Dr. Richard Berendzen, physicist and Harvard collaborator with Carl Sagan, debunks faster-than-light travel claims while emphasizing humanity’s cosmic insignificance despite Earth’s potential to host detectable TV signals like Ricky Lake or Jackie Gleason. He dismisses 90-95% of UAP as natural phenomena, citing SETI’s billion-channel radio scans and the Big Bang’s role in creating stars older than the universe. Stanton Friedman, nuclear physicist and Roswell investigator, presents Brazilian Vargina case evidence—credible witnesses describing recovered non-human bodies with oily skin and large eyes—while critiquing Bob Lazar’s flawed propulsion theories and the dubious Alien Autopsy film. Friedman acknowledges classified magneto-aerodynamic research but insists recent Area 51 sightings stem from Cold War-era military tech, not extraterrestrials. The episode leaves listeners questioning whether humanity’s technological footprint or its own credibility might be the bigger cosmic mystery. [Automatically generated summary]
He has a resume about two pages long, and I'll give you a little idea of what he's all about.
1960 to 2, he was Geophysics Corporation of America staff scientist.
2-4, he was a staff scientist with Ling Temco Vought.
1964, Harvard Project Physics staff writer for them.
Going up, lecture at Harvard.
Acting Chairman, Department of Astronomy at Boston University, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor and Lecturer in Astronomy there at Boston University.
A consultant to the National Academy of Sciences.
There's a lot here.
A consultant to the American Council on Education.
Associate Professor on Leave, Boston University, the American University, president and professor, a NASA headquarters consultant, a professor of physics on leave at the American University, professor of physics again at the American University, and on and on.
He belongs to just about, is a member in and belongs to just about every science organization that we have on Earth, I think.
He specializes in education, in science, communication, astronomy, space science, space exploration, the history of science, demographics and workforce planning, management, and administration.
Very nice resume.
Man is about done it all.
So he is a professor of physics.
He is something of an astronomer, all-around kind of guy on space with a view different than you heard yesterday on the program.
Then at 2 a.m. Pacific time, we've got yet another physics kind of guy, Stanton Friedman, all the way from New Brunswick, about four time zones east of where I am right now.
Stanton just got back from Brazil.
And those of you who have been following the news on the internet about what has occurred in Brazil will know what this is about.
As a matter of fact, Professor John Mack was also there.
And so we will indeed talk with Stanton Friedman at 2 a.m.
So it's going to be a physics-loaded night.
Tomorrow night, Major Dames from SciTech.
So we've got a lot lined up for you, as you can see.
And that is what's coming up on the show this morning.
I want to remind everybody that we have got all of these, well, in fact, the entire scientific report, along with photographs, electron scanning microscope photographs, and graphs of the spectrophydends that I received, purportedly from Roswell.
It is getting increasingly interesting.
It's all up on my webpage.
So if you want to see the science that is being done, the careful, step-by-step science, you're welcome to go take a look.
My webpage is www.artbell.com.
www.artbell.com.
All of that coming up in a moment.
Here we go, everybody.
This should be fascinating.
Coming to us all the way from, well, I'm not sure where he is.
And the people in cities now, particularly those troubled with air problems, and that's a lot of them, don't really know anymore what the real sky is like, do they?
Certainly most of the people on the East Coast don't.
And most Americans in any urban area do not because of light pollution.
We all hear about air pollution, but light pollution is an equal problem.
We do not have our lights oriented properly.
We put out vastly more light than it's needed for safety, security, or just getting around at night.
And so what we're really doing is fogging the sky and depriving ourselves and our children of the opportunity of seeing the wonders of what's really out there.
I remember driving once across West Texas by myself late at night, and I noticed how beautiful the sky was.
I stopped, got out of the car, standing there as the breeze was blowing across around 11 p.m.
And I saw a whitish blur, and I thought, that's a strange-looking cloud.
Then I realized what it was, is the Milky Way.
So like the ancient peoples of thousands of years ago, I stood there in awe and looked up at what we now, of course, know is literally hundreds of billions of unresolved stars.
It makes you wonder what people centuries ago must have thought and wondered and how fascinating it truly was to them.
I bet they wondered the same things that I wonder when I look at that site, and that is, are we ever going to get to one of those stars?
I mean, we don't yet travel faster than light, and presumably unless we're willing to donate generations into space travel, Unless we can do that, we're not going to get there.
The laws of nature, as given to us by Einstein and others, seem, in fact, inviolate.
We simply cannot go faster than the speed of light, and I think the evidence for that's quite compelling.
Now, given the distancies to the nearest stars, even, which are the order of many light-years, if we were to have a rocket that was to travel at, let us say, 90% speed of light, it would require a prodigious amount of energy and yet require a very long time to do it.
So I'm afraid it will be a long, ambitious journey.
But I hope that we can take at least the first steps.
You know, how will the history books, assuming people are still around a thousand years from now, record our century?
Here, for the first time in human history, we stepped off of our planet gently, feebly, to the nearest neighbor, to the moon, and then we retreated back, sort of like a child stepping into the cold ocean and running home again.
It's a curious sort of retreat, and I hope that eventually we'll have the will, stamina, and the money to go back to the moon, this time to stay, and then ultimately go on with robots and finally with human beings to Mars, and I think maybe even before Mars to asteroids.
We went because it was the Cold War, and the United States and the Soviet Union were the only two remaining superpowers following World War II.
And we were clinched in this tight adversarial position in the 50s.
They beat us into space.
We were stunned to find that they had that kind of technical prowess.
We scrambled to catch up.
Didn't seem that we could, and eventually we did.
The leader of the space program in the Soviet Union died, which ironically helped us.
We had von Braun and his crew here, which helped us.
We had the technology, the electronics, the computers, and then it was a political decision on the part of President Kennedy because, after all, he had suffered the embarrassment of the bay of pigs and other problems.
And so, despite all the odds, he said, we're going to go to the moon.
And then, of course, he was assassinated.
And it became almost a national need to fulfill the pledge of the now fallen president.
So we did get there.
And it was one of the landmarks in the history of humankind.
But it was at the same time as the Vietnam War and a host of other problems.
I've got a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer here.
And astronomers report they have discovered a solar system far closer to our sun than any of the previous half-dozen planet discoveries.
Moreover, the new planetary system has features strikingly similar to our own, and it's not apparently that far away, about a little better than eight light years.
What would that mean, assuming we can't break the speed of light, eight light-years?
Well, a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, and 186,000 miles per second.
So it would take us literally eight years, or 8.1 years, if we could manage to go that fast.
And of course, we can't go that fast.
The fastest thing that humankind has ever launched was the Galileo probe, which plunged into the upper atmosphere of the planet Jupiter on December 7th of last year.
It was traveling at about 108,000 miles per hour at the time.
Not because we launched it that fast, but rather because of the gravitational tug of Jupiter.
So we can't get anywhere even remotely close to that kind of speed.
So I'm afraid it's going to be a long trip.
But this discovery, if it turns out in fact to be real, and it needs now to be confirmed, if so, it's really quite impressive and very exciting because the object is astronomically right in our backyard.
It is a star not dissimilar from the sun, and the planetary system might be something similar to our own.
If life had evolved there, surely we should have, by now, heard radio or television or something, eight light years is not that far, and surely our signals are bombarding their system.
In fact, it's one of the sobering realities of our time, that the principal way that intelligence on this planet is known off of the planet is not through the great writings of our religions or of Shakespeare or the science of Einstein or Newton.
Well, with respect to our picking up a signal from out there, we'd have to assume that their life forms began at about the same time ours did, that their star began at about the same time ours did.
Our sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old in a universe that many of us think is of the order of 12 to 15 billion years old.
And so it's a second generation star.
Now, we don't know what generation star that one is out there, and we're not sure of its age, but estimate that it's in the ballpark of the suns.
But we don't know enough about the planets.
If the planets formed at about the same time that ours did, then the question is whether or not our evolutionary rate here on Earth is typical of elsewhere.
And of course, we only have one case study, and that's here on Earth, so we just don't know.
Well, I have been one of the people for a long time who's been saying that in the vastness of our enormous universe, given all the multitudes of astronomical objects that we know about, to assume that we are the only beings that have ever been or could ever be seems to me preposterous.
It's just difficult to imagine.
Now, it is possible, however, that life could have arisen elsewhere and not have become intelligent enough to communicate off of its planet.
There are a number of biologists who point out that out of the billions of species that have come into being on our planet, as far as we know, only one, human beings, are capable of communicating off of the planet.
Chimpanzees and dolphins and whales, many have their own languages, but they can't communicate off the planet.
so if those kind of odds apply elsewhere even if there is life communicating with it might be very difficult do you consider of course we're just extrapolating this Sure.
The only case study we know, as I said, is human beings, and we know our own progress, and we know how we slowly, torturously started in Babylonia and then with the Greeks and went through our long period of silence in the Dark Ages or Middle Ages, and then eventually we rose again, and then finally came to the Industrial Revolution and so on.
Now, whether or not that's the story elsewhere, who's to say?
The first question is whether or not there are viable stars or planets around likely stars.
