Art Bell

All Episodes

Previous Next

May 1, 1997 - Art Bell

02:51:43

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Ray Villard - Don Savage - NASA

Participants

Main voices

01:07:52

boris said

14:44

don savage

58:43

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Geography Scholars, Minnesota is east of the Rockies, and you're listening to AM 1500 KSTP.
unidentified		Music
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be across all these many varied time zones, stretching from the Hawaiian and Tahitian Island chains all the way east to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the Bowl, and worldwide on the internet this is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Postcodes A.M. I'm Mark Bell.
unidentified		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right.
		In a moment, Don Savage from the public affairs, actually a public affairs officer, I guess, of the Office of Space Science for NASA, and Ray Billard, public affairs officer for the Hubble Space Sciences Institute, are going to be my guests.
		In other words, folks, here comes NASA.
		It should be rather interesting.
		And so we'll get to all of that and a lot more throughout the night.
		Welcome to Open Line, Unscreened.
		Anything goes, Talk Radio, 7911.
		That's 1-800-447-7911.
		Well, all right, here we go.
		I'm going to read you first what began this, and then we will go to our guests.
		I received a letter, a two-page letter by facts, from NASA.
		And it says as follows, Dear Mr. Belt, the reason we're writing is to ask your help in setting the record straight on the subject of the Hubble Space Telescope's observations of Comet Hale Bopp, which we learned was discussed by a guest on one of your recent programs.
		Apparently, the interview motivated a number of people to send faxes to NASA headquarters this week.
		Unfortunately, from reading many of the letters, it seems most of them were reacting based on incorrect information.
		We will send a copy of this letter to all those who left their addresses or phone numbers, but many didn't.
		So I'd appreciate it if you can let your listeners know the facts first.
		Most wrote that they were upset when your guest, that would be Richard Hoagland, my ad, said that Hubble has not been used to observe Halebach, or perhaps it had, but we were hiding the images.
		These accusations are totally false.
		Hubble has been used to observe Halebach a number of times since 1995, and the images have been widely available on the internet and have been in the news.
		I suppose it's a measure of how much people have come to appreciate Hubble's capabilities that they look to it whenever something happens in space.
		But Hubble is far from the only instrument available to astronomers to study this comet.
		Most major discoveries made about Halebaff, including the finding of organic molecules and the sodium tail, were made with ground-based observatories as well as other spacecraft.
		Hubble's major contribution has been to accurately measure the diameter of the nucleus about 25 miles.
		Late last month, NASA put out a press release and a series of images when Dr. Harold Weaver of Johns Hopkins University, the principal scientist researching Halbop with Hubble, published his findings in the prestigious magazine Science.
		A number of newspapers and TV stations around the country reported the press release and images are available widely on the internet.
		They provide a list.
		Another point some people asked about was the possibility of using Hubble, even though the comet is in the solar avoidance zone, that is, within 50 degrees of the sun, as seen from Hubble's location in orbit around the Earth.
		In fact, one of the few disappointing aspects of this apparition, apparition rather, of Comet Hale Bob, was its relatively poor viewing geometry.
		Hubble cannot normally view objects at angles closer than 50 degrees to the sun because of possible damage to the observatory.
		Hubble's pointing restriction can be relaxed somewhat under certain unusual circumstances.
		And Dr. Weaver had requested observations make that of Halebop during the first two weeks in March.
		However, a detailed analysis showed that Halebop would be visible to Hubble for about five minutes while the observatory was in Earth shadow and thus protected from sunlight.
		This was not enough time to make observations and slew the telescope back into a safe configuration prior to emerging into potentially damaging sunlight.
		Even if observations were attempted, no spectroscopy, I believe it is, sorry guys, was possible because the new instruments installed during the servicing mission only a few weeks earlier were not yet ready to make astronomical observations.
		Thus, the prime scientific motivation for Hubble observations searching for new chemical species in the comet could not be achieved.
		As I have said before, many other observatories and spacecraft are observing Halebop, many with specialized instruments that Hubble doesn't have, and they are studying the comet right now.
		Now, let's see if we can bring on Don Savage, the Public Affairs Officer of the Office of Space Science, and Ray Villard, once again, Public Affairs Officer for Hubble Space Sciences Institute.
		Gentlemen, are you there?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good.
		We've got you both.
		Don, where are you located?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I'm located in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. Okay, and Ray?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'm up in Maryland, outside of Baltimore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, excellent.
		Gentlemen, first of all, welcome to the program.
		Glad to have you both on.
		You both, let me be straight about this.
		You both are employees, or are you not, of NASA?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me start first.
		Thanks for having us on this morning.
		I'm Don Savage, and I am an employee of NASA and NASA headquarters in Washington.
		My job as a public affairs officer is to talk to members of the press and members of the public primarily about what NASA does.
		And I'll let Ray answer the question from his perspective.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Ray?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I'm a news manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
		We're run by a consortium of universities, and we're based at the Johns Hopkins University.
		And the primary goal of my office is to put out the latest findings from Hubble that are of public interest, and we work with the worldwide astronomy community in translating those findings for use by news media.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Ray, let me begin with you and ask you how Hubble's time is apportioned.
		What sort of criterion and decision-making process goes into deciding what Hubble looks at and what it doesn't?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Astronomers around the world are invited to submit proposals for using Hubble.
		It's a very unique observatory and competition is open worldwide.
		The demand for using Hubble is so great that typically we're oversubscribed 4 to 1 or 5 to 1.
		The selection on who gets to use Hubble is made by committees, peer-reviewed committees of other astronomers who come to Baltimore, meet at the Institute, they sort through the proposals, make their recommendations to our director, and then he picks the programs.
		What's interesting is that Hubble is a truly international project.
		We have astronomers from more than 35 countries involved in it.
		And if you count the astronomers and their teams, we have per year more than 1,000 astronomers conducting about 150 observing programs with Hubble.
		Again, using the telescope is based on the scientific merit of the proposal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and that is decided by committee?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		That is decided by astronomy peer-review committees.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		In the letter, it suggested the major contribution of Hubble was to estimate the size of the nucleus.
		Would it be true or not that in 1995, Mr. Weaver himself, Dr. Weaver, would it be?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would presume Dr. Weaver, said our current best preliminary estimate is 40 kilometers or 25 miles.
		In other words, that was way back in 1995.
		And since that time, we had expected to get photographs with much better resolution, which seemingly never came.
		In other words, there is a suggestion that there has been a deliberate, I'm not sure what the right word would be, a degrading of the sharpness of the photographs since the 1995 photographs.
		You want to address that?
unidentified		Oh, wow.
unidentified		Well, Hubble has very sharp vision.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		But again, if you think of Hale Bob, a nucleus 25 miles across that's millions of miles away, if you do a little geometry, you figure out that that's way below even Hubble's resolution limits.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And Hubble never truly resolved the nucleus.
unidentified		Estimates were based on the brightness of the nucleus and other behavior.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So in other words, you never actually saw the nucleus.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Even with Hubble, you're seeing only the relative brightness?
unidentified		Yeah, you're seeing reflection of light from dust around the nucleus.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		But again, it's just even the 25 miles across.
unidentified		You can't resolve it.
		Even not with Hubble.
		It's just too far away.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Tom Van Flandren, astronomer, has a model, a theory, which suggests that comets, or the nucleus of comets, are not necessarily solid, but are made up of orbiting pieces from a once long ago blown-up planet, as many as six or seven, in this case, orbiting pieces.
		There would then be, with the photographs that we've got so far, thus far with Hubble, no way to confirm or deny that model?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Models I've heard about for the nucleus, again, talk of it as sort of a flying rubber pile.
unidentified		Even there, your pieces would be within a certain radius and still not resolvable by Hubble.
unidentified		Let me mention, Art, that a year ago when comet Yakutake came by, in fact, we could see big pieces breaking off, which was interesting.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		We published a picture of what we call the sister particle following Yakutaki, which would, again, would attest that comets are very fragile.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		The comet that hit Jupiter broke into, you know, a year before the impact broke into more than 20 pieces just based on the tug of Jupiter.
unidentified		So all of this would attest that these things are very fragile, and if they're not already in pieces, they're easily broken up into pieces.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but there's nothing that you've observed so far that would rule out the Van Flandren model.
unidentified		No, again, that would not be, even if they were little pieces, Hubble could not dissolve that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		One of the questions that Mr. Van Flandren has had, Dr. Van Flandren, is with respect to Hillbop's now leaving, and there is this apparent five-minute window when Earth's shadow would allow some photography of Comet Hillbop.
		And he felt might be able to resolve this question once and for all, of course, very important to him.
		It's his model.
		Now, is it absolutely true that there would be no way to get the Hubble telescope oriented and taking Pictures and then safely back out of the way as the shadow leaves.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		As you had read from the letter, that is a very tricky observation, and it does put the entire observatory at risk.
		And nobody wants to be charged with turning a $1.5 billion telescope into a $1.5 billion solar collector.
		I think the feeling among the astronomers who had to make the decision was that the risk was not worth the reward.
unidentified		As I understand it, we did this only once before as an experiment.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		We looked at Venus, which, of course, is very close to the Sun.
unidentified		And it just wasn't deemed that important.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And also, as had been alluded to, initially we were in the middle of checkout from the last Hubble servicing mission.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I don't think people are convinced that by risking Hubble like that, you're going to learn much more than what you are already learning from ground-based telescopes.
unidentified		Certainly, this issue of resolving applying rebel tile, I'm 99% sure just is not feasible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Again, I know this is a very direct accusatory question, but I'll ask it, that images taken since 1995, for example, one released in October, I believe October 17th of 1996, about seven months ago, if you look very closely, would appear to be deliberately degraded to about the same spatial scale as the first taken in 1995.
		You would deny that?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		These are pictures of the Hillbot nucleus.
unidentified		Is that what you're saying?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we are.
unidentified		So you're claiming that we had a sharper picture, but we degraded it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, that's pretty far-fetched.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Our astronomers go to a great deal, great effort to try and extract as much sharpness.
unidentified		I can't imagine any reason why one would want to go out of the way to do that.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		These pictures are worked on very hard by Dr. Weaver and other astronomers, and they represent Hubble at its peak performance.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, let me address a question to you.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is Don Savage.
		Don, there was a report called the Brookings Report.
		Are you familiar with that?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I am.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would it, in your opinion, be true or not that we, meaning I guess you and NASA and the government, still operate or do operate on the basis of the conclusions of the Brookings report?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, that's not even an operable document right now.
		It's basically an historical document.
		It was written for NASA, as the title implies, by the Brookings Institute back in 1960, or that's when it was published.
		At the time, NASA was being formed during, you know, from 1958 from pieced together from other agencies and given a charter to go explore space, kind of a, you know, somewhat vague charter.
		The Brookings Institute was asked to put together a team of very eminent scientists, thinkers, and philosophers to decide, you know, what it is, what should be the goals of an agency that would explore space and what kinds of things should we do.
		And they came up with a blueprint looking at Earth orbiting satellites, weather satellites, communication satellites, man in space, explore the moon, explore other planets with unmanned probes, followed up by human exploration later.
		Basically, kind of laid out a roadmap, which very, I think you could say, you know, it was well thought out, and a lot of that has come to pass.
		The part that you're asking is whether this is NASA policy.
		And no, it is not.
		It was basically a think piece.
		Very well done.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Part of that thought piece was the suggestion that the public, even scientists, religious institutions and so forth, should life be discovered elsewhere, that it would be extremely disruptive to them, and that that information, therefore, should not necessarily be revealed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would you say that's a fair statement?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, the report, in fact, said a number of things about the possible discovery of life and what it might mean here on the earth, both to scientists and to the general public.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		And they covered a wide range of things, you know, saying that there in some places, it depends on the cultures that you're talking about, that they would handle that kind of news in different ways.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		They're all, you know, hypothesizing anything from, you know, this could result in world unity to, you know, factional fighting.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Who knows?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		To anarchy, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Who knows?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		And they said it requires further study.
		Some of the things they suggested were that we do other studies and follow up.
		I don't know if any studies like that were done, but that was an interesting discussion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was and is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know of any other, you just said, you don't really know of any other studies done since Brookings that would tend to confirm or refute those findings?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		No, other than I think if you look at the intervening years, we've had a number of opportunities to study people, I guess, in kind of a general way.
		And if you look back in popular culture, you know, in the 1950s, extraterrestrials were viewed at kind of with fear.
		They were going to come to the earth and, you know, take over and burn and destroy and so forth.
		And that was a very big fear expressed in, you know, sci-fi movies and so forth, for the most part.
		And that has changed over the years to where we are now, I guess, with E.T. and I mean, you know, there was Independence Day, too.
		Well, I was going to mention that.
		I mean, you know, it goes all over the place.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What I guess I'm asking is: does NASA and do you still embrace those, or do you embrace those aspects of Brookings report?
		Or is it now your view that all of that has changed?
		And should we find life, it would be accepted reasonably well?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, it doesn't really matter, I guess, in one respect how we think it's going to be accepted because we have a charter to get this out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No matter what.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and we certainly did that back in August 1996.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You did.
		Listen, guys, we're at the bottom of the hour, and I've got to break away.
