Feb. 23, 1996 - Art Bell
01:20:21
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Morning across all these many happy time zones from the Hawaiian Islands and Tahiti all the way across this great land into the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands south into South America north well to the pole right up pole we've been heard hi everybody welcome to another edition of Friday night Saturday morning exercise might ask of post to post a.m live on screen crop radio throughout the night time now | ||
| I bet you're curious about what's going to happen right now. | ||
| As promised, in a moment, Rod Hopkins and more. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I'll tell you a little story. | ||
| We're going to leave the miraculous world of politics for a little while here and talk about something else. | ||
| Can you handle that? | ||
| Is that a cheer I heard? | ||
| It was about a week and a half ago to put this all into chronological order for you. | ||
| Yet I got a call from Bud Hopkins. | ||
| Normally, a very serene individual, investigator, best-selling author of Intruders and Missing Crime. | ||
| I think probably both million sellers toppled the list, that kind of thing. | ||
| So, you know, Bud is out front. | ||
| Investigates and looks into things like missing time and people who have been abducted. | ||
| And Bud was really upset. | ||
| And that's putting it mildly. | ||
| And said that there was a hit piece coming up on, of all things, NOVA, which most people regard as a science-oriented program, devoting itself to educating the masses in the sciences. | ||
| And Bud sent me a ten-page sort of brief on what is coming up on NOVA. | ||
| And I'll just read from the first page, which ought to be sort of a teaser to get going on what's about to happen. | ||
| On February 27, 1996, 27, WGBH Television will present a NOVA program entitled Kidnapped by Aliens, with an apparent question mark at the end of that, which outrageously distorts the nature of the UFO abduction phenomenon. | ||
| It's fair to say that as a result of this show, NOVA has abandoned its right to be thought of as either objective, balanced, or scientific. | ||
| What NOVA presented in its program on the abduction phenomenon was a, quote, deliberate mangling of the truth that the limit having absolutely nothing to do with the scientific investigation of the available data. | ||
| Typically, on a show filled with hostile authority figures with little or no acquaintance with the case material, astronomer Carl Sagan essentially stated he believed all abduction accounts | ||
| accounts could be explained as delusions or hallucinations Nova was obviously unconcerned that Dr. Sagan, whose uniformed opinion on the subject is well known, has yet to mount a serious investigation into even one abduction report. | ||
| This Nova UFO program was designed to air during Sweet Week, the period when the Ratings War is at its hottest. | ||
| Unsport lazy producers chose to begin the show in the most sensational tabloid style imaginable with eerie music, foggy reenactments, and spooky lights suggesting that Nova now sees itself as going head-to-head with hard copy and entertainment tonight. | ||
| That's from the man you're about to hear about, from Bud Hopkins. | ||
| And so that gives you some idea of the degree of, well, I'll let Bud put the word to it. | ||
| I don't know what he would say. | ||
| Anger, disappointment. | ||
| We'll get the readout on that in just a moment. | ||
| So that's what's coming up. | ||
| And with Bud, the apparent subject of part of the NOVA examination and somebody who has been in close contact with Bud Hopkins, and we will call him by his first name only, John. | ||
| My presumption is you'll hear or hear about John on the program. | ||
| So all of that coming up in just a moment. | ||
| And by the way, I've also got something from Gordon Michael Stallion, which we'll get on afterward. | ||
| Fairly serious message for you all. | ||
| In office. | ||
| And what's their offer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Team. | |
| And the person we are going to call, John. | ||
| So, first of all, Bud, are you there? | ||
| I certainly am. | ||
| All right, super. | ||
| And John, how about you? | ||
| Hi, all right. | ||
| I'm here. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| You're both here, then. | ||
| We're in business, I think, folks. | ||
| All right, Bud, I recall to the audience the phone call you made to me. | ||
| You were pretty dropped on upset that day. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And I think you still are this day. | ||
| What would you describe what you feel about Nova? | ||
| Are you angry? | ||
| Are you saddened? | ||
| Are you, what is it that you feel? | ||
| Well, I think I'm certainly angry. | ||
| I'm certainly saddened. | ||
| And I'm profoundly shocked at the dishonesty of their presentation. | ||
| All right, now you're going to go get him. | ||
| And I want to tell the audience, Bud, as you do this, our network was contacted by TBS earlier in the day by an Ellen Doxer, I guess, who is some official at this CBS outlet. | ||
| And she said, look, we understand Bud's going to be on. | ||
| We really want to have somebody named Denise on. | ||
| Is he the producer? | ||
| Denise Bianni is the name of the producer of this program. | ||
| So I thought, fine, and I want the audience to know. | ||
| I called you, Bud, and I said, she wants to be on. | ||
| How about it? | ||
| And he jumped out and said, yes, let's have her on. | ||
| So I called them back, and I said, yeah, Bud's jumping on it. | ||
| He wants to come on with you. | ||
| He's more than willing to come on with you. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, They began backing away. | ||
| And I further want the audience to know that I said, Well, call me back and please let me know. | ||
| Yes or no, she's going to be on or isn't going to be on. | ||
| But they never even returned the call. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Well, I'm not surprised. | ||
| They're in a certain sense running for cover. | ||
| I don't think that they ever imagined that they would have opened such a can of worms for themselves as they have. | ||
| And John, our other gentleman on radio with me, is a man who's had UFO vaccine experiences. | ||
| And he had been asked to go on to NOVA, actually, to help advertise this program. | ||
| And it's a program in which he is called the victim of self-memories, and his genuine emotion and so forth is regarded as some sort of self-delusion. | ||
| The shocking part of this is the fact that NOVA, which touts itself as being television you can trust, was actually trying to deceive the very people that they had taken on the program, assured that they would be treated with dignity and seriousness and so forth. | ||
| They were going to trick these people by asking them to advertise the program without knowing in advance the content of the program that they were going to be made to look foolish on the air. | ||
| And John will explain his emotion on that, but it's very intense. | ||
| Well, they came to you, and I know they also came to John Mack, Professor Mack, yeah, and they apparently, or maybe I should ask you, did they misrepresent themselves to you? | ||
| Well, they did, because they said that everyone would be treated with dignity and et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, I just got a little advance advertisement of this program or a little comment on it from U.S. News and World Report. | ||
| And this is typical of the way the program will read by, and it's being read by critics. | ||
| It says, kidnapped by UFOs, you'll be transfixed by the seeming veracity of the series of accounts of alien infection on this episode, NOLA. | ||
| And equally captivated by how Carl Sagan and other scientists debunk them. | ||
| And then, listen to this, hallucinations, top culture, and the therapists are among the culture. | ||
| I'm referred to as a therapist throughout the program, something I don't claim to be and am not. | ||
| And yet John Mack, who is, of course, a psychiatrist, he and I are, of course, as they would say, you're among the culprits. | ||
| We're actually to blame for the UFO abduction phenomenon. | ||
| In other words, your creation. | ||
| Yeah, this is, of course, a shoot the victim operation, which means the victims here being the victims of UFO abduction. | ||
| They're being put down totally by the program. | ||
| And, of course, it'd shoot the messenger, too, if I and John Mack are regarded as the messengers. | ||
| Why do you think they're doing this? | ||
| Why are they doing it? | ||
| That's very hard to know. | ||
| Actually, NOVAT has been a very conservative program. | ||
| And, of course, they've been very closely tied to Carl Sagan. | ||
| Carl Sagan's personal attitude towards this is that there's nothing to it. | ||
| It's all hallucination and delusion, which are very, you know, a heavy-duty mental problem to describe to literally thousands upon thousands of people around this country. | ||
| I think I should mention that to begin with, the people who have come forward to talk about their absent experiences to me and to have those experiences explored include, so far, I've dealt with probably 10 or 12 police officers. | ||