And increasingly, astronomers are finding that the pieces of the puzzle are coming together.
We know that there are multitudes of stars out in space, not dissimilar from our own sun.
So without being overly chauvinistic about the Earth, if we want to be highly conservative and only look for life sites somewhat similar to our own and assume that the life is forming on a planet, and who's to say?
Maybe it could form in a cloud or elsewhere.
But assuming that it forms on a planet, are there planets out there?
A year ago, no one could have said definitively, but now we can, because at least a half a dozen have been found, and bear in mind the planets are only about one billionth as bright as their stars, so they're terribly hard to see.
By the turn of the century, we're going to find dozens.
Of course, what we don't have yet are enough statistics.
We don't have enough findings to provide real data.
We can't say what the likelihood of a star having a planetary system is.
We just don't know.
But I think within 10 to 20 years, we will know.
I imagine the astronomy books of the year 2010 are going to say roughly 40% or whatever of all stars have planetary systems.
And then we will begin to accumulate data about what those planets might be like.
My guess is that there are multitudes of small planets of the order of the Earth.
The first ones that we've discovered have been the big guys, the big Jupiters, which is just what you'd expect because they're bigger, more massive, they tug in their stars better.
But all the little rubble-like things like Earth, which is terribly important to us, but nonetheless small, will be a harder search.
You either consulted or have been part of the SETI program, haven't you?
Right.
SETI has gone through some evolution with government funding and then no government funding.
What I'm wondering, Doctor, is if there is life out there and there are feeble signals coming from someplace or another, how good are the odds that SETI, as it is presently configured, might find something?
The first question is where to look, which means what candidate stars might you look at.
Next, do those stars have planetary systems?
And we're beginning to give pretty good answers to those questions.
The next question is, is radio the rational mode of communication?
It certainly seems to be to us, because after all, it's part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
It's light itself.
It travels at the maximum possible speed of nature.
It's easy to generate.
It's easy to transmit.
It's easy to receive.
It is not blocked by most of the things out in the universe.
It seems like a uniquely rational mode of transportation.
On the other hand, maybe we are temporally chauvinistic.
Maybe this reflects the fact that we live in this century.
Maybe people a thousand years from now would say, oh, heavens, no one would use radio.
What we use are gamma rays.
But if for a moment we don't jump to that and we stick with radio because we know it works, we know that nature itself emits radio waves, 21 centimeter lines, for example, of hydrogen, where then do we look and how do we look?
Next comes our biggest challenge of all, the tough one.
And this is the one that is almost never mentioned in books or articles, and that is when to look.
And by when, I don't mean whether it's 10 o'clock tonight or 11.30 tomorrow morning.
I mean, should we look in 1996 or should we have looked in the year 1700 or in the year 3000?
Because the universe is so old, so big, and the distances are so great, we have to realize the time spans become enormous.
It could be that the Earth was bathed in loud, clear, unmistakable signals from intelligent beings, even on planets around the star that was just studied, the one that you mentioned.
My guest, Dr. Richard Berenson, he's a physicist, something of an astronomer.
It's been connected with SETI, and we're talking about that, and we'll get back to that in just a moment.
Back now to Dr. Berenson.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
Doctor, I'm a ham radio operator, so I understand a little bit about the radio spectrum.
And the lower frequencies, of course, tend to pretty much bounce off the ionosphere and return to Earth.
That which we're on now, AM radio, does it very well at night.
Short wave frequencies do it.
And not until you get up, oh, I don't know, into at least VHF, can you be assured that it'll pass through the ionosphere and keep going out to space.
Now, the center of my question here is, what are the most likely frequencies to listen to that would arrive, you know, make it across all this space and make it to Earth?
Well, where most of the listening has occurred is close to 21 centimeters, which is about 14, 20 megacycles.
Really?
And the reason for that is that that is where hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, has its own natural signal.
And so the logic is that if nature is sending a signal in that frequency band, wherever beings happen to be elsewhere in the universe, if they knew as much as we knew, they would surely be aware of that particular radiation.
And so it might be sort of a natural beacon throughout the cosmos.
With respect to our atmosphere, we have to be very cautious because an atmosphere elsewhere, an ionosphere elsewhere might be different from ours.
And tune up and down the dial because you don't know exactly where to look.
And the largest, most ambitious undertaking of that sort is now being done at Harvard.
And this was privately funded, not government-funded.
I was the first person to testify before Congress, actually, for government funding of SETI some years ago.
And it was, in fact, provided for a time.
And then, of course, it's provided and then cut and back and forth, depending on the year.
At the present time, it was cut off, as you probably know.
In 1992, it was turned on in a major way in the 500th anniversary of the landing of Columbus in this hemisphere.
But then just a few months later, it was cut off again because of the budget squeeze here in Washington.
Well, I'm a member of the board of the Planetary Society, and as you know, we're a very large space-oriented organization, and through private philanthropy, they provided the money so that a team up at Harvard is running what's called the billion-channel analyzer.
So it is scanning up and down the radio dial, literally looking at a billion different frequency bands.
Years ago, you'd be the perfect person to answer this, really.
There was something called the Brookings Report, and I bet you're familiar with it.
If not, in brief, it simply says, if we were contacted or visited by an intelligence greater than ours, and that information got out, that it would so destroy religious scientific paradigms as to cause anarchy.
People giving up on faiths, all that sort of crazy thing.
First of all, it may or may not be true, and nobody knows, and it's just terribly hard to know because we don't have any case study to compare it with.
And by being more advanced, the beings elsewhere might be one year more advanced or a billion years more advanced.
We would not normally carry on a lively conversation with a flatworm, and yet the extraterrestrials could be that much more advanced than we are.
Or maybe we're more advanced than they are.
If we assume that we're roughly in the same stage of advancement, or maybe they're only 100 years more advanced, would that be utterly traumatizing to us, and would this be something that we should fear?
Or we could consume for dinner, or we could be put in a jar, or we could be put in a zoo.
I mean, there's all kinds of possibilities.
Or maybe we would be considered something benign, and they would be advanced enough to where they would not be so bellicose as we and our earthly tendencies tend to be.
I just don't know.
But with respect to fearing something from elsewhere, one of the things that astronomers, I think, seem to relish a great deal, and I participate in this too, is warning the American people about the potentiality of real doom and disaster.
When the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, for example, plowed into Jupiter a couple of years ago, many of us pointed out that that could, in fact, have occurred here on Earth, and indeed has in past occurred here on Earth.
And that's probably what led to the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
And the evidence for that now, I think, is compelling, including even probably the location of the crater where the largest object hit the Earth, and that's off the Yucatan in Mexico.
Well, the Earth is hit every day, right now, even while we're talking, by small objects, and sometime, probably within the next 10 years or so, we'll be hit by an object large enough to impart as much energy as the Hiroshima bomb.
And we hope, of course, that it's going to hit in the ocean or hit in the desert, not close to your desert, but somewhere else, Sikara, and not here anywhere close to a human being.
The last time was in 1908, and that time it hit in Siberia.
Fortunately, killed no person because it's very sparsely populated, but it did kill thousands of reindeer.
The Earth will be hit by such objects as that.
So I point it out only because astronomers point out these kind of potential problems all the time.
And I think rather than fear it, it'd be something that we would want to explore.
If Shoemaker-Levy 9, its multitude of pieces, had plowed into the Earth, there would have been no doubt land and sea strikes, mostly sea, because we have mostly sea.
What would the effect of Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Earth have been?
You know, it's really quite interesting about that because we didn't know as early as one day prior to the first impact what it would be.
I happened to have been on a national radio broadcast that day, and one of the callers suggested that there'd be no impact at all, that it was really like a loose ball of gravel and it would just simply disintegrate in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter.
And I said, well, you may be right or you may be wrong.
I don't know.
Let's see how compacted this object is.
It turned out that that was a fairly small comet that brought enormous damage to Jupiter.
Many of the impact sites were larger than planet Earth.
Many of them imparted more energy than the total nuclear arsenals of Earth combined.
Now, if that had hit the Earth, what would have happened?
The first thing that would have happened is acid rain.
We know what happens if a large object passes at very fast speeds through the Earth's upper atmosphere.
It causes acid rain.
So the poor dinosaurs, for example, we think were hit by an object about six miles in diameter.
Probably first it would be as if huge amounts of battery acid were dumped on your head.
And then would have come the fires.
And the fires would have been unlike anything that we would have known since.
They would have burned not only the trees and the grass, but they would have been superheated, similar to what happened in World War II and the firebombing, for example, in Germany, in which case almost the air itself catches on fire.
And then the winds would have picked that up and spread the smoke, which would have then dropped the temperature, broken the food chain, and the poor dinosaurs would have hit it in many different ways.
To say nothing of the tidal waves, when the chunks hit the water, the tidal waves could have been far taller than the World Trade Center rushing inland at it several hundred miles per hour.
And if you consider the weight of water, that would have been one heck of a mess.
Would any?
We could have had that happen if Shoemaker Levy 9 had hit us.
However, we know that when the dinosaurs were hit, if our theories on that are right, and I really think the evidence is pretty strong on it, roughly half of the species on Earth were killed.
