Kevin Randle and Renee Barnett debate UFO crash claims, with Randle’s History of UFO Crashes pinpointing just four credible cases among 125 reports since the 19th century. They critique NASA’s inconsistent handling of phenomena like the "face on Mars" (1976) and Europa, citing delays in broadcasts and suppressed astronaut accounts, while questioning why Jimmy Carter never disclosed promised UFO files despite alleged pressure. Randle dismisses infighting within ufology as a distraction, arguing scientific rigor—not legal battles or media hype—must drive credible investigations to uncover the truth behind decades of secrecy and misinformation. [Automatically generated summary]
And so I guess then it makes absolute sense that Renee Barnett from Strange Universe, seeking to do a program on the top 10 crashes, would go to Kevin Randall.
Renee, welcome to the program.
Thank you.
Is that a pretty good assessment of why you went to Kevin?
If you go back into the 19th century, and I think the first one chronicled in the book is actually 1886, we can document reports of about 125.
Of those, I think maybe four are good, solid cases.
The rest of them are hoaxes, misidentifications, wild guesses, single witness reports that have no additional corroborative information for them.
So we take a look at all of that kind of information and try to put together a good, solid chronology of this from the 19th century up until, I think, 1989 as the last one figured in the book.
Well, interestingly enough, I've conferred with my advisor, and I'm probably going to end up doing a dissertation that relates to the abduction phenomenon.
What I think my point of view has been, and I think is what we need to do in the UFO phenomenon, is elevate us from the amateur, if you will, as science in other realms have done, move ourselves up to the next level where we're looking at it with a more logical mind, looking at it more seriously than we have in the past.
It's great to have the people out there chasing the lights in the sky, but after you found 100,000 cases or 200,000 cases, there's not much more that we can add to our knowledge.
And I think we need to attempt to move ufology from that realm to the next level where we're doing conscious research and performing experimentation, if you will, looking for the hard physical evidence that the phenomenon actually exists.
I mean, you know it exists.
I know it exists.
We've got to convince the journalistic community and the scientific community that this is something that deserves a good scientific look.
I don't think there's been a good scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon since it began.
Well, later we will talk of Dr. Stephen Greer and his efforts and what you think of that and so forth.
Let me turn for a second to Renee.
Renee, you've got a segment coming up on the top 10 UFO incidents, I guess, of all time.
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Well, yes, in recent history, I guess, actually, the phenomenon kind of kicked off, and I'll give away another of our top 10 with the Kenneth Arnold sighting, which was in 1947, as well as the Roswell incident.
So it's celebrating its 50th anniversary in the month of June.
Yes, and, you know, Kevin is actually the expert, but I can tell you that I believe it was, and correct me if I'm wrong, Kevin, June 24th, 1947, Kenneth Arnold was a pilot, and he saw a flying, or what he saw looked like a saucer.
And that was actually when the term flying saucer was coined, which is another important thing about that event.
What Kenneth Arnold saw near Mount Rainier, Washington on June 24th, you were right, was nine objects moving with this motion that he described like saucers skipping across the pond.
So he really wasn't describing the shape of the objects as saucer, but their motion like saucers.
And he said they were crescent-shaped objects.
And what is important about the Arnold sighting, of course, is it began the whole UFO phenomena, the modern phenomena, alerted the media to it.
But as Arnold's sighting ended, there was a fellow named Fred Johnson who saw the same objects.
But Johnson reported that his compass began to spin wildly as these objects neared him.
So we have the first of the electromagnetic effects.
And the Air Force, and you really can't blame them in 1947, the Air Force decided that the action of the compass was not related to the appearance of the UFOs.
We now know about the electromagnetic effects.
But at that point, there didn't seem to be any causal relationship between the appearance of the objects and the spinning of his compass.
I think what we look at, and again, we have to take a look at 1947.
Nobody knows what's going on.
And we read the newspaper clippings, and this is where it becomes very interesting.
You read the newspaper clippings, you have governmental spokesmen saying, we don't know what it is.
We think it might be this.
We have the scientific community saying, we don't know what it is, and proposing a number of theories.
There are military spokesmen saying, it's not secret projects that belong to us.
We don't know what it is.
Arnold sort of sparks all of that discussion in the press.
On the July 4th weekend, the same weekend that the events in Roswell take place, a flight crew in Idaho reports an object.
The United Airlines flight crew reports seeing objects pacing their aircraft.
Nobody says anything about them.
In fact, the military is extremely concerned by the number of pilots reporting these things, especially military pilots who they see as very credible.
It's only after the Roswell case that takes place, and I even found the article in the Las Vegas Review Journal on July 9th, the Associated Press reports that the Army and Navy moved today to suppress the stories of flying saucers whizzing through the atmosphere.
So what's interesting here is some event takes place on the July 4th weekend, the crash at Roswell.
Suddenly the military and the government knows what's going on, and they move to suppress the sightings.
And then people start making the comments like, well, flying saucers have been seen in 38 states except Kansas, which is a dry state.
So suddenly the ridicule factor comes into play.
You don't mean you see those flying saucers, do you?
Or are you one of those guys with three teeth and bib overalls that sucks down beer all the time?
You can't be trusted.
But what's interesting, if you take a look at the files, even the Air Force files show this.
The higher the level of education, the more qualified the observer.
The longer the object is in sight, the less likely they're going to find an explanation for it.
So it's just the opposite of what they had suggested, that the lower the educational level, these are fleeting things that you only see for a moment, and it's people who haven't been highly educated or highly trained.
And when you look at the Project Blue Book file, you find exactly the opposite.
And we went over the remaining number, which was the majority of the cases, together.
And I think that we tried to select cases where there were sufficient documentation and mainly something more than just a sighting, but something more like interaction with the environment,
such as in the Kenneth Arnold sighting, the compass of Fred Johnson that went spinning, that was actually some effect on the environment that this had.
You know, of course, the crash at Roswell, we had, you know, trace evidence.
We had debris.
And we had, of course, lots of documentation.
And we had a press release by the Army Air Corps, I guess it was called at the time.
Yeah, as a bit of trivia, which probably no one cares about but me, the Army Air Corps became the Army Air Force in 1941, and by the end of the war, it was the Army Air Forces.
So in 1947, before it broke off to become its own branch of the service, it was the Army Air Forces.
What happened is in the history, of course, at first the Air Force was part of the Army, part of the Army Air Corps, but it grew into such a powerful and important organization that at the end of the war, you had the Army broken into two separate units, the ground forces and the air forces.
And so you had, for example, in 1947, you had Dwight Eisenhower as the chief of staff of the Army, but under him were two high-ranking officers, one commanding the Army ground forces, one commanding Carl Spatz, I believe it was, commanding the Army Air Forces.
And you've got to find visual ways to tell your story.
And that's particularly difficult in the UFO field.
So how'd you do it?
unidentified
That's right.
Well, as I said, with Kevin's help, Kevin had a lot of videotape.
He had some great pictures.
He had some documents.
And so we traveled to Kevin's place to pick some of that up and to get that on tape and also to get Kevin to narrate our sightings for us, or our events, I should say.
There is no doubt in my mind that bodies were recovered at Roswell.
