Jerry Pournelle, co-author of Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), warns of Earth’s vulnerability to comet strikes like the fictional Hollywood-discovered threat or Tunguska’s 1905 explosion, with impacts delivering 20 megatons annually—rare but devastating enough to kill billions. He criticizes NASA’s bloated budgets and political constraints, proposing a $2B private lunar colony (vs. NASA’s estimates) using Orion nuclear propulsion, dismissed as "feasible but restricted." Pournelle also debates Robert Monroe’s interdimensional claims, the Duluth "heartbeat egg," and Roswell skepticism while deflecting comparisons to Arthur C. Clarke. His survivalist novel’s Cold War-era success contrasts sharply with today’s underfunded space readiness, exposing a gap between visionary science and bureaucratic caution. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good morning from Texas country to the Hawaiian and Tahitian Island chains eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the Pole, and worldwide on the internet.
Something you're going to want to get the calendar for, I'm sure.
And I would not have believed it was possible.
But I did give it a try.
And I am amazed.
Coming up this next Wednesday, May 15th at 1 o'clock in the morning Pacific time, Richard Hoagland in debate with Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
Kind of going to be the radio events of the century.
And I make no predictions about its outcome, none.
But you wanted it, you got it.
Richard Hoagland wanted it, he got it.
And I will tell you a little bit about the genesis of this.
Richard Hoagland, as you know, has been on my show many, many times, and now Dr. Edgar Mitchell with a recent appearance.
And Richard Hoagland has done a lot of work to try and prove, to show that there are large glass structures on the moon.
We've had him on the show many times.
And then we had Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut on.
And he basically said green cheese and bologna in response to Richard's work.
And so earlier in the day today, I called Dr. Mitchell and offered him a debate with Richard Hoagland.
And his initial comments withheld, he said no.
I said, okay, fine, that's kind of what I expected.
And then he said, oh, wait a minute.
Maybe I've been a little hasty.
Let's do it.
So I said, fine, let's do it.
So I suggest you mark that one down on your calendar.
Richard Hoagland and Apollo 14 astronaut, the guy who stood there, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, together for at least some period of time, May 15th at 1 in the morning.
And I want to thank both of them for accepting the opportunity.
And I need not tell you how interesting it's going to be.
Now, this evening at, well, in about 20 minutes, we're going to have a brief guest on the program.
As you know, I'm a science fiction aficionado.
I love it.
One of the first science fiction books I ever read was one of my favorites, remains one of my favorites to this day.
And it's called Lucifer's Hammer.
Well, guess what?
We've got the co-author of Lucifer's Hammer, Dr. Jerry Purnell, as a guest coming up in about 20 minutes here.
And I'm really looking forward to that.
I read Lucifer's Hammer I don't know how many times.
It is one of my favorite topics.
For those of you who have not read it, it is a book about an asteroid and the Earth.
And we'll talk more about that.
And I know Dr. Purnell is working on a new book right now.
We'll talk to him about that as well.
If he's willing to talk about it, we'll see.
So there's a little bit of what's coming up on the show both next Wednesday and this evening.
Otherwise, we will have open lines during the night tonight.
You all know by now about Operation Purple Star, the biggest, actually the biggest war game that has been played most recently with tragic results.
50,000 U.S. and British people involved.
Biggest actually in a decade.
Two helicopters collided.
And there are 14 dead, 14 dead Marines.
As a result, that was at Camp Lejeune, which is where I was born, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
And it's pretty awful.
A CH-46C night helicopter transport collided with an AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter, both great big monsters.
There was, at the time, darkness.
Night vision goggles were in use.
I'm sure many of you have seen some of the coverage of some of the faults thought to be contained when using night vision goggles, the misperceptions.
That may or may not be part of it.
We don't know yet.
IR today's helicopter crash brought back painful memories for me.
81, I was a naval corpsman attached to the Marine Air Wing in Tustin, California.
One evening while I stood watch in the sick bay, the crash phone sounded.
It's like the one today.
Two choppers had collided, gone down.
Seven Marines died in this one.
One survived.
I'll never forget the sight sounds, especially the smells that terrible night.
So there's going to be a lot of investigation.
They're going to try and determine whether military planes and aircraft helicopters are kept in the same kind of condition as civilian.