So then what about those who theorize, and there are many now doing it, that man has been here not just this time, but previous times, and that Earth is very old indeed, and that man may have come and gone, or some version of man, any number of times.
And I have not seen evidence that's compelling in that.
I don't presume to be an expert in anthropology or archaeology, but I certainly read about those subjects, and I teach history of science.
And the story that I think that we generally present is certainly a very beautiful one, and it seems to me to have good documentation, that the universe began about 12 to 15 billion years ago.
Our sun is probably a second, maybe a third generation star, so that some of the elements in the sun and in the earth, and indeed in our own bodies, were made in the interior of stars now long dead.
We could not be alive except for the fact that another star died, and today we are made of its material.
The director of the Harvard Observatory once said, we're brothers of the boulders and cousins of the clouds.
Indeed, we are.
As for the origin and evolution of civilization, we think we're getting closer and closer to that.
It appears that given the atmosphere and the early conditions of planet Earth, when acted upon by radiation from the sun and volcanism and radioactive decay and electrical discharge in the atmosphere, we think probably you could have formed the pre-biological molecules necessary in the oceans to have led to the life.
Is that miraculous or is it not?
Well, I think it's pretty extraordinary.
If you want to call it a miracle, that's no quarrel with me.
In any case, it would have come about and, as far as I know, have arisen only once.
I think the answer of the modern cosmologist is that there was no time before the Big Bang.
You know, intuition tells you that time has existed forever, that it's infinite and it had no beginning.
But stop and consider that.
Challenge that assumption for a moment.
There are only two possibilities.
Either time is infinite or it had a beginning.
And if it's infinite, that in itself is quite a jolting commentary.
Can you think of anything else that's infinite?
Probably not.
What we are beginning to conclude in cosmology today is that the Big Bang was literally the beginning of everything.
And what we therefore have to do is divorce ourselves from what we're naturally inclined to do.
And that is to make a human-like analogy.
And what we're inclined to think of is a huge room, like a giant auditorium, and in that auditorium there is an enormous blast, like a huge dynamite cap going off, in which case you can logically ask what happened a second before the explosion.
If, however, the modern cosmologist is right, there was no space and there was no time before that explosion, why would there be no time?
Because Einstein taught us that space and time are indelibly linked together.
If there was no space, there was no time.
Was there any space?
Did the explosion then throw material out into space?
No.
What we think is that the Big Bang brought forth space and time together, and what has been expanding ever since has been both.
So time has been continuing, and space has been expanding.
Well, if you ask me now, as an individual, as a person, I happen to think that the laws of nature are so beautiful, so exquisite, they work so magnificently, and I've seen the images of the distant objects and how beautiful they are.
And this is illustrating what to some non-scientists appears to be a real problem in astronomy, and there's therefore something wrong.
I look at it the other way around.
I see it as a real opportunity for astronomy and physics.
In fact, I think it's just terribly exciting.
Whenever you come to this kind of strange paradox, what it usually suggests in the history of science is that you're on the verge of a major breakthrough.
When you find stars that are older than the universe, obviously there's something wrong.
Either we don't have the right age for the universe, we don't have the right age for stars, or both.
Well, the redshift implies that the universe is getting larger.
It doesn't necessarily imply that there was a Big Bang.
I mean, Fred Hoyle over in England, for example, proposed way back in the 40s that there was a steady-state model, that the universe has been around forever and that matter is continuously coming into being.
And they were trying to think of not only a special place in the cosmos, and you know, since the days of the ancient Babylonians, we've been struggling to find that we here on Earth are not at the center of the solar system, our solar system is not at the center of the galaxy, our galaxy is not at the center of the universe.
There does not appear to be a privileged place.
And so they're arguing there's not a privileged time either.
But a couple of problems.
Quasars, these astoundingly bright, remarkable objects, are all far away.
It is not as if, and therefore very far out in time.
It's not as if you can find them nearby and therefore close to us in time.
And even worse for the steady state theory was the discovery of the 3K background radiation made at the Bell Telephone Labs many years ago, which led to two Nobel Prizes when they interpreted it.
We have now heard the radiation.
We can hear the hiss even today of the explosion that began the universe.
Yeah, if you imagine an explosion of almost unimaginable intensity 15 billion years ago, the universe expands, the radiation, the energy that that explosion led to is still in the universe, but the universe is now vastly larger.
Then the amount of energy per cubic centimeter would necessarily be lower.
The temperature is lower, and it is three Kelvin, three degrees Kelvin, actually about 2.8.
And that's exactly what your radio telescope picks up.
From the great American Southwest, I bid you good morning.
I'm Art Bell.
My guest is a brilliant man, Dr. Richard Berenson, and his credentials are 10 miles long.
I know some of you are just joining us at this hour.
So good morning.
You're in for a real treat.
Dr. Berenson has consulted with the SETI program.
He has been a professor of physics with the American University, consulted with NASA, an associate professor on leave from Boston University.
And I could go on and on and on about every award, just about every professional accolade ever given to somebody in his field, has worked with Dr. Carl Segen.
We're going to ask him about that as well in a moment.
And I have pulled from him one more hour.
I want to remind you that at 2 a.m. following this segment, we're going to be talking to another physicist way far away, Stan Friedman in New Brunswick.
And he's got a real shocker for you about what he just found, what they just found in South America, in Brazil.
What people like to do is to point out things which are rather vaguely stated and then try to interpret it after the fact and say this is what it was referring to and pick any event at any time and you can make some sort of a claim.
You don't have to be an Ostradamus to do that.
I can make vague enough statements and sometime within the next 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, there's going to be something that's sort of going to seem like it.
I know there have been a number of investigations by prestigious universities that have tried to and have noted some magnetic anomalies and lower temperatures, all that sort of thing, but not enough for scientific repeatability.
The famous British scientist Stephen Hawking has done extensive work on that, and your listeners might like to read some of Hawking's material, although it's not easy reading.
And there's a fellow at Caltech by the name of Kip Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E, who's probably the top authority in this country on black holes, and he's written extensively on this as well.
What they suggest is that the black hole once formed can continue to suck in mass.
Will it become larger?
Yes, it can become larger, but most importantly, it becomes more massive.
For example, at the center of our own galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy, which consists of some 300 billion stars, and this is the band of light that we were talking about earlier, we are really quite convinced there is a very massive black hole that could have a mass perhaps a million times that of the sun.
Remote quasars, these incredibly bright, distant, rapidly moving objects that we've seen out in the universe, may be devouring the mass of the Earth something like every five seconds.
If we understand it right, it is simply collapsing essentially out of the cosmos.
Imagine taking an object which is perhaps 200 times the diameter of the Earth, millions of times the mass of the Earth, compressing it to the volume of the Sun, the volume of the Earth, the volume of the Moon, the volume of a city, the volume of a block, the volume of your house, the volume of your room, the volume of your hand, the volume of a dot, gone.
Well, that's very hard for us to accept or to imagine.
And it gets a little more complex than that because the clock inside of that black hole is not running at the same rate that our clock is running because of the general relativity that I was mentioning earlier on.
But in essence, that's what's happening.
Now, what happens is that once you reach this threshold where we can no longer see it, in my personal view, the laws of physics as we understand them break down.
And I have many colleagues who go on writing equations and speculating about what's going on inside, and that's fine, and I'm glad they do that.
But from my point of view, our laws of nature as we understand them no longer apply, and I'm more inclined just to say I don't know.
Yeah, I'm a Vanderbilt student, and we were talking about something in physics class, a physics class I took a couple semesters ago, about paired photons that I didn't really understand it.
I was hoping your guest could give me a little better understanding of it.
It sounded really fascinating.
If you split a beam of light, you get two photons that are paired, one's up and one's down.
And if you flip one, the other one flips instantaneously, faster than the speed of light.
He has a wonderful ability to explain science in a very understandable and engaging way.
And then I was a professor and head of the astronomy department at Boston University for a time, and Isaac Asimov was on the faculty at BU in the biology and medical school, and Isaac and I used to give a number of lectures together.
And so a few times we invited Sagan to join us.
And now that was an interesting experience.
I couldn't get a word wedged in there, but we would try.
If we are being watched, and there is always that possibility that we are being observed by some group, I think if I were up there observing and looking at the social structure down here presently, I wouldn't land.
The first one is about whether interstellar space travel is even possible no matter what the technology is.
When you consider the fact that our galaxy alone is 1,000 light years across, you've got the Great Andromeda Galaxy that's 2 million light years from ours.
Well, when you look at those types of distances, even traveling at the speed of light, is it reasonable that you can have that, you can achieve that?
And also, concerning the planet Mars, there are some scientists that believe that there were great rivers on that planet, even a couple of large oceans on the planet Mars.
I'd like to know if you believe that, and if that were true, what do you think happened to get rid of those rivers and oceans?
Well, first, with respect to the travel, we talked about that earlier.
You might not have heard that discussion, though.
But our galaxy, in fact, is not 1,000 light-years across.
It's 100,000 light-years across.
Some people suggest 120,000.
So it's really big.