Once we have that in our possession, once we know what's going on based on that, then subsequent cases Are not nearly as important other than their corroborative value.
I think this list is put together much in the same way I put together the chronology for a history of UFO crashes in that I accepted all the information, looked at all the information, and put it in the book whether I believed it to be accurate or not, because I felt we ought to put that much information out.
There's always a possibility I had made a mistake.
I might think that a case is a hoax or a misidentification and, in fact, be wrong about that.
So I thought it was sort of using the Lennon Stringfield idea that let's put as much information out there as we can, and maybe it'll key a memory or it'll key something from someone else, and it'll put the whole thing together for us.
One, the Roswell autopsy, supposed, and the latest being the supposed interrogation of an alien at Area 51, which, by the way, ran on Strange Universe as well.
I'm not going to ask you, Renee, because it's just too tempting to try to get to the top 10, and I know you don't want to give them all away because you've got a show to do tomorrow night.
But, Kevin, is there any, in your opinion, legitimate footage of aliens?
Well, I think the alien autopsy film that Ray Santilli and the boys has is probably a fake.
They're operating as if they know something about the film and they don't want us to know and have done everything in their power to make sure that we don't get sufficient information about it to make any kind of a pronouncement.
We also have to take a look at it from the point of view as it's not incumbent upon us to prove that film a fake, but Ray Santelli should provide us with the information so that it can be authenticated.
He's failed to do so.
But there are some interesting things out there, some interesting photographs, some interesting things out there for us to take a look at.
And I think, again, I'm dubious of that sort of thing because, once again, the provenance of it hasn't been effectively established.
I think we need to take a look at all aspects of the UFO phenomena, I think, with a very skeptical eye, that we're not going to allow our personal beliefs infect how we view these cases and let the evidence carry us to where it goes.
And I don't think on the interrogation of the alien, all the evidence is in yet.
We have to wait until we can get some more information and some more evidence before we can make a positive call on that.
unidentified
All right.
Speaking of that alien interview, as it's called, by Rocket Pictures, who owns the full two minutes and 55 seconds of available footage on that, we're doing a follow-up on that next Tuesday on the Strange Universe.
Right.
And we're still continuing our investigation into that and seeking out any evidence that anyone might have to corroborate this or to disprove it.
The one horrifying thing that is in my mind is that we finally get a piece of the Roswell wreckage, I mean a real, honest-to-God piece of the flying saucer, and we take it to the proper authorities to have it analyzed, and they say, hey, it's aluminum.
One other aspect of the aluminum that was very important was that when you looked at it under an electron microscope, there were thousands of little pieces of embedded sand.
And the report that came back said, whatever this aluminum material is, it was involved in a very hard impact with the ground.
There's the Yubatuba sample, object seen to explode near Yubatuba, Brazil in 1957.
Material picked up on the beach, taken to first a columnist in Brazil, and later it arrived at the headquarters of the Aerophenomena Research Organization in Tucson.
According to the original analysis done by the Brazilian Army or the Brazilian government, it was magnesium that was 100% pure, did not exist in that form in 1957, and that sample was destroyed in the analysis of it.
Two other pieces made it into the United States.
One of them was allowed, or maybe both of them were allowed, were given to the Condon Committee, the University of Colorado study in the late 1960s for non-destructive analysis.
And the Condon report made a very unscientific conclusion, I thought.
They said, well, we looked at this metal.
It's very pure magnesium, but it's not 100% pure.
Therefore, the story of it being 100% pure is disproven.
No, that's not what it proved, because if I blow up your car, I can find all kinds of different materials.
I can find cloth and rubber and glass and metal.
So if I analyze a piece of glass, I cannot say that your car was made of glass.
And so the counting committee drawing the conclusion that the piece that was destroyed in the analysis in Brazil was not 100% pure, even though the Brazilian laboratories said it was.
The counting committee can't say, well, that's been disproved.
All they can say is the samples that they examined were not 100% pure.
But there's another example of hard physical evidence from a flying saucer, if you will.
Both of you, the anniversary of Roswell is coming up.
What do you expect from that?
Will there be anything new, anybody else coming forward, any amazing new information about Roswell on the anniversary?
unidentified
Gee, it would be hard for me to say if anyone's holding back information that they're going to reveal on the anniversary, but that would certainly be an exciting premise to go on.
I would think that that would be a great time to reveal it.
There have been a number of different people who have told stories about their involvement in the Roswell case in the last year or so.
Again, Strange Universe did the financial officer from the base coming forward and talking a little bit about what his involvement was.
But that was something new.
There is other people who have been a little bit freer with what they know, but I don't see any major revelation coming about just because of the 50th anniversary.
But what I'm saying is that's been a problem we've been having for quite a long time.
Jesse Marcel Sr. died in 1986, for example.
And I'm appalled by going back through my address book and the numbers of witnesses that we've gotten on either audio or videotape and discovering these people have since died.
Edwin Easley was a major loss.
I think we did not properly investigate what he knew.
He was somewhat reticent to talk.
And had we realized that he was as ill as he was, I think I spoke to him about six months before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
And had we known in that six months, we could have gone out of our way to get more information from him.
And what happened there was I had made the call to him when we were having that Discussion from the Center for UFO Studies office, and I didn't have a tape recorder.
Since then, people have said, Well, you should have gone out and bought one right away and called him back and gotten the information from him again.
And they're absolutely right, I should have done that.
I didn't think about that.
I thought we were going to have an opportunity to interview him on videotape because we were making plans to go to visit him at his home in Fort Worth and videotape him before he got sick.
And the circumstances crowded us out on that.
We do have some of his statements on tape, for example, being sworn to secrecy.
And it's kind of funny in the first conversation as I talk to him and I ask him questions about this, and he keeps saying, I can't tell you that.
I was sworn to secrecy.
I can't tell you that.
I was sworn to secrecy.
So we have a man who is very credible, who retired as a full colonel from the Air Force, who clearly was the Provost Marshal of the 509th Bomb Group at the time this took place, telling me that he can't talk about this incident because he was sworn to secrecy.
Well, a lot of people then took all this very seriously.
Renee, I have a question for you.
I have an opportunity to interview the famous, infamous, mysterious Victor.
Victor is willing to come on my program for apparently about an hour with a voice changing apparatus and be interviewed with regard to the tape that you ran and the follow-up that you're about to do on Strange Universe.
Now, that probably is going to occur in the next few days, Renee.
If you would be interested in getting a list of questions to me that you think would be appropriate to follow with Victor, it would be very helpful.
unidentified
I would love that, and I appreciate the opportunity.
I would certainly love to have the opportunity to interview Victor myself, and I envy you for being able to, this is a real coup, I think, that you're getting him.
We were certainly not afforded that opportunity at Strange Universe, and the fact that he's going to be on for a full hour is really great.
I wonder if I were to say, well, I'd like to bring Renee Barnett from Strange Universe on and let her also ask some questions, whether Victor would then sprint away.
I'll give it a try because I know you had many questions.
In the meantime, the big one coming up tomorrow night, the top 10, would you say of contemporary UFO incidents or all time?
unidentified
I would say, well, contemporary UFO incidents, but I guess in some ways that is for all time because the real evidence and documentation that we have on UFOs has really been only in contemporary times, starting back 50 years ago.