There's some indication that the military craft Ron Brown was flying was not, safety-wise, anywhere near ready for civilian standards.
Awful tragedy at my birthplace.
The House has passed adoption benefits.
You adopt a child, you get a $5,000 tax credit for families earning up to $75,000, somewhat less for those to won $15,000, $115,000.
Colby's autopsy results are back.
No foul play indicated.
The State Department says the Clinton administration has decided against imposing sanctions on China for the alleged export of nuclear weapons-related technology to Pakistan.
Ooh, isn't that something?
State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns says no sanctions are needed because China has now agreed to make no such sales in the future.
How many of you think we can trust the Chinese?
Raise your hands.
A newly declassified U.S. intelligence document says that Nazi leaders plotted in the waning days of World War II, get this, a post-war return to power in Germany.
Document refers to meetings in 1944 between Nazi leaders and top German industrialists to plan a secret post-war international network to restore the Nazis to power.
Can you believe that?
That sounds just like something out of a science fiction novel.
You know, the Nazis are back, but they almost were.
So it seems what man can imagine more times than not occurs.
Tonight, an hour ago, Reuters.
Is it a bat?
Is it a witch?
Is it from Mars?
We only know this much.
It is furry, has big, bulbous eyes, and sucks the blood of goats and other creatures.
The mysterious vampire-like creature known as Chupacabras has gripped the fevered imaginations of many Mexicans.
Now people here.
While government officials appeal for calm, enterprising trinket sellers have jumped on the bandwagon with chupacabra t-shirts, keyrings, and so forth.
In Tijuana, they're offering tours of sites allegedly linked to the creature.
This is Reuters, I'm reading you about an hour ago.
Some say it is extraterrestrial.
Others say drought in Mexico's northern states has driven bats, wolves, and coyotes to carry out the attacks.
Witnesses say it sucks their blood until they die, leaving telltale puncture marks on the neck and other mutilations.
A one man so far has been attacked in Mexico, two bite marks.
And so the mystery of La Chupacabra continues and certainly, folks, begins to deepen.
This art last night, no, check that.
Art I thought you might like to know, the goatsucker is now in Arizona.
Last night on the news, Channel 3, they reported that El Chupacabra was seen in Tucson, Arizona last week.
A boy woke up to see it in his room.
After he screamed, the creature jumped through the window, breaking it as he did.
Really?
Can you imagine that nightmare?
I mean, when you're little, you jump under the covers frequently enough to avoid imaginary monsters.
How do you like to have a chupacabra show up in your room?
Good lord.
Then this, aren't they at a teaser for the 10 p.m. news here in Los Angeles on Fox, Channel 11?
One of the stories they talked about was about what in the world is killing small animals.
They showed about a half dozen dead rabbits with big holes in their necks.
Is Chupacabra here in L.A.?
And all we have is rumor, the fact that some Mexican cowboy may have killed one, it is claimed.
A powerful concoction of illicit drugs dubbed homicide, dubbed homicide on the street sent 116 of the drug abusers into Philadelphia hospitals.
Philadelphia, I said.
An official with the Philadelphia Department of Health said most of those admitted Thursday night had been released, but several people remained in the hospital.
He said the drug killed five people in Philadelphia in February.
Lewis said the drug was analyzed as a concoction of heroin, cocaine, scopolamine, I guess it is, which is used as a sedative or hypnotic, vitamins, and a cough suppressant.
Health department officials said that for about seven hours Thursday, drug users with overdose symptoms were being rushed to Philadelphia hospitals.
It gives me the heebie-jeebies, folks, to talk about something and then have it come true before my eyes.
You know what we talked about the last few days, and then all of a sudden, boom, here we go.
So, there you've got it.
And again, I want to remind you, because it will be the event of the century, it's going to be interesting.
Look, next Wednesday at 1 o'clock, we're going to have Richard Hoagland and Dr. Edgar Mitchell here.
And it should be something indeed.
I've got another newspaper article here, this time from the Oregonian yesterday, entitled Militias Draw Up Plans for War.
And so it is confirmation of the story that I've been giving you for the last couple of days about what lies directly ahead with regard to the militias, and I'll try and get to that this morning as well.
Howdy art, have you heard about the creation cannibal?
Rodney Hines, a California resident, was recently arrested on charges of stealing and eating the remains of four people.
Heinz explained to police that he believed doing so would enable him to live forever.
