Karl Grossman warns of Cassini’s 1997 launch using 72.3 lbs of plutonium-238, 280x more toxic than bomb-grade plutonium, with NASA admitting a 32%–34% fuel dispersal risk in accidents—far deadlier than their 2,300-cancer estimate. He cites "fingernail-thin" shielding and past disasters like SNAP-9A (1964) and Cosmos 954 (1978), while proposing ESA’s solar-powered Rosetta as a safer alternative, exposing NASA’s Cold War-era plutonium lobbying ties. Callers debate risks, crop circles (Oregon’s Highway 22 anomaly), moon land sales, and "Men in Black," while Bell muses on dimensional doors and vampire conspiracies—ultimately framing space exploration as a battleground between scientific progress and hidden, high-stakes dangers. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, depending on your time zone.
Prolific as they are in our coverage area from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Island chains in the west all the way east to the U.S. Virgin Islands, south well into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the Internet, the Old Internet, courtesy of AudioNet in Dallas.
Thank you, folks.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Mark Bell.
And we are now on Mars.
Soon, we are due to go to Saturn with a mission called Cassini.
It'll be a four-year close-up study of the Saturn system, including the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field, the rings, and several moons.
The mission represents a rare opportunity to gain significant insights into major scientific questions about the creation of the solar system and the conditions that led to life here on Earth.
In addition to a host of questions specific to the Saturn system, as the best instrumented probe ever to be sent to another planet, Cassini will produce the most complete information about a planet system ever obtained.
That is the upside.
My guest coming up in a moment, Carl Grossman, has what may be the downside, at least certainly something that we should all be aware of.
and just wait until you hear what it is.
Transcription by CastingWords Well, all right, I have experienced victory over my computer.
And I, again, tonight, like my computer.
Last night I had the Tri Studio Cams off.
You know, we have three cameras here that take photographs of me as we do the program.
And I may be soon adding a fourth that will be out of doors.
I'm working on that now.
Yesterday I had a computer torn totally apart in here, and it was so messy, I was embarrassed to have it on.
So I finally got everything whooped, and the studio cam is back on live tonight.
So if you go to the website, you can take a look-see.
That is www.artbell.com.
We're on Mars.
We're talking about going to Saturn.
And now comes Carl Grossman.
Carl Grossman has for 30 years specialized in investigative reporting on environmental and energy issues, for which he has received the George Polk Award, among many other honors.
He is a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury, where he is the coordinator of the college's media and communications department.
Books he has authored include Power Crazy, Cover Up What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, and The Forthcoming, The Wrong Stuff, The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet.
Articles by Grossman on environmental and energy issues have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Village Voice, The Globe, The Philadelphia Enquirer, Environmental Action, Extra, The Boston Phoenix, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Crisis, Common Cause Magazine, and so forth and so on.
He is program director and vice president of EnviroVideo, which is a New York-based company that produces environmental television documentary and news programming.
He hosted, wrote, and co-produced EnviroVideo's documentary Nukes in Space, the nuclearization and weaponization of the heavens.
Wait a minute, we don't have weapons up there, do we?
Which received the gold medal at the WorldFest Houston International Film Festival and Three Mile Island Revisited, which, by the way, received the silver medal at the WorldFest Festival.
Among the courses he teaches at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury are environmental journalism, investigative reporting, and politics of media.
He lectures widely on environmental and energy issues.
Here is Carl Grossman.
Carl, welcome to the program.
A pleasure, Art.
I read you a little ditty there on the upside of why go to Saturn.
It is subtitled New Knowledge.
In other words, here we have an opportunity to explore a planet which will bring us much information about our own beginnings, I suppose.
And that's highlighted by the fact we're on Mars now with Sojourner and Rover, and we're getting all these photographs back showing all these cool rocks.
Now, it is the Cassini mission, I believe, that will go to Saturn, correct?
Well, I have no problem whatsoever with this space program.
I don't think there's anybody on Earth who saw the pictures from Mars in the last several days who wasn't thrilled.
I mean, it's just wonderful.
It's just terrific.
But the issue to me is let's explore space safely.
Let's not do it in a way that a portion of life on Earth might be destroyed in the process.
And my concern has to do with the use of nuclear technology for various space devices and the possibility of some of the nuclear poisons, the radionucleides involved, being dispersed and affecting people and other life back here on Earth.
In fact, an isotope of plutonium which is extraordinarily toxic.
Not the plutonium-239 that most people are familiar with, stuff that atomic bombs use as fuel or is built up in nuclear plants.
But the fuel, it's plutonium oxide.
Primarily what it's composed of is plutonium-238, which is 280 times more radioactive than 239.
And they're using this in what are called radioisotope thermoelectric generators, two, three of them on Cassini, to produce a very modest amount of electricity, 745 watts on an average, for the instruments on Cassini.
In fact, there's some thinking that if they had a bigger rocket like the old Saturn, they might be able to avoid...
But they're going to use a Titan IV.
And the Titan IV doesn't have a 100% record of good launches.
In fact, in 1993, at the Vandenberg Air Force Base, there was a launch of a Titan IV, which went haywire 101 seconds after launch, blew a spy satellite system to smithereens.
19 launches of Titan IVs, this one very serious accident, so it's about a 5% failure rate.
If the Titan IV carrying Cassini blows on October 6th, if they go ahead with this launch, there is a possibility of some of the plutonium being released, particularly if a hard surface is struck by some of the modules containing the plutonium and a possibility of a dispersal thus in the neighboring communities.
The other concern, though, somehow, are they coming back to Earth or are they going to use Earth as a slingshot effect to head out towards Saturn or what's the deal?
They're coming back, as they said in that old movie.
The plutonium, as I say, isn't being used for propulsion.
The Cassini probe is to be propelled in space by a very conventionally powered rocket, a centaur rocket, chemically fueled.
Now, it doesn't have the power to get the Cassini probe directly from Earth to its final destination, which is Saturn and Saturn's moons, particularly Titan.