I mean, we're limited to 10 different events, and I'm sure that if you sat down to think about what you would think of the top 10 UFO events, you might come up with a slightly different list.
But I know in the construction of the list, what was a primary consideration was the evidence available.
Did the UFOs interact with the environment?
If we went, from a scientific point of view, the scientific community, the skeptics are always saying, where's the physical evidence?
And I think that was kind of in the backs of everybody's mind as the list was put together is those that were more than just a sighting, but had some additional element to it.
Kevin Randall is my guest, and we'll get back to him in a moment.
This just came in, and I thought it deserved your attention, dear Art.
Strange things are going on in Grants Pass, Oregon.
There appears to be a man, a notch, well, who knows, going around grabbing women and trying to kiss their ankles.
He is described as being a good-looking man in his 20s who approaches the women, asks to kiss their ankles, tries to fondle and kiss the aforementioned ankles.
Two times now, in two weeks, this has happened.
Each time, he's managed to escape.
Attempting to kiss ankles is apparently not a crime, at least at this time, and this fellow has broken no real laws.
However, police have officially advised the women of Grandspass to quote keep on their toes.
The case remains under investigation.
Yeah, Strange Universe indeed.
Last hour we had Renee Barnett here.
Tomorrow night on Strange Universe, there is going to be a segment on the top 10 UFO incidents in, I guess, all of history, really.
And they consulted Kevin Randall to find out what those were.
And so Kevin Randall continues to be our guest at this hour, and he'll be back in a minute.
The Beijing Free Player.
1050.
All right, back now to Kevin Randall.
And Kevin, you wrote first The History of UFO Crashes, and then, most recently, your current book, The Randall Report.
It started off with the UFO case book in 1989, and then UFO Crash at Roswell, which was made into the Showtime original film, cleverly called Roswell, and the truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, and then History of UFO Crashes, and then we get into the Randall Report, I guess.
What the director said to me was, hey, it's a movie.
They weren't making a documentary.
They were making a film.
If they could remain faithful to the truth, they did so.
But they invented an interesting framework for the film, Jesse Marcel, the Air Intelligence Officer, trying to piece together this story, which, of course, didn't happen in real life, but it was a way of bringing that information to the forefront.
So they attempted to remain faithful to the film.
And if you look quickly, you can actually see me in that film.
Well, in the beginning, there's a scene where the sheriff's office, and the sheriff has got a call from London, and the deputy says, sheriff's not here, Cheerio, and there's a reporter in the background arguing with another deputy.
Well, I'm the reporter arguing with the deputy.
You have to look through a door, and you see me back there arguing.
You know, sometimes it frustrates my audience, but in covering this kind of material, Kevin, all the time people will call up and they will want to tell you a story.
And I understand why they want to do that.
You know, back when I was six years old, I saw these lights and they did the following and they zoomed and zoomed and then they were out of there.
And I've sort of stopped or tried to discourage people from telling these stories because there are now so many millions of Americans that to me, it's fait to compli.
In other words, UFO sightings are real.
Millions and millions of Americans have seen them.
But we need to go beyond that.
We really, really need to go beyond that.
Either with a body or physical evidence or indisputable photographic evidence, that one's hard too.
I've got on my website, gosh, I've got so many photographs up there.
The problem you run into in today's environment with photographs, frankly, is anybody with a computer and a good graphics program, a graphics creation program, Photoshop or Adobe.
Well, but what I'm saying is it's so easy to even create a negative in today's environment that it's almost impossible for even the experts to tell whether or not that's been manipulated with some kind of a computer program.
It's a piece of equipment that allows you to manipulate videotapes.
And I have a friend, Russ Estes, who showed me how easy it was for him to create a very good-looking videotape of a flying saucer with the equipment that he has at his studio.
And so we've got a real problem with looking at that sort of thing today.
So we need, if you've got videotape of a flying saucer or an object, you've got to have a photographer who has impeccable credentials or multiple witnesses.
Now, if you get videotape of the same object from two or three locations, it's going to be very hard for someone to have fake that.
My understanding is they're still in the process of investigating it, because it's a fairly recent activity.
And you have to take a look at the whole body of evidence that is available from that.
And if you've got, as I say, videotapes from two or three cameras from two or three sources, and you have people who are credible people, such as you and I, I mean, you wouldn't be out there faking a video of a flying saucer near the sky.
We don't have a history of creating those sorts of hoaxes, if you will.
Then you begin to assemble some very credible evidence.
But I think the point that we need to take a look at, and you allude to it, another sighting of lights in the sky or even a daylight disk isn't going to help us If we start building the cases from a scientific standpoint and looking at the evidence very,
very carefully and taking the witness testimony and asking all the questions that should be asked, not just the ones we want to hear the answers for, and put together a solid body of evidence, even if we do not have a bit of metal, we're still going to be able to put together some very credible cases.
And when those opportunities to collect the bits of metal have come about, the scientific community have ignored them.
Chris Stiles and Don Ledger in Nova Scotia have just spent the last couple of years investigating the Shag Harbor case from October of 1967.
An object apparently either fell into Shag Harbor or dove into Shag Harbor to avoid something.
The Canadian government attempted to find out what fell into it.
They fell into Shag Harbor.
They were accompanied by Americans.
And there's even an indication that the Soviets were involved in some fashion trying to get in there to look what was going on.
What's so important about this case is it happened in October of 1967.
This is when the Condon Committee was out investigating UFOs for the United States Air Force.
$550,000 of our tax money they're spending to investigate UFOs.
Here is the perfect example of a case that could produce very good physical evidence.
The Condent Committee called up into Canada, made a couple of phone calls, thought that just some teenagers saw some lights in the sky, and didn't follow up on it at all.
And Chris Stiles and Don Ledger have spent a great deal of time following up and gathering documentation, realizing here was an opportunity for Condon Committee to do exactly what they were supposed to be doing, a scientific analysis of a UFO sighting, and they just blew it off.
All right, whether it's the Condon Committee or Blue Book or any of the other investigations that have occurred, have there been, in your opinion, any really legitimate investigations conducted?
And by that I mean by some official source, government or otherwise, whatever?
It's my opinion that there has been no good scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon.
There have been things such as the Condent Committee or Project Blue Book that you mentioned that were supposed to be doing that sort of thing.
And everybody sits around and says, well, Project Blue Book, the Air Force looked at 12,000 UFO sightings.
They were able to explain all but 701.
And is that 701 in a significant number?
And if you take a look at it from a statistical point of view, it really isn't 701 unexplained sightings out of 12,000.
But what you have to take a look at is what the Air Force said.
They said, well, the rest of them were astronomical phenomenon, weather phenomenon, weather balloons, aircraft misidentifications, and hoaxes.
What they don't tell you is about 4,000 of the cases in the Project Blue Book files are stamped insufficient data for a scientific analysis, which means there's no explanation for them, but they are labeled.
I have interviewed officers who were in missile silos in this country who said that UFOs hovered over their installations, that UFOs, in fact, deactivated some intercontinental ballistic missiles.