Unlike Jeff Dahmer, Hines did not kill the people he ate.
In fact, what he had stolen was cremated ashes.
Heinz ingested the ashes by sprinkling them on regular food, seasoning, I guess, and by snorting them.
After hearing Heinz bragging about his immortality scheme, an acquaintance tipped off the local police.
The authorities in Chico, California had been investigating the disappearance of several urns from a local cemetery, and they made the connection.
Gives a whole new meaning to the idea of having a friend for dinner.
The full story is in our Enigma section in Periscope.
See you in cyberspace.
Indeed, cyberspace.
If you would like to join us in a chat, you may do so.
It'd be a lot of fun.
What you do is go on America Online, right now, click on keyword, no keyword, and enter the word periscope.
That's P-A-R-A-S-C-O-P-E, Periscope.
Then when you get to Periscope, you go to the Grassy Knoll.
Don't you like that name for a chat room?
The Grassy Knoll.
Where I guess you can all lurk.
And I'll probably be in there in a bit.
So AOL, Periscope area, then the Grassy Knoll chat room.
And it's a big gathering every night now, and you'll enjoy some people that listen to this program.
And the comments are ongoing about it in there.
Let me give you the appropriate telephone numbers to call when we get to that.
The first time caller line, for those that never have ventured forth, is Area Code 702-727-1222.
702-727-1222.
The wildcard direct aisle lines, area code 702-727-1295-1295.
West of the Rockies, it's 1-800-618-8255.
1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
1-800-825-5033.
If you're outside the good old US of A, get hold of your AT ⁇ T USA direct operator, or get the USA direct number for your country, and then dial 800-893-0903.
800-893-0903.
Well, okay, when I was a youngster, I say youngster, I was really on the island of Okinawa at the time.
I read Lucifer's Hammer.
It was a book about a collision with Earth of an asteroid.
It's one of the better science fiction books that I've ever written.
It was co-authored by Larry Niven and Dr. Jerry Pornell.
And we're going to have Dr. Pornell here in a few minutes.
And it captivated me.
It originally sparked much of my interest in space and topics of this kind.
It simply riveted me.
And I'm kind of curious what book Dr. Purnell is working on now and what he thinks about all the rather recent close visitations of comets and asteroids and meteorites and all the rest of it.
I mean, there really has been a lot.
The modern version of that might have been Without Warning, which also was, I thought, one of the better television shows I had ever seen.
It was a modern version.
Without warning was the modern version of Lucifer's Hammer.
So we're going to explore all of that here in a moment and talk with Dr. Pornell.
I think you'll find it absolutely fascinating, and I recommend you stay right where you are.
Pass the word, folks.
It'll be Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the man who stood on the moon in Apollo 14, and Richard Hoagland.
When you say this show, I guess you used to be on with Ray Bream at KBC and A. Yes, I guess I used to be on sort of the Insomniac Hour on Friday night for Ticket.
Somebody, in fact, it starts at a Hollywood party.
And an amateur astronomer has just discovered a comet and having a good time telling everybody about its coming, and it's going to come close to the Earth.
Well, as time goes on, it turns out it's going to get a lot closer than they thought.
Indeed, it turns out it's going to get very close, like it's going to hit us, or pieces of it are.
And that's the first half of the book, is that it's coming.
The second half is what happens afterwards, because it makes an unholy mess of things.
Well, that was a big meteor, which, in fact, I guess came closer than the moon's orbit, which is, that would have made a mess, not quite as big a mess as Lucifer's Hammer.
With Lucifer's Hammer, we exercise some storyteller's art in there.
Instead of everything that fried a whole lot of the Earth, or maybe all of it, at once, we broke it into chunks so that there was enough left that you could have a story afterwards.
But most of it burns up in the higher atmosphere, and you don't know about it.
Every now and then, you get something like the Tunguska event of 1905 in Siberia, where a stony asteroid went off with about 10 megatons of force at maybe 10,000 or 11,000 feet.
Fortunately, that happened before we had all these nuclear weapons poised to blow each other up or somebody, which you couldn't have told the difference between the one and the other.
The Russians could easily have thought it would have been an atom bomb, except that it wasn't, of course.
If there was something coming our way, evil comet, asteroid, whatever, do we have the ability, in your opinion, everybody always asks this, to stop it?