And thus, NASA has devised a scheme, a flyby scheme, or a gravity assist maneuver, that's what NASA calls it, in which Cassini will be sent instead of to Saturn first off, to Venus.
And it's going to circle Venus twice and pick up a little velocity because of Venus's gravity.
And then in 1999, in August of 1999, it's to come hurtling back at the Earth for a flyby.
They make use of Earth's gravity.
It's to come in at 42,300 miles an hour.
And it's to be, the original plan was for it to be 312 miles high.
Now there's some discussion by NASA putting it up a little higher, 500 miles high.
But in any case, this thing is going to whip in at essentially 300 to 500 miles high.
and if there is a miscalculation that there is a problem that is an accident and that happen all the time in space just look at the Mir space station event just last week or of course the Challenger accident but if there is a mishap and this thing doesn't whip in at that right altitude Yeah.
Well, if it did that and the Earth's atmosphere is 75 miles high, so we're not talking much of a margin of error.
It's not coming in at 20,000 miles high.
It's coming in just a few hundred miles high.
It would disintegrate.
And a good portion, and NASA admits, they don't admit it in their PR.
Their PR, they keep talking about these modules being like bank vaults.
They are quite a PR operation.
But in fact, you look at the environmental impact statement, which can be obtained from NASA, the final environmental impact statement for the Cassini mission, what it says, and I'm reading right here from page 4, hyphen 51,
for all the re-entry cases studied, about 32 to 34% of the fuel from the three RTGs, those are the radioisotope thermoelectric generators, is expected to be released at high altitude.
Now this is the real worrisome thing.
the fraction of the fuel particles released during the reentry, estimated to be reduced to vapor or respirable particles, ranges from 66% for very shallow reentries to about 20% for steep reentries.
The problem with plutonium is that if it becomes a dust and people breathe in that dust or vapor...
It's horrendous.
Plutonium has been described over and over again as the most toxic substance known.
And it's the most toxic, it's the most lethal.
It's not water soluble.
And if a person just breathes in that microscopic pin dot, even smaller than a pin dot of plutonium, it lodges in the lung, it doesn't wash out, it irradiates that portion of the lung, and the impact can easily be lung cancer.
So you're talking here about, I mean, he has NASA admitting others, including a whistleblower at NASA, formerly with NASA, 30 years with NASA, who I've interviewed at length, Alan Cohn.
He says he doesn't expect 32% to 34% of the plutonium being released.
He says 100% is more like it.
But in any case, even NASA is admitting pounds of plutonium.
And then it goes on in the environmental impact statement in terms of how many people on the planet could be affected.
Let me just read it because otherwise people wouldn't believe it.
In the unlikely event an inadvertent re-entry occurred, approximately 5 billion, this would be of the estimated 7 to 8 billion world population at the time could receive 99% or more of the radiation exposure.
Now let me hasten to say that NASA then goes on to say that this is going to mean only 2,300 fatal cancers.
I don't know, only, but they say 2,300 fatal cancers.
But I've had this NASA data looked over by a variety of independent scientists, and they project fatalities far above 2,000.
They go anywhere from Dr. John Goffman, University of California, professor emeritus who was with the Manhattan Project, isolated some of the first usable portions of pieces of plutonium during the war.
A giant in the field with MD, PhD, he says you're looking more at perhaps a million deaths, 900,000 to a million.
Dr. Ernest Sternglass, professor emeritus, radiological physics, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, he speaks about 10 to 40 million deaths if this plutonium oil gets out.
And again, that goes back to my concern, you know, is going to Saturn is wonderful.
It would be like the Mars mission.
We learn a lot.
But do we want this kind of catastrophe to occur, particularly if it's not necessary?
And this is the next point that we should talk about.
As you mentioned, they say that they're in bank vault-like conditions.
Frankly, I live out here in the desert adjacent to the area where they're going to be putting all this really nasty stuff that's supposed to be taken care of, will be custodial appearance for it for tens of thousands of years.
So I have a lot of concern about this sort of thing.
But, you know, they run advertisements here in Nevada showing these casks that they're going to be keeping this high-level waste in.
And they show them dropped from helicopters.
They show them dropped out of the back of trucks.
They show them in collisions with trucks.
And they've done everything but have a woman with high heels kick them.
And, you know, trying to convince us that these things are safe.
Now, I would imagine with 72.3 pounds of plutonium oxide, which might do what you just described, they would indeed have this in a very, very safe container that would withstand any kind of re-entry.
I mean, it would be great if that was the situation.
But they're not.
I mean, I'm a journalist.
I'm a reporter.
And I frankly don't.
I don't believe the PR spin.
Particularly in investigative reporting.
You kind of stay away from the PR characters.
You really want people who, often whistleblowers, people from the inside.
Sure.
The actual documents.
And here, Dr. Horace Pola, he's a gentleman, worked 22 years for NASA contractors at the Kennedy Space Center.
And here's the way he describes the shielding of the plutonium on Cassini.
Fingernail thin.
It's a joke.
The so-called shielding, says Pola, this is a misstatement, consists of an iridium alloy shell with a thickness of 0.022 inches, or 41 28ths of an inch.
Imagine 72.3 pounds of plutonium oxide coming back at Earth like a bullet at 42,000 miles an hour, somewhere between 200 and 500 miles above Earth to slingshot it towards Saturn.
Now, I'm sure that NASA would tell us nothing can go wrong.
And in effect, they are telling us that.
But even should it go wrong, they're telling us that they've got this stuff in bank vault-like conditions, right?
So we're going to once again lay out these bank vault-like conditions for you in a moment.
Listen, tomorrow night, John Kirby is going to be here at the beginning of the program, and he will bring with him some interviews that I think you're going to be very interested in.
Walter Hout, who was the base PR officer at Roswell.
Frank Kaufman, one of the men in charge of the cleanup at Roswell, will be interviewed.