And indeed, we cannot go faster than the speed of light, and even to approach it is quite a ponderous feat.
So travel among the stars will not be so far as we know the way that it's done in Star Trek where they conveniently go to warp speed.
What we would assume is first we will explore our own solar system, but eventually we will send robotic craft.
In fact, four American-made craft have already left our solar system, as you know, and are traveling now out among the stars, or they will be within a few years as they move further out.
You can imagine situations where you actually have human beings aboard spacecraft moving at extraordinarily fast speeds, perhaps using cryogenics, freezing them, keeping them frozen in some sort of state to extend their life expectancy.
Who knows?
Or maybe you have whole generations of people who never live back here on Earth, but are born in the spacecraft.
They go through their lives.
They have their children.
They die.
Their children continue.
Or maybe you build outposts, and it's not a matter of something where you take a trip like flying to Chicago and back, but this is something which is generational in occurring because it is truly that epic-making in scope, so that it involves literally thousands of years of outward expansion and travel.
With respect to your second issue about Mars, yes, there's a great deal of evidence that Mars used to have flowing water.
The images which came back from the Viking spacecraft taken in 1976, which was the United States bicentennial, so we sent two spacecraft to land there, and also two orbiters, really provided, I think, very strong evidence that there used to be heavy flooding on Mars.
And later this year, there will be three robots sent to Mars, three robotic missions, two American, one Russian.
And one of these will involve the first rover ever to land on a planet.
It's a cute little thing, about the size of a microwave.
It has six wheels and a very charming name, I think.
We had a contest nationwide to have somebody come up with the name.
And a young woman who is 11, I think, in Rhode Island submitted the winning name.
And she suggested naming it after the black slave woman in the Civil War in the South who changed her name and wandered around the South giving lectures about the evil of slavery.
And she had changed her name to Sojourner Truth.
And so this first robotic rover on another planet will be named Sojourner.
And one of the things it'll do will be to drill down about a meter or two and see an answer to the question if the water may be in a permanently frozen state there.
There are a number of us who think that there could be a permafrost layer down under the visible surface of Mars.
Now, if that's the case, that's really quite exciting.
Because even though Mars is quite a ways from the Sun, about 50% further out than the Earth is, and it's therefore rather chilly, about the same as Antarctica here on Earth, realize that life is teeming in Antarctica.
And I'm not just talking about the penguins and so on, but there's microbial life forms in abundance there.
So you could imagine that a meter or so down underneath the Martian soil, nobody's expecting and finding a little Martian being walking around, but you could have at least primitive prebiotic Martian chemistry going on, and that in itself would be very exciting.
Venus, our so-called sister planet, is just about the same mass, about the same radius as the Earth, and it's just a bit closer to the sun than the Earth.
But that's where the similarities change.
Venus is shrouded in a cloud cover so thick that we can't see through it invisible light to its surface, and that's why it's called Venus, because to our eye it's this soft, beautiful object glowing in the evening sky.
We think that what happened was that in the early days of Venus, there was a volcanism, and the volcanoes blew out carbon dioxide, they blew out nitrogen, they blew out water, and many other things.
And that's what volcanoes typically do.
The water, however, because Venus is close to the sun, broke apart.
And the little hydrogen atoms, the lightest elements of all, were moving around so fast that they simply escaped from Venus.
And once a planet has lost its water, you can't get it back.
It's gone.
So the hydrogen is gone.
You're left with the oxygen, which can combine with the carbon into the carbonate rocks or to make carbon dioxide atmosphere.
And that's how it got this thick, smoggy carbon dioxide atmosphere, which then trapped the radiation under it, the famous greenhouse effect, which heated up the surface even more, pumped out even more of the gasses, which led to even more carbon dioxide.
It was a runaway greenhouse effect.
And that is certainly not a direction we want our own planet to go.
My friends who are liberal in orientation will argue impassionately that we're endangering the planet and that we could have a significant greenhouse effect enough to where the Earth's overall average temperature might rise 2, 3, 4,
5 degrees in the next century, which may sound trivial, but that amount of temperature increase would begin to melt the giant glaciers and ice flows up in Greenland, which in turn would raise the water table enough to where you would have flooding along the coastal regions of the United States.
It would be very severe indeed.
My conservative friends and colleagues claim that the industrialization is not that bad and that in fact volcanoes and other things pump out these materials all the time.
I really think that the evidence is pretty compelling that since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have been pumping out these greenhouse gases, and I think the automobiles and the factories are today.
I'm not an alarmist.
I'm not suggesting that we stop industrialization for heaven's sakes.
I don't want to turn us into a third world nation.
But I do think we have to be cautious, and we have to really try to restrain in doing that.
Well, you know, this is one of the outcomes of chaos theory, and we are beginning to get more refined on being able to predict these kind of seemingly unpredictable phenomena.
I don't think the listeners, though, in the Midwest should panic about this.
I really think an alarmist sound here would be unwarranted.
I think what it suggests is that meteorology and very careful study of this is warranted, and I hope the federal government will do that.
What we have known in geological times in the past is that regions have changed dramatically.
Where there have been no deserts, deserts have formed.
We can find very compelling evidence that regions of the world today, where you would never think there would have ever been a desert, there used to be deserts.
The world has changed dramatically.
What we don't know is the time scale exactly in which it changes or how gentle a nudge can lead to this kind of change.
I would tend to doubt that there would be a higher form of life in the sense of higher than us or anything even remotely approaching us.
What would be possible would have been in theory that there might have been very elementary primitive microbial life forms.
If there was ever the conditions that it would have been warm enough, and by the way, it's pretty chilly there, and you would have had water, it would have been several billion years ago.
But then the weather changed and it would have frozen.
And so then you could reasonably wonder what happened with the water and what about the outflow channels.
We think that there were volcanic eruptions, perhaps, which heated things up, melted the water.
That allowed these outflow channels, which we can now detect, and you can see where the water flowed.
It then re-froze.
And Mars, as far as we can tell, has been in a permanently frozen state for a very long time.
And we think that the water that used to be there is still there, but it's just down under the surface.
Would it be possible, assuming that we could find a planet that would lend itself toward this possibility, to, in effect, take a sterile but workable planet sort of and mold it, terraform it, if you will, into something that would be friendly to human beings?
And of course, they were the first to Venus, and we were the first to Mars.
But we don't own any of those things.
With respect to terraforming, I suspect a modified, general form of that definitely will occur.
I was asked by NASA headquarters a few years ago to come in and work on space plans for the United States off into the 21st century, and I can tell you we have in the files detailed plans of how to build space colonies on Mars, on asteroids, on the moon and elsewhere, and how to use indigenous material.
You know, the main cost is getting the material there, just the weight of lifting it and transporting it.
And one of the things that you desperately need, of course, is water.
We consume huge amounts of water, and water weighs 64 pounds per cubic foot.
So that's an awful lot of weight to lift there.
On the other hand, if we can extract hydrogen and we can extract oxygen out of the lunar regolith, out of the lunar soil, we could combine the two and make our own water out of the lunar material.
So that I think we will do.
And I think we will build encased capsules which will produce our own atmosphere so that the astronauts can walk around without wearing spacesuits.
That is a modified form of terraforming.
In terms of rebuilding the whole place to somehow look like Earth, I don't know.
Yeah, Doctor, you just hit just about on the question I was going to ask.
Why don't we take, when we know some of these asteroids and these comets are coming by in our proximity, why don't we hitch a ride on these asteroids or comets with a beeping device or some type of sensor device that can send back data to the United States, to the world, to us here, on their travels?
And one of the things which is on the drawing board to do early in the next century is to send a craft, think about this, it's really the stuff of romance, to fly alongside a comet.
A comet, as you know, is this iceberg which is in orbit around the sun.
And as it approaches the sun, it begins to defrost and forms this long filamentary tail, which can stretch tens of millions of miles.
Well, we flew through Halley's Comet in 1986, or rather the Europeans did.
But this would give us a case, a chance actually to fly it along with it throughout its entire course.
We have just not yet studied very well these near-Earth-passing objects, and we really should because it's a terrific opportunity, and they could be life-threatening as well as life-giving.
Some of the organic material in your body came from comets that fell on Earth.
And the next time you get a drink of water, ask yourself, where did the water come from?
And you say, well, it came from the reservoir.
Yeah, and where did it come from?
Well, it came from the rain.
And where did it come from?
Well, it came from volcanoes that blew it out of the center of the Earth.
Much of it, in fact, came from comets falling on Earth.
unidentified
Like the comet that they just found, they didn't know where it came from, or comets that we know come by every 2,000 years or so.
Why not hitch a ride on one of those because they go so far out into the solar system and the data and stuff like that that it could retrieve while traveling and send back that data to Earth?
In other words, hitch a ride along on a long-period comet.
I think one of our problems on that, though, Jerry, is just the orbital mechanics of achieving it.
You have such a very short lead time.
You don't know when those long-period comets are going to come.
You have absolutely zero warning.
You don't know that it's going to come two years and three days from now.
The shorter period guys are all tabulated in books, and we really know their orbits really quite well.