| I've dealt with seven psychiatrists who are abductees. | ||
| I've dealt with a NASA scientist who came to me for help. | ||
| Doctors, lawyers, some very well-known people in show business, political figures, people literally in all walks of life. | ||
| I have worked with people in places like Brazil and Australia, England, etc., etc. | ||
| It's a worldwide phenomenon. | ||
| And yet very few of these people, for very logical, solid reasons, are willing to go forward on a public television program and show their faces because of the risk of ridicule, of the risk of problems to their jobs and so forth. | ||
| So when a very few people were willing to come forward, John being one of the brave ones who was willing to, they were all assured, don't worry, NOVA will treat you with great respect and you will have nothing to worry about. | ||
| So, of course, what the message is that Nova is sending out subliminally is look what happens to people who come forward. | ||
| They become ridiculed and so on. | ||
| So if you are out there with abduction experiences and you have, let's say, very heavy-duty credentials in the world and people would take you seriously, so don't you dare come forward because this is what's going to happen to you. | ||
| I regard the program as an attempt in a certain sense not only to suppress evidence, but to intimidate witnesses and future witnesses in these cases. | ||
| Well, and it will have that kind of chilling effect. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because the net effect you're suggesting of the program is going to be ridicule. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the basic thing is, if a program is trying to deal with the abduction phenomenon and explain it to the public, you have to actually deal with what the phenomenon is. | ||
| You have to deal with all of its irregularities and all of its difficulties of explanation. | ||
| For instance, one of the typical explanations, so-called, that the program puts forward, and it's been done over and over again, there's a teacher of psychology at a southern university named Baker, who is now retired. | ||
| And Baker announces this is all sleep paralysis. | ||
| It's a sleep phenomenon. | ||
| And people wake up and they are momentarily paralyzed for just the first second or two. | ||
| And that's what this is all about. | ||
| It's only that. | ||
| Well, of course, I explained to the nervous people at the beginning that we have literally thousands upon thousands of abductions that take place in the daytime. | ||
| This takes place when people are driving automobiles. | ||
| I've had cases where a car with six people in it will suddenly be stopped in the middle of the day. | ||
| The car engine dies. | ||
| The people are paralyzed. | ||
| If two of the people are abducted from the car, the other four are left inside switched off. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| I said, that's the kind of case you have to explain. | ||
| This is what I was saying to Delva to the beginning of. | ||
| But I've got a question here. | ||
| Of the cases researched, what would you guesstimate the percentage of conscious recollection of these things is versus that recollection dressed up from repressed memories? | ||
| Through hypnosis and so forth. | ||
| So I would say that a third of all of the accounts I have are remembered without hypnosis. | ||
| And that's the other issue. | ||
| So that's one of the other issues that they chose to use to misrepresent the phenomenon. | ||
| They tried to pretend this only happens at night. | ||
| It only happens to a single person one at a time. | ||
| There are no such things as multiple abductions. | ||
| At least that's the message sublimely that goes out. | ||
| And it's always a product of hypnosis. | ||
| All those statements they knew to be false. | ||
| Well, again, I'm going to circle back to my why. | ||
| In other words, who do you think is really behind this? | ||
| If they want to do a piece that causes people to think 25 times before ever admitting anything or coming forward to a person like you or anybody else for that matter, why? | ||
| Is the phenomenon growing in some evil way, do you think they perceive? | ||
| Or is it dangerous to them in some way? | ||
| Or why? | ||
| Well, that's a hard one to answer. | ||
| It would have been, of course, very good if Nova had decided to try to defend itself rather than ducking out, as you just explained that they did by not appearing. | ||
| One can guess lots of different things. | ||
| I think that there is just enormous resistance amongst the scientific community to allowing themselves even to think for a moment that such things can be going on. | ||
| This just kind of shreds all the givens that we assume are true about the way the world of physics operates. | ||
| I don't think it's easy to overestimate how disturbing it is for anyone to admit that there is some other intelligence operating right as we speak this moment in our environment, abducting individuals, putting them through medical examinations, reproductive experiments, and so forth, and returning them, that this is actually happening. | ||
| To admit even that possibility is to admit that we are not in control of our own world, or as somebody once said that we're not even maybe head of the top of the food chain. | ||
| Well, you're tampering with primal forces, eh? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That is religion, governments, and so forth. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And there's lots of reason to want this to be hidden in the closet, firmly, out of sight. | ||
| This is really upsetting. | ||
| And my take on Carl Sagan, who I've had dealings with, I've appeared with him on a television program, where we've exchanged letters and messages and so forth, is that he is really profoundly uneasy about this material. | ||
| It upsets him. | ||
| And I think that he's been, he's more or less a key figure on the NOVA program. | ||
| If it upsets him, and if it's truly, truly bothersome to the scientific givens that he's taught for lots and lots of years and so on, then maybe the thing is to try to kill it, to try to hide it, to try to sweep it under the carpet. | ||
| And I think that's one of the motivating reasons that they've done this program. | ||
| So how much do you know? | ||
| I complain bitterly all the time about TV, and I don't do television, but precisely because I understand what can be left on the floor and that they can come at you with a complete agenda, as they can in newspapers as well, or I suppose even radio. | ||
| But television is uniquely suited to coming at you with an agenda because no matter what they do with you, they can make it look the way they want it to look when it runs. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So I don't do television for that reason, bud. | ||
| I've been ambushed a couple times in my life. | ||
| Is that what this is, is an ambush? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And a vicious one, a thoroughly vicious one, because of the fact that they don't even allow for a moment even the possibility that any of these people are remembering events that actually happened. | ||
| And if you were saying to the audience that all of these people who seem so rational, are coming forward and talking, and they're describing their experiences as John does with great emotion, all of these people are just dead wrong. | ||
| They imagine the whole thing. | ||
| When you say that about all the people on the program, I mean, you're doing a really horrible disservice to those people and to their reputation in the communities and so forth. | ||
| And you're presenting absolutely no evidence that this is the case. | ||
| They did not investigate a single solitary UFO experience with any sense of bringing in any psychological testers, any kind of investigators. | ||
| They simply shot a lot of film footage, showed it to a bunch of debunkers who said, oh, of course, this is people it can't be. | ||
| This is all false memory, or this is all a product of hypnosis, or this is all sleep paralysis or something. | ||
| No reasons are ever cited. | ||
| Nobody is ever questioned about it on the program. | ||
| I mean, none of the SFTs are asked questions about how they remembered what they remembered consciously or anything like that. | ||
| Well, they didn't even really try to investigate. | ||
| Oh, there's no investigation done at all. | ||
| And as John will explain, one of the most important things is John volunteered. | ||
| He said he would do any kind of tests that they wanted. | ||
| He would do any psychological tests if they wanted any medical examinations, MRIs, X-rays. | ||
| He would volunteer. | ||
| He would volunteer that they come to his home and check out his family and his son, who was actually, John remembered seeing his son in an abduction experience. | ||
| His son has already described abduction experiences. | ||
| Hold it for nothing. | ||
| They refuse to investigate. | ||
| Hold it right there, Bud and John, and we'll come back and we will find out what John's story is. | ||