		Networks demand exact clockwork.
		So we'll get back to this right after the break.
		Relax, everybody, and we will be back.
		Don Savage and Ray Villard, both NASA people, are my guests.
		There'll be more.
		From the high desert, this is CBC.
unidentified		CBC.
		Art Bell is taking calls on the wildcard line at 702-727-1295.
		That's 702-727-1295.
		First-time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
		NASA is here in the personages of Don Savage and Ray Villard.
		And we'll get back to them in a moment.
		R-U-A-R-R-C, or in numbers, 1-888-465-3572.
		Back now to Don Savage and Ray Villard.
unidentified		Gentlemen.
unidentified		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning again.
		All right.
		Back for a second to the Brookings report.
		I can say his name, though you might not.
		His name is Richard Hoagland.
		He's been a guest here a bunch of times.
		He's one of the people who have been saying things that no doubt have brought you to the program.
		Now, I have one great disagreement with Richard, and I've had it for a long time, regarding the Brookings report and its conclusions about how our institutions of all sorts would react to announcement of life.
		And I'm here referring now to more than microbial life found in a rock from Mars.
		I happen to believe that the Brookings report is probably right.
		And, you know, I sit here and do talk radio, and I talk to people of all stripes and sorts.
		I've done it three years.
		And I can tell you that a lot of fundamentalist religious folks out there would find the discovery of life extremely disturbing to their belief systems and that it would cause quite a bit of social disruption.
		I believe that.
		Richard Hoagland does not.
		And are you suggesting to me that you, in effect, agree with Richard that those findings with regard to Brookings are not true anymore?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, again, I don't call them findings exactly.
		They were, I guess, suggestions of the kinds of reactions that might occur, and they ran the gamut from disruptions and certainly in some societies and cultures would react more strongly than others.
		And at the other end of the scale, it could possibly bring the world together in a new unity.
		So it just was all over the place in terms of what they said are possibilities, and we need to study it more.
		And that was really their bottom line, was this really needs to be studied by sociologists before we really understand.
		So I think that if I can interject one thing that I think came to light after the announcement last August that there was possible life, microbial life even, a number of news media interviewed theologians and philosophers about this very topic,
		and most of them were very, very comfortable with the notion of not only of possible microbial life, but of the bigger picture that maybe there's intelligent life out there.
		And in fact, in that regard, I think scientists, astronomers in particular, would agree.
		They think although we have no proof of this at all, certainly if you do the math, the probability is very high, almost 100% that there is life out there and a very good chance that there's intelligent life somewhere out there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's quite a statement to make.
		Is it, just taking a side course, based on what you just said, almost 100% that there is life out there, do you consider it unusual that we have no evidence of that yet?
		In other words, our society, for example, right now, radiates all kinds of RF energy all across the spectrum, known to us.
		And you would think that other societies would at least pass through a period of evolution in their evolution where they would do the very same thing.
		So is that a very short time?
		Are you not surprised that we have not received signals that would indicate intelligent life yet?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's a really interesting thing that's being researched now.
		A number of eminent scientists and people for many years have postulated that, that at least at some point in some advanced civilization, they go through a phase of using radio as we are now.
		We've been doing it for roughly 80, 90 years.
		We've been radiating stuff into space, so there's a bubble of this kind of radio waves going from Earth out to about 90 or so light years away.
		So, stars that are within that, and if they have the capability, could possibly pick up some signals from back early in our radio days.
		Signals would be extremely weak, but it's possible.
		And in fact, we have been listening on and off through the last 30 years or so for these kinds of signals, both in NASA with the so-called SETI program, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
		And when that program was disestablished in 1993, it was picked up by a private institution out in California using most of the same equipment and getting new equipment and private funding.
		And they're continuing with that research.
		Yeah, and it is disappointing, I guess, but the search goes on.
		They haven't detected any, I guess, clear signals or indications that they found some kind of intelligent signals coming from outer space.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have heard rumors, maybe you can confirm or deny them, that there are a number of signals that they have considered to be significant.
		Not ones that they declared not the, oh my God, here it is signal, but signals that were very, very interesting in terms of possibly indicating something of a regularity that would indicate life.
		Have you heard that?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I've heard that they had something along those lines, but I'm not totally clear on what it is.
		The kind of thing they would be looking for would be a pattern kind of a signal that would indicate some intelligence behind a pattern.
		In the past, patterns have been found, and then they determined later on that these were actually from natural phenomenon leading to, in fact, some very interesting astronomical discoveries.
		So, you know, they try to sort these things out, but they need also to be repeatable over a period of time so that they can go back to it, and it's not just a one-shot deal or, you know, just something that flashes on, and that's all you have.
		It's just, you know, a couple of seconds or a couple of data points to go by.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I understand.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		But I recommend you talk to someone at the SETI Institute, and I'm sure they'd be more than happy to talk to you about that.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		My understanding, too, are that these have been interesting, but one shot event.
unidentified		But what I also heard that was interesting was that a number of them were along the galactic plane.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That is interesting.
unidentified		They have more stars, and you would tend to see more things along there.
unidentified		So those are interesting questions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're actually in the galactic suburbs, aren't we?
unidentified		Yes, we're about 25,000 light years from the core of the Milky Way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So we're way out there.
		I once saw a photograph with an arrow pointing to Earth and showing the rest of everything, and we're sort of way out here, not in the populated area at all.
		The equivalent probably of where I live out in the middle of the desert.
		All right.
		Do you both agree that NASA is a public agency?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yes, in fact, we're totally publicly funded.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I think, you know, the scientists I deal with, there's a tremendous interest to want to share their results with the public.
unidentified		And I think both John and I find our jobs just so rewarding.
unidentified		I don't think we trade them for a minute.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we live in such a tremendous time.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		This is a golden age of discovery.
unidentified		And wondrous things from Hubble and other telescopes are being uncovered daily, weekly almost.
unidentified		And it's wonderful to share this with the public.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Was the last repair or replacement of module mission to Hubble a complete success?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we're in very good shape.
unidentified		All the instruments, electronics are working well.
unidentified		There have been some problems with the infrared camera, but those look like they're getting better.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And we hope to have some pictures out in a few weeks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're all looking forward to that.
		A lot of people feel that NASA at its beginnings is not the NASA of today.
		That in the beginning of the very beginnings of NASA, there was a lot more openness than there is today.
		For example, with regard to the photographs that come in, at one time they used to come in in real time.
		And now I refer to photography or imaging coming back from the shuttle or from our probes.
		And these days, we hear stories that there is a proprietary period of time, for example, with probes that are sent out, where scientists are able to view this and have the data all to themselves for some period of time, six months or whatever, before it's released to the public.
		Is that a change?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me start with that, and then Ray can also talk about how that works on Hubble.
		But in fact, proprietary periods have been around for a long time.
		But specifically for the images, there is a difference, I guess, in the last six or seven years, roughly.
		I don't know exactly how long, but in the past, most of the imaging instruments have been what we call facility instruments, which are they were provided by like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or one of the other NASA centers.
		So they were not provided by a principal investigator, or we call them PI, which is a scientist from, for instance, Arizona State or Stanford or other institutions that propose to put their instrument on a particular spacecraft because they want to study gamma rays or the magnetic field around Saturn, Something like that, they would propose an instrument.
		They would build it, they would fund that instrument out of the grants and put together a team and do all the work.
		So that's why you'd have a proprietary period.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but that still is, when you're talking about grants, that's public money, yes?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and the reason that they would have that proprietary period of, in some cases, six months to a year, I think a year is the longest I've ever heard, and we're trying to move away from that as much as we can.
		But it's still, it's a very cost-effective and fair way of doing science, and that it gives the scientists who have spent, in some cases, a decade or more of their career building this instrument, putting a science team together to study a particular problem.
		They have the first crack at looking at this data and publishing a paper before someone else can grab this stuff and publish something that they have toiled their entire life to do.
		That's a brief period of time, and then all of that data is available to the scientific community worldwide, the raw data.
		Anyone, it's in the data archives for anyone that has an interest in that to go research it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but Don, from a public relations point of view, do you understand the public's complaint that that is grant money that goes to those scientists, public money?
		You are a public organization, and the public is going to be suspicious of these six-month to one-year periods of exclusivity when they don't get to see the images.
		I mean, do you understand why the public has questions about that?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that by and large, most members of the public don't have a lot of concern about that.
		I think that there are, you know, there have been a few people that have expressed some concern about that.
		But if you look at the rewards of the science that you get from this and the cost savings, what you have primarily is a system of science that we have had in place in this country for a number of years that is working extremely well and returning some, as Ray said, we're in a golden age of discovery in astronomy.
		This kind of system works very well for us to get the most for the money out of these missions to immediately provide data from these particular scientists who, in many cases, have put together an instrument that is a brilliant instrument.
		It's patentable.
		It's got their own special design to answer these very difficult questions.
		I mean, we've done most of the easy work in astronomy.
		We're now at the stage where some of these questions just cannot be answered by inexpensive means.
		It's a very big challenge for us to try to put together a mission for a very modest amount of money that's going to do anything useful.
		And to do that, we rely on the ingenuity of scientists and engineers and these teams of, in many cases, grad students that work with these brilliant scientists to build these instruments for us for a very modest cost.
		It's going to unlock the secrets of the universe.
		And to then just say, okay, we want you just to give that to us and then just stand back and maybe your competitor in some other institution will publish a paper before you get a chance to even have a reasonable amount of time to look at your own,
		not, I wouldn't say your own data, but look at this data and have a good shot at it, to write a paper, publish a paper, and get some credit for all the work and years of efforts you put into this.
		You know, those kinds of things do happen, unfortunately, and it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But again, do you understand the public's suspicion when it's all public money involved?
		I appreciate the deference to the scientists' work, you know, everything they put into it.
		But the public sits back and says, wait a minute, this is public money that went to the scientists.
		This is public money going to the spacecraft that was launched.
		And NASA is itself, you said, public.
		So it's all public.
		And yet there is this period of time when we don't have access to the images.
		And that arouses a natural suspicion that a public affairs officer ought to be well aware of.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Art, let me jump in with a couple of comments on this.
		A lot of the pictures and results we've put out from Hubble, in fact, have come out before the end of this one-year proprietary period.
		Sometimes there are discoveries that are so exciting, we put them out even before a peer-reviewed paper has gone out.
		Another interesting thing with Hubble is that our institute director, in his wisdom, has used some of his time to make observations which are so important that they have been shared almost immediately with the public and the worldwide community.
		The biggest of those was the Hubble Deep Shield.
		This was mankind's deepest look ever at the universe.
		This picture went out two weeks after the data were taken.
		It was given to astronomers around the world and the public.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I recall that.
		It was an incredible photograph.
		Absolutely incredible.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		More recently, Hubble reacquired this very mysterious gamma-ray burst on the optical counterpart.
unidentified		That data were taken and given out to the worldwide astronomy community.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you referring to what some are calling an antimatter cloud?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		No, that's a different thing.
		Now, this was a burst, we think, from very far away, very powerful explosion of energy, gamma rays, but Hubble found the optical fireball from that explosion.
		But again, that was considered so important that was given to the community and shared with the public immediately.
unidentified		The astronomers we Work with.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		The problem is, you know, they get their data and it takes time.
		They have to sit down with it.
		They have to figure out what they have.
		They have to work on the pictures.
		I guess one could somehow put all the raw data into public domain.
		I'm not sure how that would serve the public.
		There would be no interpretation.
unidentified		There would be no data processing.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		It's all very raw stuff.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		These observations need time to gel.
unidentified		And again, historically, if we have something that is truly remarkable, there's a lot of pressure to want to get that out to the public.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		And I might say, too, that in many cases we're talking about two different things.
		I think in general, the thing the public at large cares most about are the pictures that we get back.
		I don't, in my discussions with people on this subject, no one has really ever said that they want to get all the raw data.
		They really want to know about the pictures and when they come back.
		And in most cases, as Ray says, we try to work with the astronomers to put out the pictures as soon as possible.
		And it's not a simple real-time thing with most instruments now, as it used to be in the past.
		With the previous types of cameras we used to have were very similar to either a still photo type camera or a video camera that most people are quite familiar with.
		It's quite different now.
		It's digital formats, and the data coming back is not much different from data from any other instrument and that it has to go through algorithms to be interpreted and turned into pictures.
		It takes some time to do that.
		In some cases, you can get a very rough, raw picture relatively quickly, but it takes a fair amount of days, weeks, and months in some cases to pull the scientifically valuable information out of the picture.
		But we occasionally have been able to work with them.
		In fact, during the Shoemaker-Levy bombardment of Jupiter, the comet that hit Jupiter, that was occurring in real time.
		We were getting pictures from Hubble, in fact, in some cases within minutes or hours of them acquiring it because they realized there was a great public interest and excitement about this.
		And they were turning the pictures around as quickly as they could and waiting on the scientific understanding to follow sometime down the road.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, gentlemen, we're at the top of the hour and we're going to break.
		When we come back, what I would like to ask you about is Europa.
		There was a Nightline program not long ago in which several of your fellow NASA people were on Nightline, virtually jumping up and down about the possibility of life on Europa.
		And now we find that there is not to be a mission.
		So we'll ask you about that when we come back.