If you mean, could we have the ability in the sense that could we do something that would now that would let us be able to do it in the reasonably near future, yes.
But we don't have any strategic.
We don't have any.
It surprises most people in this country that we have no missile defenses, as an example.
If we knew that a missile had been launched from Libya to land in New York City, or the Chinese recently said that if we interfered with their operations in Taiwan, that we really wouldn't want to do that because Los Angeles is more important to us than Taiwan.
And you're in the middle of the official that said that has since disavowed it.
But if we saw a missile launch from China at Los Angeles, all you'd do is run and you'd have about 20 minutes.
If you couldn't shoot it down, we have nothing to shoot it down with.
It would take a couple of years to develop the capabilities to get to space fast, basically.
You know, if you had a crash program and you threw everything at it and you try to do it, who knows?
I am sort of an unofficial advisor to NASA on a lot of things, and I know something about our capabilities.
And if you just went all out for everything, you might get something up there.
What you're trying to do, of course, is to get enough explosive force at the center of gravity of whatever's coming at you to aim it in a slightly different direction.
There was a company Formed to go mine it, thinking that anything that made that big a crater would have to be a lot of very valuable nickel iron down there.
All right, well, what I've heard, Doctor, is that we will not see the one, in all likelihood, that would hit us because it would be coming directly at us, and that would prevent astronomers from getting a good look at it.
What you really need, you know, every 10 million years, approximately, something really big hits.
I'll give you a number that will surprise you.
Your chances of being killed by a large object from space are approximately the same as your chances of being killed in an airplane crash.
Which is to say it's a low probability event for any individual.
But in the case of a large object from space, while it's a very low probability event, the number of people that it was kill is a very high number, if you see what I mean.
Professional astronomers spend most of their time looking with great big telescopes at very far away objects.
There are a few observatories like the Lowell that spend a lot of time looking for smaller objects in the solar system and stuff, but most professional astronomers aren't interested in anything that's under a billion light years away nowadays.
They'd like to, but the trouble is that the administration has interpreted the Strategic Defense Treaty, which was made with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which no longer exists.
I mean, if I've got something that can shoot down things coming at us, then it will obviously do a better job of getting the close ones than it will the ones that are far away, do you see?
Fermi was famous for his little seminar dinners where he would have his graduate students over to dinner and they would discuss things and then he would ask a question at the end of his dinner.
And one night, the question was this.
If you assume that the galaxy consists of 100 billion sun, and 1% of those could have planets, and 1% of those planets could possibly support life, and 1% of the ones that can support life do,
and of those, 1% of those have life that's a million years older than we are, so would be more evolved, you are still talking about billions of planets, you see.
Another one is that I wrote a series called Janus Series, which is being reissued from Vaden Books, by the way.
Isaac Asimov once said that there is no possible explanation for the notion that aliens, beings powerful enough to get here across interstellar distances, if they wanted to remain hidden from us, they could remain hidden from us.
There is no explanation for why we would see them at all if they didn't want us to.
So why haven't they, so if they've got here and they haven't walked up, you know, landed on the White House lawn or in the UN Plaza, then it's because they don't want us to know it, and so there's no reason why you would ever see them.
And I got thinking about that and realized that Isaac was at Boston University and not there for very long.
He was mostly a writer.
He never been around, let's say, out in Pasadena on the night after final exams at Caltech, has he?
So I got to thinking, suppose that the reason that they don't want us to know about him is because they're a bunch of professors of anthropology and they're examining us, right?
Yeah, their graduate students get drunk and put on a show for the locals every now and then.
One thing that I would like you to think about during the break is there was something called the Brookings Report, which I would imagine you're familiar with, that says that the American people are not ready.
They are not ready to accept the fact that there is a greater intelligence or that there would be anybody from elsewhere with a greater intelligence.
I started off when I was in the Korean War, so they'll tell you how old I am as an artilleryman.
And then I used to run the human factors program for Boeing back in the late 50s and early 60s.
And then come to California in 1964 at the Aerospace Corporation and went over from there to North America and part of the Apollo program, that sort of thing.
unidentified
So I did a lot of aerospace operations research work and human factors work, that sort of thing.
And that was the largest amount of money that had ever been paid for a science fiction novel in history.
Fawcett Books bought it from the paperback, right?