And in order for us to send a probe so that it could go into the right kind of trajectory and latch onto it or travel with it, we'd really have to plan that many, many months in advance.
And for example, the comet that came by just a few months ago, we had a lead time of all of about a month or so.
And moreover, you know, this is a very bizarre comet.
Its chemistry is now suggesting to us that either it's of a class of comets that we know virtually nothing about, or even more interesting, it's maybe not a part of our solar system.
Maybe this is a comet that got captured by our solar system and was not originally a part of our own.
Well, that's certainly been an interesting hypothesis.
It's one that Stephen Hawking in England has written about.
It would require extraordinary conditions, and the only time we know of that those kind of extraordinary conditions to have caused such a thing would have been during the Big Bang itself.
And so Hawking has done the computations, and others have too, which has suggested that given the exceptional blast of radiation that we think occurred then, in theory there could be very miniature black holes, which would be tiny things, not the mass of a star, but much, much smaller.
So far, none have been found, but they're fascinating to think about because they could be anywhere.
They could be floating right through our own Earth.
And talking about what happens if you were to hit one, if you were to take a piece of a neutron star the size of your fist and suspend it over the earth and break the suspension, then it would rush towards the center of the earth.
It would just keep plunging through the earth because its density would be so much greater than that of the earth.
It would move with the same freedom that your hand moves through the air right in your room.
It would go right through the center of the earth, rush all the way to the far side of the earth, say to China, turn around and bounce back because of the gravitational tug, be like a big yo-yo going up and down.
Yeah, and its rate of spin depends upon the object, its mass, and so on.
But they spin exceedingly fast.
They might be of the order of turning around its axis once a second or maybe even 100 times a second.
So you have to imagine an object which is initially 10 times perhaps the mass of the sun now collapsing down to such a small, compact, rapidly rotating object that it can spin around 100 times a second.
Well, our theory is that as it compresses down, it squeezes its magnetic field so that it spurts out, as it were, at both the north and south pole, and it's what we call the lighthouse effect, as this thing wobbles around in the same way that you see a lighthouse beam only when it sweeps by you, and you don't see it all the rest of the time.
You would see this pulsar only when its beam sweeps by you, and then a second later, by it goes again.
Well, first of all, we have to define what we mean by the size of the comet.
A comet has a nucleus, which is this frozen sort of dirty iceberg, and that's what you're referring to.
And being typically of the order of a few miles in diameter, it's about the size of a good-sized comet.
Once the comet starts approaching the sun, though, it begins to defrost, and it forms a coma, and that coma becomes substantially larger, and then it forms the long filamentary tail, which, of course, is the most dramatic part.
So far as we can tell, Hellbop is intrinsically a bigger comet than Hayatake was.
And given the amount of activity that it's already showing, this thing could be really quite dramatic.
And it's not just a matter of seeing an impressive sight in the sky.
Realize you're seeing an old ancestor coming back to visit us.
It is the very stuff of which we ourselves are made.
And more than half of the cells in our body, after all, is composed of water.
And that water, in part, is a comet.
So you're drinking a comet.
We're made of this stuff.
And comets back in the formative days of the Earth, 4.5 billion years ago, pounded into this planet.
We're really quite convinced of that.
And some of those comets brought with them organic molecules.
And we ourselves, in part, are made not only of the water, but probably even of the organic stuff itself.
Every time the comet goes around the sun, you know, it's using up some of its material, so it has a finite lifetime.
Halley's comet has been recorded back for many centuries, but it eventually will die because it'll just use itself up.
As for breaking off, there have been a few cases of comets going around the sun being tidally disrupted, breaking apart, and ending up as two comets as they come around the other side.
There have also been some comets that have actually collided with the sun.
They've been going in an orbit which would swing them around, but then they get perturbed by something, by a planet or something, which moves them into a slightly peculiar orbit, and they never make it around.
Dr. Richard Berenson, and I just know you've enjoyed that.
What a wonderful, wonderful three hours of Don't Touch That Dial because we have another physicist, an atomic physicist coming on next.
He's Stanton Friedman, and he has some shocking news for you from Brazil.
He's just back.
That's coming up right after the top of the hour.
A full scientific report on what are affectionately being called Arts Parts, along with electron scanning microscope photographs and the spectrophy charts, all up on my website right now.
Be sure to take a look and comment for us.
It is www.artbell.com on the World Wide Web.
www.artbell.com.
We'll pause here at the top of the hour.
And a big piece of important information upcoming.
Stay right there.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
And in just a moment, we will travel across four time zones from where I am to Fredericton, New Brunswick in Canada, and a nuclear physicist named Stanton Friedman.
And he has got some really, really interesting information for you, and I'm going to let it unfold on Naturale in a moment.
Bachelor's and Master's degrees in physics in the University of Chicago.
Carl Sagan and I were classmates for three years, even though we're on opposite sides of the UFO fence.
Then I've had a sort of weird career, 14 years in industry working only on eventually canceled, very advanced, highly classified nuclear and space system development programs.
Things like nuclear airplanes, fission and fusion rockets, nuclear power plants for space, little companies like General Electric, Westinghouse, General Motors, TRW Systems, Aerojet General.
I was an itinerant physicist, as it turned out.
I didn't intend to be, but that's what happened.
I got interested in flying saucers in 1958, a long time ago, just by reading a book and then reading a bunch more books.
And I'm a little slow.
I gave my first lecture in 1967.
I found I enjoyed it.
The public liked it.
Much more important to me, the professional groups to which I spoke, engineering societies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, sections of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, that sort of group, responded so well that when the bottom fell out of the nuclear and space system business in 1970, I went full-time as a speaker.
I continued that until 1982, that I did a lot of nuclear consulting and stuff.
And I kept up the lecturing, the writing, the investigating, even got what you believe, research grants for UFO investigation, which were pretty rare back then.
Top secret slash magic, M-A-J-I-C, about the infamous Majestic 12 documents.
I've been to 15 archives.
I get around.
Because I worked on classified programs.
I know something about security.
And it reviews the evidence, including some new documents never previously published about MJ-12, Majestic 12, and makes a strong case, I hope, only time will tell, I suppose,
that some of the MJ-12 documents are legitimate and therefore the most important ones ever leaked to the American public because they state unequivocally that in 1947 a crash flying saucer was recovered with bodies and that a group was appointed, Majestic 12, accountable only to the President of the United States.
And the question, of course, is whether the documents are genuine.
And there are a lot of armchair theorists out there who think they don't need to go to an archive.
They can write letters and both documents are obviously fraud, they say.
I think I make the case in the book that they're not obvious frauds and that some are genuine.
And it's been an exciting time with regard to MJ-12 and Roswell and that crazy big fuss about the autopsy footage, supposed autopsy footage.
Yes.
And I have to say this.
One of the highlights of the past year, besides finishing the book and a CD-ROM UFO's The Real Story, and frankly, I'm incredulous as to how much information you can put on a CD-ROM.
But I actually was involved in a debate at the historic Oxford University Debating Society last October, the very same place where O.J. Simpson appeared months later.
Well, yeah, it was kind of strange to watch him on television in front of that because it's an old building, you know, and the audience is right on top of the speakers.
I mean, there's no stage or anything, you know, you're just standing there.
But you'll be pleased, or I don't know if you'll be pleased, somebody will be pleased to hear that the topic for debate and the students involved, the men wore tuxes and the women wore gowns, I was incredulous, was this house believes that intelligent alien life has visited planet Earth.
And several of the students were speakers who knew absolutely nothing about the subject, but were very clever in their speaking.
Oxford prepares politicians for future life, you know.
And I was the anchor man.
The man before me on my side was a solicitor who has worked with a lot of abductees.
I did 40 interviews during that two-week period, radio, television, newspapers, whatever.
There was a publicist going crazy arranging all these things all over England.
And I found that 98% of the English journalists knew nothing about the subject.
Many of my audiences, none of them had read any of the five large-scale scientific studies that I discussed.
So even though there are some fine English ufologists, this was by and large a country which hasn't heard about the science side of things.
So to get 60% under those circumstances of, man, I'm pretty good audience, Oxford University, was very pleasing to my partner and I. Why do you think they're so generally uninformed on the subject there?
There is very much an attitude on the part of what I call the ancient academics, the fossilized physicists of the country, the journalists, that there's nothing to this subject and very few scientists over there have spoken out at all.
And so it's a tabloid side, and that's what they see.
If you look at the Gallup polls for the last 30 years in this country, and forget about the people who say, I don't know what's going on, 60% of the rest say, indeed, that flying saucers are real, and the greater the education, the more likely to say so.
You know, sort of a strange way of putting things.
But there has, in comparison with any other case, It's probably been more attention paid, more witnesses found, clearer indication of government cover-up.
And what people tend to forget, I mean, this is, you know, 1996, I think.
We're talking a long time ago, so of course a number of the major witnesses have died.
You can't help that.
But when I hear people attack some of the witnesses, just the UFO nut and things like that, I get angry.
I was the first to talk to many of the key witnesses, and remembering that the 509th, the military group involved at Roswell, Roswell Army Airfield at the time, was unique.
It was the only atomic bombing group in the world.