He'll play a very historic audio tape of Jesse Marcel Sr., now of course passed on, calling his son Jesse Marcel Jr., whom I've interviewed on this program.
And you're going to hear a lot of very interesting stuff like Major Edwin Easley from the 509th Bomb Group, Provost Marshal, saying that he still can't talk about the incident because he's still sworn to secrecy.
Colonel Thomas DuBose, chief of staff of the 8th Air Force, saying the balloon story was indeed a cover story to keep the press off General Ramey's back.
So that should be a very interesting program.
That's tomorrow night, John Kirby.
all right uh...
we will get back to our plutonium friend carl grossman but that that that in just a moment Now back to Carl Grossman.
Well, that's what they would the impression that the PR people from NASA would like to lead.
But as I say, Polar, and indeed he wrote a letter on the draft environmental impact statement for Cassini, where he goes through these measurements.
And I should just perhaps add, it starts off with the 0.02 inches or 3, 1 28th of an inch of iridium.
And then it's followed, he notes, by two graphite shells, each less than a quarter inch thick, insulating foil, and finally a quarter, 1 16th inch thin aluminum.
And he says this is not hardly shielding at all.
This isn't heavily shielded.
And he goes on and on about the possibility here for, as he describes it, Dr. Poehler, the mother of all accidents if the plutonium gets out.
It says, you know, for all re-entry cases studied, says the environmental impact statement, 32 to 34% of the fuel is expected to be released at high altitude, and it goes on, and a substantial amount of that could end up as vapor or respirable particles.
Also, if this stuff hits a rock, I mean, if it falls down on the cement of the Cape Canaveral Air Station, but a launch is supposed to occur on October 6th in an accident, the cement will bust open this stuff.
If it falls down, in fact, the rooting of Cassini is they'll first launch from Florida, then what they do is fly it over Africa.
I mean, first the ocean, of course, then Africa.
And they admit in the environmental impact statement.
If there's an accident and the stuff, these modules fall on Africa.
If they hit rocks on Africa, the plutonium gets out.
And the next big, big concern is the flyby.
So, you know, these are not bank faults whatsoever.
Iridium is a very strong metal, of course.
But we're talking here about a very, very strong likelihood of rupture in all these various cases.
What NASA has going for it, I suppose, is the claim, and this is the basic defense, the likelihood, the probability of a catastrophic accident dispersing this plutonium.
Well, it went tumbling out of control, they think.
Yes.
Now, everything is dependent on those burns being accurate, because if they did a burn and suddenly it was headed for Earth and they couldn't do another burn to correct it, what would we do about that?
I mean, she'd be coming in at 42,000 miles an hour with all this plutonium.
Once it's, I mean, if it's coming in too low, they can try to do corrections.
But, I mean, accidents do happen.
In fact, the current issue of Space News talks about this current Mars mission and then goes on about, this is towards the end of the editorial, space exploration is inherently a risky business.
Things go wrong, as they did with the Mars Observer.
So things could go wrong on the Cassini mission, on that flyby.
But generally, when we talk about that, we're talking about the lives of astronauts or cosmonauts or even a possible explosion at the Cape at a launch.
You know, these sorts of risks is, in my thinking, remembrance, is what we're discussing.
Things go wrong.
I agree.
It's not a perfect science.
But here we're talking about not the lives of seven astronauts.
By the way, no matter where it comes down, whether it comes down here or in another foreign country, Paris, you mentioned, London, whatever, we, the American taxpayer, will pay for it.
No doubt, relocating.
now if it comes down on london were really in trouble uh...
because we're going to end up uh...
with london relocating to somewhere here i don't know there is a You say that this mission is going to take how long?
Because in fact, the European Space Agency back in 94 with a company called Deutsche Aerospace did a breakthrough on high-efficiency solar cells.
In fact, I have their announcement right here.
They talk about how these new high-efficiency cells with the highest efficiency ever achieved in solar arrays will replace plutonium-powered systems on deep space probes.
ESA expects the new high-performance silicon cells could possibly be used in deep space missions.
It goes on in 1995, a physicist from ESA said, give us a few years and a few dollars and we'd do solar for your Cassini mission.
And in fact, I was in Germany a few months ago and Gerhard Strobel of Deutsche Aerospace said that you couldn't do it immediately.
You couldn't just slap on solar panels on the Cassini probe.
But redesign the probe and we'd have a solar system ready.
In fact, Strobel stressed that the European Space Agency will be sending up the Rosetta space probe beyond the orbit of Jupiter to rendezvous with a comet, and it's going to be equipped not with the plutonium system like Cassini has, but with solar.
So, I mean, the technology is here, and Saturn is further than Jupiter.
And as Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of nuclear physics at the City University of New York, says, if you couldn't get to the last mile to Saturn with the solar, because the sun becomes a little spot in the sky way, way out there, some long-life fuel cells could take it on too.
Oh, sure, but with these new solar cells, according to Strobel, the European Space Agency, well, for example, just looking at their announcements, spacecraft operating at a very large distance from the sun experience a solar intensity which is only about 5% or less than near the Earth.
But then it goes on that, however, these solar arrays, these new solar cells that have been developed, achieve a 25% efficiency.
This is a breakthrough and so forth.
So even at distances that years ago, no one thought you could harvest solar power.
You can't.
The reason that it's not being done has nothing to do with the technology.
Well, the plutonium that is used in this space probe and has been used in some of the earlier shots, U.S. shots, and in fact has been used on satellites until there was a big angle.
I mean, we're not talking here chicken little if the sky can fall.
In fact, in a way it has.
In 1964, the SNAP-9A, which was a plutonium system on a U.S. satellite with 2.1 pounds of plutonium, fell from the sky.
It disintegrated.
The 2.1 pounds of plutonium spread all over the planet.
Dr. John Goffman, I mentioned him before, University of California at Berkeley, has long connected the SNAP 9A accident with an increased level of lung cancer.
