had a very, very broad impact on Western culture. And so how has that affected our understanding? It's hard for me to say really.

[00:12:51] I do know that I - I divide media as I divide society, into strata, into classes. And I believe that there is - there's owner class, there's management class, there's worker bee class, there's expendable class. That's America today.

[00:13:09] Alright, and I look at TV as reflecting that. So that, for example, ah I don't think it's likely that within America say, a major network such as CBS News is going to put out a documentary or a news broadcast that will highlight the reality of UFOs, and in fact they don't, alright?

[00:13:29] That's left to the ah the stations that are one or several cuts below. So that the impact, it goes out to the rabble, okay, by and large. It's not taken as seriously. So that there are - there's not just one culture, there's not just one media.

[00:13:48] You've got several different media speaking to different ah different groups. So the management media, you know, for the management class, they don't get UFO reality stuff because you're not supposed to believe in that. Any management class has got to be unified in terms of their ideology. And part of that ideology in our age today means ixnay with the UFOs. .We're not to believe in that.

[00:14:10] So ah I'm sure a lot of the members of those groups go slumming it when they go check out a good UFO documentary, right? But they're not supposed to discuss this type of thing and talk about it.

[00:14:22] MOST UNFORTUNATE. FASCINATING. IT'S A FASCINATING HISTORY. IT'S WHY I'M SO UTTERLY DELIGHTED TO HAVE THE POSSIBILITY TO DO THIS FILM, WHICH BY THE WAY, MY WORKING TITLE - I DON'T KNOW WHETHER IT WILL STAY THAT WAY - IS MAGIC IN THE SKY: UFOs AND THE POLITICS OF REALITY.

[00:14:42] Oh cool. Cool-cool. Yeah I like that. I'm seeing a crisis that we're going to come to and it's not going to be caused by the UFO phenomenon. I don't think so. But it's coming. There's going to be a big crisis. I don't know what it's going to be. I don't know if it's going to be oil. Maybe. Or some other natural resource that's going to cause a crunch and a social upheaval. It's going to be very bad. And that to me will be an opportunity for first of all for a rollback, one would hope, of the kind of neo-fascist system that is being imposed. That's one opportunity. >The other opportunity is to, for some government insider, which is very likely - I think that would be - to let some stuff out, some UFO related information out into the public.

[00:15:31] I see this as a possibility. It's my hope. I don't know that this is going to happen. But I know, I mean just judging historically in the other ah instances within the last let's say 30-35 years, that kind of thing has happened in cultures and there's no reason it cannot happen again.

[00:15:50] PERFECT. THANK YOU.