| That's coming next. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| It's Bud Hopkins and John coming next. | ||
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| 1-800 and John, both in New York. | ||
| Bud, I think the thing to do now is kind of turn it over to you a little bit and bring us up to date on John and let John tell his story, and then we'll integrate that with what Nova's going to do. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Well, I think that John could start by talking about how he happened to call me up and feel that he had UFO experiences to begin with. | ||
| And then his thought process was when Nova was asking people to come forward. | ||
| So John, why don't you tell us about how you decided that there was something strange going on in your life? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Up until two years ago, I was pretty skeptical myself about the whole abduction phenomenon, although I really didn't know that much about it. | ||
| I was very skeptical. | ||
| My wife bought me a book. | ||
| It happened to be Bud's book, Intruders. | ||
| And as I was reading into the book, I became more and more disturbed because in the accounts of the abductees, I was recognizing, I mean, a whole laundry list of memories and experiences that I've had in my life. | ||
| And here it was in front of me in a book, you know, that my own personal life experiences fit this pattern, and that that pattern was connected to UFOs and aliens, and it just blew me out of the water. | ||
| I think I took the book down at 3.30 in the morning and knocked the letter out to Bud right away. | ||
| And what I did was describe what I thought was a horrible vivid nightmare I had had some years before. | ||
| And when I nailed the letter, I didn't, first of all, I never expected to hear back from Bud. | ||
| And if I did hear back from him, I fully expected him to, you know, bash off a little note saying, oh, don't worry about it. | ||
| This has nothing to do with anything. | ||
| Instead, what we ended up doing was arranging an interview. | ||
| And the more I talked, the more I realized how much material was there. | ||
| And it became very frightening for me initially. | ||
| All right, John, let me stop you there and ask Bud. | ||
| Bud, I know because I get hundreds of letters. | ||
| I get email I can't ever answer. | ||
| You get probably many times that. | ||
| And so what was it in John's letter that inspired you to write back to respond? | ||
| Well, to tell you the truth, I don't remember exactly in the letter because I get so many letters. | ||
| Because what happened is, of course, I read the letter. | ||
| We sent off a form letter response. | ||
| And when John came in, then, of course, I did an extensive interview. | ||
| And many different incidents then surfaced in the interview. | ||
| And it's very hard for me to sort out what came in the letter. | ||
| All right, well, then the interview, in other words, what impressed you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, the first thing that came up, and this was not something that John was essentially involved with, it just was, for him, almost marginal to other things, but it caught my eye. | ||
| He described walking home one night on the streets of Brooklyn from a dinner and seeing this object, a very large light passing overhead and being extremely intrigued and wondering what this thing was, and then not seeing the thing emerge from the other side of the building and being unclear as to exactly what had happened and finding himself very, very, very frightened. | ||
| And he didn't know why. | ||
| But there was a great deal of fear. | ||
| He didn't know whether he ran home or what happened. | ||
| But I recognized right away in cases like this, when you have someone, and our listeners should be paying particular attention here, if one has a fairly clear-cut UFO sighting and it doesn't seem to end in a very clear-cut way, | ||
| if you remember vividly how it begins as you're watching the object, but then it's unfolding and its disappearance and all that's very unclear and you are left with a great deal of terror and confusion it may mean that you're simply not remembering consciously the rest of the experience and when John told me this he wasn't putting any particular weight to it may I stop you and ask you do you think that that lack of remembrance or the foggy ending to it | ||
| is a product of something that they have caused to happen to the abductee or a simple protectionist mechanism of the abductee. | ||
| Well, it's probably a little of each, but I definitely think that the UFO occupants are able to block memory, to force memory to be somehow retained in the unconscious and not the conscious mind. | ||
| But I do think that there is a very human built-in device which says, I don't want to really remember this. | ||
| And the thing was, John wasn't paying too much attention to this, but when we first, with that particular incident, the fact it was the first one we decided to look into. | ||
| And we explored it first with as much information as we could recall. | ||
| Then when we did a hypnotic regression, out came a pretty disturbing experience, which he can tell you about. | ||
| All right. | ||
| John, what did come in? | ||
| Well, as it turns out, you have to understand a little background on this. | ||
| I'm a native New Yorker. | ||
| I'm 47 years old. | ||
| I'm born and raised in Manhattan. | ||
| But I'll tell you I'm a big guy. | ||
| I'm trained in martial arts. | ||
| I am never afraid on the streets of my city, no matter what time of day or night. | ||
| And what was unusual, that I found a little unusual, was that after I had seen this thing, and it was pretty close up. | ||
| It was only maybe 45, 40 feet away from me. | ||
| I felt terrified. | ||
| I thought something was going to leap out of the bushes or someone was going to mug me. | ||
| And I was having all these paranoid, fearful thoughts. | ||
| And I literally began running off. | ||
| All right. | ||
| What did you look back up? | ||
| What did you see exactly? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I didn't, it wasn't, it wasn't like a disc or a, what I saw was an intense light. | ||
| I mean, brighter than the sun, but it didn't, doesn't, didn't hurt your eyes to look at it. | ||
| About, oh God, maybe 30 feet long and 15 feet thick in the middle. | ||
| A football shaped, an intense football shaped light. | ||
| About the size of a van, you know, and close up. | ||
| Oh, what did you look like, ma'am? | ||
| Just over a rooftop across from me. | ||
| Oh, over a rooftop. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Nevertheless, Brooklyn is a very populated area. | ||
| It was late. | ||
| I was coming home from a dinner party. | ||
| It was about two in the morning and the streets were fairly deserted. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Although, you're right, you know, it's a major metropolitan area. | ||
| Somebody must have seen something, but, you know, how to connect with those individuals, I have no idea. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What came out of the first session was that as I walked, as I approached my house, four of these little, these little gray guys there about three and a half feet tall with the big black eyes emerged from behind a hedge that surrounded the front of the house that I lived in at the time. | ||
| I became frozen for a second. | ||
| At first, what happened was a really intense confusion set in. | ||
| I didn't know what I was looking at. | ||
| I didn't know if they were animals. | ||
| I didn't know what it was I was looking at. | ||
| And then when I realized that these things weren't, in fact, animals, that they were something that I had never seen before, this panic set in that literally took my breath away. | ||
| I was having trouble breathing. | ||
| And then immediately following that is this wave of just calm and recognition. | ||
| The thing that shocked me the most was the recognition. | ||
| I felt like I knew these things. | ||
| I knew these beings. | ||
| I knew who they were. | ||
| So you feel as though they induced this in you suddenly and removed the fear? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's some kind of control, mind control, emotional control, maybe some kind of physical control. | ||
| I don't pretend to know exactly what's at work there. | ||
| But there is definitely some kind of mind control or something at work there. | ||
| My instinct was to turn and run as fast as I could, and I just couldn't move. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And then my panic just subsided completely into this really calm state where I was completely at ease with the situation. | ||
| And, in fact, felt like I knew these beings. | ||
| I think that can be attributed to the fact that they somehow wipe your memories after these experiences happen and that every time you see them, it's almost like you're seeing them for the first time until that recognition sets in. | ||
| There was something very familiar about it at that point. | ||
| Were there communications? | ||
| Did they tell you what they wanted or why you or what was about to happen or any form of communication other than a feeling of calm? | ||