And it was 15 weeks as number two on the bestseller list.
And during those same 15 weeks, The Thornbirds was number one on the list.
And then that woman had the nerve to go write the best historical novel I've ever read in my life after she kept me off the bestseller, after being number one on the bestseller list.
We never made number one with Lucifer's hand, but we were number two for 15 weeks.
We got number one with a book called Footfall a few years later.
It does seem to have had some influence in its time.
It was a big survivalist book back in the days when survivalism was when we thought World War III might really happen and people really paid attention to having places on the Rogue River and keeping camping outfits and that kind of thing.
There have been a couple, there are a couple things I want to talk to you about.
One is something that I've noticed doing talk radio over the years, and that is things are quickening socially, economically, politically, almost every way you can imagine, even earth changes, earthquakes, and all the rest of it.
There seems to be more of it all going on, and it seems to be happening faster.
So we're headed, it seems, like towards some sort of change.
You recall the Unabomber and his manifesto, which decried technology and the march of technology and the fact that we're not keeping up with technology and it will eventually ruin civilization.
One of my friends is Wendell Berry, who is a farmer in Kentucky and wrote a wonderful book called Another Turn of the Crank.
Wendell has much of the sentiments that many people have that these huge agro-businesses, there's not very good farming, but I'm not sure what you do about it.
If you try to go back to the old family farm concept, your farm productions will fall fairly rapidly and food prices will either go up or people will start starving or both.
In a sense, we have built ourselves into a box, haven't we?
And one thing I wanted Dr. Purnell to speak on at whatever length he can is the system of propulsion for the ship in Futsal, which was the Oracle nuclear pulse propulsion.
Right.
Yes.
That's a very interesting topic for me because I'm a big advocate of space exploration at any cost.
And I just was wondering if you could discuss that at length or at whatever length you can on the air and also give me a hint as to what happens after footfall because I've always wanted to know.
Yeah, well, our publisher, the late Judy Lynn Del Rey, always wanted us to do a sequel to footfall called Harponet for President, in which the alien runs for president, the captured one, the one that had come over to the Dreamer Fifth herd.
Orion would work.
It was originally put together, the concept was originally put together by Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Studies and Ted Taylor, a nuclear weapons designer.
And you could, with an Orion, put about a 4 million pound package on the moon in one whack.
Just do it.
What is an Orion?
An Orion is basically take a manhole cover, a big one, say in the order of 300, 400 feet across, a big, thick manhole cover, put an atom bomb under it and blow it off.
That sucker will move.
And if you keep throwing bombs underneath it, obviously you have a ship on top of it.
You have a dome.
You have some springs to keep it from shaking everything to death.
But you can have a several million-pound spaceship.
And in footfall, that's what we do.
In order to try to fight the aliens, we essentially build a space-going nuclear-powered battleship.
There is nothing in that concept that wouldn't work.
Like putting a firecracker under a can when you were a kid, and then suppose you could keep throwing firecrackers underneath the can after it was in the air.
It certainly would work, but the best way to get to the moon is the way Buck Rogers did it, or to get space the way Buck Rogers did it, which is to say you take a ship, you fill it up with fuel, you fly it space, you bring it back, you fill it up, you fly it again, like you do an airplane.
Instead of these disintegrating totem poles that we use that basically throw most of the ship away on its way up.
Well, you must understand that as the mission planner for Apollo 21, or one of the mission planners for Apollo 21, you will also remember there was no Apollo 21.
Yes.
Clearly, I had some stake in it continuing.
In fact, that's why I left the aerospace business, is that there weren't any more Apollo missions.
The reason we stopped is because we did it the wrong way.
Basically, well, I'll even tell you a story of what happened when Kennedy proposed that we go to the moon, Art Kantrowitz went and talked to Jerry Wiesner, who was at that time Kennedy's science advisor, and he pointed out that if you really wanted to do it, the way to do it was not to build those huge disintegrating totem poles and do it all in one.
You built basically a space station, and you use the space station to fuel a ship, and you fly the ship from the space station to the moon, it comes back, and you would build the structure up, and you could do it fairly routinely, having done that, right?
And it would be reusable.
Yes.
And Weezer went in to tell Kennedy, and he came back with his head under his arm, basically.
And he said, don't you ever do that to me again.