Oh, let me tell you, I saw some very, very interesting cancer stats indicating that the amount of cancer for American men since World War II is up 300%.
Now, I just cannot imagine why that would be.
That's non-smoking-related cancer, by the way.
I'll tell you what, hold tight.
We'll come back after the top of the hour and continue with this.
72.3 pounds of plutonium oxide.
We'll be back.
unidentified
You'll listen to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from July 9, 1997.
Coast to Coast AM from July
9, 1997.
Coast to Coast AM from July 9, 1997.
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired July 9th, 1997.
He, for 30 years, has specialized in investigative reporting on environmental and energy issues for which he has received the George Polk Award, among many other honors.
He is a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury, where he is the coordinator of the college's media and communications department.
Now, on October 6th, an interesting date, Titan IV will lift off with, among other things, 72.3 pounds of plutonium oxide.
I think it's 238.
I wrote it down here.
Really rough stuff, anyway.
Yeah, 238.
Plutonium oxide, 238, which is about 280 times as radioactive as 239.
You know, the stuff we use in the bomb.
Now, this Titan IV will launch a project called Cassini, which is due to go and explore the Saturn system.
Not quite the way we're exploring Mars presently, but explore, orbit, take photographs, map it, do that sort of thing, so that we might learn more about ourselves.
Now, NASA has always maintained there are risks in going to space.
And there are.
Generally, though, those discussions have been limited to the risks associated with the astronauts, brave astronauts, cosmonauts, and we have lost some.
In this particular case, there are two problems.
One, the Titan IV may, as it has before, explode on launch.
That would be bad.
Two, Cassini is due to come back to Earth at about 42,000 miles per hour and graze the atmosphere at anywhere from 200 to 500 miles above Earth so that it might gain speed and then sort of relaunch itself towards Saturn.
Now, should they miss by just a little bit as this thing comes back toward Earth at 42,000 miles an hour, and should it re-enter, the implications indeed are dire, and we have been discussing that with Carl Grossman and will again in a moment.
All right, this 72.3 pounds of plutonium is on board to supply a total of about 745 watts of power for the Cassini probe.
And again, to put that in perspective for you, that is roughly half what my hair dryer uses, or yours, not a lot of power.
And it could be achieved not using all of this deadly plutonium, but instead simply using solar power.
It is available.
It is efficient enough to serve the Cassini probe, according to Mr. Grossman, but they're not going to do it.
And the next question is why?
Mr. Grossman, welcome back to the program.
Why, why, why?
Will they, since we've had advances and solar would work, why take this horrid risk?
Well, that's, again, I think the central question.
Just let me note, I'm not saying that, as Dr. Strobel stressed, that you can put the solar panels immediately on Cassini as it now exists, but a few years of work and it could be flown safely.
I mean, Saturn is going to be around, I bet, for a few more years.
I bet.
They could do this thing right, and there would be no problem.
And as to why not, I found four basic reasons.
One, you have the pressure of the manufacturer of this device, and the company is called Lockheed Martin.
And it's not exactly your mom-and-pop store.
In fact, two years ago, I was out speaking on this issue in Colorado, and there was a little item, maybe other people didn't notice it, but I did, about how a little subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee led by Representative Jerry Lewis had canceled the Cassini project because of cost.
He's a conservative, kind of a new Gingrich follower.
And just on the basis of cost, said, I mean, this is billions of dollars.
And I thought, well, that's the end of Cassini.
And it's interesting how the end came over dollars, not safety.
Well, but the time I got back to New York two days later, things had changed.
I called the full House Appropriations Committee, asked for the staff people, people who handle the reporters, and said, well, what's happened now with Cassini?
And Lapella said, and I quote this in my book, The Wrong Stuff, you wouldn't believe what happened that subcommittee zeroed out Cassini and we landed on by Lockheed Martin.
And boom, it was all back.
So we know how the Congress of the United States seems to work.
And the paperwork seems to be mostly green that propels the Congress.
So you have Lockheed Martin.
Then you have, oh, and prior to Lockheed Martin, incidentally, for decades, these RTGs, these plutonium systems were made by General Electorate.
And I don't know about them bringing good things to life, but they certainly have impacted very heavily on our political scene for many years, pushing what G.E. Westinghouse, the co-contepsi of nuclear power worldwide, very very formidable corporations.
Then you have the national nuclear laboratories like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and Brookhaven National Laboratory and so forth.
They're all involved in the fabrication of these plutonium systems.
And particularly in a post-Cold War era, they want to keep busy.
I mean they can't just be building nuclear weapons like they did before.
So this other use of nuclear in space represents things for those government bureaucrats and scientists at these national laboratories gives us something to do.
I've never had such trouble getting information as I've had on this story, which I've been on for over 10 years.
And a lot of what I've gotten through the years has to do with the Freedom of Information Act.
I can give some background on that.
I mean, I got into this issue, and I had no suspicions about NASA.
I mean, I saw Neil Armstrong on the moon, and I mean, everybody was so proud.
I kind of figured NASA was one of these exceptions to a government agency, squeaky, clean, and efficient.
Wow, was I wrong.
But I had seen a little item in a Department of Energy newsletter right back in 85 about how two shuttles were to be launched in 1986, one being the Challenger.
And this was a nuclear shot to be the Challenger's next mission.
In any case, in 85, I saw this little item about how NASA planned to send up two plutonium-fueled space probes on shuttles, two separate shots.
And at the end of the article, they talked about how they had considered accidents that could occur on launch in the lower atmosphere, the upper atmosphere, and so forth and so on.
I just filed very simply a Freedom of Information Act request with NASA, the Department of Energy, the five national nuclear laboratories involved in these two missions.
And wow, did I have...
For starters, they wouldn't give me anything without paying fees for the documents.
They wouldn't grant a fee waiver, even though I'm a journalist and entitled.
Finally, when I appealed that, then they said they just wouldn't give me anything because all that they had was pre-decisional.