		Don Savage and Ray Villard from NASA are my guests.
		I'm Art Bell, and from the high desert, this is CBC.
unidentified		CBC.
		It doesn't call our bell toll-free.
		West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
		1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
		1-800-825-5033.
		This is the CBC Radio Network.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what it is.
		I'm Art Bell.
		We have NASA with us in the personages of Don Savage, who is the Public Affairs Officer of the Office of Space Science, and Ray Villard, who is the Public Affairs Officer for Hubble Space Sciences Institute.
		And we'll get back to them in a moment.
		We're about to talk about Europa.
		Listen, if you own any stall.
		438.
		Back now to Don Savage and Ray Villard.
		Ray, I think this one is for you.
		It has been said that Hubble's resolution is approximately one pixel at the distance of Mars, or about 1.5 miles per pixel.
		Is that about right or is that wrong?
		For some reason, I'm not hearing you.
		Ray, are you there?
		You know, for some reason, I'm not hearing you.
		I don't know why.
		Let me try something here.
		Let me put you on hold.
		Don, are you hearing me?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I can hear you.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Can you hear me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I sure do.
		Let's try again and see if we can get Ray back.
		Ray, are you there?
		No, for some reason, Ray, it's like you have suddenly disappeared on us.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Ray, I can hear Ray on my end.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're hearing Ray on your end.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		He is, he is there, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		Very odd.
		What I'm going to have to do, I guess, is to, Ray, I'm going to have to try and recall you and get you back on the air.
		I don't know what went wrong, so we're going to re-dial Ray.
		In the meantime, Don, let me turn to you.
		And my question for you is, Europa.
		There was a Nightline show the other night, Don, in which people just, from NASA, were jumping up and down about water on Europa.
		My goodness, some people are suggesting there may be more water on Europa than there is on Earth under this ice.
		And I guess there is a model suggesting that volcanic venting just might provide, because of tidal forces, the possibility of life under Europa.
		Would you characterize that as a correct model or the possibility of a correct model?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's certainly an intriguing notion that they think that based on the way they can interpret the pictures coming back from the Galileo spacecraft that had a very close flyby of Europa, in fact, had several of them and will have several more.
		It looks like the ice surface on there has been moved around quite a bit and crunched up in different patterns by possibly convection.
		And they think in some of these areas it looks like there may have been the result of some volcanism, as you suggested.
		And what you have then is two of the conditions necessary for life.
		You have an energy source for heat and energy and possibly nutrients welling up if it is volcanic coming from the interior.
		And you have water.
		And with those two conditions there, then what you would need at that point is the other necessary ingredients for life that somehow got started on the Earth.
		So it's very intriguing.
		It's a possibility.
		Some scientists have gone out on a limb and say they think that there is life there.
		But we have no evidence for that, but we certainly are intrigued and do want to follow up on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		So we all agree.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A very intriguing place to go.
		So everybody was very shocked when we heard the first report, of course, said NASA rejects a mission to Europa.
		Now, I understand that it was not quite like that, and that there were presentations by scientists for projects to take up what budget there is to apportion money for missions, and that Europa, I think I can quote accurately here, didn't make the cut, or the two proposals to go to Europa did not make the cut.
		Is that correct?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, let me tell you what this was all about.
		Sometime last year, in the middle of last year, there was a proposal or request for proposals that NASA sent out, which we do periodically for various spacecraft programs.
		And this particular one was for the Discovery program of small, what we call small, in the neighborhood of $150 to $180 million missions, which historically that's a relatively inexpensive planetary spacecraft.
		And we requested the scientific community and spacecraft designers and builders and scientists to propose missions for this.
		We were going to select five missions at this point, and for further study, they would be funded at a certain level to then look at in more detail these five missions.
		Each team would come back later on this year, and out of that five, then one would be selected that would have the greatest chance of making it to its goal.
		So right now we have some very exciting things going on in the discovery program, but I'll get into that later.
		But to address the specific question, there were 34 proposals that came in.
		Two of them had to do with missions to Europa.
		And these were made, as I said, again, last year, these missions were put together.
		This was before the recent big excitement about Europa.
		And when you looked at these particular missions that were proposed against and evaluated against the other 32, 34 total, by a panel of 50 scientists and engineers both in and out of NASA, I think the majority were actually outside of NASA that reviewed these proposals.
		They selected the top five that had the greatest chance of succeeding in their mission and answering some very key questions.
		And these two Europa missions were just not deemed to be among the best proposals for doing that.
		Let me tell you the ones that did make it.
		We're not going to send a spacecraft.
		One of these five would eventually be a mission.
		One of them proposes to send a spacecraft to study Mercury.
		Another one, the atmosphere of Venus.
		One mission wants to go to the Martian moons and gather some surface material from there and return them to Earth for study.
		And one of them wants to, one mission wants to collect solar wind and return it to Earth.
		And one is a very interesting one.
		It relates to a previous discussion, wants to go to a comet nucleus, take images and spectral maps of at least three comet nuclei and analyze the dust flowing from them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, of all those you just mentioned, Don, do any of them have the possibility of detecting life that a mission to Europa would have?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		You know, we never really know what discoveries are going to be made by spacecraft, but certainly when you talk about life in our solar system, outside of the Earth, of course, we look at Mars and we look at Europa.
		And with this recent excitement about Europa, and then, of course, these two missions that were proposed, they weren't selected, I think that there was some disappointment that people may have erroneously thought that we were just backing away for some inexplicable reason.
		But let me tell you that that's not true.
		We're not backing away from Europa.
		These two particular missions weren't deemed as being as high of scientific value to answer the kinds of questions that we would like as the others.
		But let me tell you what we are doing with Europa.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Again, though, my question was, do any of the missions that you mentioned have as much possibility of discovery of life as would a mission to Europa with a proper configuration?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, specifically, I don't think that any of these missions were designed to look for life.
		And I don't really know whether the two Europa missions were either.
		I really don't know enough about those particular Europa missions.
		So I guess I can't answer that exactly.
		But let me tell you what we are doing with Europa.
		We have just extended The Galileo mission that is already at Jupiter to make eight more close flybys of Europa.
		We have done this $30 million study to make these flybys.
		What they have done is find savings from other parts of that program and to fund these studies, eight more flybys.
		That's going to give us a huge amount of information.
		We also have requested $10 million in funding for FY98, that's fiscal year 98 funding for technology research on future missions to planets, including Europa.
		And that'll be a major topic of discussion at workshops this summer to determine how we can adequately follow up on the discoveries that we've made at Europa.
		There's a number of really interesting proposals that have come up.
		And to be able to do these successfully and spend the tax dollar wisely so that we would have the very best chance of finding life or signs of life or conditions that would be conducive for life, that's the kind of thing that we would want to ensure that we would be able to do.
		And as a taxpayer, I certainly would want to have a mission that would have the best chance of doing that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You understand why the public is mystified and somewhat upset to first hear about the great possibility of life and then to hear a mission is not going to go there?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, again, from a public relations point of view, it seems all wrong.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, we certainly don't make mission selections based on public relations.
		You know, we are a public agency, as you said before, and we enjoy a lot of public support.
		And we open ourselves up to both criticism and people that enjoy what we do and fully support us because we are so open.
		And then these kinds of misunderstandings do occur.
		I think if there had not been a finding from Europa like this, probably no one would have given it any passing thought, but the fact that we did have it, again, and I'm in NASA, I really don't know what these two Europa missions were supposed to do, the proposals, that is, if they were actually capable of following up on the search for life or not.
		So that's something that I really can't comment on, whether or not they would have been the right missions or not.
		But we are looking at what missions would be the right missions to send to Europa, and we want to do that in the right way.
		These missions that would be selected out of the five that were selected in this go-round, they would be ready for launch after the turn of the century.
		And it's a possibility at this point that it takes several years to put together a good mission to follow up on a finding.
		But we've got some very bright people looking at it, and hopefully they'll be able to propose a mission that we could do that will be both cost-effective and will have the greatest chance of bringing back the kind of information that would be the most valuable in bearing on this question of whether Europa does, in fact, have the right conditions for life, or maybe even discover something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I think I've got Ray back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ray, are you there?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I'm right there, Art.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Good, good, good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let me repose a question to you, and that is regarding Hubble's resolution, that Hubble can resolve roughly one pixel at the distance of Mars, or about 1.5 miles.
		Would that be about right?
unidentified		No, let me give you the numbers, Art.
unidentified		When Mars, the last time Mars was closest to Earth, the last opposition, which was in March, Mars was 60 million miles away.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		And at that moment, we took pictures and we could resolve, well, each pixel was 13 miles across.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		13.
unidentified		Yeah.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		We released pictures just before opposition.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		We have a bunch of beautiful pictures we're going to be putting out in a few weeks.
unidentified		And again, it's about 13 miles per pixel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let me ask you both.
		It's been a long time since a man has walked on the moon.
unidentified		Why?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a question that's, I think, bigger than both of us, certainly.
		Yeah.
		It's definitely not something that is in the area of space science, which is the area that we work in.
		But I can tell you that, you know, in NASA, we certainly are very enthusiastic about exploring space and want to get back out there and certainly look forward to getting the International Space Station up and running and hope that that could lead to exploration of the Moon and Mars again and open up a whole new era.
		But, you know, all of those things are yet to come, yet to be funded.
		And the first step in any exploration is to get the International Space Station up there and getting the kind of research about what we need to know to exist and to live in space for long periods of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Don, I'm glad you mentioned that because I would like to ask you what you know, if anything, about the present status of Mir.
		And the American public has been hearing very little about Mir, and I'm hearing behind the scenes that Mir has been very close to evacuation, that Mir is suffering all kinds of leaks, and I guess is aging, and that may yet have to be evacuated.
		Do you have any news on that?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, the latest I heard, we have a mission, a space shuttle mission that will be going to Mir.
		And let me look up the date here.
		May 15th, we plan to dock with Mir, and we'll conduct five days of joint operations with The crew of Mir.
		Astronaut Jerry Leninger, who's on board Mir, he will then get on the space shuttle when they return.
		And astronaut Mike Fole will then join the crew of Mir and stay there for, I guess, roughly four and a half months.
		I'm not totally certain how long that is.
		So yes, it's an old station given its design life was only five years and it's now over 11 years old.
		And they've done a tremendous job given the kinds of resources they have at hand.
		They basically can't just run out to the corner hardware store and buy what they need.
		They have to make do when a situation comes up with what they have there to fix it with.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, how critical is the situation on Mir?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I don't think that I would use the term critical.
		I think that if there was anything that was unsafe about it, that they would have certainly made an announcement.
		I mean, unsafe enough that they would have to consider abandoning or doing anything like that.
		We have no plans to do that, and certainly the Russians that are operating the station are keeping a close watch on the conditions, and they have not announced they're going to be bringing their cosmonauts back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you confirm, though, that evacuation has been considered and at a couple of points has been close?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I don't know that.
		I really, again, don't work in that area, but what I've heard was they did have a couple of situations of, I think, a leak in a coolant system that caused some anxiety and some problems for them, but they were able to get those resolved.
		I don't know if they ever were close to abandoning the station.
		I really am not certain about that.
		No, I don't think that it ever got that critical, though.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's talk a little bit about Mars.
		Mars is a very interesting subject.
		There is, of course, the infamous face on Mars.
		Is there an official present NASA position on the relative scientific interest regarding the face on Mars?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, the scientific position, I guess, is that we have a very limited data set.
		We've got, I think, about nine images from the Viking era, which was the Viking missions were orbiting and also two landers, but two orbiters of Mars from 1976 to roughly 1982 that the last of the signals were received.
		About nine images of that.
		The best of them are not all that high of resolution, but it's a very interesting looking feature.
		You know, it's, of course, called a face on Mars.
		When the picture first came back, I think it was in 1976, shortly after it got there when the mapping began that year, Viking Orbiter 1 sent back the picture, and somebody noticed it on there.
		And it's kind of a neat thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gee, it looks like a face.
		Listen, I've got to ask you both to pause.
		We're once again at the bottom of the hour.
		I believe it was Dr. Golden himself who has suggested that the public interest in the face on Mars may indeed affect the way NASA proceeds in trying to examine it.
		In other words, public pressure.
		And we'll ask about that and more about the face on Mars when we return.
		This is CBC.
		CBC.
unidentified		CBC.
		The End
		Art Bell is taking calls on the wildcard line at 702-727-1295.
		That's 702-727-1295.
		First-time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, here I am.
		Good morning.
		There are millions of Americans who have cellular phone out there.
		From NASA, Don Savage and Ray Villard will be right back.
		To you, Free Pure.
		Call right now, 1-800-313-P-U-R-E.
		Back now to my guests, Don Savage and Ray Villard.
		Gentlemen, let us return to the subject of the face on Mars.
		To most Americans, they look at it and they say, boy, that looks like a face.
		And it seems like it is intended to be seen from, at the very least, Mars orbit or with our telescopes like Hubble.
		I don't know what we can see.
		I guess we can't resolve a ray.
		That would be a good question for you.