| No, yes, sir. | ||
| You hear them in your head. | ||
| Nobody talks to you. | ||
| You know what they're thinking or saying. | ||
| It's usually reassurances or calming things. | ||
| The way you would talk to a child who's upset, you know. | ||
| They say things like, we're not going to harm you. | ||
| This isn't going to hurt. | ||
| This is something we have to do. | ||
| You're doing just fine. | ||
| You know, almost like a doctor's bedside manner. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, you know, one interesting thing that I remember from that section was as they were saying those things, and John was terrified earlier and then in this sort of calm state, he sort of whispered as if he was repeating what they were saying to him, and they said to him, don't worry, this is only a dream. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is only a dream. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| My dreams never tell me that. | ||
| You know, just in regards to this and all the things, business you know um uh I don't expect to be able to go in front of the public or in front of you and make these kind of claims without being willing to substantiate them in some way. | ||
| And just in regard to this NOVA business, you know, I don't expect to be able to go in front of the public or in front of you and make these kind of claims without being willing to substantiate them in some way. | ||
| And part of the reason why I consented to do the Nova episode was because I very naively believed in their reputation. | ||
| John, how did Nova find out about you? | ||
| Well, actually, I guess they had asked Bud to offer some cases of people that were willing to publicly come forward. | ||
| Denise Diani reviewed one of Bud, with my permission, Bud called me and asked me if it was okay to show these people my regression tapes and share my case with them. | ||
| And I said, sure, fine, go ahead, Bud. | ||
| And Denise Diani reviewed my hypnotic regressions and I guess whatever other information Bud gave her verbally or showed her in writing. | ||
| And I guess I think the selection was made that way. | ||
| What did they ask of you? | ||
| I know that you volunteered to do certain things for them, and I'd like to know what those certain things were and their reaction to those efforts. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you what. | ||
| Because it was Nova, the first night that I went there that I knew I had been invited to Buds House. | ||
| And the staff, the producer and the assistant producer and someone else from Nova's staff was there that evening. | ||
| And I had jotted down some notes on the way because I know, I mean, I know how incredulous this all sounds. | ||
| And I figured whatever kind of tests they can do in order to help substantiate the claims we're making, you know, would be so much the better. | ||
| And I wrote on a piece of paper, the first one was I suggested a complete psychological evaluation. | ||
| I figured that that would be the very best way to eliminate psychopathology as an explanation. | ||
| You know, I could, you know, I'm willing to talk to any doctors they chose and take any kind of tests they want, you know, in order to prove my sanity. | ||
| I also suggested that they come to my home and interview my family members to take readings, to look for magnetic anomalies or unusual radiation levels. | ||
| I figured maybe these things leave some kind of physical trace evidence. | ||
| I'm not a scientist. | ||
| I don't pretend to know. | ||
| But I was trying to come up with the most practical kind of testing that I thought would help to prove the reality of what was saying. | ||
| You invited real investigation. | ||
| Yeah, it was what I was hoping for. | ||
| And it turns out that there was, in fact, no investigation at all. | ||
| They assembled a group of so-called experts, none of which, by the way, has ever looked into or studied an abduction case. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| But these people had analyzed me literally on the air, you know, like Fraser Crane on the basis of a two-minute video clip. | ||
| They analyzed me. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| John, wait a minute. | ||
| You mean these experts that were rendering a judgment on you never talked to you? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| They never interviewed me, never tested me, never requested any material on my case from Bud Hopkins. | ||
| They knew me only from a video clip they viewed. | ||
| Actually, you'll see it on the segment when it airs Tuesday night. | ||
| Their experts are sitting in front of a TV monitor. | ||
| I'm on the monitor going through a hypnosis regression. | ||
| They stop the tape, and then the expert says, well, he's obviously suffering from false memory syndrome. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing was a complete sham. | ||
| It's the most insulting, demean, degrading kind of thing, treatment I've ever seen. | ||
| Well, you know, he's genuinely sorry I participated. | ||
| John, this is the kind of thing, Inbo, that you would expect of, you know, Geraldo. | ||
| Yeah, you know, they're the same genre kind of show. | ||
| There's a million of them up there, but not Nova. | ||
| No, not Nova. | ||
| And incidentally, I think it should be pointed out that Nova had the gall to say that later on to, you know, cover their fannies, I suppose, they said, well, we offered to do tests, but nobody came forward, and Hopkins didn't present anybody. | ||
| It was, of course, after John had put it in writing, but he wanted to do any kind of test they wanted. | ||
| Did you get any written response, John? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| On October 19th, I have the letter right here, and I'll read it for you. | ||
| But what it is, basically, is a long list of reasons and excuses why they're not going to do any tests. | ||
| Now, that's the point that I became concerned. | ||
| And I said, what are these people doing here? | ||
| Nobody's spoken to me. | ||
| They haven't done any kind of tests at all. | ||
| Are they just putting out a testimony like that? | ||
| You know, I was shocked. | ||
| I mean, like I said, I'm not a scientist. | ||
| And even it didn't make any sense to me. | ||
| So, bud, this amounts, obviously, then, to a totally agenda-driven piece right from the beginning. | ||
| What I'm curious about, bud, is when did you realize what was going on? | ||
| I didn't realize that until we found out that the name of the program was Abducted by Aliens, question mark. | ||
| They've recently changed it to Abducted by UFOs. | ||
| But that was the lurid title that they gave it. | ||
| And we found out Denise Diani, the producer, is a friend of my wife's, and he was telling them that. | ||
| Is that friend or former friend? | ||
| Former friend. | ||
| That they had finished it, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And the program was all wrapped up. | ||
| Now, this was before there was any question about, you know, I mean, it was after they had rejected any kind of, doing any kind of real investigation or testing. | ||
| And we began to get very suspicious then, but that was back in November, actually. | ||
| I honestly, well, I told the producers at the very beginning when we started this, I said, I am not naive enough to think that you're going to say at the end of the program, yes, UFO abductions have taken place. | ||
| You're not going to do that. | ||
| I just know that's obviously the case. | ||
| But I said I insist that you are honest enough to say at the end of the program that no matter how you try to explain these cases away and think that you may have explained some of them and so on, to be absolutely honest, you're going to have to admit that a mystery remains. | ||
| Now that seems to be a very small thing to ask. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But of course, what actually happened is they leave the impression, without any doubt, that all of this has been explained away. | ||
| There is no such thing as any mystery that remains. | ||
| All of UFOs are explained away. | ||
| There's no such thing as a UFO. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And as a matter of fact, they present a scientist who says he would love it if UFOs would land, but in fact, he says no UFOs have ever landed or ever will land. | ||
| Is that Carl Sagan? | ||
| No, this is a band named Horowitz. | ||
| It sounds like Carl Sagan. | ||
| It does sound like Carl Sagan, yes. | ||
| In fact, how much of a part does Sagan play in the program? | ||
| Sagan plays a very major role. | ||
| I would say he's the central spokesperson for the point of view of the debunkers. | ||
| And he comes into the program from time to time. | ||
| And I have to say, sadly, that as you may know, that on a personal level he's been extremely ill and is extremely ill right now. | ||
| Evidently, it's a form of cancer. | ||
| And he does not look well on the program. | ||
| I wish him good health and a recovery. | ||
| As a matter of fact, we've changed letters about that recently since I was at one point suffering from cancer. | ||
| But despite that, despite my sorrow for his situation, I find him to be, in this program, intellectually dishonest. | ||