There were hand-picked officers, hand-picked men, high security.
A key witness, for example, was at that time Colonel Thomas Jefferson DuBose.
He was at the 8th Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas.
The 509th reported to the 8th Air Force.
8th Air Force was part of the Strategic Air Command.
A nice clear chain here.
DuBose was the chief of staff to General Roger Ramey, head of the 8th Air Force, under which was the 509th.
Now, DuBose, not only a West Point grad, 18,000 hours as a pilot, he set up the Air Force's search and rescue team.
I spent time with him at his home before he died.
When he tells you that he got a call from the acting head of the Strategic Air Command telling him on July 8th, 1947, to cover up this story, to send some of that wreckage up here when it gets there with one of your Colonel couriers, and never to talk about it again.
That's an order.
Do I need to put it in writing?
And DuBose says, no, sir.
Well, when a couple-star general tells a colonel what to do, he does it.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there are outstanding people involved, and even Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer for the 509th.
Now, there have been four different television programs.
They all portrayed the wrong notion of how his story came to light, making him sound like an angry old man who wanted to vindicate himself because he was treated badly in 47.
And a couple comes up to me after a full house lecture and says, ever hear anything about a crash-flying saucer in New Mexico?
Well, yeah, I've heard stories.
Tell me more.
They tell me about a friend of theirs who worked for the government, mind you, the Soil Conservation Service, another outstanding individual, in Socorro, New Mexico.
And he had told them about coming across a down-flying saucer with bodies next to it.
I got that information, passed it on to Bill Moore, with whom I had worked very hard on the research that led to the first book, The Roswell Incident, first book about Roswell, 1980, mind you.
And Bill had a story from an English actor, actually a Canadian, but he lives in England.
He's still alive.
I talked to him a couple months ago.
Ewey Green.
He on the radio heard stories about a crash-flying saucer while heading toward Philadelphia from Los Angeles.
When he got to Philadelphia, nothing.
He could pin down the date.
End of June, early July, 1947.
Bill went to the University of Minnesota Library, started going through all the newspapers, and there was the story.
And a lot of people think, because the article has been seen so many times on television, that the story only appeared in the Roswell Daily Record, hardly one of the world's great newspapers.
Matter of fact, probably the best newspaper in Roswell today because it's the only one.
But anyway, it appeared in the Chicago Daily News.
In the Los Angeles Herald Express, full-width headline, Army finds flying saucer.
It was all over the place in evening papers.
And I stressed the evening because of the timing of the press release.
July 8th, 1947.
The cover story went out five hours later from Fort Worth, Texas for General Raimi.
Next day's papers said Raimi empties Roswell's saucer.
And that was the end until I got involved more than 30 years later.
So Major Marcel never sought attention.
He talked to people who contacted him.
I gave his name and number to several media people, did some television interviews, all that sort of thing.
But he did not seek attention.
And a noisy negativist in England said, Major Marcel sold his story to the National Enquirer, which is hardwash.
There was an article in the Enquirer, 1980, after Bill Moore and I had talked to over 60 people.
The Air Force, the villain in the piece, if you will, which has been playing hardball about Roswell the last couple years after totally ignoring it for 40-some years, tells us that the story came to light when a tabloid, the National Enquirer, carried an article saying that Major Marcel was claiming that he recovered wreckage of a flying saucer in 1947.
Also in 1978, a UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman, they can't say nuclear physicist, you see.
That would spoil the story.
Yes.
Began looking for other witnesses after meeting with Major Marcel.
Well, the Enquirer article was two years after the story began.
We'd already talked to 60 witnesses.
I don't get my research ideas from tabloids.
But you see, that tabloidizes the story, and therefore we can ignore it.
When you look at all the testimony, and people are attacking now the Air Force, would you believe that one of the Air Force guys who wrote that was involved in that it's $52 if you want the report, incidentally.
Well, okay, the story is Party A gives it to, who was supposedly there at the recovery site, gives it to Party B, who is very fearful that he'll be killed if he says who he is, who gives it to Party C, who goes to the museum in Roswell.
The thing was in a frame, literally a picture frame.
It's several inches long, and it doesn't seem to be corroded.
And what we know so far is it's made out of copper and silver.
Two common dense elements.
It's used for decorative purposes, used for all kinds of things.
Copper's all over the place, as you know.
I don't know what to make of it.
I see no reasons so far without a provenance.
You know, who was the first guy, and was he really at Roswell?
Sure.
Obviously, he's not seeking attention.
It's in my gray basket, maybe.
Now, I'd better stress that there is one story about a piece of a crash saucer, which leads me to believe that there are pieces out there.
One of the reasons I've approached these with kind of an open mind.
There was a pilot at Roswell Army Airfield called Pappy Henderson.
He was a World War II pilot, you know, more than 50 missions in Europe and all that stuff.
And he was in charge of ferrying supplies to the nuclear weapons test conducted on Operation Crossroads, 1946.
509 was involved in that.
So he obviously was highly regarded.
He even had to fly the VIPs who were out there for the test.
There was a bomb let go underwater and one above the water out there.
Nobody killed in these tests.
And so Pappy in the early 80s saw an article in a newspaper about a crashed saucer at Roswell.
This is because the first book, The Roswell Incident, was already out at a supermarket.
And he tells his wife, Sappho, that, you know, he'd always wanted to tell her, but this was classified.
But since there's an article in the newspaper, obviously some of it's been declassified.
He flew some of that wreckage to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
He also mentioned having seen bodies.
Now, his story was known by Len Stringfield, who's dead now, but this was one of 50 stories Len had about crashed saucers.
And I managed to locate Pappy's wife.
Len wouldn't give me the address to protect her identity.
And she told me what he had told her.
And she was on the Unsolved Mysteries program in 1989.
After the program, which was only seen by 28 million people, she found out that another old buddy of Pappy's, I mean, I'd already gotten the names of several of his people, and one of them had confirmed his World War II Bombardier that Pappy had told him the story.
But after the program was on, another one, a dentist, mind you, came forward, a mutual friend, and he told Sappho, and I talked to him.
Not only had Pappy told him the story in 1978 on his honor as a former Navy officer not to talk about it, which he didn't, but in 1979, he'd actually handed him a piece of the material, which unfortunately he took back and we haven't been able to find.
But when you have a dentist telling you about this and what the material felt like and stuff, if Pappy had a piece, remembering the GI attitudes of World War II, if it moves, grib, then other people must have had pieces as well, especially from the corona site where there was debris all over the place.
So it is reasonable to assume that people could have slipped them into pockets, people could have souvenirs, small pieces.
Now, several months ago, Stan, as you well know, I was sent what was alleged to be pieces from the crash in New Mexico wherever it occurred, or one of them, however we look at this.
Now, these pieces have been subjected to some fairly rigorous scientific investigation.
We have on my website now a pretty good presentation with the electron microscope photographs and the scientific report.
And there are anomalies with regard to the aluminum, not as much as we originally thought, but still remaining anomalies.
Even more interesting, though, Stan, we've got this piece that purports to be from the skin.
Now, when you get something like this, you assume I've either got, as they said in New Mexico, trash or treasure.
Who knows?
And I thought, well, this stuff could be from a junkyard.
But lo and behold, the scientific testing has shown that we have an incredibly, strangely layered piece that purports to be from the skin of the spacecraft, layered with bismuth.
I don't know what the hell bismuth is.
And bismuth and magnesium.
And this is clearly, you're a physicist.
You tell me this isn't something to come out of a junkyard, is it?
And it's interesting because these are sort of at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Magnesium is lightweight, lower density than aluminum.
And it's used in all kinds of applications.
The first space satellite, Sputnik, was made out of magnesium because it's very lightweight.
Bismuth, on the other hand, is up there with lead.
It's much more expensive than lead, and it's got some peculiar properties, electronic properties and other things.
But the thought of putting the two together in a layered structure is quite remarkable, as a matter of fact.
And now, one note of caution here.
Many people think that, well, gee, you just take this stuff to the lab, whatever this crazy wreckage is, you find out it's made of elements not from here, and ipso facto, you've got an extraterrestrial remnant.
But that isn't the way it works.
One expects from all our studies of the stars out there all over the galactic neighborhood that the same elements are out there as are here, but they may be manufactured for a different purpose and with a different technique and have unusual properties, not always easy to discern.
I mean, suppose somebody had found a chip from a computer.
And so it takes a lot of digging to come up with something.
And also, there's a complication.
I worked on classified nuclear programs.
We often used exotic materials, things like lithium hydride, boron carbide, beryllium oxide, tungsten rhenium.
I mean, weird stuff.
Now, it may well be that there are special alloys created, special structures for various military programs that the average good scientist in the lab knows nothing about.
And so you have to be very careful before you say this is odd, therefore extraterrestrial.
You've got to get somebody who can say, well, no, we didn't use that in our latest laser weapons device, stuff like that.
I spoke with Linda Howe earlier today, and she has been looking very carefully into the bismuth industry, such as it is, and has yet found no application.
And she's talked to some fairly heavyweights in the area, has found nobody who has said there is application or we ever know of anybody who has put or layered this bismuth magnesium in this way.