		Can Hubble resolve the Sidonia region to any effect?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		No, this feature that looks like a face, I believe, is about a mile across.
unidentified		Okay.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And it's way below Hubble's resolution.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		The resolution we have is good for sort of global monitoring of Mars and sort of looking at Mars as a weather satellite to look at Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		But we do have a mission headed back that way, and it seems like NASA has been hedging a lot about whether or not we're going to be able to image the Sidonia region once again.
		Now, as I mentioned before the break, Daniel Golden suggested in a public forum not long ago that, yes, the public's interest in the phase on Mars May affect an attempt to reimage it in the coming missions.
		Would you say that's accurate?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, let me say that I don't know that we've been hedging exactly.
		What we're saying is we're going to make every effort to do that, to image those, and also to make the images available both ahead of time to tell people that we're going to be imaging this area as a spacecraft goes in its orbit.
		It sweeps up the line, I guess the meridian, and images everything under its path as it opens the camera shutter, and it just takes kind of a strip of an image, feeding that back to Earth.
		So what they hope they can get with possibly the medium resolution camera is a swath of territory that would include a pretty decent, probably much better resolution than we got with Viking.
		And if we can, we'll do that.
		We'll tell everybody in advance.
		The problem is we don't know now when we're going to be able to do that because it's not possible to predict right now exactly how the orbit is going to be established and where it's going to be on any given day until it gets into its mapping orbit, which will be later in March.
		You're talking about the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, years ago, after the original imaging of the face and the artifacts at Cydonia, or whatever they are, NASA seemed very intent on continually saying that these are nothing but tricks of shadow and light and all the rest of it.
		I mean, very much so.
		A lot of statements of that sort.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Is that accurate?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that was, I guess, one of the original, I guess, a seat of the Pan Festima on what possibly caused the formation to look the way it does.
		And it does sort of look like a face.
		You sort of see, which I don't have a picture here in front of me, but I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with it.
		It has kind of a vague, either somewhat human or semian possibly look to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure does.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		And particularly if you blow the pictures up to a great deal.
		The original pictures were 47, or the best pictures we have to date are about 43 meters per pixel, which is meaning over that whole thing.
		You don't have a whole lot of pixels covering it.
		So these aren't the best pictures that you can make some kind of a determination.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, a lot of people have done a lot of work with enhancement, Dr. Malin, for example.
		And they find features that are very striking and even suggest more detail.
		And at the very least, it's got to arouse an awful lot of scientific curiosity.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, you mentioned Dr. Malin.
		He, in fact, is the principal investigator for the Mars Global Surveyor Camera, which is actually going to have three cameras on there of various resolutions.
		And he's interested in that.
		He's got a website, which I would encourage everybody to go check out, which I think he's done a very exhaustive research on what we know about it, what we can tell given the limited data set that we have now.
		And what we hope to do, of course, is to get more images and whatever other kinds of measurements can be made of that area, make them available for anyone to look at and make their own research into it and investigate it and determine the best they can what's there.
		Nobody really knows whether pictures alone will be enough ever to resolve that, but we'll certainly get the best pictures.
		We'll make every effort to get the best pictures we can and put those out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, you seemed early on after the original images not to be at all interested, actively, almost disinterested in reimaging that area, talking about the shadows and so forth.
		And today's statements seem markedly different.
		Is that a result of scientific discovery in playing with the images, the old images we have, or is it a result of public pressure, Don?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I think that we're very interested in the Sidonia region.
		This is a fairly extensive region of what they call fretted terrain on Mars, of which the face formation and some other formations around there are in that area.
		That region is very scientifically interesting, and they have always included that on the list of images that they want to get to try to understand the terrain better and how the features may have been geologically formed and affected and evolved over time, which may tell us a lot about the water and the atmospheric conditions and the geology of Mars early in its history.
		So those kinds of things have always been very interesting.
		The faith itself, to the degree that people have enhanced the pictures, I don't think that the scientists and planetary geologists that I've talked to feel that there's just not enough there to convince them that this is anything but a natural formation or that could have been formed by natural means.
		They can think of any number of explanations.
		Until we get better pictures that maybe would say something else, it's a wait and see attitude.
		They feel that it's certainly worth going back and taking pictures.
		We know that the public is interested in it.
		And when we first released the pictures back in 1976, it got a little bit of interest at that point.
		And we acknowledge that, and we certainly want to let the public know when we're going to image that area.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let me address this to Ray.
		Ray, if there were not a civilization on Earth, cities and other signs of civilization, and we had an orbiting spacecraft or the equivalent of Hubble in Mars orbit, and we looked at Earth, what would we probably conclude about the Giza area of Egypt and the pyramids there?
		Would we conclude that this is a trick of light and shadow?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's an interesting question, Arb.
		Let me think about that.
		I think, again, thinking of Hubble's, if Hubble were at Mars and at the opposition like the one we just had, we're talking, again, about 13 miles per pixel.
		So Hubble could not see those pyramids.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about an orbiting spacecraft, much as we would have orbiting Mars?
unidentified		In other words, if for Mars you sent a probe to orbiter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		And we looked down at Giza and saw these pyramidal type things.
		What do you think we might conclude?
unidentified		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		About the same thing, huh?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Well, they have, well, it's funny because pyramids are kind of shaped like mountains and they cast the same sort of pointed shadow.
		I've noted with the Mars face, it casts a pointed shadow, too, which frankly tells me it's a mountain.
		And for the record, I think it's interesting that if you look at some Mars pictures, you find Kermit the Frog and a couple smiley faces on Mars.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So personally, I've never been convinced with this procedure.
		All right, gentlemen, because we have such limited time, I've got to keep moving on here.
		The STS-48 mission, I know you both are well aware of the controversy surrounding the footage that came from the STS-48 mission.
		NASA characterizes what we see as ice crystals.
		Other people absolutely argue that ice crystals could not do the kind of gyrations that we see in that footage.
		Moreover, it was at about that point that NASA quit allowing live coverage and went to delayed coverage of what comes from the shuttle.
		Anybody have comments on that?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I don't know of any delayed coverage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No delayed coverage.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		As far as that goes, it comes down live.
		Of course, it goes up to the TEDRIS if it has to be transferred around the world, but it comes down the exceptions would be anything having to do with the help when they have their medical conferences or personal family conferences.
		But to my knowledge about the ice crystals, that's what they say they were.
		And the astronauts that were there say that's what they were.
		And I don't see any hard evidence to suggest they were anything else.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How does one account for the right angle turns and the apparent interceptions and that sort of thing that one observes in that footage?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And now there's an is it STS-80, I think, or 82, I'm not sure, that has provided some even more intriguing footage, very much like STS-48.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I'm not aware of anything from STS-80.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I, you know, I hate to say I can't answer that, but I really don't know anything about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		All right.
		Try this one then.
		One of the discovery missions, this is from a listener in Portland, that were selected to study the moons of Mars by sending projectiles onto them and collecting samples in a slow flyby.
		What in the world is more interesting about the moons of Mars over a moon which seems to contain all the elements for life?
		Again, of course, Euroboard.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, let me go back to what I said before about why these missions were selected.
		We have a panel of 50 scientists in this case that looked at all the proposals.
		They selected the missions that have the highest probability of achieving their objective and have the highest science objectives that they're trying to answer.
		So it's more than just, you know, is this something that's really interesting and we would like to do?
		Yeah, of course we would love to go back to Europa, but we want to do it in the right way.
		And the answer about the moons of Mars is we don't know what's there.
		We've only gotten, in my understanding, only about, I don't know, maybe less than a dozen or so.
		Ray, you might know pictures from Russian flyby missions which have imaged that and it's very limited amount of knowledge on these moons.
		So we really don't know what we'll find there.
		And you're talking about a total blank slate.
		We just don't know.
		That's where some of the biggest discoveries could be made in areas you don't know about.
		So with Europa, though, we do plan to follow up on it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		And you both would say, again, without equivocation, that the video footage, aside from the health matters and the personal communications of the astronauts on the shuttle, is not delayed, but coming down, we're seeing it real time.
		There's no 10-second, 20-second, 30-second, one-minute delay.
		Is that correct?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, we have, as proof of that, you could watch NASA TV when we have press conferences with reporters on the ground, which we have on a fairly regular basis when a shuttle mission is up.
		I would say on a more than daily basis, the reporters ask a question.
		You know, you have the minor delay if it has to go through satellite connections or whatever that you would have.
		In fact, even in a transatlantic phone call, just the amount of time it takes for the message to get there and back.
		The astronauts answer the questions.
		there's no delay of anything more than a second or two that it takes for the signal to get there and then for them to do their answer and then come back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, that's a good straight answer.
		All right, this is going to be a tougher one.
		If you can explain NASA's position about data and theories that favor alternatives to the Big Bang model for the origin and nature of the universe.
unidentified		Oh, boy.
unidentified		I understand that.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I don't think there's any official NASA theories.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		The astronomy community, of course, is using Hubble to help pursue evidence favoring or disfavoring the Big Bang.
unidentified		I could say unequivocally, everything Hubble has come up with has nicely supported the Big Bang.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		The notion of the Big Bang, which basically says we've lived in an expanding and an evolving universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How far out is Hubble able to look?
		Is it about 16 billion light years?
		Is that about right?
unidentified		Well, we can look back almost to what one would call the beginning of time, which would be, oh, God, back to almost a half a billion years after the Big Bang itself.
		We're looking for the very earliest structures that formed in the universe, the very earliest galaxies.
		How far?
		Well, depending on the actual expansion rate of the universe, that could be about 12 or 13 billion light years or so.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		And there is some controversy, I might add, about just how old the universe is, and Hubble is helping to try to resolve that.
		And we hope in a few years, maybe we will have a pretty good answer.
		Is the universe 8 billion years old?
		Is it 12?
unidentified		Is it 15?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, that bears on your question, in fact.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		My question continues in this way.
		What is NASA doing to test challenges to the Big Bang?
		For example, Markarian 205 is a high-redshift quasar with an apparent luminous bridge to a low-redshift galaxy and has the potential to falsely even the basic idea that the universe is expanding.
		Why is that luminous bridge not yet inspected with a Hubble telescope?
unidentified		Oh, I've got that, Art.
		We, in fact, now, you know, I think we got a question like this on email.
		Let me tell you what I understand about it.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		In fact, we had an amateur astronomer program a few years ago, and one of these bridges was the target picked by the amateurs, and they imaged one of these things.
unidentified		It may have been Markarian 205 or another one.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		They never saw the bridge in the Hubble pictures.
unidentified		More fundamentally, Hubble has shown really unequivocally what quasars really are.
		And quasars really are these very active, explosive cores of galaxies that existed long ago.
		And that has sort of put to bed this much older theory that the quasars somehow challenge the expanding universe or they're shot out of galaxies like Cannon.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		That was an old idea.
unidentified		Hubble has really helped put that to rest.
unidentified		We show they are truly cosmological things that existed long ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		You are both public affairs officers for NASA.
		And I would ask you to try and give me as honest an answer to this as you can.
		If there was a major discovery made by any aspect of NASA's research regarding life, do you believe, A, that you both would be told about it immediately?
		And B, that we, the public, then, would be told about it immediately?
		I'm asking first on your own part.
		In other words, would they even come to you immediately, or would there be a process that...
unidentified		Let me jump on that.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		It's hard to imagine what Hubble could do along these lines, but suppose a Hubble researcher thought they had a piece of data that pointed to something of artificial extraterrestrial origin.
unidentified		There you go.
unidentified		I think, number one, they would really want to work on that data very hard and revisit the phenomenon to make sure that they really believed it.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Because, you know, again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
unidentified		So I think they would be very cautious, very careful.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I certainly don't think they'd get on the phone and call me.
		So you might not even know.
		I think when they reached the point that they really thought they had something, they would go ahead and publish.
		And I can tell you, dealing with the scientific community, it's very hard to keep secrets once you have something really exciting that spreads through the community like wildfire.
unidentified		I don't think I'd immediately know, but I think anything of that nature would be very hard to keep under wraps for a long time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, gentlemen, we're at the end of the second hour.
		It's not enough.
		Would either one or both of you like to volunteer to do one more hour?
unidentified		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm happy to stay with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that both?
unidentified		That's both of us.
unidentified		Yeah.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		And in fact, I'd like to comment on that question if you'll come back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good.
		It is an important one.
		My guests are Don Savage and Ray Villard, both from NASA.
		A very unusual opportunity to ask people of NASA questions.
		Now, I am going to try and open the phone lines.
		As you know, I've got a new phone system here, and so I trust that it will work properly.
		But when we come back, we will deal with the question of who would be told and when, and we'll try and get the phone lines open.
unidentified		Okay?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's the deal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Art Bell, and from the high desert, this is CBC.
unidentified		Hi, Rick.
		Call Art Bell, toll-free.
		West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
		1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
		1-800-825-5033.
		This is the CBC Radio Network.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		I'm Art Bell, and my guests are Don Savage and Ray Villard, both NASA personnel.
		Don Savage, the Public Affairs Officer for the Office of Space Science, and Ray Villard, the Public Affairs Officer for Hubble Space Sciences Institute.
		And they have kindly agreed to stay another hour.
		So, we'll try some phone calls here in a bit.
		No guarantees.
		I want to talk to you for a second.
		60.
		Not available in stores, guaranteed to work or your money back.
		You've got nothing to lose but those symptoms.