| All right. | ||
| On that note, Bud Hopkins and John in New York, hold on. | ||
| We're going to break the news at the top of the hour. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, isn't this something? | |
| You must see Coast to Coast A.M. on a Friday night now, Saturday morning, out across most all of America, save the Hawaiian Islands. | ||
| I'm Arbell. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
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We'll be right back. | |
| From the P.A. Zoom, sounds like a Nazi Crime. | ||
| Valley Ho across New Clay Nation. | ||
| I am Arbell. | ||
| I have guests, Bud Hopkins, and NASA bestsellers to include intruders, converted improvers, and losing time. | ||
|
unidentified
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*BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* | |
| And abductees, there is a Nova piece being done coming up February 27th. | ||
| And you just wouldn't believe what's cleared my fax machine. | ||
| It was statements on the internet from, I believe, the producers of this program. | ||
| And I'll kind of set it up for you, even those of you who are joining this hour in just a moment, continuing with Todd Hopkins and John. | ||
| You hear this music on my show just about every night. | ||
| It is Cusco. | ||
| The USCO they're a German group, and no matter how many times you hear it, it does nothing but draw on you. | ||
| It's actually incredible music, and I'd like to offer you the opportunity to have it for your own. | ||
| You can get the Cusco 2000 album plus Cusco 2002 in the best-selling Mystic Island. | ||
| That's three CDs for the discount front. | ||
| We brought the lens of science journalism to one of the strangest stories of our time. | ||
| One of the trickiest decisions for the film has been how to deal with the alleged physical evidence surrounding abductions. | ||
| Abduction proponents frequently point to such physical evidence, photographs of round traces left by UFOs, or most commonly reports of strange scars or scoop marks on the body of an abrupt team. | ||
| When examined more closely, so-called round traces are usually just a commonly occurring fungus. | ||
| Scars, scoop marks appear to be quite ordinary, likely the result from everyday injuries or traumas, but still we have nova. | ||
| We're serious and open-minded. | ||
| Abduction proponent Bud Hopkins, for one, claims to have more compelling evidence, even an x-ray of an alien nasal implant. | ||
| In interviews and in writing, and specifically in a letter sent October 17th of 95, we offered several abduction proponents the opportunity to have NOVA hire independent scientists to examine any physical evidence from a current case. | ||
| We went so far as to offer to perform an MRI or other radiological test with the approval of a physician in cases of alleged nasal implants. | ||
| We were not taken up on the offer, and it was further suggested that the aliens are too smart to let such evidence fall into our hands. | ||
| One MIT physicist, a fervent proponent in alien abductions, and the process of scientific inquiries confirmed there is not one single independently confirmed piece of scientific evidence for alien abduction, not one. | ||
| In fact, when pressed further, most proponents themselves back off the importance of such conventional data and point instead to what they refer to as the real evidence for abductions, that is the similarity in the stories themselves and the sincerity and emotionality with which they are told. | ||
| This, then, is the true heart of the alien abduction phenomenon and the focus of our documentary. | ||
| There you go, Bud. | ||
| What do you say to that? | ||
| Well, you just heard John describe all of the tests that he offered to undergo himself, which were declined, which puts the absolute why to that statement. | ||
| Would you mind if I read their response letters? | ||
| No, in fact, I almost need to demand that you do that. | ||
| I mean, we have a real discrepancy here. | ||
| They're saying they did all this. | ||
| You're saying you offered and they refused and you got it on paper. | ||
| I'll tell you what, I'll fax you a copy of this letter on their letterhead signed by Denise Gianni. | ||
| let me read this to you on the air if you'll allow me. | ||
| Please, this letter is dated October 19th, 1995 of last year. | ||
| I had written a letter because I'm complaining about their choice of title because I thought they were sensationalizing the topic and setting a tone that didn't, you know, just didn't engender open-mindedness or seriousness. | ||
| And also, again, in writing, requesting that they do all these tests. | ||
| This is a response letter I got. | ||
| Dear John, thank you for your thoughtful facts of last week. | ||
| As far as the title for our Nova program... | ||
| Hold on, everybody. | ||
| Hold on a moment. | ||
| We had a big tone there. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Please begin again, John. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Dear John, thank you for your thoughtful facts of last week. | ||
| As far as the title for our ANOVA program goes, titles like teasers and promo spots are designed here by individuals not associated with the production, in other words, their marketing department, with the goal of bringing viewers to our programs. | ||
| Listen to the language carefully here. | ||
| According to them, a more subtle title would not serve the end of igniting interest in our program and bringing the widest possible PBS audience to the subject matter. | ||
| In other words, a sensational title would bring them more higher ratings. | ||
| There was also another concern about this title. | ||
| Susan and I, Susan is the assistant producer here. | ||
| Susan and I proposed alien encounters or abducted by aliens, and our market research department determined that many viewers misread, quote, aliens as, quote, illegal immigrants. | ||
| I will certainly forward your letter and one from Bud Hopkins to our series producer and to our director of national programming. | ||
| You've also asked why NOVA did not expend the resources to conduct independent scientific tests to marshal evidence for or against the literal interpretation of the abduction story. | ||
| As far as your willingness to take a polygraph test, let me assure you that nowhere in our program do we suggest that you or any abductees are being deceptive or dishonest. | ||
| As you know, polygraph tests cannot address external realities, but rather only the belief one has in the truth of a fact or event. | ||
| As far as psychological tests go, our research has convinced us that adequate psychological tests have been undertaken by Bud Hopkins, John Mack, and from another point of view, the late Nick Spano for Carleton University. | ||
| Since nowhere in our program do we suggest any psychopathology on the part of the abductees, there was no need to undertake more tests to prove or disprove such pathology. | ||
| As far as MRI or other scanning tests, mind you, Art, I volunteered to expose my body to radiation so that these people could determine the presence or the lack of any foreign objects in my body. | ||
| Okay, what's the response I get here? | ||
| As far as MRI or other scanning tests to confirm the presence of alien tracking devices goes, in principle, I would be willing to participate in such a test if a qualified, licensed, and independent physician believed there was a reasonable medical indication for the test. | ||
| To expose any individuals to medical procedures without medical indication seems to me irresponsible and something MOVA cannot participate in. | ||
| Should you or other attructees have need of such a test, however, MOVA would be happy. | ||
| Now listen to the wording. | ||
| MOVA would be happy to bring in an independent radiologist to observe the test and to analyze the results. | ||
| In other words, if I went out and got a doctor to say that I needed these tests and then I paid for them, they would be willing to send an expert down to observe and analyze the results. | ||
| I told Denisiani, hey, listen, I volunteered to take the tests, not pay for them. | ||
| She closes the letter by saying, I hope this addresses some of your concerns, and I thank you again for your participation in our program, Cecilie Beniciani, who's the producer of this thing. | ||
| And who also apparently wrote what I just read to you indirectly. | ||
| Which is completely contradictory. | ||
| Yeah, indeed. | ||
| And just to go back to the issue of the physical evidence. | ||
| Yes, bud. | ||
| I explained to her that I had four samples from a landing area in connection of a UFO landing connection with an abduction. | ||
| The soil had been baked to a rock-like intensity. | ||
| Hardness, I have the regular control soil from outside. | ||
| I volunteered the soil to be studied by their people. | ||
| I had photographs of the site over a situation. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| They say it's fungus here. | ||
| Yeah, they said it's fungus without ever having looked at anything. | ||