I've had other people tell me that story is absolutely accurate, but I actually talked to one of the officers 2020, long time ago, I think it was, did a story on a UFO that hovered over a Russian similar installation and began activating an ICBM.
Now, whatever UFOs are, it seems to me that if they're doing that kind of thing, if they're not a threat to national security, then the people in Washington have their heads in a very dark place indeed.
I mean, if something's doing Mach 405 crossing the country at high altitude and they don't go up and see what it is, what the hell's wrong with our defense system?
The Randall Report is looking at UFO investigations in the 1990s and how UFO investigations operate in the 1990s.
And that is how we bring in the Shag Harbor crash for 1967, for example.
The investigation by ufologists began in the 1990s.
And I think Chris Diles says that he was inspired by the Unsolved Mysteries segment on the Roswell case and realized that there was a similar event that took place in Nova Scotia and that maybe he could look into that and discover some documentation or talk to some of the witnesses and maybe uncover some evidence about it.
So we take a look at what has happened in the 1990s in the way of investigation and how the investigative technique of the ufologists have improved.
We used to be a bunch of amateurs out there kind of bumbling in the dark, just wanting to believe in UFOs and not taking a good solid look at the evidence, going where the evidence took us.
And if you take a look at the investigations done today, those same so-called amateurs are doing extremely incredible investigations.
We've learned, and you alluded to it earlier with Linda Howe, she may not be competent to analyze the metal, the arched parts, but she's certainly competent to find the proper authorities to analyze that metal.
I think we take a look at the news media as a responsible entity or the scientific community.
We have an awful lot of people out there who have spent their careers building their credibility, and they don't want to lose their credibility by investigating flying saucers for crying out loud.
unidentified
You're not telling me you believe in those little green men, are you?
And so they can go back and say, well, I don't believe in this stuff.
Look what I found.
Instead of investing the time and the effort in learning exactly what goes on in the UFO phenomena.
You mentioned yourself, the Heaven's Gate event is linked directly to the UFO phenomenon as if we're somehow responsible.
In fact, I saw Harlan Ellison on the sci-fi channel this Sunday lamenting the fact that all these crazy people believe in flying saucers, and look what it got them.
39 people are dead in Southern California.
And that's no more fair than to blame the Catholic Church for the Guyana tragedy in Jim Jones.
He was no more a Catholic or a Christian in the sense that the people at Heaven's Gate are ufologists.
And so we get tarred with that brush, and nobody bothers in the journalistic community to understand that we're not responsible for that craziness.
Well, I want to talk to you about Heaven's Gate, and I want to talk to you about Dr. Stephen Greer, who just recently made a very serious attempt, a valiant attempt, that really went nowhere in the press, and it should have.
So stay right there, Kevin.
We'll be back to you.
It's the bottom of the hour.
Once again, I'm Art Bell.
We are talking ufology, the general state, I guess, of ufology in a way, with a man who should know about it, Kevin Randall.
I'm Art Bell, and this is the American CBC Radio Network.
It is, and we're about to open the lines and let you ask questions of Kevin Randall, if you would like.
He's been investigating UFOs a long time.
So if you have a question, come now.
Do you drink bottled water?
Do you still, from Alaska or Hawaii, call 918-687-0404?
All right.
Back now to Kevin Randall.
Let us talk for a second about Heaven's Gate and the 39 suicides in Rancho, Santa Fe.
When that story broke, Kevin, most folks decided they were going to blame me because we had had Courtney Brown on and a series of photographs showing an apparent anomaly behind Hailbop, which we, of course, proved to be a hoax long before the suicides.
But never mind that.
The press decided several things.
They decided that they were going to make this story about UFOs no matter what, despite the suicide note saying that whether or not there's a companion is irrelevant, despite the fact that they'd been going after it 22 years, despite all kinds of facts, like they said that the marker was the comet and all the rest of it.
If you do just a little bit of due diligence and research into what was going on with that cult, you would have come up with a very different story.
But that is not what the American press wanted.
By God, they were going to have their UFO equals suicide story no matter what.
And I wonder if you kind of had the same take on it.
The news media, unfortunately, has got to get their story right now, this minute, and tomorrow we'll have another one.
And we have To get it right now, this minute, and they're not interested in what the truth is.
I was at the offices of the Chicago Tribune, and the reporter told me, never tell this story.
We were talking about, again, the case at Roswell, and one of the editors says, Well, I don't believe in that stuff.
And I said, Well, there's been a government cover-up, and I can prove it.
I have the documentation.
I mean, the documentation is there.
I have a book coming out called Conspiracy of Silence, and the documentation is presented in there showing that there was an attempt to suppress UFO information.
And the attitude of the editors, senior editors, the Chicago Tribune, is, we don't care what the documentation says.
But the press always tell the story the way they want to tell it, regardless of what the facts are.
They get it in their mind that this is the way the story is, and then you have a very hard time of convincing them that it's not that way.
They have their own agenda.
The New York Times is the best example of that when the Air Force came out with a report in 1995 that said, well, we can explain Roswell's a weather balloon.
Didn't look at the story where the Air Force says, you know, back in 1947, we said it was a weather balloon.
We've checked our weather records.
We lied back in 1947, and what we've discovered is it was a weather balloon.
He recently went back to Washington and took some incredibly credible folks and provided testimony in an attempt to do exactly what we've been trying to do, legitimize the investigation.
And I expected to see some pretty big headlines as a result of the Greer business.
And there's been literally, unless you count the internet, nothing.
And the internet, unfortunately, there's so many people on the internet that are not qualified to make any kind of pronouncement.
You read some of those messages and you wonder how they can actually type in English.
But I think Dr. Greer's attempt may have been a tad bit premature, that the news media wasn't ready for that sort of thing, regardless of the list of witnesses that he brought forward.
I mean, when you have Jesse Marcel being attacked because his military record does not reflect what he told Bob Pratt some 30 years later, where we're still having to fight those sorts of battles.
And I know of all the people in the debate about Jesse Marcel's record, I'm probably the only one that ever served in Army aviation.
And I know for a fact my record is wrong.
I tell you I have 41 air medals.
I mean, Marcel had five and claimed he had five and the record showed two.
My record shows two, but I can prove the other air medals that just was never an important enough discrepancy for me to bother to correct, that sort of thing.
And what we're saying is this record that is kept by or created by draftees is somehow a document cast in stone.
And what Jess Marcel said some 38 years later to a reporter who may have misunderstood what he said, we don't have the tapes anymore to compare it.
Somehow this proves that Jess Marcel is a liar.
I mean, here's a man who is exactly who he said he was in 1947, and we're now arguing over trivia from his record.
And I have a sense with all the various books that I've read that obviously our government has known about, we'll call, something flying around our planet, which they probably felt for perhaps their own reasons that us people on the planet didn't need to know about it.
But in the various cases where people have actually had contact, they almost all allude to some type of human experimentation of which we are being used.
And the type of experimentation almost always implies that, the stories imply that they are using human embryo for,
their own benefit it appears to be genetically related in other states right now one of the statements i read was that someone was told uh mankind's going to become sterile so this is why we're doing this but there always seems to be sometimes two varieties perhaps seen together one taller than the other and yet different as though one is a type of clone Maybe off of the human,
and the other one is the actual, we'll call extraterrestrial entity.