Because it turns out the hidden agenda for the Apollo program was Lyndon Johnson's price, which was the reindustrialization of the South.
And all of that huge structures built in Florida and in Texas and in Tennessee and meshud in outside New Orleans in Louisiana, and the rest of that was part of the price of the political support of the program by Johnson.
He literally wanted the reindustrialization of the South as part of the as his price for supporting the moon program.
And as a consequence, we went about doing it in a way that built a huge standing army of space people rather than just getting the job done.
And that hidden agenda has eaten the dream ever since because the shuttle was designed to employ 26,000 development scientists rather than to just go to space and come back.
And it does that.
I mean, if you think of the shuttle as the full employment act for a bunch of civil servants, what do you see ahead for us?
Have you seen the flights of this little ship that flies out in the desert that goes straight up and comes straight down again, lands on the tail of fire like God and Robert Heinlein intended?
We've been flying the DCX at White Sands for a long time.
Now, that ship was essentially designed in my living room.
The story is fairly well known that in the last part of the 80s, Dan Quelt, the vice president, was the chairman of the National Space Council.
Clinton abolished the National Space Council, and thus Mr. Gore Does not have that job.
But under Bush, the chairman of the Space Council was the Vice President of the United States.
And General Daniel Graham and an engineer named Max Hunter and I went to the White House and talked Dan Quayle into building this reusable spaceship, this little DCX that you see on television.
And there, by the way, they were flying the A model of it on the 17th of this month.
But a full-fledged single-stage to orbit ship basically puts somewhere between 9,000 and 20,000 pounds in orbit for essentially for the price of the fuel.
Which is to say, unlike the shuttle where the flights are in the order of between half a billion and a billion dollars a flight for 35,000 pounds to orbit.
You're talking about about somewhere between 9 and 19,000 pounds to orbit for a few million dollars, not a billion.
when i asked dr mitchell the same question yeah why we haven't been back he said because the american people don't care i think that's not true but whether they care enough at let me try to try to You have to take it on faith.
I could prove it if you asked the right questions.
But if you were to come to me and say, we want to go to the moon, and you, as the chairman of the Lunar Society, the nonprofit corporation, what would it take to put a colony on the moon?
By colony, I mean, you know, a self-sustaining colony.
People go up there, they live there, they're going to die there, they're going to have kids there.
Yes.
You were to tell me that, I'd say it costs $2 billion if I do it.
You hand me the money, get the heck out of my way.
I'll do some of it in Grenada and places other than the United States simply because of the Occupation Health and Safety Acts and the I don't need to hire crippled astronauts.
I'm sorry to put it that way, but the Americans with Disability Act would require me to have wheelchair access.
Now, if you were to tell the Air Force to do it and you say, but do it black, which is to say you're not hampered by the Armed Services Procurement Regulations, just go to a Skunk Works and get it done.
The Air Force would want about four because their red tape is just, they have more than I do.
Now, we would still have, you understand that we would both be hiring the same people to do the job.
If you were to advertise in Commerce Daily and say, given all of the restrictions, the Air Force wants you to put a lunar colony up, what will you bid?
The difference in cost is dependent on who does it.
As to why it would be a good idea for the United States, I'm not sure it would, that the government ought to do it.
I'm not at all sure.
If we really wanted a lunar colony, by the way, I'd tell you the exact way to do it.
The Congress should just say that we determined that it is in the national interest to have an American colony on the moon, and the first American company that puts 50 Americans on the moon and keeps them there alive and well for two years in a day is to get the sum of a $5 billion tax-free prize, and no other public money shall be spent on this venture.
I think a good reason that extraterrestrials don't land at a place of science or higher learning is because they're probably afraid we'll take them captive, cut them up to see how they work.
I am what you would call a hard science writer, and I spend more time at things like the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings than I do in places that discuss philosophy and metaphysics and occult and that sort of thing.
I know some people who do pay a great deal of attention to that sort of thing, but I am not one of them.
Yes, I rather have always enjoyed the style of science fiction that you do, the good, hard sciences kind of science fiction as opposed to the paranormal aspect, although I look into that as well.
Yeah, and for instance, my friend Tim Powers has this new book out, Expiration Date, in which basically the ghost of Thomas Edison is imprisoned in a vial and is allowed to get loose.
Now, I don't write that sort of thing, but Powers does it splendidly.