They hadn't kind of figured out the consequences yet, which turned out to be false.
In fact, when I got the documents finally in late 85, after applying a great deal of political pressure, I mean, I had to go to Senator D'Amato.
here in New York, Senator Moynihan and others to try to get these agencies to follow the law.
And finally, in late 85, I got the documents, and they said essentially that they could be a terrible accident if the plutonium on these two shots was dispersed.
But the likelihood of a shuttle accident, I mean, this was what one of the documents said, was highly unlikely because of the extreme reliability inherent in the shuttle.
In any case, there I was in January, January 28th of 1986, to be exact, on my way to the State University of New York to teach my investigative reporting class when I hear on the car radio that the Challenger had blown up.
And I stopped the car in front of an appliance store along the Long Island Expressway.
I live out of Long Island.
And there's that horrific image of the Challenger blowing up.
And all I was thinking then was, wow, if it was the next mission, which was slated for May with 25 pounds of plutonium, it wouldn't be seven brave astronauts dead.
Wherever that plutonium might have spread, I mean, pieces of Challenger ended up all over the coast of Florida.
In fact, just a few months ago, some pieces washed up still.
You would have had many, many more people.
It could be who would know?
It depends on how that plutonium would be released, as dust, or if the particles would stay together and so forth.
Then I, from a pay phone, I called the Nation magazine and asked the folks at the Nation, did they know that the next Challenger mission was to be one of these plutonium space probe missions?
And they didn't.
And they asked me to help them put together a piece quick, and I did.
And then I also called the government.
The Department of Energy had been made the sort of point agency to deal with me.
And I called a guy, I remember his name, Dan Butler.
It was Dan Butler.
He was the person I was told to have my dealings with.
And I said to Mr. Butler, I said, look, the chances, it wasn't one in 100,000, Mr. Butler.
I mean, this is the 25th launch, and look what happened.
And he just didn't kind of absorb that.
I went on and I said, well, are you still going to do these plutonium shots?
And he said, absolutely, absolutely.
There might be a suspension or postponement in the shuttle schedule, but certainly we're going to do it.
And we've done them before.
Yeah, they did it before, but at that point they had done 22, and there was three mishaps.
I mean, that I had picked up in the documents they had sent, including that when I had mentioned that SNAP-9A satellite, which came down, disintegrated, and the plutonium fell out all over the place.
In fact, it isn't just the U.S.'s space program which has had troubles with these nuclear devices.
The Soviets, they've had 41 nuclear space shots.
And what they do, most of the time, they don't want to use plutonium because they fear that if there would be a launch bed accident, the hot radioactive plutonium would be released.
So what they do is most of the time, not all the time, for example, the Russian Mars space probe that fell from the sky back in November, November 16th of this past year, that fell on Chile and Bolivia, that contained a half a pound of plutonium.
All right, so if they tamper with numbers for their own self-interest, and most organizations do that, then let's again discuss the possibility of, I mean, Cassini slingshots back, comes within 200 to 500 miles of Earth to gain acceleration to fire out towards Saturn.
If it should miss by a little bit and re-enter our atmosphere, they have done, I mean, you're using their numbers with regard to the number of deaths that might occur, say if it came down in a metropolitan area like Los Angeles or New York or whatever.
No, it's actually pretty devious what they've done.
I hate to use that word, but I mean, I've had a long experience with these people.
And the notion of, I mean, there was Neil Armstrong on the moon, for example, and he was an Eagle Scout.
I was an Eagle Scout.
I ultimately ended up interviewing the man, and I was so impressed.
But I can't tell you, I've been impressed by the other folks I've met from NASA.
And in terms of the Cassini accident, what they're doing is averaging out the dose from that plutonium all over the planet, not considering the fact that, you know, maybe it won't be the Northwest Territories like what happened with the Cosmos 758.
It could be L.A. It could be Madrid.
It could be in New York.
It could be a population center.
So, you know, it could be much more, much, much more serious.
You're playing with a game of billiard with the planet Earth when you throw these things up and they start coming together.
You don't know exactly what hole they'll end up in.
And in fact, the book, The Wrong Stuff, begins with President Clinton, this is the first chapter, and I get into all the documentation I was able to gather, with President Clinton calling the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, this is November 17th, and warning him, turns out that Clinton was going to go to Australia the next day on a state visit, so Clinton had a personal warning him that this Russian Mars space probe with a half a pound of plutonium.
And it doesn't sound like much, you know, a half a pound, but this plutonium-238, as I say, is 280 times more radioactive than 239.
I mean, that's why they use it.
It has a shorter half-life.
Instead of 24,500 years, which is what 239 has, this stuff is 87.8.
And because it has a shorter half-life, its decay rate.
That would mean that the decay rate is much more rapid.
It's hot.
And what they do is they couple the heat in these radioisothermoelectric generators and produce electricity in that way.
So when you're talking about a half a pound, you're talking about the equivalent of, well, the arithmetic is pretty stark.
You're talking about the equivalent of hundreds of, 140 pounds of plutonium-239.
Though I should note, too, that in the plutonium oxide mix is a little bit of plutonium-239.
About 10% is plutonium-239-2.
In any case, there was this thing coming down, and the U.S. Space Command, which is very involved in tracking space objects, advised Clinton that it looked like a thing was coming down in Australia.
We're talking about the Cassini launch, which, by the way, is this coming October 6th.
It is a date you're going to want to remember.
Hopefully only for a short time.
And then you're going to want to remember it because Cassini's coming back our way at about 42,000 miles an hour.
It'll graze the atmosphere.
It will do that to gain speed to launch itself out toward its final intended target, the Saturn system.
And it's a great adventure, and indeed there are risks with the space program, but it seems to me the American public has a right to know that the risks they're talking about this time are not just to the astronauts, but to all of us.
Well, there are a couple things, though, about what we did, thank you, that are not so funny.