		So call 1-800-249-6060.
		Again, 1-800-249-6060.
		Again, Don Savage and Ray Villard from NASA.
		Gentlemen, we're back on the air.
		The question before the top of the hour was an intriguing one, I guess, and that was, if NASA, through whatever investigation, whether through Hubble or through one of our probes, were to discover something amazing, life, even intelligent life, I ask first, would you, as public affairs officers, in your own opinion, honest opinion, be told immediately about that?
		And then, of course, would the public be told about that?
		And you were beginning to respond to that.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yes, this is Don Savage.
		And let me at least give you, I guess, the true case study of what actually happened when we had the announcement of the Mars fossils, or the possibility that is, of Mars on, life on Mars, excuse me.
		It's a little early in the morning here, starting to catch up to me, I think.
		But that occurred last August.
		We had a major press conference, as you all probably recall, in which we announced the findings that were being published in Science magazine from a team of NASA researchers that also included a number of researchers from Stanford and other institutions around the country.
		So it was a fairly extensive team.
		On that press conference, we also selected an individual not connected with the team who was skeptical of the findings and provided a counterbalance, I guess, to the team saying what it is that he felt that they needed to prove their point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But they'd been working on that a long time, right?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		They had been working on it for quite some time.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		At the point where they decided they were ready to publish their paper and submit it to Science Magazine, that is when the team members, who, again, were NASA employees at the Johnson Space Center, determined that they needed to let the public affairs people know that they were going to do this because they obviously realized that this was a big story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So they told you at the last minute?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		No, not at the last minute at all.
		It was submitted for publication, meaning it would go through peer review.
		In the peer review process, it takes quite some time, and a number of scientists, in fact, in this case, considerably more than the normal, were reviewing the paper to look for any obvious flaws or any flaws in their reasoning and research, not necessarily to disprove it, but to find something that would stick out and, you know, maybe not make a very strong case.
		At that point, we were in a wait-and-see mode.
		When the paper was accepted for publication, we began our planning.
		That was some weeks before the paper was to be published in Science.
		And the magazine itself had an embargo, that is, you know, in the news business, not to go public with it.
		However, at that point, not a large number of people knew about it.
		People at Science Magazine, some people within NASA, people within some of the institutions involved.
		But the number of people, of course, a big story like that, it's very difficult to keep it quiet.
		So the numbers of people involved in this or knew about it grew with each passing day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, the Mars Rock, Don, was interesting, but controversial.
		Suppose there was something very unambiguous.
		Suppose one of your probes took pictures of some sort of craft that came along and blew its smithereens, and you knew darn well, or NASA knew darn well, that it was something extraterrestrial, just for the sake of the discussion here.
		How quickly would that information reach you, in your honest opinion?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was giving you the previous example because that is something that actually happened.
		And it's a benchmark to go by.
		We are a very open agency.
		We do have certain protocols we have to follow.
		And in this case, of course, Science Magazine said that since this is being submitted for publication, here are the rules, and we will follow that.
		We also, because we are, you know, a publicly funded agency, on an announcement of this magnitude and even other announcements, we would certainly let the White House and the Congress know before we make an announcement so they could be prepared.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so there would be a period of time when the government would consider how to deal with all this and how to deal it out to the public.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, depending on how the information came to light, let's say in your example, an alien space.
		Okay, here's a good example.
		We've got a spacecraft going to fly by next month an asteroid, Matilda.
		The near spacecraft will be able to get some pictures.
		They won't be the highest quality.
		They'll have to work on them a little bit.
		We'll have those coming back on the day that it is passing by there late in June.
		And the reporters will be, you know, we certainly hope will be interested and we'll be there.
		We'll be watching them come in.
		Let's say that there's an alien spacecraft on the surface there and the aliens are down there Waving at the near spacecraft as it flies by.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good example.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, this is going to be flashed on the TV screen for all to see, you know.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		And there you go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Earlier we talked about, I asked you about cameras being delayed.
		I would like to again revisit that just shortly to be sure that the answer covers all bases here.
		There are two cameras in the shuttle, or two types of cameras.
		One camera is inside the shuttle and is sometimes pointed out a window.
		Then there are outside cameras on the shuttle as well.
		You would say unambiguously that both of these cameras are not, or the output from them is not delayed.
		Is that correct?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		That's my understanding.
		I certainly, again, I'm not involved in the space shuttle world that much.
		I'm mostly involved in space science and astronomy.
		But my understanding is that when they beam pictures back to Earth, that they come back and they're put immediately on NASA TV on the feed and they go out on our satellite to whoever wants to pick them up.
		I mean, we make that available when the feed comes down.
		And, you know, I know of no delay in the picture.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		The Internet is a wonderful tool, really, truly a wonderful tool in this day and age.
		When you begin getting images back from one of your probes, wherever it might go, I think I've got a whole pile of angry faxes here regarding our earlier conversation about a proprietary period, anywhere from six months to the outside of a year, when the scientist who proposes the mission has an opportunity to pour over the data before we get to see it.
		Everything is public.
		The money the scientist uses is grant money, public money.
		Your money is public money, NASA money.
		Actually, an analog to digital or digital to analog conversion in this modern day and age is very possible.
		It's possible to be done very quickly indeed.
		And you were talking about the time it takes to convert the data that you get to image data.
		So are you saying that, do you still maintain that it could not be converted and dumped real time into the internet or whatever other resource to be distributed to the public?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Boy, that's a good question.
		Again, I think a basic problem is it would not be worth scientists, certainly people using Hubble, it would not be worth them to use their research time if they didn't have some amount of time to work with this.
		I know in the case of the Hubble images, there's a lot of image processing that needs to take place to clean up the image.
		Basically, the image is impacted with cosmic rays and such, so there's a technical problem.
		But again, this whole issue of how long does somebody have or deserve time to figure out what they've got, that's a trickier issue.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But is it as though if the information were relatively or instantly given to the public and there was some sort of great discovery, one would have to imagine that the scientist who had proposed the mission would still receive credit for that discovery since he had proposed the mission.
		So it's just confusing a lot of people in the public this proprietary time.
		And I'm not even sure I quite understand it.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Well, again, great discoveries just don't, unless it's something truly extraordinary, they don't happen instantaneously.
		You need time to do a detailed analysis of what you have.
		And again, you want to make sure you don't come out with something that's wrong.
		That doesn't serve the public interest.
		We all remember the story about cold fusion where people jump the gun.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, however, the gentlemen who discovered it are still working on it, unfortunately, outside our country.
		They've had to actually go outside the country to continue the research.
		At any rate, here's another one from Carol in Mesa, Arizona.
		Art, please ask these gentlemen why we would want to go to Mercury.
		What would be the purpose of that mission?
		And again, Venus.
		We have sent probes there, and so far we have very little new information.
		Why Martian moons?
		NASA needs to explain the purpose of these missions, and who are they placating with these missions?
		So that's a pretty good question.
		Again, you really addressed it once, but maybe we'd better address it again.
		Why are these missions more interesting potentially than Europa, which is absolutely fascinating?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess the whole premise of that question, I would like to turn around and say that we are going to Europa.
		In fact, we've identified it as a very interesting and high science priority target.
		We want to do it the right way.
		We've just, in the very recent past, found $40 million.
		That's just within the past few months to get us started, first of all, doing a much more intensive survey with the assets we already have there.
		That's the Galileo mission.
		It's going to take a number of years for us to build the spacecraft and to get it out to Jupiter.
		And we want to know what this spacecraft needs to do.
		First of all, we don't know how thick the ice is there.
		So to be able to get below the ice, we would like to know a lot more about it, to find out, you know, is it one kilometer thick?
		Is it 60 kilometers thick?
		It's going to make a lot of difference as to what a probe would do.
		And if we sent a probe there to bore down through, you know, a kilometer or two of ice and it didn't reach anything, I think the people would say, well, you know, you're stupid, NASA.
		Why couldn't you figure this out?
		Well, that's what We're trying to do before we send a probe there is figure out exactly what we need to do to the best that we can determine and then design a mission to go study it in the right way so we can bring back the very best information that would pertain to the question of life and oceans, possibly and the conditions for life.
		These missions that were proposed, again, I don't know enough in detail about those particular missions, but they were deemed by a panel of scientists not to have as high a chance of fulfilling of science objectives that they proposed, which may not even have been to look for life.
		I really don't know than these missions that were proposed.
		And the ones that are, they're relatively low-cost missions to study some of the remaining questions.
		In most cases, they're right.
		We have learned a lot of the top-level quick look kinds of things.
		Now we're getting down to where the remaining questions that we have, and there's still plenty of things we don't know, are much more difficult to get to.
		And they take specialized missions, specialized instruments, and a great deal of ingenuity to design missions to go to places and survive the trip, survive the environment, to be able to return data to answer questions that may pertain to what's going on here on the Earth.
		For instance, on Mars, why is Mars the way it is today?
		It used to be more like the Earth.
		What happened?
		Is that something that could happen to the Earth?
		What about Venus?
		It is very Earth-like in a lot of ways.
		It's not that far from the Earth.
		Why is it covered with these clouds and this poisonous atmosphere?
		What happened?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The possibility, I assume, of global warming is what you're discussing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And in the case of Mars, perhaps a grazing of what used to be its atmosphere by something big, those possibilities exist?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's a number of theories, of course, and we are looking to the scientific community to propose research to try to answer these questions about how the conditions on the planet evolved over time and what caused this to happen, what it might have been like at one time.
		Was there life there?
		In fact, there's been recent reports that perhaps life could have evolved on Venus sometime, which is a very, I think, a long shot.
		But there have been, I saw something in the news not too long ago that someone thought that there was a possibility that there could be life on Venus, or at least at one time, perhaps.
		So it can't be discounted.
		Wherever there are conditions right for life on the Earth, we find life, including deep in the ocean, deep inside rocks, in thermal vents, in the Antarctic.
		So we just don't really know the extent of where life could arise.
		We're looking to answer a lot of different questions, a lot of difficult questions that in some cases some people will say it's just pure science.
		In other cases, it really does have an application about the kind of things that are happening here on the Earth as well.
		We can compare planets like Mars to the Earth because we think that it's a somewhat simpler ecosystem, let's say, or climate system than the Earth.
		So we can then look at that as a possible model for changes that might be occurring.
		The same with Venus.
		The greenhouse theory arose from studies of Venus.
		Those are the kinds of things that do help us to understand the kind of changes that we're doing on the Earth, as well as the changes that are occurring on the Earth.
		We could separate them out.
		Is this a natural change, a climactic change, or is this something that we're doing to the planet?
		We just don't know.
		And it does help us to understand how planets change.
		And our two nearest neighbors, Venus and Mars, are helping us there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you consider it to be possible that we are undergoing a change right now?
		Certainly our weather seems to be indicating.
		You know, I realize it could be just cyclical, but things appear to be getting very much more radical.
		Even our vice president the other day suggested he believes the weather is going to be much more severe in every way as time goes on, indicating he believes that model.
		Don, I want to ask you, and then I've got a question for Ray after the break, but Don, there are a lot of near-Earth crossing asteroids.
		What is NASA doing to keep track of these asteroids so one of these one or two mile monsters doesn't plow into us and do to us what was probably done to the dinosaurs?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a very good question.
		Just a few weeks ago, there was an interesting hearing in Congress, and Eugene Shoemaker, who is a big proponent of studying near-Earth asteroids and comets, testified.
		I don't have all the hard numbers and so forth, but there could be a couple of thousand of these Earth-crossing asteroids.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The question is, are we doing enough, Don?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's going to take us a number of years.
		We're working with the Air Force, and it's a modest level of effort right now.
		And, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I've got to stop you right there.
		I'm sorry.
		Clock says I've got to stop.
		Bottom of the hour, we'll be right back with Don Savage and Ray Villard from NASA.
		I'm Art Bell, and this is CBC.
unidentified		CBC.
		Art Bell is taking calls on the wildcard line at 702-727-1295.
		That's 702-727-1295.
		First line callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, once again, here I am.
		My guests are Don Savage and Ray Villard from NASA, and we'll get right back to them.
		Do you drink bottled water from Alaska or Hawaii?
		Call 918-687-0404.
		All right, back to my guests now, Don Savage and Ray Villard from NASA.
		And Don, I would like to again say, with regard to these asteroids, many of them, as you mentioned, that cross our orbit, one of these days, one of them is going to head toward us.
		And my question to you was, in your opinion, are we doing enough right now in trying to observe them and know if one is headed our way?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I think what we're doing now is starting on the right path, which is to catalog and identify all of the Earth-crossing asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth.
		And we think there's probably about 2,000.
		I believe we have identified in the neighborhood of a few hundred of these that we know their orbits very well.
		And at this point, I want to reassure everybody, there's none of these asteroids that we know of are on a collision course with the Earth anytime soon.
		But there are plenty that we don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Plenty that we don't know of.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		So what we're doing is working using the partnerships with Air Force, with a number of observatories around the world.
		We're trying to get this started on a long-term basis to catalog these.
		Because once we do, over a period of possibly a couple of decades, we will be able to determine the orbits of all of them that are out there that could threaten us.
		And we'll be in pretty good shape as far as asteroids go.