And so how would you classify this in terms of interest level, say, compared to what they've found down or has been turned over to the museum in Roswell?
Well, this stuff is no doubt, this, as opposed to the aluminum pieces, which is another matter entirely, this stuff is undoubtedly curiouser and curiouser.
It's weird.
It's strange.
It's different.
That doesn't yet make it extraterrestrial, but certainly puts it at center stage to say, what in the world is this?
In other words, nobody running to the junkyard could come up with this, as far as I know.
If it really was from skin, and if this device used not jet engines, obviously, or internal combustion engines, if there was, say, an electromagnetic or magneto aerodynamic system, and I've been talking about such systems since the late 60s in my congressional testimony, because there is work that points in that direction.
If there were, then it may have very peculiar electrical and magnetic properties.
That's one major possibility.
There's a lot of work showing if you can create electric and magnetic fields at the right orientation to each other.
You can control heating, drag, lift, radar profile, a whole bunch of other things by running a current through the outer boundary of whatever you got going up there.
So that's one possibility.
Another is that it may fulfill one of the objectives that you need.
For example, heat protection.
It could be, I don't know of any superconductor made out of just those two metals, but there are special superconducting materials which allow for the passage of a very high current, the creation of a big magnetic field, et cetera, that are made out of bismuth compounds.
And normally found, it's similar to lead in a lot of its properties.
For example, here in New Brunswick, Canada, we mine a lot of lead and zinc, and they recover bismuth at the same time.
It's present in much lower abundances, but it's a byproduct of the production of these other materials.
Compounds, this may sound a little strange, but because lead and bismuth together, they make compounds which have low melting points.
They can be used as a heat transfer agent, believe it or not.
And they're dense, so they're good gamma-ray shielding material.
And in a reactor, people have actually run heat transfer systems with lead and bismuth.
Now, it's heavy, not quite as heavy as mercury, for example.
So it's a high atomic number element that most of us won't see.
There are some organic chemical compounds with some medical properties and stuff that have bismuth in them, but not in layers with magnesium, believe me.
Yes, the other interesting thing about it, of course, is it's very charred on the outside, very charred, as though it, well, I don't know, just charred.
Heated, yes, heated.
There you go.
And then there's the aluminum pieces.
Interesting.
They say the spike is of just tremendous purity.
But the interesting thing about the aluminum is the sand.
In the electron scanning photographs, there is this aluminum hit something very hard, Stan.
A couple of years ago, a colleague and I thought we would have access to some pieces of material.
Okay, I've been down this road.
So we lined up a lab, an outstanding testing lab in Southern California, which does forensic testing.
In other words, for example, if an airplane crashes, was it a failure of something, in which case millions of dollars could ride on the analysis of that?
Was it failure of an electronic compound?
Again, you've got to really do first-class forensic testing that can stand up in a court of law with the other lawyers hitting at you, so you really got to know your stuff.
We lined up such a lab.
We were hoping to get access to a piece of material, very lightweight, supposedly bendable material that you couldn't scratch with a knife and stuff, about a few inches square, okay?
We felt that in order to get that analysis done properly, obviously depending on what happens the first time, the second time, what tests you run without destroying the material, good idea, you know, that we would probably, it would probably cost about $20,000 to do that testing.
So people have complained there was the anomaly or supposed anomaly about the density of specific gravity and so forth.
And if somebody out there would like to donate a big chunk of money, we certainly know where we can get a whole battery of tests done, first rate, where people will sign their names and stand up in court and all that sort of thing.
So at the end of the investigation, and I'll tell you, Stan, I turned it over to Linda.
I'll tell you, Stan, it's not such a blessing getting materials like this.
At first, you think, oh, this is really cool.
This is great.
You quickly realize from several points of view that it's not such a blessing as you might imagine it is, and the world begins to come toward you with all kinds of criticisms.
You know, so it's been a little rough going, but I'm committed to keep going, and I'm glad we did, or else we never would have come to the point we are at now, which is a fascinating point.
And I suppose at the end of this, if the anomalies remain unanswered, then you go out and you look for funding and you get the kind of work done that you just talked about.
Well, there is something else that I hope the guy who sent this stuff in is listening.
You know, when I first read the first letter you got, my thought was science fiction, and it sounds science fictiony.
I hate to say that, but it's true.
If we could work more on the other end, that is the providence, if we could find out who his grandfather was and establish that that person was indeed at Roswell, I've got a copy of the base yearbook, and there's a lot of checking you can do on people.
I've located lots of people and records on them and stuff.
That would give us, even without going public with that, getting a certified notarized statement from somebody that they have checked the records and so forth, that the party of the first part was indeed at Roswell and that sort of thing.
That would give us a real lake up.
Because not knowing who got it or how he got it, there's a story there, but we don't know who the person was.
That would make life a great deal simpler.
And, for example, suppose he had picked up pieces of strange material at some other site entirely where they were testing the latest and rocket systems or Lord knows what.
That would be very different from being involved with Roswell.
And I will say this, if he actually heard about this, your source, back in the early 70s, which is how the story goes, that was before I first talked to Marcel in 1978, even Lydia Sleppy's story about the military or the FBI shutting down transmission of a story from Roswell to Albuquerque on this.
I heard in the early 70s.
That would make life a great deal easier and might make it simpler to get somebody to come forth with the money to do the job properly.
Source, if you're out there, give Art a hand here, please.
Okay, because one thing that scares people may be reluctant to come forward if they think, oh, Christ, I'm going to have every ufologist in the world beating the past of my daughter.
I'd been invited to this conference in Curichiba, Brazil, which is a couple hundred miles from Sao Paulo, many months ago.
And I'd agreed to go down and to give a talk.
You know, crash-flying saucers, all that jazz.
Sure.
I speaking in English and being translated, and then speaking in English, boy, that's frankly.
Yes.
The holding on to your attention while they translate, never sure whether the audience is hearing what you said or thought or whether the interpreter has done a little interpretation there.
But anyway, before I went down, the man in charge of the conference had notified me that there was quite a fuss about this Vargina case about the capture of a couple of alien bodies with nets, alien beings, and them being sent off to the States.
And frankly, I had a very highly raised eyebrow.
Oh, you know, because it just, it sounded weird.
But he told me, he promised me that at the conference there would be people that I could talk to who spoke English that would give me the inside story.
Now, it turns out that in the interval from when I was invited to when this conference took place, and I just got back on Tuesday, that there has been even more investigation and more coverage in the Brazilian press.
A major magazine, sort of the equivalent of Time or Newsweek or weekly, you know, U.S. News and World Report, that sort of thing, carried a story on May 22nd, six pages, a cover story with pictures.
And they interviewed a number of the witnesses and so forth.
And I was fortunate enough while I was down there to be able with two other well-known researchers, John Carpenter, who's a psychiatric social worker from Springfield, Missouri, who is in charge of abductions research for the Mutual UFO Network, has worked with 150 abductees, and I've known John for a number of years.
And Graham Birdzall, who publishes UFO magazine in England, which has a worldwide circulation of about 50,000, which for a UFO magazine is quite something special.
They were both there, and we were able to meet with a man, one of a team of people who gave to our paper there.
This man has money enough, and I bring that up because it's hard to do the research without money.
And we found out that John Mack had been down there, met with some of the witnesses.
We interviewed this researcher and got the whole story on videotape.
John Carpenter has a tape of that.
He speaks great English, so there's no problem that way.
We are having a lot of stuff translated.
And the story, as we got rid of the cultural problems, I mean, for example, one thing that bugged me, what do you mean the fire department came out with nets and captured this thing?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Well, it turns out that in Brazil, if there is a mad dog or a monkey from the jungle or whatever, a strange animal that comes into a city, it's the fire department that goes out with nets, sort of like our dog catcher, you know, to capture these.
Now, the man that we talked to has talked to military people.
He has talked to medical people.
He's well connected, as it happens, right in the area where this happened.
And so as the story evolved, it seems that several bodies were recovered of, I'll call them creatures because I don't know what other term to use, frankly.
I don't want to say ETs, but it certainly doesn't sound like anybody from around here.
Little guys, short, big heads, skinny bodies, oily skin.
And the initial report involved three young ladies, two sisters, ages, what, 14 and 16, I think.
No, 22.
Yeah, the two girls were 14 and 16.
They had a friend with them who was 22.
And they were walking home.
Go past an empty lot.
They look over, and one of the girls at first thought it was a statue.
Here's a creature, bent down, seemingly in distress, not moving or anything.
And they screamed.
I mean, you know, there were three bumps on the head as well, incidentally.
And relatively large feet and crouched down, and the girls scream, and one of them thought it might be the devil because it sounded little, you know, red eyes, bumps on the head, the whole business.
Well, I should add that there's a connection in Brazil between the military, the fire department, the police departments.
There are a couple of named military installations in the area, and the man we talked to has talked to some of those people, and he's been threatened, incidentally.
And apparently, an attempt was made to bribe the young girls by guys in suits, and they're a scenario where you don't expect to find guys in suits.
That's a funny way to describe somebody, but this is not downtown Washington, D.C. Right.