| In other words, it is fungus in the same way that an abruption recollection is a false memory for the reason that UFOs don't exist, therefore they can't land, and therefore they can't do anything to the ground, and therefore any memory of such a landing or an experience has to be false. | ||
| Because they, in their infinite wisdom and in their intense belief system, know that such things can't happen. | ||
| They declined to look at any of the evidence I had, to look at the photograph, to have the photograph studied, or to have anybody come and look at any of the wounds on any of the abductees or learn anything about them. | ||
| They simply proclaimed them, no evidence. | ||
| Well, they proclaimed them to be nothing more than the everyday bumps and bruises one might expect to get. | ||
| Well, I had a woman who was a writer for a rather cheap little magazine, but a debunker, looked at one of these slides that I had, and it has 55, I believe, perfect circles arranged in a grid-like pattern with a large curving, perfectly symmetrical curve around each side enclosing it. | ||
| It's about two and a half inches across. | ||
| It ended up on the hip, really, high up of a woman who had an abduction experience in Costa Rica. | ||
| And this woman proclaimed it an everyday, normal kind of bruise, which, as I always said, made me wonder what this woman has on her fanny. | ||
| Wow, all this is looking at the picture. | ||
| But the point is, they declined to look at anything, to bring anybody around to study the scars, to look at any of the medical records. | ||
| They simply proclaimed what there is no evidence. | ||
| Now, what Dr. Pritchard was talking about, and which I explained to them at the beginning, as I said, we have every single solitary type of evidence one could possibly want to support the reality of these abundance experiences, except one type of evidence, and I said, we do not have an object that could be taken into a laboratory, and this is what Dr. Pritchard was talking about. | ||
| We do not have an object that all of science would look at and say, this could not have originated on Earth. | ||
| In other words, we do not have a piece of the UFO. | ||
| I think the government's got them, but we don't. | ||
| We don't have an object that can be absolutely attested to as non-earthly in its origin, but we have every other single solitary kind of evidence. | ||
| Well, let's discuss somewhat lesser evidence that they mention here. | ||
| They say that you claim that you have x-rays showing an implant. | ||
| Now, surely they came to you and said, let us have the x-rays. | ||
| Yes, they did. | ||
| And I did not let them have that x-ray because this is a current, this is a piece of evidence which is crucial. | ||
| I'm certainly glad I didn't give them the x-ray, too, knowing what's happened to everything else. | ||
| This is a case I'm working on right now that will be the subject of my book coming out in August. | ||
| The book is called Witnessed. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| The true story of the book from Bridge, UFO Abductions. | ||
| This is an extraordinarily important piece of evidence, and it's been studied by a neurosurgeon and so forth. | ||
| I have other sets of x-rays, too. | ||
| I did not let them have that material. | ||
| I said you could have everything else but. | ||
| And so, of course, I mean, I don't have to give Nova everything I have. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| I gave them everything that they wanted or everything that they could have wanted except those particular x-rays in several different cases. | ||
| Right, but give me a kind of a mental picture, if you would. | ||
| If they had received those x-rays, you know the quality of the x-rays, how do you think they would have debunked them? | ||
| Oh, I think they would have simply said it has to be a hoax. | ||
| In other words, it has to have been faked by the radiologist. | ||
| I mean, I can't think of any. | ||
| There's no other way they could have said it. | ||
| It's not a mistake. | ||
| I mean, this is clearly a metallic object of a very precise structure. | ||
| That's in one case. | ||
| In the case of a child in Europe, it looks rather different. | ||
| It's located in the brain. | ||
| I have three different x-rays from different points of view. | ||
| I deliberately did not want them to have the x-ray material because I'm reserving that for my book. | ||
| I mean, I do have some rights, some kind of material. | ||
| I could see that I wasn't forthcoming with them. | ||
| I offer them absolutely anything else in the world to stay to look at. | ||
| But the simple idea of hiring an estimate that I've heard is that NOVA spent something between $1 and $2 million to make this program. | ||
| They could have afforded to hire a surgeon to examine the wounds on people's or plastic surgeons or whatever, on people's bodies and correlate what they found about the nature of the cuts with the accounts that the person remembers, if it involves children, what the parents remember about the wounds, and so forth. | ||
| Absolutely no investigation whatsoever. | ||
| All right, well, didn't they apply some expertise in the statement that these wounds are here? | ||
| Or to be the normal everyday sort of bumps and bruises you might get? | ||
| Surely they offered some expert opinion saying that. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| They simply suppressed the evidence and declined to show it on their program. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| If I can interject for just one second, it's really important to note, but it's okay. | ||
| I mean, you know, we don't mind if these people argue against the weight that that kind of physical evidence may carry, but not to mention it at all and to, in fact, deceive the American people by telling them that there is no physical evidence, I think that's not science. | ||
| I mean, not in my book. | ||
| Well, they certainly call it science here to bring a scientific NOVA kind of investigation into this area, and then they've applied none of what they claim. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| If you could say that I presented physical evidence to them in slide form, in photograph form, they didn't even, they simply suppressed it. | ||
| They refused to show it and pretended it didn't exist. | ||
| It might have meant something if they had shown the pictures. | ||
| And as John said, they had brought in an expert and he could have said, well, this could possibly be a such and such, or we're not sure about this. | ||
| Incidentally, the fungus issue about ground traces is totally idiotic because the fungus, in the cases I'm referring to, the fungus doesn't do anything in terms of turning the soil to rock down below. | ||
| I mean, to almost fusing it. | ||
| Plus, it tends to grow in circles, the fungus. | ||
| And this was the ground was studied by an agricultural expert who examined it and found that there was no fungus involved. | ||
| Plus the fact that one of the marks leading from the circle, which seems to have to do with the takeoff path of the UFO, is 48 feet long and it's a straight path about three feet wide. | ||
| And this fungus, of course, never grows in that area. | ||
| Anyone could tell just by looking at the photograph. | ||
| But they simply made these assumptions. | ||
| We must remember that they had as a consultant Philip Klass. | ||
| Philip Klass? | ||
| Oh, Philip Klass, really? | ||
| He was the consultant. | ||
| And they brought in Baker and every kind of hardline skeptic who was a Psychops committee member, and they made absolutely no attempt to investigate, to look into any of the evidence. | ||
| They suppressed evidence and they intimidated witnesses and ridiculed witnesses. | ||
| And this is the shamefulness of this program. | ||
| Well, then there's this, Bud. | ||
| Unless I miss my guess, NOVA is at least in part, well it's controversial, funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars. | ||
| It certainly is, isn't it? | ||
| And Rayathon and Merck. | ||
| I hope for our listeners that when you watch this program, that you may want to write in some kind of protest to WGBH in Boston. | ||
| We can give you an address here. | ||
| John, do you have the NOVA address handy? | ||
| Yes, right here in the letterhead. | ||
| It's WGB8 Science Unit, 125 Western Avenue. | ||
| That's in Boston, Massachusetts. | ||
| And the zip code is 02134. | ||
| If you just tell me one more time, WGD8 Science Unit, 125 Western Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts, 02134. | ||
| All right, if you hold on, we'll do one more half hour. | ||
| Bud Hopkins is my guest with John, both in New York, responding to a program that's going to run, a Nova program, this next week. | ||
| You're listening to the CBC Radio Network. | ||
| As I'm informed, one's just joining us this morning. | ||
| It is KLBI in Laramie, Wyoming. | ||
| And we got late word of this after we were actually on the air. | ||
| Manager Russ Jenks, thank you. | ||
| And PB there Jake Sherlock, thank you. | ||
| They are 1210 a.m. in Laramie as we continue to blanket city after city across America. | ||
| Now, back to Bud Hopkins and John, both in New York. | ||
| And Bud, I've got a fact here that says I've always thought of Carl Sagan as being a brilliant man of limited scope. | ||