One is, as you point out, the first time we did this, I mean, everybody says it, everybody, that these creatures, if they exist, communicate telepathically.
So I thought, what the heck?
Have millions of people telepathically try and contact whoever they are and have them show themselves.
The first time we did it, within two weeks, Phoenix.
The second time we did it, within a few days, Las Vegas.
So dare I do it again?
Dare we do it again?
I don't know.
I'm not saying that we caused those massive sightings, but there is a lot of coincidence there.
So I may pick a third time.
I mean, the third time, they say, is the charm, right?
Well, we've got a lot of their books, and I'm waiting right now for some of her channeling cassettes.
I just was, I don't know, I would really like to hear exactly what is said during these, and I was just interested in how you felt about her since you had her on.
Well, I don't know anything about them other than that it's infrigerate Motorola, Canada, whatever.
Okay, what I wanted to take to task with you about was the attitude of your discussion about putting plutonium and making it sound like it is the American people have a right to build.
Well, the point is, if it came down in Australia, you can bet your bottom dollar, American dollar that is, that the American taxpayer would be paying to clean it up.
unidentified
Oh, well, I doubt it, because I tell you, we didn't get any money from the Russians when that Cosmos 931 or whatever crashed up Northwest Territories.
And, you know, I was a little kid when that happened.
And I can tell you, I've got two relatives who have died in the last few years from cancer.
And, you know, it's very suspicious.
You hear all these things that will increase cancer rates in baby boomers.
And, you know, and I wonder why in British Columbia, all places where we don't have a lot of heavy industry, we don't have, you know, most of our industry is natural resource-based, not using a lot of chemicals, like, you know, forestry, for example.
Why do we have such elevated incidents of cancer of the environmental type?
And that's what's bothered me.
And, you know, plutonium carries on the wind quite far, especially if it's vaporized.
It goes around the world in a matter of a few hours on the upper elevation wind.
Those of you who have access to the internet might go up there and take a look.
We've got the webcam back on today.
I had a big fight with my computer yesterday, and I had, you know, parts all over the room.
It was messy, so I was embarrassed I didn't turn it on.
It's back on today, and my computer is fixed, and I'm happy about that.
Daryl says, hey, Art, I like that t-shirt.
It's one I got in Stockholm, Sweden.
He says, an aura of ABBA.
So I'm playing ABBA in honor of that.
Have these studio cam images over my shoulder on a 70-inch Mitsubishi.
Another web TV at our home here in Los Angeles.
And I have to tell you, you fill the room.
70-inch Mitsubishi.
That must be something.
All right.
We'll get back to what we're doing here in a moment.
And what we're doing now, coming up on, is open lines, and I'll update you on a little bit of what's going on, and we will launch.
The last two hours consumed by Carl Grossman telling us about Cassini, 72.3 pounds of plutonium to go up on a Titan IV October 6th.
It'll head towards Saturn, but not before it comes back to Earth in a slingshot effort to increase its speed.
It will come toward us at 42,000 miles per hour and will graze Earth at anywhere from 200 to 500 miles, they hope, should it re-enter and should it come down in a populated area.
NASA has plans to relocate and, for example, LA or New York, all the citizens of these cities.
Plans the American people know nothing about.
And I really don't have a problem with our space program.
I'm a big supporter.
But I do think the people have a right to know what the risks are.
Now, NASA has always said there are risks associated with our space effort.
And I have always generally assumed those to be, for the most part, to the astronauts, very brave, who go up in these vehicles.
But if there is a risk, a substantial risk, or even a reasonably sizable risk, after all, NASA said the chances of a shuttle exploding were one in 100,000.
And of course, turned out to be not quite that.
And we've had Titan IVs that have gone up like Roman candles as well.
So I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it.
I'm not even sure about, we talked with Mr. Grossman about solar power, the advisability of using that, whether we can or we cannot.
I'm not enough of a scientist to know that.
But what I do think is that we have a right to know what the risks are.
And apparently the only way we can find out what they are is to do what Mr. Grossman has done.
He's an award-winning journalist, and he's pried that information from NASA through the freedom of information request route.
And it just seems to me that NASA should be more open and should at least tell us what we're facing.
We have a right to know.
So that's why he was on the air.
The End Looking around at what's going on, as you know, Tyson here in Nevada has been banned.
No more boxing for Mr. Tyson.
And they have fined him $3 million.
That is a record fine, by the way.
Now, I don't know how much that hurts because it amounts to only 10% of the $30 million purse from the fight.
So in other words, he's left with $27 million, not a bad payday.
He'll fight again.
He'll be able to appeal every year, and if they ever let him out of the country, he can go box in South Africa or something.
We've got a new rating system for TV shows.
It'll take effect October 1st.
And it adds, let's see, the letter S for sex, L for language, V for violence, and D for suggestive dialogue.
They already had to use that for sex, so I had to use dialogue.
So S L V D will be the new rating system.
And no doubt, that's how most of our younger people will decide what they're going to watch in that order.
No, maybe not that order.
If it has an S, that makes it very appealing.
If it has a V for violence, it's very appealing.
An L for language helps out.
And a D for suggestive dialogue, might as well throw that one in too.
So if you get an SLVD, you've really got something you want to watch.
Don't you remember when you were a kid?
That's how it works.
SLVD, oh my God, run the tape machine on that one.
Mr. Clinton's approval rating, never higher, 64%, mostly due to the good economy.
It is good.
Market takes 100-point jumps daily up and down, but more up than down.
The Mars rover continues its work.
I find it astounding.
There will be a news conference at 12.30 Pacific Time later today, and I'm looking forward to that.
We'll see what new rock it's kind of saddling up to another rock right now.
They're naming these rocks.
Casper and Scooby-Doo are to be the next rocks that it will look at following the examination of our friend Barnacle Bill.
An earthquake in Venezuela has killed 28.
5.5, but still killed 28 people, including students trapped inside a collapsed school building and injuring 150 others.