And so the story has swirled on.
There is an indication of contact between the U.S. government and the Brazilian government about something expected to be coming down.
Now, I better add something here that people may not have thought about, but I'm sure they're aware of.
Namely, that all governments, especially the Americans and the Russians, anybody who puts satellites up, would love to get their hands on the other guy's technology if a spy satellite were to come crashing down.
I found out that, while one should always be skeptical, that John Mack was apparently very impressed after his interview with the girls, and he spent several hours with the three of them, that they're not lying.
There's a consistency from the man we spoke to about what the military say, the medical people say, a whole bunch of doctors.
One of these bodies at least is dead.
Another one was still alive at the time and was apparently shipped off to the United States.
Well, the only aside from this visual observation of the strange submarine-shaped thing quietly moving around a guy's field, there are other reports of trucks filled with strange, shiny wreckage.
And what I'm saying is for the locals, people who might know something, somebody who knows somebody who was at the hospital, that sort of thing, or who was in the military, the press attitude has been straight, which is all one ever wants.
In other words, this is a story like a murder story or a plane crash story or something like that.
Witnesses have been spoken to.
Here's what they'd say.
There is consistent testimony from a lot of different people independently.
Well, I'm afraid of what it would turn out to be like.
There'd be a brief story that doesn't explain things that would immediately be jumped on by the powerful American press.
I'm thinking of how they've treated the Air Force and the GAO with regard to the Roswell story over the last couple of years, where the Washington Post and the New York Times, two outstanding newspapers, have gotten all the data wrong, basically because they presume there was nothing to it and they could just soak up the Air Force comment.
So what I'm hoping will happen is that a major effort will be mounted to go down there.
And see, my picture was on the front page with a CD-ROM I'm holding up about UFOs.
John Carpenter was pictured on the front page on a different day.
And we asked people to translate, of course.
And it was not silly season, it's Curaciba.
It was taken very seriously.
And so I'm optimistic that more information will come forward.
A book is probably in there for somebody down there because there are so many different strands of what was going on and where it was going on.
And incidentally, Art, I'd like to make an offer.
I've got a two-page report from an English-language, actually by an American who lives down there, on the Vargina case.
This just came out a couple weeks ago.
And I'd be happy to send a copy.
If people will send me a self-addressed stamped number 10 envelope, and you can imagine if I had to write all the envelopes and put all the postage on, it's an enormous chore.
A copy of this two-page article about Vargina.
I'll have a list of my books and papers and about the CD-ROM and all that stuff too.
Let me help you out here because I know, Stan, from experience, it's the middle of the night in a lot of the nation, and people are racing for a pencil or a pen.
And incidentally, neither of this stuff is not on my computer, so I can't email it to anybody.
I'm a neophyte at that stuff, and I don't have a scanner and all that.
So, you know, I realize I get people emailing me in effect saying, hey, send me all you have about, or email me all you have about the physics of flying saucers.
And the second thing I wanted to say was basically that I have heard that in conjunction with work in the U.S. government, this is just a rumor, of course, nothing can be proven, that the Grays were working with the U.S. government.
Do you know anything to that effect, or have you heard things to that effect?
Yeah, I've made five trips to England this past year or so, and I met twice with Mr. Santilli, the exploiter of the film.
Every time I've checked on what he has had to say, it turns out not to be true, which is sad.
And again, I start from the position that, yes, bodies were recovered.
Undoubtedly, autopsies would have been done, and undoubtedly they would have been filmed.
So I have no prejudice against the basic notion.
However, I can find nothing in the footage.
And I was a Fox brought me down to Washington.
I spent a couple of days going over this darn thing.
And I've been to England, as I say, and I can't find anything in it that leads me to believe it has anything to do with Roswell, crash-flying saucers, alien bodies.
Mr. Santilli has just not proven to be trustworthy.
Just one example of that.
He quietly told me that the name of the photographer was Jack Barnett.
And Barnett had shot some of the early footage in Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-50s.
And after he had bought the rights to this footage from Mr. Barnett, Barnett told him that he had some other stuff that he might be interested in.
He could use the money for a wedding gift for his granddaughter.
Now, when you start checking back, you find that indeed, according to the book Elvis A to Z, on page 221, there is a story about the first time Elvis was filmed.
And it was by Jack Barnett.
Sounds great.
Now, actually, though, the filming was done for a man named Bill Randall, who at that time was the first disc jockey outside the South to play Elvis stuff.
He worked out of both New York and Cleveland frenetic life.
He's now a lawyer, incidentally, $300 an hour, and didn't like wasting his time on the phone with people like me who weren't going to pay him.
But here's the kicker.
Jack Barnett was indeed a well-known motion picture photographer, a cinematographer.
He was an officer in the Union.
However, two big kickers.
He was never in the military.
He was a war correspondent, but not in the military.
And he died in 1967, and I managed to get a copy of his death certificate.
And so Mr. Santilli certainly never bought anything from Mr. Barnett in the 90s.
And then he gave the name, well, that was a cover name.
It was Jack Barrett.
And he was in the military, but got out in 1945 and was not a motion picture cameraman.
The next name was Jack Bennett, and I'm waiting for Garrett Gannett, etc.
I was told in our first conversation within a week of when this big noise started in England that you could clearly see Harry Truman in the film.
And the careful commentary, the thing that bothered me first off the base here was that I worked under security for 14 years.
The notion that a cameraman would be able to keep rolls of what was clearly top secret plus footage just in 1947 especially just doesn't make sense to me.
That's not how classified stuff gets handled.
They are not casual about it.
And Kent Jeffrey, who's done a splendid job of gathering up some old-time cameramen, military guys, respectable guys, has found that this would violate all the rules, how the film was shot and all the rest of that.
Now, what I cannot do, Art, unfortunately, is tell you that this film was made by company XYC on January 39, 1992 at this studio.
I don't have the genesis of it, but the burden isn't on me to provide that.
I remember because I had your home phone number, you had mine.
We used to correspond.
Now, it's such a pleasure because the only time I get to see you was when you're on sightings.
You know, it's such a pleasure to see you again to talk to you again.
Listen, I want to ask you a question.
You answered my question about the autopsy, because I wanted to know if you thought it was real or not.
You know, what they're talking about.
That was the other part.
But the question I have for you, Art, also is what color when you, Stanton, asked me what it looked like that I saw, how big it was and so forth, because it was going around, but it was standing still, and it was as high as a two-story building.
And one was real big, and the other one was kind of small, and it was olive green.
Couldn't tell if it was wood or plastic, but it was all framed in, tethered down, and back flap was flapping, and it was written in stencil with black.
Well, you know, that area has received so much attention this past couple of years, partly because of Bob Lazar and all the other noise that's been made, that I've heard rumors, what else can I say, that much of the fancy activity has been moved from there to other locations.
There are now much more remote places up in Utah and Nevada, for example, and up in Idaho.
And people need to remember that there was a perfectly legitimate reason for being that using, building that secret area that was to test advanced propulsion systems.
And so, you know, stealth and the U-2 and SR-71 and maybe Aurora and all these things.
And especially interesting, the remotely piloted vehicles and I love this name, uninhabited aerial vehicles.
These things look sort of like saucers.
They're very lightweight, using very sophisticated electronics.
They can stay on site, so to speak, for hours, observe an enemy from a short distance, and send back real-time data for targeting missiles and all that sort of thing.
And naturally, they're being tested out there, and naturally, people, because there's so many spectators around, have seen them.
That doesn't mean they're alien spacecraft.
So I don't know about anything really hot and new other than I know when I was down in Brazil and when I was in England and France that I got asked about Area 51.
Another guest that Bart's had on a couple of times, Stan Deo, he lives in Australia now, has talked about rotating electromagnetic fields as a propulsion system for aircraft.
And he has said that in a doughnut configuration, that's the aircraft's configuration, that in near space we have achieved hypersonic speeds of between 35 and 40,000 miles an hour.
I mean, orbital velocity is 25,000 or 18,000, so 35,000 seems sort of out of, literally off the world, out of the world.
I have been writing about magneto-aerodynamic propulsion systems since the late 60s.
There's an enormous amount of published in classified literature data.
And of course, there was an electromagnetic submarine that basically worked on the same principles.
That was not magneto-aerodynamic, obviously.
But if you replace one electrically conducting fluid, seawater, with ionized air, it turns out you can get around all the problems of high-speed flight.
Naturally, the work was classified.
I had over 900 references in a bibliography that I threw up, had done for me back in 1969, believe it or not.
So there's been a lot of work going on, and there's some very exciting work that may be related to this being done at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute in Troy, New York, by Professor Leek L-E-I-K-Mirabeau, M-Y-R-A-B-O, who's got facilities, sort of wind tunnel and laser and stuff, and has demonstrated some of this.
There's been quite a bit of publicity over the last year.
So it's a new direction for propulsion.
It doesn't work by carrying along something you throw away.
It works by interacting with your surroundings.
And so it's a good area for future research.
Certainly, we've kept the lid on whatever success we've had for obvious reasons.
And the world of the future may see a lot of MAD, magneto-aerodynamic MAD systems running around up there.