| He's always denied the possibility of UFO contact, even though he admits the possibility of life on other planets is very high, and I've often thought Sagan himself might be an alien. | ||
| Seriously, could this NOBA program be disinformation created because of the very real alien autopsy film, which has the whole world abuzz? | ||
| Well, of course, I suppose anything's possible. | ||
| I'd rather not speculate on that because I have my doubts about the validity of the alien autopsy film itself. | ||
| But there's a very important thing I want to bring up here. | ||
| I understand that what you were reading was a statement that came in on the facts from NOVA. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Well, physical evidence? | ||
| Yeah, it's from NOVA and it came from the Internet. | ||
| It didn't come directly from Nova, but from listeners. | ||
| Because what's extremely interesting is, of course, this being a science program, they make absolute assertions there, right, about the ground traces and physical marks. | ||
| What's the evidence that they present that supports their decision to, their description of this? | ||
| What evidence did they present that these are everyday bruises and so forth? | ||
| Well, that was my question. | ||
| Is there any evidence at all? | ||
| No, certainly not in this description, which is entitled a letter from the producer. | ||
| No, not any at all. | ||
| Nova just calculates that these are the following. | ||
| In other words, they're simply asserting an opinion and doing absolutely no scientific research whatsoever. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's cover one sensitive subject, Bud, so we can get it out of the way. | ||
| I know another person covered, and a person who's been victim himself of what I consider to be just an outright fraud, really. | ||
| Professor John Mack. | ||
| They're surely going to go after John Mack. | ||
| John Mack has been attacked viciously on the program, yes. | ||
| Now, John Mack, the issue is the Donna Bassett affair where the woman said that she pretended to be under hypnosis and made up a story about Chris Jeff and Kennedy and so forth. | ||
| That is, of course, a problem. | ||
| John was too uncritical, I believe, in citing that at the time or doubting it or arguing with it. | ||
| And that, of course, gave rise to the idea that she had fooled him and so forth. | ||
| I don't want to get into this because I think really you should have John on to explain his situation and defend himself. | ||
| I've had two or three conversations with John in the past 24 hours. | ||
| He is actually irate about the way he's been handled and the things that have been said about him by Donna Bassett, who has said some extraordinary things to me about John. | ||
| For instance, he has said that he is a CIA agent who has devoted a lot of his time to mind control experiments. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| It is, of course, absurd. | ||
| And many other statements of the same sort. | ||
| I would say that John Abasset's credibility is a very dubious quantity here. | ||
| That does not let John off the hook, though, of having been perhaps less careful than he could have been in handling that. | ||
| But this is a new field, a new area of study. | ||
| John was a very open and caring man, and he trusted her, and it turns out he shouldn't have. | ||
| Well, Bud, I guess I would ask you what cautions when you've got somebody like John, who we've got with us this morning, what cautions do you inject as you conduct an investigation that would catch something like John Miss? | ||
| He was fairly new at it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes, I got, of course, one of the parts of it. | ||
| He's a good-hearted man, and he had no reason to feel that she was tricking him. | ||
| It's a highly complex story, as I say, it's much better that you be discussing it with John himself. | ||
| I'll do that. | ||
| But the point is, in terms of built-in methods, it isn't that there isn't any of us who couldn't probably be fooled by some sort of very careful researcher who is an excellent actor and so forth in some way or other, just as you could be fooled, Nova could be fooled, or anybody could be fooled. | ||
| But the point is, I have ways in which I can test, especially under hypnosis, people, which I would rather not go into because it's important that I keep this material secret. | ||
| There are testing methods which have many times, or not many times, but quite often, have exposed somebody who is, in fact, confabulating. | ||
| Well, as you pointed out, John is certainly good-hearted, and I'm sure he feels like he's been struck on the head by lightning here. | ||
| In your opinion, will this further, could this endanger his academic standing, or is that now fairly well settled despite what Norman may do? | ||
| Oh, no, I think that MOVA is attempting to really see. | ||
| Don't forget this. | ||
| The basic evils that they present on the program are myself and John Mack. | ||
| I mean, we are the ones who have brought this all about. | ||
| We are the ones who have put this in the heads of totally innocent people. | ||
| And in effect, what really emerges is that there are two classes of people they're dealing with, charlatans, that's John Mack and myself, and mentally ill people, which are the abettes. | ||
| Got to be you, John. | ||
| Got to be John. | ||
| That's exactly the way it boils down, if you read carefully the implications of this. | ||
| Obviously, nothing is stated that boldly, but that's exactly the tone of this very, I think, totally dishonest program. | ||
| They're out to harm John as deeply and wound him as harshly as they possibly can, and to do the same to me, and to do the same, of course, to the FSPs. | ||
| So, in a sense, John's mistake is going to be mixed in a careful blend with Bud Hopkins. | ||
| Yes, actually, the program ends with John's mistake as if this is the final proof that there's nothing to this. | ||
| With regard to the mental illness, John, how would you respond to that? | ||
| I mean, you did offer to go to a psychiatrist, did you not? | ||
| Yes, I did, and they never. | ||
| Do you think that a science program investigating something as odd and unusual as alien abduction would snap up an offer like that? | ||
| Any history, John, of mental illness? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| To tell you this, I'm a 47-year-old man. | ||
| I've been married for 27 years. | ||
| I've raised two beautiful children to adulthood. | ||
| My daughter is 23. | ||
| She just recently made me a granddad. | ||
| My son is 21. | ||
| I've earned a living as a graphic artist most of my adult life. | ||
| I'm a homeowner. | ||
| I've lived my life in an almost aggressively normal way. | ||
| The only unusual thing going on in my life has to do with these alien encampers. | ||
| Other than that, you couldn't tell me apart from John Gulk on the street. | ||
| All right, you two. | ||
| Listen, we've only got a few moments left, but I want to let a couple of people ask questions. | ||
| Leslie Rockies, you're on here with Bud Hopkins and John. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
| Yes, I'm in Scottdown. | ||
| Arizona, all right. | ||
| Arizona. | ||
| We love them down here, Art, and appreciate your program. | ||
| Mr. Hopkins, I'm reading the book Abduction by Debbie Jordan and Kathy Mitchell. | ||
| And it's a great comfort to me. | ||
| I had an experience in 1966 when I was 12 years old. | ||
| And I had a witness with me, my grandmother. | ||
| And around 1980, I had the misfortune of talking with Dr. Philip Klass. | ||
| You've given him a promotion. | ||
| He's not a doctor. | ||
| He's simply a print journalist. | ||
| No expertise. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, very well. | ||
| And there's a big agenda I would like to add to that interview. | ||
| What was your conversation? | ||
| He reassured me, this was on a talk radio program in the Bay Area, San Francisco. | ||
| And he reassured me that it was a weather balloon that I saw. | ||
| Of course, I was greatly relieved at that point. | ||
| He answered all my questions, everything I wanted to know about this incident. | ||
| And I matured and did some reading and realized that there was no way that this was a weather balloon that I saw. | ||
| And as I actually, my grandmother recalled, we weren't able to move and there was missing time. | ||
| And the weather balloons tend to do that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Look, thank you very much, Sam. | ||
| I want to ask you this. | ||
| In America or in the world, what is the best evidence or compilation of numbers? | ||
| How many people have had or claim to have had experiences? | ||
| Well, we don't really know. | ||
| There's never been a really careful compilation of everyone's case material. | ||
| But in terms of the Roper survey, which I was involved with with Dr. David Jacobs and others, Dr. John Mack was involved in it too, by asking carefully worded questions and not mentioning abduction, but mentioning the kinds of symptoms that abductees commonly report, | ||
