Art Bell hosts Don Savage (NASA’s Public Affairs Officer) and Ray Villard (Hubble Institute), debunking claims Hubble hid Comet Hale-Bopp images, citing its 1995 observations and Dr. Harold Weaver’s published findings. NASA denies degrading data, explaining Hubble’s operational limits and peer-reviewed proposal system. The Brookings Report’s 1960 speculation on extraterrestrial life discovery—ranging from unity to conflict—resurfaces, with Savage dismissing it as outdated but acknowledging scientific openness. Bell questions transparency, while NASA insists on rigorous review before public disclosure, referencing the 1996 Mars meteorite fossil announcement. Callers raise UFO concerns, including Project Stardust and private colonization risks, with Bell teasing Richard Hoagland’s upcoming appearance. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And Hubble never truly resolved the nucleus.
unidentified
Estimates were based on the brightness of the nucleus and other behavior.
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?
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.
And also, as had been alluded to, initially we were in the middle of checkout from the last Hubble servicing mission.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I mean, again, from a public relations point of view, it seems all wrong.
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.
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.
When Mars, the last time Mars was closest to Earth, the last opposition, which was in March, Mars was 60 million miles away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And no one has ever bothered to mention Velikovsky, although all his theories and ideas are being proven.
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.
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?
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.