I'm not sure that's fair to say the vast majority of them.
There is a majority of them that when you collect the data from people who claim to have been abducted is suggestive of some kind of genetic manipulation and experimentation, yes.
Well, I think they also suggested that when a technologically inferior civilization comes in contact with a technologically superior civilization, the technologically inferior civilization ceases to exist.
I was going to suggest that the mere introduction of the horse to the Plains Indians after the Spanish arrived in the New World certainly altered their lifestyle.
And of course, now we, where are the Indians today?
We're operating under a lot of different premises.
It strikes me that we're operating under big brotherism.
We are so childlike, I guess, that if the government were to come out and tell us that there were extraterrestrial entities flying through our atmosphere, that it would be disastrous.
We just couldn't handle this sudden knowledge that we are not alone in the universe.
And we can see that kind of attitude by the U.S. government all the time in a lot of the laws they pass and the things they do.
So, yeah, I think we're still operating under that sort of a auspices, if you will.
Let me change course here just for a second with you, Kevin.
I've got an important question.
I've had, as you know, Richard Hoagland on the program many times.
Richard has concentrated on things like the face on Mars, artifacts on the moon, and 17 years ago, life on Europa, and those sorts of things.
He has been pressuring a long time now, NASA.
Two days ago, I got a letter from NASA directly from NASA to me.
And they finally have begun to react to this, particularly with respect to the announcement that there will not be, amazingly will not be, a mission to Europa.
Very suspicious.
And so tomorrow night, I'm going to have Don Savage, who is the Public Affairs Officer, Office of Space Science from NASA, and Ray Villard, who is the Public Affairs Officer for the Hubble Space Sciences Institute.
They're both going to be on the show.
And NASA has finally decided to publicly respond.
Now, this goes to an argument made by Tom Van Flandren, and it's all centering around Hubble.
In other words, I'm told that Hubble can look at comet Halebop and make a decision, though it's a narrow window, about whether comets are made up of a solid piece or many smaller orbiting pieces that we see as a solid nucleus, but in fact is not.
And that would prove the Van Flanderen model that a planet long ago exploded and these comets are pieces of that planet.
A non-trivial argument.
NASA, it seems, doesn't want to look at Comet Ailbop as it leaves.
NASA doesn't particularly want to look at the face on Mars.
And they don't seem to want to go back to Europa.
So I would like to get your take on this prior to talking to NASA tomorrow.
I think that the face on Mars, for example, to me, this is a question that can be answered easily.
It's either an optical illusion or it is some kind of construct.
And if it's something that has been constructed by intelligent creatures, that proves that there's extraterrestrial life out there and it has inhabited our solar system or invaded our solar system at some point because the proof is there on Mars.
And we certainly didn't do that.
In the Randall report, I talk about the STS-48 case.
But the point is, after you used to be able to watch the NASA missions in real time, and people were downloading the signal and watching it on the NASA Select channel.
After that piece of film was discovered, NASA decided to delay everything by two hours or four hours or whatever.
Well, let's look at the Condon Committee just one more time.
We now have the documentation to prove the whole thing was a setup.
We have a copy of the letter from the Air Force to the condon committee saying, this is what we want you to find.
The letter back to the conduct committee says, thank you for telling us.
And three days later, Condon is in New York saying to a group of scientists, my attitude is right now the Air Force ought to wash its hand of this whole thing.
There's nothing to it.
But I'm not supposed to come to that conclusion for another 18 months.
And that's why I say I don't think there's ever been a good scientific investigation of UFOs.
Condon certainly didn't do it.
The Robertson panel, the CIA-sponsored study back in 1953.
And I go through this in great detail in The Conspiracy of Silence.
But again, Dr. Swords found by putting together the chronology of the Robertson panel, here you have this high-powered guy named Robertson running this four-day investigation of UFOs.
On Friday night, he says, I'll do the report.
And by the time they meet the next day, not only has the report been written, it's been reviewed by one committee member and the director of the Air Force, and they've signed off on it.
Now, how in 1953, before fax machines, computers, and all the high technology we have today, could you write a report on a Friday afternoon or Friday night and get it reviewed by the proper people so that when you show up on Saturday to give the report to the rest of the committee, it's already signed off, so they make a couple of cosmetic changes, and that's the report we get.
I have to agree with your thoughts on the Big Brotherism.
I lived here in Southeast Missouri since 1972, and we were having a lot of sightings in the early and mid-70s around a small town called Piedmont, Missouri.
I don't know if you're familiar with that or not, and we had a lot of cattle mutilations there.
And we had several people from the university here in Cape Girardeau, one physics professor in particular that had went and did an investigation on these, you know, out in the field every night taking photographs and doing some kind of electronic and magnetic measurements.
And he wrote a small book on it, and he was so severely slapped down from that, he had to resign his position at the university.
And he made an honest effort in trying to measure the phenomenon.
And something was going on because I had seen them myself one summer up around that area.
And back in the 76 election when Jimmy Carter was running after all this, I remember.
Not only that, we've had a number of people who have attempted to ask Carter about that subsequently after he left the presidency, and he refuses to answer the question.
You know, I had a fellow who said he went to a book signing by Jimmy Carter, and he actually managed to make eye contact with Jimmy Carter and asked him that question, and tears formed in Carter's eyes.
Can you imagine in your mind what they could have told him that would have been so incredible that Jimmy Carter, who whatever else he was, was an honest guy, put that kind of silence across him?
What could they have told him that would have been so serious, Kevin?
Any speculation, Kevin, on why the aliens apparently did not attempt a recovery of their own crashed saucer at Roswell, even though there was a substantial period of time between the crash and notification of the authorities by George Brazel?
But again, it is speculation, completely and totally speculative.
My favorite theory is that they were attempting to alert us to their presence in the most non-threatening way they could come up with was a crash saucer and dead aliens.
What they were attempting to tell us was they were fallible.
They were not godlike.
They were like the human race.
They could make mistakes.
The problem with that theory is simply that if it didn't work in Roswell, why select Roswell, first of all, because it's such an out-of-the-way place.
Why not do it somewhere closer to a population center?
And if it didn't work the first time, why not do it again to make sure that the message gets through?
I don't understand why they didn't try to recover their craft and the bodies unless they figured the craft was destroyed.
And once their fellows were dead, there was no reason to risk additional life in an attempt to recover it.
We just really don't know what the motivation of an alien race would be.
Art, this suggestion may have already been tried, but I haven't heard of it.
Why not have the top ufologists file a suit against the government in order to call witnesses to present the evidence?
Short of that, why not get with some production company, broadcast a live trial with real attorneys and a real jury, and present the evidence live, not rehearsed.
Get a real judge, present the evidence in a court setting.
If the evidence is there, present it in a forum that will affect the most people.
Broadcast the trial during the day, and I'll bet the press would love it.
If you do that, you, in effect, take it away from the tabloids.
Have it live, not scripted.
Have it take time, like the OJ trial, so it can sink in.
Kind of a good idea.