It is the country's worst earthquake in 30 years.
Just 5.5.
But again, it's the type of quake.
Nobody knows what dangers await Mira's cosmonauts when they open the hatch to the space station's depressurized lab.
Floating glass shards.
Now that's a bad, bad deal from broken bottles.
Can you imagine going in in a spacesuit and facing the possibility of floating glass shards, globules of blood and urine from popped vials, toxic spills from ruined experiments and burst pipes.
It could be opening an orbital Pandora's box.
As a result, NASA is scrambling to put together a what-if-worst case list in preparation for the repair job later in the month.
Staying with space, check this out.
It's from Donald Keogh.
There is a very disturbing possibility underway right now.
If any of the robot reports were correct, witnesses may have seen a special breed of space explorers similar to the fearsome cyborg, which NASA is considering for long voyages.
Cyborg, cybernetic organism, is the goal of a program under NASA, under NASA contract now.
Check this out, folks.
Using chemical mind changers and surgery, some future astronauts would be transformed into semi-robots.
But the plan is strongly opposed by men in medicine and some scientists, including Dr. Toby Friedman of the North American Aviation Organization.
This surgical tampering, said Dr. Friedman, would produce a weird being who accomplishes his space mission by trading, get this, trading most of his physiological systems for electronic ones,
whose mouth is sealed, lungs collapsed, body wastes recycled through himself, neural pathways partly severed, and all his emotional feelings dissected out.
He would be so fantastically changed, he could never rejoin the human race.
Such closed-cycle astronauts would be a mating of man with machine.
Artificial units would replace their hearts and most other main organs.
They would need no food, no water.
They would have built-in energy suppliers.
Eventually, even their brains might be replaced.
Cyborg, the emotionless semi-robot, would be used on long journeys, which could break down a normal astronaut.
There is no question that it can be done by us or an alien race.
So, would you go for that?
You still want to go on a long trip?
A Staten woman, this is the Salem area, says she has found a double crop circle in a wheat field near Highway 22.
Mary Ann Koch says the formation is about 50 to 60 feet across and is located in a field about 100 yards northeast of the Silver Creek Falls exit.
She says she's fascinated by crop circles, so she contacted the media in order to document this one.
And when we get a photograph of it, you know we will get it to you.
I second what the guy said about the Colonel Corso tape.
And I recorded it.
I'm sending it to a friend of mine in South Carolina, Neil, who's a boyhood chum who, after 35 years, I was able to locate through the person locator link off of Michael Lindemann's website.
And Neil, we used to go around blowing up stuff kind of like the way you did as a kid.
Apparently they have the ability to change their direction also.
I don't know if you have any contacts with the Air Force or anything, but it'll be interesting to find out more about them, what they're doing with them.
For example, I know there is a treaty that says we would not have nuclear weapons in space, but I would be willing to lay down a lot of money, and it would be a safe bet, because we can't prove it.
But I would bet you a lot of money that we have nuclear weapons in space now.
And I think I might even bet more money that the Russians also do.
Especially if it was beside something other than the internet.
But anyway, I want to remind folks we've got chapters in Phoenix, Portland, Houston, Santa Fe, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Sarasota, San Antonio, Austin, and in Denver.
11 total, with three or four more on the way very soon.
I'd love to be on the air in Britain, and we are working on it.
Now, now that I'm thinking international, let me give out the international number, something I never do.
Because, you know, I have this little phone number bumper, and I should be giving it out, but I don't.
So look, if you're in a foreign country, England, New Zealand, Australia, I'm thinking mainly of English-speaking countries here, but anywhere else in Europe, Asia, South America, wherever, you can call us toll-free.
Here's the deal.
Our toll-free international number is, what you do is get hold of the AT ⁇ T operator in your area.
Call and ask to speak to the AT ⁇ T operator.
When you get her, ask her to call in the U.S., toll-free, 800-893-0903.
We will pay for the call from anywhere in the world.
The number again is 800-893-0903.
Now, there is another way to do it.
If you have the AT ⁇ T USA Direct Country Code, you can dial that and then simply dial 800-893-0903.
It's a lot of fun to hear from the people listening on AudioNet in all of these far-fung places.
And I'll tell you, the new AudioNet program, I don't know if any of you with computers have downloaded it, but the 4.0 version, and then they've got one with streaming video as well.
The 4.0 version is absolutely stupendous.
I mean, it really does give pretty decent audio.
So I would imagine more and more people worldwide are beginning to glom on to real audio and more computers.
So I don't care, China, Japan, anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the world, really, outside the USA and Canada.
The number is 800-893-0903.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from July 9, 1997.
Music by Ben Thede
Premier Radio Networks presents Part Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired July 9th, 1997.
Well, there are a couple things, though, about what we did, thank you, that are not so funny.
One is, as you point out, the first time we did this, I mean, everybody says it, everybody, that these creatures, if they exist, communicate telepathically.
So I thought, what the heck?
Have millions of people telepathically try and contact whoever they are and have them show themselves.
The first time we did it, within two weeks, Phoenix.
The second time we did it, within a few days, Las Vegas.
So dare I do it again?
Dare we do it again?
I don't know.
I'm not saying that we caused those massive sightings, but there is a lot of coincidence there.
So I may pick a third time.
I mean, the third time, they say, is the charm, right?
To answer your question, Lori Toy is a very, very interesting individual.
There are other people who have received information by channels, and I don't discredit it.
You know, I really don't altogether.
I simply, I've said this on the air a million times, and I'll say it again.
There is too much room for fraud.
Yeah.
That's the problem that I have with it.
unidentified
Well, we've got a lot of their books, and I'm waiting right now for some of her channeling cassettes.
I just was, I don't know, I would really like to hear exactly what is said during these, and I was just interested in how you felt about her since you had her on.
Well, I don't know anything about them other than that it's infiderated Motorola, Canada, whatever.