		Comets are another matter because we only know of, you know, Ray, maybe you know this, there's a certain number, maybe 100 or thereabouts that are periodic that we know come back on a scheduled basis like Comet Halley.
		Sure.
		But plenty of comets just come in from the outer solar system and this large cloud of comets out there called the Oort cloud that we believe many comets come from.
		They just swoop in and they swoop back out again and they travel at tremendous rates of speed.
		We don't know a whole lot about comets, so that's one of these discovery missions proposed to go look at a comet.
		I think it should be of particular interest.
		We also have another mission that's going to be launching soon to go look at a comet as well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, if something like Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been headed at Earth instead of Jupiter, could we have stopped it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do we have that technology now?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that we possibly do.
		The question of whether we would be able to or not is difficult to answer because something like Shoemaker-Levy, of course, being broken into so many pieces makes it extremely troublesome because they were hitting Jupiter every couple of them every day for a period of a week.
		Any one of those fragments hitting the Earth would have caused tremendous devastation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So your answer sounds like a qualified probably not at the moment.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know.
		There's been some studies on that.
		The Department of Defense and working with other agencies is studying various ways that comets and asteroids could be diverted or destroyed.
		And there's a number of ideas that they propose.
		You know, it's so we're not short of ideas.
		I think we just don't really know what's going to work because, first of all, we don't know enough about these bodies to know how densely packed they are.
		So what's really going to work.
		We've never really gotten a good close look at a comet nucleus.
		We did have one spacecraft, actually, the European Space Agency and other agencies around the world sent spacecraft to study Halley back in 1986.
		They were not able to really determine the kinds of characteristics that may bear on this, whether or not it's densely packed enough or would fly apart or could we stop it?
		Would an explosion do it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I saw a recent bit of news about a proposed U.S.-British joint project to fly some probes toward a couple of asteroids, one I think less than a mile and one two miles in size in the next few years, photograph it as we approach it and then slam into it at 42,000 miles an hour and see what happens.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you heard about that?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've heard about that and some other proposals as well to try to, by doing that, of course, taking measurements, seismic measurements to see if we can determine just how these things are composed and how well they hang together, so to speak.
		Are they solid or are they, I think Ray used the term, collagulates or like rock, but just a whole bunch of gravel clumped together.
		We really don't know.
		But we actually have a spacecraft, the near spacecraft, near-Earth asteroid rendezvous that will, we hope, be able to answer a lot of these questions.
		It's going to fly by an asteroid late next month, just briefly.
		And that's not its main objective, though.
		It will rendezvous with an asteroid in 1999, a near-Earth asteroid called Eros.
		And it will study that for a year.
		It will just fly in formation with this asteroid.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's very close.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Taking a lot of observations of it for a year.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		So we're going to learn a great deal about these somewhat mysterious visitors.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		If I might, let me quickly turn to Ray.
		Ray, this one comes from Tom Van Zlanderin for you, Dr. Van Slanderen.
		Comet Halebob has the largest nucleus of any comet seen in recent years.
		The Hubble Space Telescope provided a rare opportunity to study a large comet nucleus from space.
		Several amazing discoveries have already been made with ground-based telescopes, including spiral-banded structure in the outer coma, a sodium tail, magnesium-iron rock signatures in its spectrum.
		The comet is so bright that just a very few minutes of Hubble observations near the time of closest approach might have found whether the spiral bands originate from the nucleus, as in the dirty snowball model, or from material orbiting the nucleus, as in the satellite model.
		A chlorine, which together with the sodium already found, might have indicated origin from an ancient planetary ocean, consistent with the exploded planet hypothesis for the origin of comets.
		And proxene, which together with the ovaline might have provided the nucleus, proved rather, the nucleus was an asteroid, not a dirty snowball.
		And can you explain NASA's priorities in foregoing these rare and important opportunities which could have been observed safely with Hubble, for example, from within the Earth's shadow?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Oh, boy.
unidentified		Okay, Art.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Let's see.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		The conclusion that this could be done safely, again, is at odds with the people who control Hubble.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		This was taken under consideration.
unidentified		The investigator, how we were, had requested time to do this.
		And all I can say, unbalance, the reward was not deemed to be worth the risk for the telescope.
		The telescope has a large plate of research it has to do.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Many of the questions it addresses are cosmological.
		Many people are looking and were looking at the comet, and that science, balanced with the risk, simply was not deemed to be that important to face the risk.
		And when you, when, you know, going within 50 degrees of the sun violates a fundamental constraint.
		And frankly, I think if we did that and damaged the telescopes, the taxpayers would have a lot to be angry about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, a lot of people would be in front of congressional committees trying to explain it.
unidentified		Why did you do that?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Now, this other, without getting into a lot of detail with the other science, we had released a picture, I believe, in 95 that showed spiral-shaped plumes coming off the nucleus.
		You expect that the nucleus is rotating.
		The nucleus is eruptive.
		It's explosive, and those things are happening.
unidentified		We did monitor this nucleus for more than a year before it went into solar avoidance.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		There was a lot of research from that that was published in Science Magazine.
unidentified		And I think we've made a very meaningful contribution.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And again, it's unfortunate, but because comets do go around the sun, they get close to the sun, and we can't follow them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Understand.
		All right.
		I'm going to try to take a couple of calls.
		No guarantees this may or may not work.
		East of the Rockies, you're on there, I hope, with Don Savage and Ray Villard.
		Where are you, please?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yes, my name is Steve in Indiana.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, go ahead, Steve.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I'm a first-time caller, and I had a question for your guests.
		And I know this may be a little bit going back off the subject a little bit, but I was kind of wondering about the probe from the Galileo spacecraft that actually plunged into the Jovian atmosphere.
		And I was wondering, I hadn't heard any information from that, and I was wondering if they had, you know, what did they find from that probe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What did you guys find from that probe?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that is a terrific question.
		That occurred back in December of last year.
		The probe went into the upper atmosphere.
		I'm trying, as we speak right now, to get to the Galileo homepage.
		If you have access to the internet, they have an excellent site that they discuss all of the findings from that.
		We had a press conference, if I'm not mistaken, it was in the middle to late December in which they released a lot of information that they had kind of a quick look, what they found.
		They saw some weather phenomena.
		They were looking for water, and I cannot recall, and that's why I'm looking.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It seems to me like there was an announcement that they found water in the atmosphere.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I believe so.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I just cannot recall that exactly, and I'm trying to get that on my computer here right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just go ahead and work on that, and we'll just try another one here.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don Savage and Ray Villard from NASA.
		Hi.
unidentified		Good one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		Fairbanks, Alaska.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fairbanks, Alaska.
		All right.
		Do you have a question?
unidentified		Yes, I do.
unidentified		I'm wondering if their decision not to come on opposite Richard Hogan was their individual decision or if it came from higher up the chain of command.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Good.
		I'm glad you brought that up.
		I found, and I asked both these gentlemen, I guess on, actually, if they would be willing to come on with Richard Hoagland, or for that matter, Tom Van Flanderen.
		And their response to me was, I thought, very reasonable, and that is that, well, actually, no, that those gentlemen had been on by themselves and that they would like to have the opportunity to present their case to the public alone.
		And I found that a compelling argument, and that's why it is the way it is right now.
		But I will ask you, gentlemen, whether you would be willing to appear with anybody of that sort, Richard Hoagland, Tom Van Flandren, or perhaps somebody else Who would take a different side and have an adult debate?
		Would either one of you or both of you consider that?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me take that.
		I think that's a very good question.
		I'm Don Savage from NASA.
		I certainly wouldn't rule that out.
		I'm not qualified to debate scientific merits of theories and things of that nature, but I would certainly be happy to talk to anybody about what our policies are and what our missions are and the kinds of things that we have done in terms of research and the things we plan to do with space astronomy.
		I don't really like to engage in debates.
		I don't know what would be gained by that, but I certainly would have a good exchange of ideas.
		I wouldn't rule it out.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a maybe at least.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don Savage and Ray Villard.
		Where are you, please?
unidentified		Yeah, I'm from Chicago, Illinois.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Chicago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		I just had a quick question, Steph.
unidentified		I just wanted to ask, how closely does the Air Force and the NASA project work together?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The question is, how closely does NASA work with the Air Force?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, it depends on the particular research you're talking about.
		We were just talking a few minutes ago about looking at near-Earth asteroids, and we've been very fortunate in the last few years that a number of areas of their advanced technology and detectors and sky observing systems have become available to us.
		We have also worked with not just the Air Force, but with DOD and the Clementine mission, in which they were testing various technologies for deep space research and realized that there could be a scientific bonus for, you know, something that NASA could do using the set of instruments that they were sending out into space.
		And we worked with them and put together a science team to look at the data and suggest things they could look at with their instruments while they were testing them for the DOD use.
		Obviously, we have a number of astronauts that are military.
		We are working with them also to fly various payloads in the future on the space shuttle.
		And there's some crossover.
		In the past, we have also flown Air Force and DOD missions on the space shuttle.
		There was a period for a few years where the other services, the armed services, that is, determined to use Titans and Deltas and other kinds of rockets to launch their payloads rather than space shuttles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, one recent mission claimed it was a very unusual news conference when they reported the discovery of water on the moon.
		And they said that the moon was used as a target for some of the SDI technology that was otherwise untested.
		So I remember that news conference.
		They said it was used as a target.
		The moon was just a convenient target, and they located water on the moon.
		Where, Don, do you think that water came from?
		Was that cometary from a comet?
		Or could there be some other possible explanation for how water got up there?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		One of the theories that I heard was that it was probably deposited by a comet because they found it deep inside a crater.
		There had been, I guess, hints and suggestions based on radar analysis of this area from Earth before that there may have been or there may be something in there.
		And the Clementine spacecraft got even better look at that area because it was, you know, its orbit allowed it to get a much cleaner look at that area.
		And that is one of the leading theories of how ice may have been deposited there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Does that make possible in your minds the permanent occupation of the moon?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, does the water discovered there, at least in theory, make that more realistic to have a base?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Let me jump on that, Art, because that's a fun topic.
		Certainly, because the Moon is a very dry body, and if you want to colonize or set up a scientific base, transporting water from Earth would be problematic.
		So I don't know how much water is estimated to be up at the pole, but in theory that could be a source for supporting a human presence on the moon.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		I might also add, I believe they actually have found evidence for ice on Mercury of all places.
unidentified		Mercury.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And again, this is material trapped up at the pole that's in permanent shadow and in all likelihood came from comets that crashed into both these bodies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		For both of you, we have a lot of things going on right here on planet Earth that seem strange.
		We've got an ice shelf about to break off in the Antarctic.
		We've got increased, and NASA, I believe, has measured it, increased ozone, or that is decreased ozone in increased UV.
		Are those solid measurements, are both of you fairly confident that the ozone, in fact, is depleting?
		There's a great political argument about this going on all over the world right now.
		Are you leaning toward we're in trouble in that area?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's the responsibility of NASA to take these kinds of measurements and provide them to the scientific community for them to analyze.
		But what we have seen, in fact, we had a press release, I believe it was last month, that indicated that there were low levels of ozone reported over the northern polar regions, northern hemisphere.
		Not for the first time, but certainly low levels.
		There was no ozone hole as people are used to referring to it.
		But those kinds of things are indicative of the kind of global change that we need to understand better.
		And the scientists, as you said, it can be controversial, and that's a controversial topic.
		But the fact is that it is something that's happening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your measurements are not controversial, though, or are they?
don savage ▲ ● ▼		To my knowledge, the measurements are very solid.
		They're conducted from a number of different platforms, both in space, airborne with aircraft balloons and ground measurements of various sorts.
		So I think there's a high level of confidence that they're getting very good measurements of the ozone concentration over the poles and other regions of the Earth.
		And I don't think there's debate that it's actually happening.
		I think that the causes of that are...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there's debate.
		Believe me, there's debate.
		Gentlemen, we are at the end of the time.
		I really have enjoyed this, and I would like to do it again sometime.
unidentified		Oh, great.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		It was fun.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		It was a lot of fun.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		We appreciate the opportunity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		To both of you, thank you, and we will look forward to doing it again.
don savage ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, sir.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Okay, thank you, Art.
unidentified		Take care.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's Don Savage and Ray Vallard, both from NASA.
		And I hope that some of your questions, most of your questions, were answered.
		You know, I'm just a talk show host, so I came up with the ones that I thought you would be interested in.
		We will follow up and invite them back and ask them more questions.
		Perhaps have a debate.
		Stay tuned.
		I've got some news for you.
		Following the news, this is CBC.
unidentified		Do you toss and turn all...
		KSTP Call art bells, toll-free, west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255, 1-800-618-8255.
		East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
		1-800-825-5033.
		This is the CBC Radio Network.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It absolutely is.
		And I've got a couple of announcements for you.
		One is, tomorrow night, Hansel Inn, Richard Hoagland, and Dr. Van Zlandren, who are going to be here, no doubt, with some comments on what was heard tonight.
		That's tomorrow night, right here, beginning of the program.
		Also, I am working on, presently working on, is probably the better part of 30 days away, three weeks, four weeks, something like that, but the elusive Victor, who is the fellow to supplied the videotape of the alleged interview with an alien from Area 51.