I wonder if anybody's thought of it, and if they haven't, there's the idea.
It certainly would be one approach, but we have to remember that we're dealing with a scientific question as opposed to a legal question.
And the other thing that we always have to look at is what I find particularly persuasive in the way of evidence may not be sufficient to persuade you, or what you find to be persuasive may not be sufficient to persuade me.
We've got a real problem with trying to present the evidence for UFOs, and I think our mistake as ufologists has been not presenting it in a proper scientific setting, not following the proper scientific protocols.
And if we elevate our standards to the scientific standards, then we may make some progress.
But that is something that we have not been able to do to this point.
When I first put you on the air out here in California, they were talking about the UFOs out in Arizona, and you were also speaking about something in Mexico City.
I was wondering if KNXV ever put that on the air, the footage in Arizona.
And also, I was wondering, what were the people just sitting there monitoring air traffic on the radios or something?
They were wondering why something wasn't breaking communications with ground control or something like that?
The explanations being offered by the government rarely fits with what we know.
They feel, I guess they feel compelled to explain them as quickly as they possibly can, regardless of how ridiculous those explanations begin to look.
And we can go back to the very earliest UFO sightings and see a government attempts to explain these things away.
Kenneth Arnold, which we were speaking about much, much earlier, I think the government and Donald Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who was the great debunker, offered six or seven different explanations.
And when somebody found a particular explanation to be ridiculous, well, Menzel had another one, including raindrops on the canopy of the aircraft drifting across the canopy.
And that apparently Arnold was such an incompetent pilot, he couldn't recognize moisture on the canopy of his aircraft.
I think my opinion is we're actively doing it to ourselves.
I think that after the Roswell case took place, there was an oversight committee developed to exploit the fine.
And part of that mission may have been to lead people in different directions.
But we've become so professional at it ourselves in the UFO community, and we have the lunatic fringe that we must deal with that I don't think they feel it's necessary to do it anymore.
I think it's more misinformation than disinformation.
I don't think they really have to do anything, just allow us to do it to ourselves.
I have yet to understand why they are so rabid in their debunking and that they're so nasty about it.
That's what I have never been able to understand is why we cannot agree to disagree on something and why they go to such extremes to make those of us who are looking at it seriously seem to be so ridiculous.
I haven't understood what their motivation is, why they feel so threatened by our attempts to learn something more.
Yeah, I asked that because I, gosh, when I got married in 1950, a guy named Artie Auerbach had a big reunion when my dad came out from New York for the wedding.
Artie was Mr. Kitzel on the Jack Benny show.
I don't know if you guys are old enough to remember that.
He's a guy that had a little Yiddish accent, and he'd say, hello, Mr. Benny, and he'd go through these comic routines.
Well, Artie, at the wedding dinner, he was telling a story that a friend of his was a scientist at Palomar, and that ever since we started setting off atom bombs, they were tracking large bodies that were going from one planet to another.
The size of one of them, they said, was roughly three times the size of the Queen Mary.
And there was one they called the milk run because it was a regular run that they could depend on to show up.
With regard to observatories, they would be very unlikely, I think, to observe anything, for example, scooting about within the atmosphere because that's not what they're looking for.
But with regard to something moving from one planet to another, yes.
Observatories, what do we know, if anything, Kevin, about what observatories have seen or when they get anomalous things that they see, do they simply discard it?
We know that J. Allen Hynek at one time in the early 50s surveyed a bunch of astronomers about their beliefs in UFOs.
And interestingly enough, Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, who had discovered the planet Pluto, had two UFO sightings himself.
And of course, Menzel explained them away.
And I believe Tombaugh as opposed to Menzel.
We do know that there have been some observations by observatories of bizarre things on the moon, bizarre things on Mars, and suggestions of some kind of craft.
But they've never been well documented.
And I think we get back to the ridicule factor, which you don't mean you've seen little green men, do you?
I talked to James A. Van Allen, a name I'm sure everybody recognizes, the man who discovered the radiation belts.
I studied astronomy under him.
I say astronomy.
I study astronomy.
I took one astronomy class, and he was the chairman of the department.
But he said he and I discussed UFOs on a number of occasions, and he always seemed interested in what we were talking about, but never followed up on anything to any great, great level.
But he also suggested to me that an awful lot of the scientific community, his fellow astronomers who were not as well-established as he was, would be very hesitant to suggest anything, that they would see anything anomalous because they would lose their stature as objective rational scientists.
And with the exception of a rumor regarding aliens activating Russian ICBMs, thus far your discussion has seemed limited to sightings in the U.S. And most ufologists seem to be in the U.S. I wondered if you could give kind of a global expose of this phenomenon.
I mean, we're interested in what's happening in our country.
And, of course, the news media isn't interested in carrying UFO stories from around the world unless there's some kind of spectacular event that happens.
About the quickening happening in the Pacific Northwest and the Vancouver region and area.
About how some of my visions I see Vancouver and British Columbia still being here after this awakening.
And I'm tuned to a station that is telling me and some of my collective people that I'm with that it's happening and somehow it's situated that this area will be here.
But my question, nonetheless, do you know if there was any sort of streak of UFOs in 1996?
I did hear of some of in Michigan, but as well in British Columbia area here of rotating nerf-like boomerang discs that pulsated.
Well, since you're in British Columbia, maybe you can help us out.
Sure.
Your CBC there and other media, do they report?
unidentified
I would have to say that you do have another person that calls from Vancouver who I would like to say he's not too brilliant because he keeps going on with the same stupid electromagnetic magnets.
But the people that do broadcast around here, I'd have to say, are pretty docile in the media and they're not so restricted.
So they're more likely to say something.
And I have heard local radio stations have talked about it, had people call in.
It's almost like a natural thing.
It's not like you're on the west coast of Vancouver where everybody's known to smoke pot and drugs.
And I think it conclusively proves that human events...
It may not at all.
But human events in nearly every category are increasing in pace at an exponential rate, socially, economically, politically, geophysically, environmentally.
You pick the category, and things appear to be speeding up.
And maybe it's related in some way to ufology, and maybe it is not.
There are a lot of people that hope that it is, that somebody is going to come along and save our butts from the sky at the last minute.
Okay, the first question is, do you possibly believe, okay, now this might sound a little crazy, that we might have actually been aliens at one time, travelers and that actually landed on Earth and that we adapted to Earth?
There have been suggestions that life on Earth was transplanted from other planets in other solar systems a long time ago.
I think that we have been, and I say we, the human race has been on Earth long enough that we've evolved through various stages.
I think the fossil record is very clear about that.
Well, maybe I shouldn't say very clear because they keep changing what the fossil record says.
But it seems to be that there is good, solid evidence that we, Homo sapiens, have been around for four or five million years now, which is not to say that sometime prior to that we couldn't have been transplanted to Earth.
But it seems that life originated on Earth through a series of events that are not ET driven.
It is, and I want to remind the audience, tomorrow night for the first time, NASA reacts in the personage of Don Savage, who is the Public Affairs Officer, the Office of Space Science and Ray Villard, who is the public affairs officer for the Hubble Space Sciences Institute, both apparently NASA taxpayer-funded organizations.