You would think that you were reading about Los Angeles until you suddenly realize that there really is a ghost in this story.
Well, there really may be ghosts in this story.
Oh, I don't mean that there might not be.
All I mean is that Powers makes it extremely real.
That isn't the kind of thing I write, but there are people who do what you might call fantasy with rivets, and Powers is certainly one of them.
Do you remember that wonderful old Charles Adams cartoon?
The archaeologists are out in the desert and they're digging around, and there is this one rather overweight lady in shorts, and the two guys in khaki shorts are looking at them and saying, Miss Abrams, we have a very strange request to make of you, and they're looking down at this egg.
I've seen, I think, all of them, Doctor, and there's something even more interesting than that.
About three weeks ago now, somebody sent me a letter and what purports to be debris from Roswell, from the Roswell crash, and I actually have pieces of metal.
Because the speculations I have heard on the Roswell incident, about which I know no more than I've seen the movies, were that possibly there were some new plastics involved, and plastics were not common in 1947.
If it's conductive and a metal and it's very, I mean, that would be very interesting.
Ted Sturgeon used to say that the only thing that would convince him of the existence of flying saucers would be wreckage and bodies, and he'd have to see it himself.
I don't know.
I took the trouble to talk to a couple of the chaps involved in making the special effects for the first Star Wars out of Dykstra's shop just to see what it would cost to make the special effect if you were to do the Roswell autopsy films as a special effect.
And they claimed that with modern techniques, they could do it for a few million dollars.
Now, this is not a small sum.
No, it isn't.
And it couldn't have been done at all 20 years ago.
But of course, you don't know that the film was shot 20 years ago.
You only know that at least some of the film came from a batch that was made in 19, actually 50 years ago.
Well, my impression is I really don't believe it because I don't want to, but I didn't see anything on it that I couldn't explain in terms of it being real, if you understand what I mean.
Sure, I do.
People say, well, why are they wearing radiation suits because it's a biological hazard?
Well, because radiation suits are what would be around at that heavy bomber wing.
And why are the autopsies done so clumsily?
Well, because they're flight surgeons, for God's sake.
They're not professional pathologists that are doing this.
They've got deteriorating corpses and they're flight surgeons, and they're wearing this clumsy equipment because it's the only thing they've got.
And, you know, it's kind of a scary situation.
There isn't anything, in other words, that doesn't ring.
I think it was probably staged, but only because that's the probability, if you understand what I mean.
But I don't see one doggone thing that really says no.
I saw these issues of the skeptical inquirer, but the trouble with the skeptical inquirer is that as far as I can see, there ain't nothing ever happened that wasn't explained.
That DCX ship which you mentioned, is that the one I think must have been on the news, I guess, two or three years ago now, which took up, moved horizontally, and landed.
Well, the next one, well, that one was, you know, like single stage to 1,000 feet.
It didn't go very high.
It was a scale model to demonstrate you could control the ship.
And the tankage was made out of iron.
That ship, they have since taken the iron tanks out and put in aluminum, lithium, oxygen tanks, and carbon hydrogen tanks.
And it should fly like a third of the way to orbit now.
Wow.
It'll go well out of sight.
And, of course, the next demonstration is to fly it two or three times in one day to demonstrate that you turn around, you know, not like the shuttle where it takes weeks to months.
I don't have any trouble getting people to do it, by the way.
We once advertised just to see the Lunar Society has a registry of several hundred people who would actually pay $100,000 each for a one-way ticket to the moon.
If you don't know how to get a hold of me with email, just check it out first, because I never know my schedule, and of course, if I have deadlines, I have deadlines.
That's Dr. Jerry Pornell, and he is the author of Lucifer's Hammer.
And when I tell you that it was the first science fiction book that I read that sort of launched me into the world of science fiction and the continuing everlasting interest that I now have, you can believe it's true.
If you have not read it, though it is out of print right now, you can probably find it in a library, in a secondhand bookstore, scrounge around, talk to your friends, get a copy of it.
It is as good today, as good a read today, as it was when it was brand new on the shelf.
That's all I can say about it.
That's, of course, an incredible man with an incredible...
Lucifer's Hammer, co-authored by Dr. Jerry Pornell, who says he could take us back to the moon.
He could put a colony on the moon for $2 billion, which is by a factor of many times less than it would cost NASA.