		Victor has agreed, apparently, to appear on this program only for one hour.
		His voice will be masked, but he will appear and answer questions about that video.
		In addition, there will be another photograph supplied.
		This one showing, you may recall, something or another coming from the alien's mouth and doctors in attendance.
		So in addition to the photograph we've got on the website, for the very first time anywhere, you will see a photograph from later on in that video that has been revealed yet in no other place.
		So we will have an exclusive for that coming up.
		All right, we're going to go to open phone lines here in a moment, and I'm sure you've got comments of all sorts.
		And so you'll be able to make them unscreened, unexpected, strange, but wonderful talk radio just ahead.
		The VTEC 900 NDL telephone is just now, GMX 69.
unidentified		On Sunday, May 4th, one of the most spectacular movie events of the year will not be in theaters, not on cable, and not on video.
		You can see it only on NBCs.
		From the master of action and suspense, Robin Cook, comes a world-premier feature film based on his best-selling novel, Invasion.
		We gotta get away from eating.
		With a billion life forms in the universe, one of them has found us and is not friendly.
		We've had several more unexplained deaths.
		I don't understand what's happening.
		Scare.
		Mankind's greatest enemy.
		Everybody kills us.
		We have to get out of here.
		Mankind's greatest friend.
		There's just six of us left.
		A must-see motion picture experience.
		We can't stop it.
		No one can.
		Robin Cook's invasion.
		Sunday, May 4th, only on NBC.
		It has to be us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's one you can't miss coming up this Sunday on NBC, and I'll have my VCR set.
		I probably will be on the air with Dreamland.
		Not probably, I will be.
		But my VCR will be running.
		You can depend on that.
		All right.
		Very briefly in the news, before I open the lines, Texas Separatists hold up in a mountain hideout, have broken two days of silence, and reopened negotiations with police, raising modest hopes of a peaceful solution to the five-day standoff.
		Now, Richard McLaren apparently did this after the police, the Texas Department of Public Safety cut off his communication to his website.
		At least the authorities believe that that is what caused the turnaround.
		As you know, I had a guest on from the Republic of Texas, the president, the other day, who believes this will not end peacefully, that Mr. McLaren will not come out peacefully, and we'll just have to wait and see.
		Meanwhile, California authorities have arrested six men, some suspected of links to anti-government groups.
		Here we go again.
		They have seized explosives powerful enough to, quote, have leveled three city blocks, unquote.
		Police say they seized 500 pounds of explosive at a home in Yuba City, 50 miles north of Sacramento.
		Police have no idea what they plan to do with the explosives, which officials believe were obtained illegally from a Montana mining company.
		It's getting weird out there.
		Winnipeg threatened with flooding.
		People up there fleeing apartments as the Red River waters burst through a sandbag dike.
		The news rattled an already tense city of 650,000 people as Red River gets near its crest.
		And so good luck up in Winnipeg.
		I'd love to get a call and find out how it's going there.
		British Prime Minister John Major is out, has conceded defeat.
		As a matter of fact, he said, quote, tonight we have been comprehensively defeated, unquote.
		Comprehensively defeated.
		Another way of saying they were slaughtered.
		It looks like time for labor in Britain.
		So that kind of covers what's new in the news.
		Other than that, we're about to enter open lines.
		So ready, set, go.
		West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
		Good morning.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Art.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		This is Dan M. Connell from California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I was just sitting here thinking with what happened up in Yuba City.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And I was just thinking that with all these bands and firearms and stuff, you know, some of those people out there with the guns don't scare me as much as the people with explosives.
		Because they're the ones that are, you know, really way out there.
		They're going to be in possession of something like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hear you.
		I can't think of anything that more concerns me right now.
		Thank you.
		And I guess I'll roll over this again with respect to what's going on down in Texas, with respect to the now, I guess, more than rumor that militias are headed in that direction.
		With all of the explosives being found, we are entering a very, very dangerous time in this country, and everything is at risk.
		And what I fear is a cycle of violence beginning that will have this country eventually reduced to what I call the Belfast model or the Sarajevo model, where people are afraid that a bomb is going to go off near them or a bullet is going to pass through them as they do nothing more than walk down the street.
		Ladies and gentlemen, that is the danger that we face right now in this country.
		The cynical, the building cynicism that our government is our enemy.
		If we continue along this path, we will destroy ourselves.
		If we conclude the gun and the bomb are the only solutions to our problems, we are going to destroy ourselves.
		We are a strong country, and in the past, we have faced threats from the outside with great courage and determination and have prevailed.
		This is one threat that really does hold the possibility of destroying all that we know and love about our nation.
		I don't know if it can be stopped.
unidentified		You tell me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Hi, this is Martin in Oceanside, and I was listening to the NASA interviews.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And I was dying to get through, but I couldn't because last night Kevin Randall had said you should ask what the astronauts saw.
unidentified		Now, I was toning down your show once in a while for something else, but did you mention Gordon Cooper or Edgar Mitchell to them?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, sir, I've interviewed Edgar Mitchell, and I've asked him what he saw.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And he clearly said that he saw nothing untoward.
		Yeah.
		So I would imagine that the answer from NASA would be confirming what he said.
unidentified		But he is on video stating that pretty strongly, like on the Today Show, that he knows of people who he believes are high up firsthand, who have first-hand knowledge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He has said that, but I don't think there would have been any productivity in asking these two NASA gentlemen about the benefits of being careful with them because they're in there.
unidentified		They're in the jobs.
		And you did a great job, though.
		Well, I appreciate it.
		I appreciate it.
		Okay, thanks a lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.
		So that's why I did not ask that question.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello?
		Hello.
		Hello.
		Hello there.
		Mr. Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's me.
unidentified		Well, what a pleasure.
		My name is Sal.
		I'm calling from Santa Cruz.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And I just call to say that I enjoy your show.
		Yes.
		And it's very interesting.
		And very, very interesting.
		I listen to your show every morning.
		And I just can't get enough of your show.
		I just hope to listen more and more.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, my friend.
		Thank you.
		That's very kind.
		I feel the same way about it.
		I can't get enough of my own show.
		I love doing this.
		I'm sure you can tell.
		It is and has been a labor of love, more and more and more as time goes on.
		Absolutely a labor of love.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hey, Art.
unidentified		Just listening on KHVH, 8.30 a.m.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, Lulu.
unidentified		Oh, no, Lulu.
		I need a little commentary.
		I just was walking through my mind here thinking about the government, and it dawned on me that actually the people make the government.
		If we start to have a government that is afraid to act against terrorism or afraid to pay the price from the public for their actions, then truly I think maybe the public opinion is what drives the government.
		So if we have a government that is afraid to go in like the Peruvian government went in and did their thing and get out, our government wouldn't do that because the people making the call would pay the price in the case of many hostages being killed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not Sure, that I would compare what occurred in Peru to, for example, Waco or Ruby Ridge or any of the things that seem to be pushing people with bombs and guns to do things they ought not be doing.
		I'm not sure I would compare the two.
		I appreciate your call, but I am just so terribly, terribly worried.
		It's part of what I call the quickening.
		This escalation.
		This coming bloodbath between our government and our citizens.
		The coming distrust, the increasing distrust, rather, the increasing cynicism, even hatred of our government.
		And as this gentleman did correctly say, we are the government.
		Despite the fact that they are out of control at times, and a lot of us feel we are not properly represented, I assure you that compared to a lot of other systems in the world, our representation remains pretty good.
		All right?
		Far from perfect, but pretty good.
		And I would hate to think what might come next if we begin a cycle of violence that ends in a basic change that rewrites that document that we still live by, our Constitution Bill of Rights, and so forth.
		Weston, the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Yes, Mr. Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		I was just listening to your interview with NASA, and you did very good on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		I can't wait to hear what Hogwarts.
unidentified		I was wondering, you know, you advertise that DHEA.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Have you done any...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any comments on that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is Mike from the business.
		Yes, Mike, I do.
		I can tell you two things.
		One, I have read Dr. Walgi's book on DHEA and other literature on DHEA, and there is controversy about it.
		But it also appears that DHEA does as advertised, and I am taking it myself.
		So I weighed in my own mind what I read on both sides and decided to take it, and I am.
unidentified		Yeah, I was just wondering if you noticed all the hoop-a-law over it.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
unidentified		Yeah.
		Also, I was wondering, do you think, which I would have liked to ask these DASA guys, say you have a couple of billionaires that get together and they want to colonize the moon or colonize a planet or something.
		Do you think that how much government, what's the right word, interference or whatever, you know?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I think the answer is there would be a very great deal.
		And what you're asking is if billionaires got together and decided to launch their own rocket, how much red tape and trouble there would be for anybody with that in mind?
		I think the answer is a lot.
		That's just my own personal opinion.
		Impossible?
		No.
		Difficult, very difficult.
		Yes, indeed.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		How are you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How about yourself and where are you?
unidentified		I am in Dallas, Texas, and my name's James.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, James.
unidentified		I have a question for you.
		Well, I actually have two, and I hope you don't mind the first one because it has a lot to do with the second one.
		Okay, James.
		All right.
		The first one is, it might seem kind of cynical, but do you yourself, I was listening to the NASA interviews that you were holding.
		Right.
		Do you yourself believe that there is, you know, possible with the mass universe that's out there, intelligent life?
		I mean, that we are not the only people here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think it's very likely that there is intelligent life.
		You bet I do.
		However, I'm not in the category of what you would call a believer, somebody who absolutely says it is so, because until I see evidence of it, I think that's a foolish statement.
		I think it's very likely there is life, more likely than not.
unidentified		Well, I agree with that.
		And then what that leads to is the gentleman said on NASA about, you know, something, you asked the question, if something like that was ever discovered, that would it be released right away?
		And they said they had to go through their, you know, different steps to release it.
		Yes.
		Do you possibly or I don't think that the government would really release something like that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I absolutely and completely agree with you.
		It is my way when I do an interview to not pin people up against the law, and I didn't do that with them.
		But my answer is, look, if they discovered something unambiguously incredible, life, you know, absolute life, no question about it, or a saucer, would we hear about that?
		No.
		My answer is no.
unidentified		Well, I would agree with you because of the not only religious ramifications, but just the fanatics out there that would just cause so much chaos.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you want to hear something interesting?
		Yes, there would be religious problems, but you know the group that they suggest would be most affected?
		Interesting.
		The scientists.
unidentified		I agree.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, they would be least able to accept the reality of intelligent life, and they would be most disturbed by that news, the scientific community.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that interesting?
unidentified		That's very interesting.
unidentified		Well, I appreciate your comments.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I appreciate your call, sir.
		Thank you.
		And good morning.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		I was listening to the NASA interview, and I was just, you know, I just couldn't believe a lot of what I was hearing.
		First of all, the whole UFO phenomenon, you know, I mean, they failed to look at this as having anything to do with ETs or anything.
		Instead, they're looking at a dumb rock.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I'm not sure that's fair.
		Listen, I've got a break.
		Can you hold on?
unidentified		Yes, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, stand by.
		We'll bring you back right after the break.
		This is CBC.
unidentified		I keep hearing your concerns about my happiness.
		But all that thought you're giving me is conscious, I guess.
		If I were walking in your shoes, I wouldn't be wearing a...
		Well, you know, friends, the world has got me out, I've been playing for fun.
		Got some flowers on the wall.
		That doesn't bother me at all.
		Why is it bothering her to talk?
		Which we want to cigarette and what means I've nothing to do.
		That's my address in test.
		The End Art Bell is taking calls on the wildcard line at 702-727-1295.
		That's 702-727-1295.
		First-time callers can reach Art Bell at 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is Coast to Coast A.M., proving on a nightly basis there is more to life than politics.
		I'm Art Bell, and in a moment, we'll continue with Open Lines.
		As a matter of fact, when you're talking about life, she's singing about probably the most important part of it right now.
		That's love.
		We'll be right back.
		In today's world of shaky currencies, that's 1-800-557-4627.
		You've got nothing to lose but the facts.
		Well, all right, back we go.
		Thank you for holding on.
		You're back on the air again.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		This is Jeff Collin from Phoenix.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Jeff.
unidentified		And I listened to the NASA interview, and I was on March 13th, okay, the UFO activity here.
		Right.
		I seen the footage that was on Incredible Universe tonight, and it was good footage.
		It was exactly what I seen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Strange universe.
unidentified		Yeah, Strange Universe.
		I was watching it through 10 by 50 binoculars.
		It was obviously not anything from this world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You didn't think it was slares, huh?
unidentified		Absolutely not.
		I could see the object pretty good.
		It was circular.
		It had lights.
		It was like a half circle of lights, like crescent.
		Right.
		Most of the object on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You could absolutely see substance to the object.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's a great debate about whether people actually saw substance in the object or whether they were lights separated by apparently nothing.
unidentified		No, it was definitely solid.
		I mean, you couldn't see stars through it or anything like that.
		I was just, you know, kind of wondering why they don't look at the UFO phenomenon more.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Seriously?
unidentified		Yeah, exactly.
unidentified		Because here they're going out in space looking for extraterrestrial life and all that when the extraterrestrials are here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it may well, you're right.
		It may well be, the answer to it may be that they know the answer to it.