They wrote me a two-page letter after the last appearance of Richard Hoagland, and so they are obviously reacting.
They would rather not, in fact, they said they would rather not, confront Mr. Hoagland on the air.
I'm sad about that, but their reasoning was that we've had Mr. Hoagland on many times by himself, and they wanted the opportunity to present their information in the same manner, and I found that hard to refuse, so they will be here tomorrow night.
And my guest right now is Kevin Randall, and we're going to get back to him in just a moment.
And I've got a very, very, very good question for Kevin relating to the Security Act and the thing that most people say they are forced to sign and that thing that prevents them from coming forward.
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Kevin, Kevin Randall is my guest, author of many books, History of UFO Crashes, and most recently, The Randall Report and others.
And I think most of the time there's a limit on how long you have to remain silent.
And the longest I've heard is 15 years that after they've been released from whatever service they were in, whatever they were doing, 15 years is the longest, and it's for people that dealt with extremely sensitive materials, which is not to say that there aren't people who, in special circumstances, aren't obligated to keep the secret for a much longer period of time.
But standard, it's seven years or 10 years or 12 years is pretty standard, especially with dealing with classified top-secret material, because the stuff, frankly, is perishable.
I mean, after the argument against, for example, an experimental aircraft crashing at Roswell, what could we possibly have been experimenting with in 1947 that is not going to be seriously outclassed by the latest generation of military aircraft?
My question for Kevin is he wrote a book called The October Scenario.
And unless I'm not understanding the book properly, it seemed at the time that he was arguing the case that the only valid saucer sightings were those or the only occupant encounters that were valid were those that took place in October of 1973.
Yet to hear him tonight, he seems to be singing a different song altogether.
Does he have any comment?
Could he elaborate on what his mindset was at the time and how it has changed?
When I wrote the October scenario, the idea that I had was we had been so busy arguing about the reality of the phenomenon when it really happened to us in October of 1973.
We were so busy with the reality that we didn't take time to see what was actually going on.
Since I wrote that book, I have continued my investigations and have been presented with evidence that persuaded me that there were other very valid UFO sightings, Roswell, of course, being the granddaddy of them all.
And so when people present me with that book now and say, well, can you give me an autograph?
I normally write into it very good information, but the theory is badly flawed.
So the theory has been disproven.
So you ignore the few pages that deal with the theory about only October of 1973 being a valid UFO sightings and take a look at the information that is presented in the other arenas.
So that's a theory that I had developed, and it just didn't pan out.
Well, if you or anybody else would like to submit a list of questions that you think would be fun to ask when you actually have NASA right here, feel free to do so.
Well, I can kind of understand where they're coming from, too, because you do offer us an opportunity to kind of go at them without them having a chance to respond to them.
I'm calling from L.A. I'm down here in business, but I heard Mr. Randall talking about a letter that he received from Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Hibler.
And I'm a retired Air Force person and happened to know two people whose last name is Hibler that are possibly lieutenant colonels right now in the Air Force.
One works for the National Security Agency and the other works for the OSI.
Well, I think one thing before I answer the question, we need to point out is that we are getting these government agencies that had ignored us to this point to actually respond to us.
And I think, again, of the Air Force report in September of 1995, where they came out with their Kakamame Project Mobile explanation.
But what is more important than that is why does the Air Force suddenly feel compelled to respond to a bunch of UFO nuts?
If there's nothing to the Roswell case, what do they care what we think?
Bentwaters, I think, is a very, very important case.
We have an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, for example, sending a letter to the Ministry of Defense in Great Britain talking about the events.
We have physical evidence left on the ground.
We have some very highly credible people telling a story of what happened to them at Bentwaters.
I think it's a highly significant case and that it should be pursued.
And what most people don't know is there was a case that took place in 1956 from the Bentwaters area, a radar case that has been pretty well ignored in the UFO literature.
Arthur C. Clarke, for example, on his program Mysterious Universe, whatever the name of it is, said at one point that he was inclined not to believe in UFOs because there were no radar cases.
And my response is always been, first of all, even if there were no radar cases, doesn't our stealth technology render that argument obsolete?
But secondly, there are some very, very compelling radar cases that suggest the objects, multiple sites, multiple radar sites, multiple witnesses, aircraft intercepts of these things in a single incident that's extremely important.
And I think Bentwaters, it ranks right up there as one of the important cases because of the credibility of witnesses such as Colonel Halt.
Well, Major Kehoe, Major Kehoe worked with Lindbergh at one point, flew chase planes for Lindbergh.
And he's been around forever, and he did an awful lot to bring forward the hidden cases from the Pentagon and suggest that things in the UFO field, Project Blue Book, for example, were not what the public was being led to believe and exposed quite a bit of the cover-up himself.
unidentified
Well, maybe you know some of his associates or something that could interview.
If you're looking for someone from that era, we've lost an awful lot of those people.
I mean, the Lorenzens would have been good, although they hid some information that they should have shared with the public.
Dick Hall might be an interesting guest, although he and he was from that era and worked with those people at NICAM, so he might be a very interesting guest.
Listen, I communicated to NASA myself the other day, and I got a response back from...
Well, they may have sent something like that, but I've got it from Doug Isbel, who was the person they contacted as a NASA spokesman in the Orlando Sentinel.
They did not approve two proposals to go to Europa.
They, quote, did not make the cut.
And I have that from Don Savage, who's going to be with us tomorrow night.
Those were his words.
They did not make the cut.
unidentified
So these might be some questions to ask him in regards to this, because I've got this quote from Doug Isabel that says exactly NASA is not canceling any plans.
Good question, Kevin, and let's fold that into a bigger question.
The Aurora and other aircraft that appeared to be producing great big sonic booms that come cascading in off the Pacific and go kaboom in San Diego and Southern California.
Moondust was put together to recover returning space debris of foreign manufacture or unknown origin.
And of course, unknown origin could refer to UFOs.
But documentation recovered that says Project Moondust clearly dealt with UFOs.
So while they might not only be picking up Soviet satellites that fell somewhere, and not necessarily in the United States, but anywhere in the world, they also, part of the mission, could be recovering alien technology.
And their UFO mission is well documented now through Freedom of Information documents that have come through the State Department and things like that.
I had a bunch of very interesting revelations that came one after the other.
The microbial life on the Mars rock, in the Mars rock, the water on the moon that we discovered with SDI technology, and then, of course, NASA up on Nightline.
This is where they're going to have a hard time jumping up and down about the pictures that they've got from Europa, where they believe there is a high probability that there could be life.
I mean, they were just on Nightline jumping up and down about it.
Well, what's interesting also, if you go back to the SETI program and Frank Grake's equation about is there life on other planets in the galaxy, in our galaxy.
And it had always been, we had to postulate the fact there were planets around other stars.
We didn't know this for a fact.
We guessed there Were because we didn't think the solar system was unique.
And we had to guess about the possibility of life developing wherever it was able to develop.
And that, again, was a guess.
And so, what's happened in the last year, we've discovered planets around other stars in our neck of the galaxy, which suggests that there are literally trillions of planets out there.
And the fact that if life developed on Mars as well as on Earth, then that suggests that life will develop on any planet that is capable of supporting it.