| we came out with a very staggeringly high figure of perhaps as many as one in 50 Americans reporting experiences, strange, odd personal experiences, such as periods of missing time with no explanation, et cetera, that are the kinds of things abductees report. | ||
| So we have no absolute accurate measurement, of course, but the numbers are staggeringly high. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Quickly, East of the Rockies. | ||
| You're on here with Bud Hopkins and John in New York. | ||
| Good morning, Art. | ||
| Tim in Denver. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| A couple questions. | ||
| First of all, to Bud and John, have both of you seen the show in its entirety? | ||
| Is this going to be shown on PS? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We only do that. | ||
| We thought over well over a week ago. | ||
| Not because they sent us any, but copies of it. | ||
| We have a friend in the media who secured a copy and was concerned enough to get us an advanced copy because I don't know if Bud did, but I requested an advanced copy on a couple of occasions and they told me that none was available. | ||
| I see. | ||
| And to John, I'm really intrigued. | ||
| I've never experienced anything like what you have gone through. | ||
| However, I don't doubt it in any way. | ||
| I think that a lot of people have experienced this. | ||
| But how, personally, how did your family deal with it? | ||
| How do you deal with your friends? | ||
| I mean, is it a topic of discussion on a relatively normal basis in your life? | ||
| Or is it something that it was hard for you to come out with? | ||
| And I'll always come here. | ||
| Thanks, Hart. | ||
| Yes, sure. | ||
| I would imagine it's the same kind of a thing for a rape victim to come forward or, you know, something similar. | ||
| That's the only thing I could compare it to. | ||
| And as far as dealing with friends and family, coming forward publicly kind of put an end to my choice as to who I talked to or told about it or who I didn't. | ||
| I'm kind of out there now. | ||
| I have nothing to hide. | ||
| I use my real name. | ||
| I don't hide behind dots or anything. | ||
| You appeared without a screen or anything on Nova Jones? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| I mean, although I was born and raised in the city, my parents are both country folks. | ||
| And one thing that they taught me from the day I was born was about the importance of honesty and telling the truth. | ||
| And that's all I'm trying to do. | ||
| So there was no scene up there. | ||
| They didn't hide your face or disguise your identity. | ||
| No, sir, and I used my real name. | ||
| That's a very brave thing to do under the circumstances. | ||
| It's a very brave thing. | ||
| And, of course, one of the issues is that many, many people who would have given, of course, tremendous evidence based on the fact that they would be highly credentialed, such as a psychiatrist or a police officer, or, of course, the people who would not come forward on the program because the producers insisted that everyone had to show their face in camera, otherwise they would not be considered for the program. | ||
| Well, back to close encounters, do you want to report UFO? | ||
| No, I don't want to report one of those. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So after this program, I think there's going to be more people of all kinds of cuts saying, I don't want to report one of those. | ||
| And is that the most probable agenda, do you suppose, Buck? | ||
| Well, I think that there's a double agenda for the program. | ||
| One is to suppress evidence all over the place and misrepresent the nature of the phenomenon, so it seems like a silly thing that can be easily explained away, rather than the deeply complex phenomenon it really is with all of its attendant supportive evidence. | ||
| All of that has been totally misrepresented and in the most scientifically dishonest, unethical way possible. | ||
| And of course, the corollary is to discourage credentialed people in the scientific areas from ever coming forward and talking about their own personal experiences. | ||
| And let's look at the possible political agenda here. | ||
| Traditionally, PBS has been funded through donation and by taxpayer dollars. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Their budget has been under some pressure, to put it mildly. | ||
| And I wonder if they are under pressure to produce ratings to justify their existence. | ||
| I think that might be highly possible. | ||
| And I caution everyone listening when they are next asked to support public broadcasting to understand that, because we are asked on these programs all the time to help fund them. | ||
| And of course, I have enormous respect for public broadcasting. | ||
| But when such a travesty of a scientific program is forced upon the American people on such a crucial issue, is this something that we should wholeheartedly support? | ||
| I'm not so sure. | ||
| And you feel the same way, John? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I take it your disappointment. | ||
| When did you begin to realize, John, when did you begin to realize what this was going to be? | ||
| About three months after the initial taping, which would make it May or June of last year. | ||
| They called me to recruit me to submit, you know, they asked me for permission to do a photo session in order to create promotional materials and packaging for the media. | ||
| They recruited me at that time to help promote the program. | ||
| I think what they had in mind at the time was to get me on the air with Denise Diani, and I would be the mindless idiot. | ||
| They would talk about little gray men and flying saucers, and Denise would be the authority figure representing NOVA and the scientific community. | ||
| And thank God, because I have some friends in the media that were concerned enough to send me an advanced copy. | ||
| We're able to utilize this time to get our side of the story across. | ||
| Everybody who watches the program should bear in mind what they have heard this morning from the both of you as they watch that program. | ||
| I would hope so. | ||
| It's either science or it's not science. | ||
| It's either science or it's opinion. | ||
| And I always thought NOVA was in the science business. | ||
| So did I. I guess until now. | ||
| Before we go off the air, I really want to thank you on behalf for giving us an opportunity to tell our side it's a heck of a lot more than NOVA did. | ||
| Well, I want to give you two the opportunity to once again give out the address where people can write in protest of what's about to happen. | ||
| Okay, that's WGBH Science Unit 125 Western Avenue. | ||
| That's Boston, Massachusetts. | ||
| And the zip code is 02134. | ||
| And I guess all you both would ask is that the people who have heard this program and then will view the Nova program, render an honest opinion to them. | ||
| One way or the other, Rod. | ||
| Well, I want to thank you both for being on. | ||
| And, Bud, you've got a book coming out called Witness. | ||
| When is that going to be out? | ||
| That will be out in August. | ||
| Witness: the true story of the Berkeley-Bridge UFO Effections. | ||
| So everybody can look for that probably on book stands everywhere. | ||
| And as Nova said, it will give rise to more false memories. | ||
| Trying to do a little number on the book even in advance. | ||
| Remember when you watch the NOVA program, watch for the physical evidence that is not there. | ||
| Watch for the references to cases that have nothing to do with hypnosis, which are not there. | ||
| Conscious memory book. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Watch for their references to abductions that take place in the daytime, because that's not there either. | ||
| They managed to suppress all of this material and more, giving totally false impressions that take hours to uncover and display to turn over every rock on this program. | ||
| All right, but you both had a chance to see the show we have at Yet Sea. | ||
| In a word, how would you describe that show? | ||
| Giving totally false impressions that take hours to uncover and display to turn over every rock on this program. | ||
| All right, but you both had a chance to see the show we have at Yet Sea. | ||
| In a word, how would you describe that show? | ||
| Why do you give your word? | ||
| Oh, my word. | ||
| How about Sam? | ||
| All right, bud. | ||
| I would just say totally dishonest. | ||
| Good enough. | ||
| I want to thank you both for both being honest and being here at what must be nearly four o'clock in the morning, just about four o'clock in the morning in New York. | ||
| Thank you, Art. | ||
| Thank you, we appreciate this, Art. | ||
| From the high desert, good night to you. | ||
| Goodbye, Hopkins and John. | ||
| And there it is, we'll preview what's coming up on NOVA, Question Mark, next week. | ||
| I'm Artel. | ||
| There's more. | ||
| It's Friday night, Saturday morning. | ||
| Stay right where you are. | ||
| You can buy it for essentially free for 90 days. | ||
| Call 1-800-40-60-CMS. | ||
| Yeah, you buy it up front, buddy. |
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