		And in effect, if you listened between the lines to the interview with these gentlemen, when they were really pressed, they suggested that, well, it would be hard to hide, they said, because it's public.
		But yes, there are lots of procedures and people that would have to be notified in the White House and all the rest of it.
		So would we hear right away or even very soon?
		I think the answer is not.
		Indeed not.
		And if they're here now, as evidenced, for example, by what was seen over Phoenix, I think the answer is the same, that if they were aware of it, we might well not be.
		Now, listen, if you would like a copy of that very rare interview with NASA, you can get it, as usual.
		Let me give you the number.
		Any guest appearance we have here or any Dreamland program can be retrieved in its entirety on they do a very good job now on the audio tapes.
		They remove commercials and they remove the news and all of that, and you get a wonderfully prepared tape of these interviews by calling 1-800-917-4278.
		That's 1-800-917-4278.
		So if there is a particular interview you want, you probably need to know either the date of that interview or the person interviewed and about when it was and call that number and they will provide it for you.
		Not without cost.
		There is some cost, but they do have an archive of all our guest programs and all the Dreamland programs.
		That number one more time is 1-800-917-4278.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
		Hi, Art.
		This is Jerry in St. Louis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Jerry.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Art, I have a question for you.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		You and the guy were talking not too long ago about your flight where you got sick, and you said something about you took some certain vitamins or something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I took colloidosilver, it's called, and I took it for many weeks prior to the flight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I took it while I was in Mexico, and I had been led to believe that I was more or less bulletproof from viruses.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and can you give your address over there before the beginning of the hour?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mailing address?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have a pencil?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, if you will spell perump, try to spell perump, Nevada, I will give it to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me hear you spell perump.
unidentified		Yeah, it sounds like P-R-U-M-T.
unidentified		Hmm.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you ready for reality?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is Art Bell Post Office Box 4755.
unidentified		4755.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In P P A H. P A H R U M P. R U M P. Nevada.
		zip code 89041 89041-4755-4755.
		That's it.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Okay, thank you, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, my friend.
		Take care.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Art Bell, how are you this morning, my good man?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just fine.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		This is Dennis down in the lower desert in Yuma, Arizona.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Art, I've been retrieving in my mind the April Fool's prank.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean on the website?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		No, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which one?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		The fly-in to Area 51.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that was on April 2nd.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Well, it was, yes, yes, April, April 1, April 2.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it was April 2.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		What I detected from that, you had indicated that there was a microphone that would cut out all sound.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		It's called a noise-canceling mic.
		There's no question about it.
unidentified		Right.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		His radio was off.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		His girlfriend had called you and told you to keep a line open.
unidentified		He said, Well, she wanted to open up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute.
		Let's get it straight.
		She sent a fax and asked me to keep a line open.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Right.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Would there be a noise reducer for a cellular phone?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		In other words, if you had an external microphone plugged into a cellular, which you would do, because you wouldn't want to have to hold a cellular phone while you were flying an airplane.
		Look, I'm not saying that what happened is real.
		I'm just saying that if you had an external mic hooked up to a cellular, and it was a noise-canceling mic, you would not hear engine noise.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I see.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		That's where I was got.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you'd want to have hands-off.
		In other words, you wouldn't have to be trying to hold on to a cellular phone while you were trying to fly a plane.
		Absolutely.
		You know, look, I'm not saying it's real.
		Who the hell knows?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Well, I just figured it was a Batter Day April Fool's joke.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It may have been.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It may have been.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		All right, God bless you, and God bless America.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much for the call.
		East of the Rockies, you are upon the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Well, a pleasant visit.
unidentified		Morning to you from Oklahoma.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Oklahoma.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where in Oklahoma, Pray tell, are you?
unidentified		All right, Oklahoma City.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oklahoma City, all right.
unidentified		Yep.
		Your previous caller was missing.
		He was about to fly into Area 51.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you don't have a very good phone, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're kind of hard to hear.
unidentified		Okay, it's on a payphone.
unidentified		I'll try to do the best I can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I see.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		Your last guest alluded to a project where they were going to go out and fly by a comet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And I wondered if you'd heard of Project Stardust.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, he even said that what they were going to try to do would be to, in effect, rendezvous with the comet and fly with it, taking a good long series of photographs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very exciting.
unidentified		I don't know if that's Stardust or not, but Stardust is going to go out and try to capture some of the dust from the tail.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Also some of the solar wind.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Some of the stellar wind.
unidentified		And currently the plans for it to land are somewhere in a deserted area in southern Nevada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Figures.
unidentified		I know that could be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not figures.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Perhaps probably.
unidentified		You might get your chance to do what you've always wanted to do, talk one of them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you're right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're absolutely right, and Tim Burton will probably do a movie about it.
unidentified		You might have to come out of retirement.
unidentified		I don't think it's going to come back to about 2006.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't rule me out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I still may be around it in 2006.
unidentified		Hey, I hope so.
unidentified		I don't know what I've been without you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I thank you, my friend.
		Yeah, I might still be around.
		My attitude about this is to continue to do it for as long as it's fun.
		And it's a lot of fun, you know.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, my name is Claudia Guzland from Santa Cruz, California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From where in California?
unidentified		Santa Cruz, California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Santa Cruz again, okay.
unidentified		My question was regarding your first UFO encounter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, my only one.
unidentified		Your only one.
unidentified		Was that when you first began to believe in them, or have you had some belief in them prior to that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've always had an interest in ufology.
		And I did interviews many years prior to when I saw what I saw.
		But in the center of your question is, did it change me?
		And the answer is absolutely yes.
		Hell yes.
		Sure it did.
		And had you been with me, you too would have been changed, believe me.
		That does not mean that I suddenly embrace little green guys or any other colored guys from anywhere else.
		But I saw something that I guarantee you I don't believe we have the technology to do right now.
		Now, maybe we're that far ahead and we're not being told.
		If that's true and it was ours, then it's a big story.
		If it wasn't ours, that's even a bigger story.
		But either way, what I saw changed me, of course.
unidentified		Okay.
		Okay.
		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
		Thank you.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Oh, let me get the radio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Turn that sucker off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tell us where you are.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		This is Jess in San Diego on 760 Hot Talk Radio with personality.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		KFMB.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		That's it.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I just want to say about this the airplane and Area 51.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I've listened to your show on Fisher RSV 737 surround receiver.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And on this system, the sound of the engines is apparent.
unidentified		Well...
boris said ▲ ● ▼		For the slightest split seconds, before and after he starts every word, there's a...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I also Heard that, and you're the first one to call public attention to it.
		But I heard that too.
		And of course, I'm sitting here with headphones on and really hearing the original thing.
		So I also heard that.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I thought that that was the most credibility-lending factor about it.
		His voice, there was something that, you know, seemed a little staged.
		But when he said, Hang on, we're going to this turn here, and you can hear, you know, you can actually almost feel the engines pulling to the right or the left, whichever way is going to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there was also one other thing that I would like to note for the technical people out there, and that is that I heard what seemed to be a squelch system in his audio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, you know what I mean by squelch?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Not technically, nobody.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, in other words, when he was not speaking, there was a silencing mechanism so that any ambient noise would not be overwhelming.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I could hear that shaking effect every time he would speak and stop.
unidentified		Mm-hmm.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		And...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't mean it's real, but...
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I'm not convinced it's a hoax.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Some of those engines, a split second before and after every word, there's quite a bit of credibility, in my opinion, especially in surround.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, especially in surround.
		All right, thank you very much.
		Of course, it would have to be, you wouldn't have real surround because we're not providing real stereo.
		You know, we could do that.
		Technically, we have the ability to transmit in stereo from here through the uplinks to the radio stations.
		And we have a significant number of FM stations out there.
		We may do that one day.
		I've always tried to figure out what would be the point.
		Well, the bumper music would all come out in stereo, and you could always take callers and put them on one channel and the talk host on the other.
		Or if you had a debate going, talk host in the middle, one caller on one side, the other caller on the other side.
		Or maybe that's just a dumb, fun idea.
		I don't know.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Morning.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Art, this is Chris up in Fairbanks, Alaska.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		I was wondering if I called yesterday and asked if you got the package, but you said you had a check.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I was the one that sent you that UFO.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Basically, how to build one?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How to build a UFO.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		I gave you a little perpetual motion machine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, I don't have that yet.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would definitely know about a perpetual motion machine when I got here.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm sending you another package.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		It has a lot of schematics in there about how to build a remote control UFO with a video camera hookup.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That sounds like fun.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, for the thing about flying around here in town, once we get it set up right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, so you're advertising it ahead of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now you're going to take all the fun out of it.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, no, no.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		We're not going to sell them or anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I didn't say that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you're going to fly a remote control UFO around Fairbanks.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You don't want to advertise that ahead of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let them be surprised like Porky did with the mountain, you know?
unidentified		Oh, I don't want to be that cruel to people.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		There's no farmers up here to fly out to.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Well, why not?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think the people of Fairbanks would get a big kick out of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of course, you might have to hide for a while, but right now we're taking a careful voice print of everything you say.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
unidentified		So the voice scrambler, is it working?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This isn't my real voice.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		You don't think that, do you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, in other words, you're saying that you are scrambling your voice.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Uh-huh.
		Well, that's a horrible thing to do to somebody.
		So you really are.
		You're going to fly a UFO, huh?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, a remote-controlled one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would be pretty cool.
		Oh, one other thing.
		Yeah.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever tried calling 1-800 ARC Bell?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you get?
unidentified		You get a weird answering machine service.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is ARC answering service.
unidentified		What do you want?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		No, it doesn't sound like the voice of Satan.
		No?
		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What does it sound like?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		It's just strange answering service.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Please enter in your numeric digit code.
unidentified		So we tried 666.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And?
boris said ▲ ● ▼		It said this is Art Bell's answering service.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't believe you.
boris said ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're right.
		I lied.
		I'm sorry.
unidentified		But I didn't lie about the UFO, and I am sending off a package of the information to you.
unidentified		Go away now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you'll be able to build your own.
		All right, sir.
		Thank you.
unidentified		Have a good one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, bye.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller align, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, this is Kevin.
		I'm calling from the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Roaring Fork Valley?
unidentified		Lenwood Springs to Aspen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Oh, yes.
		That's where the elite go to serve.
unidentified		Yeah, well, that's where the non-elite live to serve the elite, I guess.
unidentified		Hey, I got just a couple of few things to say here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		First of all, the idea of the spirals in the tail of the comet, this is depicted on several different indigenous peoples records, pictographic records.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And if you correlate that with Velikovsky's writings, which I'm quite familiar with, and it's astounding to me that over the last couple of years, there's been a few really good programs on television about asteroidal impacts and near misses and so forth.
unidentified		And no one has ever bothered to mention Velikovsky, although all his theories and ideas are being proven.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, he's mentioned here all the time.
unidentified		Really?
unidentified		I'm going to start listening more.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You really do?
unidentified		I certainly do.
		And the other thing is the militias and all that.
		There's a correlation between all these things.
		All these things are connected.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they may be.
unidentified		Well, they are, and it can actually be proven.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where do you think this is going?
		I mean, more and more now, we've got people hold up.
		We've got standoffs.
		We've got people with automatic weapons.
		God, I saw one of the weapons I collected from these people that are on the way to the standoff, and it looked like it would hold about 500 rounds, you know.
		And then now we've got people with bombs and big enough to blow up three city blocks and all this crap going on.
		Where's all this going in your mind?
unidentified		Well, I'll tell you where it's all going in my mind is to, ultimately what will happen is we're going to see The federal government, the U.S. government, declare martial law.
unidentified		It's going to be involving a lot of foreign forces who will be under the jurisdiction of basically the U.N. Well, who's really promoting this?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, I know that the groups believe that the government is doing this, and they have this great fear that our government is going to clamp down and we'll be in a police state and all the rest of it.
		Well, if this kind of thing keeps happening, they're going to create that reality.
		In other words, yeah, you bet it's going to happen, and it's going to be a cycle that I have no idea how we're going to get stopped.
unidentified		Well, we're not going to be able to stop it.
		It's already actually, the wheels have been well set in motion.
		What we're witnessing is the manifestation of something that's taken a very long time, actually close to 6,000 years to unfold.
		It's a prophetic legacy that we're all involved in, whether we know it or like it or care to be.
		What's going to happen ultimately is we're going to have a thermonuclear war.
		And we're also coincidentally, as has happened in prior civilizations on this planet, we're going to go through cataclysmic natural catastrophes right coinciding with that time.
		And the social chaos and the breakdown that we're seeing in confidence in governments all over the world is just one example of how things are leading that way.
		It's all coming to a head, to a focal point.
		And that'll be shortly around the turn of the century.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's what I call the quickening.
		It's just the process leading up to what you describe as one resolution to it.
		But, you know, there will be something on the other side of what you're talking about.
		I don't know what, but something.
		Sir, I've got to run.
		We're at the top of the hour now.
		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, and this is the CBC Radio Network.
		Don't touch that dial, for in many markets, we will be right back.
		Trust me, more morning shows come next.
unidentified		Whatever.
		Leave me this away.
		I can't be by.
		I can't save the lie without your love.
		Oh, baby, don't leave me this away.
		I can't accept how surely miss your sins are here.
		Don't leave me there.

▲