So the idea that there is intelligent life on other planets is leaped forward, I think, immensely in the last year.
Well, I don't know what that means, but Kevin, it is a good question regarding where these things come from.
Is it in your mind equally possible that instead of coming from another place through space, as we imagine transit at the speed of light or even greater?
Or is it equally possible they come from another parallel dimension of some sort?
People speculate it could be man's invention, that there really is no time other than that which we manage to discern and tick off by planets going around suns and counting the time that we need some way to count it all.
Well, if you look at what conventional science says about the Big Bang, it seems to look out about 15 billion years and say the objects that we can see, as far as we can see, it's about 15 billion years.
And that the Big Bang all began from one central point and began throwing objects in an outward direction.
And the most distant we can see is about 15 billion years out.
Well, a really good question is, what's beyond that?
And I think if we could see, if we could see, then there would be objects behind that, because every time we've limited ourselves on how far we can see out from the Earth, new technology pushes that limit back.
Because I seem to remember 25 years ago reading something that we could see about 6 billion years out, and now it's 15 billion years.
What the government and the Air Force has done very carefully is suggest there was something special about these balloons, when in fact there weren't.
They were regular weather balloons and ray wind targets, easily identifiable.
In fact, they were of such little intelligence value that two days after the Roswell event was announced in the newspaper in Roswell, newspapers around the country carried pictures of one of those balloon trains and a ladder in one of the pictures.
Charles Moore, who was one of the project members, told me that they bought that ladder from Petty Cash.
So it was of such little intelligence value that we've got photographs published in the newspapers two days after the event.
unidentified
I've got one other thing, and I'll let you go.
Surely.
There was a radio talk show I was listening to in 1979 on WLWL in Cincinnati.
It was an open forum.
And a gentleman called in and said in the early 1970s at a drive-in theater.
I don't know if this was on a Friday or Saturday night, but there was approximately 200 people there.
And this flying saucer just all of a sudden appeared out of nowhere and was flying all over the place, like a go down a block and it'd fly back and it'd go back down two blocks and fly back for 30 minutes.
You would not imagine, no matter what these things are, that it would relate in any way at all to educational level, except perhaps as the likelihood of reporting it might be.
I think what they're suggesting there is that the more education you have, the more likely you will be able to identify the object as being astronomical or weather-related or maybe an aircraft.
I think that's what they're suggesting.
So it's the unsophisticated people that see flying saucers because they don't know what's in the sky around them.
And that's just not borne out.
In fact, the Air Force had a habit, if you saw a flying saucer on more than one occasion, they usually wrote it off as a psychological problem because you clearly weren't smart enough to identify things.
And seeing a flying saucer was such a rare event, you'd only seen on one occasion.
You'd only have one opportunity.
And of course, Clyde Tombaugh, as I said, who discovered Pluto, had seen UFOs on two separate occasions.
So that means he's an unreliable observer, even though he discovered the planet Pluto.
Well, actually, actually, if you go back, Thornton Page and Carl Sagan did a book.
They had arranged a symposium at an AIAA meeting about UFOs, and in the course of Menzel's lecture, he mentioned that he had been, of course, working for the government in a decrypting capability during the Second World War.
And I don't find that particularly heinous.
I mean, anybody who was any kind of scientific capability in the Second World War, I think, contributed to our effort to win the war.
I remember hearing the person who wrote this book say that he went to the home of Mesla after he was dead, introduced himself to the guy's wife, said he was writing a book and he wanted to include him.
She was very flattered and allowed him to delve into personal papers.
And there in the papers he found this one paper which identified him as having been hired by the government, so to speak, to debunk UFOs.
I don't think any evidence that he was actually hired by the government to debunk UFOs, although he did do that.
And if you go back and you take a look at the Project Blue Book files, although he's never listed as one of the consultants, you see throughout the Project Blue Book files Menzel's handiwork.
In fact, the Project Blue Book files as they are now, they've expunged all the names of the witnesses, and there's a letter, and the letterhead says Harvard Observatory.
And of course, the name of the author has been blanked out, and the signature has been blanked out, but at the bottom it says DHM, which is Donald H. Menzel, which is clearly it's Menzel writing this letter explaining some UFO case.
So he had an active role in debunking UFOs for the government, but I think it was more, as we talked about, I think in the last hour, it was just something that he felt compelled to do that he just didn't want anybody to believe in UFOs.
I even have a letter from Menzel where he suggests that people who see UFOs or claim to see UFOs are just damn liars.
unidentified
Well, I do remember definitely the person who wrote the book being interviewed said this.
As far as people working at observatories, I met somebody here in Chicago in 1969, a young man approximately 30 years old who was working full-time, going to college at night.
And we got into a conversation about UFOs at a time when you couldn't talk openly about it without being ridiculed.
So he told me privately, after becoming sure that I was a believer in UFOs, that his father, and he asked me not to repeat it at that time, that his father had worked at Polymer for many years and had seen UFOs on many occasions.
I think that a lot of times if you report something like that, then your colleagues began to laugh at you, even though privately.
And that's something else.
I found that if you sit down with people one-on-one and you talk about them, they're much more likely to express a belief in UFOs than if you get them in a large group where other people can laugh at them.
I think there's no problem with disagreeing with one another if, for example, Stan Friedman and I disagree on some aspects of the Roswell case, for example.
I don't think there's a problem with us disagreeing about that because we agree on the basic premise that there was some kind of an extraterrestrial event.
But if we degenerate into calling each other names, well, you cannot trust Kevin Randall because he writes fiction, for example.
First of all, the fact that I have actually written science fiction is completely and totally irrelevant.
And why would my day job disqualify me from UFO research when no one else's day job seems to disqualify him?
That is not right.
And we do an awful lot of that in the UFO community, calling each other names.
And that hurts us.
The Air Force, in their report in 1995, made a big deal out of the fact that the ufologists couldn't agree on the exact date of the crash.
Well, first of all, we don't have the documentation the Air Force has.
But second of all, we agreed that it was the first week in July of 1947.
So if the Air Force is suggesting that there's this big disagreement over the date and somehow this as if to suggest that if we could just get the date right, why they'd admit it.
Or that somehow that we've created this big problem for us because there's no agreement on the date, how can they possibly research their files and find anything?
Well, geez, we agree on it happening somewhere between the 2nd of July and the 5th of July, the crash taking place.
This does not seem to me to present a big, major problem.
And if we had access to the files and the FOIA request that we filed, then we could answer that question specifically.
But the fact we don't agree on the precise date is really irrelevant.
I was sending a letter to Jesse Marcel Jr., and I went to the local post office to post it, and the woman working behind the counter said, is this the guy that saw the flying saucer.
I said, Well, yes, it actually is.
Do you know him?
Yes, I actually do.
unidentified
I have a short story for you guys, real quick.
A friend of mine went into a local health food store a couple of weeks ago, and he said he saw this lady pull up behind him with Texas license plates.
Well, he got out, went inside the store.
The lady got out, followed him in, and while my friend was looking around for whatever he wanted to buy, he heard the lady go up to the lady at the cash register say, Where's the best place to see aliens?