Okay, what I wanted to take to task with you about was the attitude of your discussion about putting plutonium and making it sound like the American people have a right to know.
But the point is, if it came down in Australia, you can bet your bottom dollar, American dollar that is, that the American taxpayer would be paying to clean it up.
unidentified
Oh, well, I doubt it, because I tell you, we didn't get any money from the Russians when that Cosmos 931 or whatever crashed up Northwest Territories.
And, you know, I was a little kid when that happened.
And I can tell you, I've got two relatives who have died in the last two years from cancer.
And, you know, it's very suspicious.
You hear all these things about increased cancer rates in baby boomers.
And, you know, And I wonder why in British Columbia, all places where we don't have a lot of heavy industry, we don't have, you know, most of our industry is natural resource-based, not using a lot of chemicals, like forestry, for example.
Why do we have such elevated incidents of cancer of the environmental type?
And that's what's bothered me.
And, you know, plutonium carries on the wind quite far, especially if it's vaporized.
It goes around the world in a matter of a few hours on the upper elevation wind.
I've got a question about your previous call or your interview today for two hours.
You know, who gives anybody permission to, you know, we're talking about...
Oh, okay.
Thank you.
You know, with the percentages of accidents that NASA's been having, and he talked about the percentages of the Atlas, the percentages of the space accidental shuttle.
Yeah, he talked about the space shuttle originally was said to have about a one in 100,000 chance of anything going wrong, you know, tragically wrong, blowing up.
As a human being, who polices the people or who's in charge to make the decision to say, well, you know, if we have an accident, we can kill so many billion people, but that's okay.
Well, I think that's the whole point that I was trying to make.
Whether you consider what he was saying alarmist or not, I think that the American people, the people of the world, have a right to know what the risks are and that it should not take freedom of information demands requests to discern what the real risks are.
In other words, NASA should be upfront and should say, here's what we're doing.
Here's what could happen.
Because they have all this on paper.
It's just that you've got to pry it out from them.
unidentified
Well, you know, I listen to your show every night because I work all the nights.
And when I can't listen to it up here on 1190 KEX, they play your rebroadcast.
But let me tell you, I think that you're right.
We have a voice, and we just need to say it.
And this is one avenue.
And I think your listeners should have other avenues that you can direct us to to voice our opinions besides writing.
There are risks attendant with nearly everything we do in space.
Even more minor risks if a spacecraft should come down over a populated area.
Lots of risks.
But look, when you're dealing with 75 pounds of plutonium, a particularly poisonous variety, then I think that it is or should be public information and there should be a national debate about it.
It is, for those of you who tuned in late, the Cassini launch, which is going to examine the Saturn system.
It will take years to get there.
On board will be nearly 75 pounds, 70 plus pounds of plutonium-238, which is particularly egregiously poisonous.
And there are two risk points.
One is the launch itself of Titan IV.
And the other is when the spacecraft comes back, in other words, before it goes to Saturn, it's going to go out and then come back and use a close Earth pass to accelerate the spacecraft.
It will pass within 200 and 500 miles of Earth.
That's close, very close.
And should the spacecraft re-enter, should there be an error, and things after all can go wrong, that much plutonium dispersed in the atmosphere would be horridly dangerous.
They claim that it's in a safe-like atmosphere, you know, a vault-like atmosphere.
But I think the reality, as described by my guests, is quite different.
And again, I'm not suggesting that the mission should be canceled, just that the American people and the world's people should know what we're risking.
That's all.
And it should not take freedom of information requests, demands even, to get the information.
And even then, it doesn't really get out to the people unless I, you know, we line somebody up like I had as a guest.
Yeah, what little I know of vampires, the more, you know, this sounds silly, but the more ethical or moralistic vamps go for animal blood and pretty much leave humans alone.
Is that true?
unidentified
Yes.
A lot of the kids who are now getting involved in this pseudo-vampire cult and the romanticism of vampirism, they're experimenting with human blood.
But human blood is only taken from vampire to vampire in rituals, also in sexual activities.
It heightens the senses, but only with the partner you're with.
So you're trying to tell the American people there are many more vampires than they might imagine?
unidentified
Yes, and they're not the kids you see with the black makeup and the pale white skin and all this.
They're the ones who are basically the stormtroopers, they're the ground troops.
The people behind the media are promoting this, promoting bands like Marilyn Manson, promoting all these bands, and getting the youth involved in it, but not letting them up to the upper echelon to know what the plan is.
Reading from the Associated Press again, a Staten woman says she found a double crop circle in a wheat field near Highway 22.
Marianne Koch says the formation is about 50 to 60 feet across and is located in a field about 100 yards northeast of the Silver Creek Falls exit.
Koch admits she's fascinated by crop circles, so she contacted the media in order to document this one.
The first recorded case is from England in 1973, but public interest waned in the early 1990s when two British men confessed to having made the first formation.
The circles, of course, are typically found in wheat or barley fields.
Well, I don't think I was probably the first one to see it, but I was the first one to report it or that had enough excitement about it and took it forth to hope that other people would see it.
I was just driving home from my store about 7 o'clock in the evening, and I usually spend more time looking around the scenery and the sky and everything that I do the road.
And I just looked over and said, oh, wow, there's a crop circle.
And then I realized I'd missed the exit.
And then I said, my God, it really is a crop circle, I think.
And so I was late getting home, so I went on home because I'd missed the exit.
And the next morning, I stopped and I got out of my car.
And there's road construction going on right in front of the area where this field is.
And this heavy equipment is going back and forth.
And I'm looking through the dust.
I'm looking over saying, you know, that it isn't sprinklers that have made circles.
It isn't other anomalies that you've normally seen in fields.
Well, it's actually, I think by crop circle standards, it's sort of small, very clean looking.
It's, yes, it's a nice little crop circle, I'd say.
It's probably, well, I skipped, the guy that called you a little while ago, he actually went out there and measured it, and I'm surprised he didn't say anything to you.
And it has a signature off to the side, which I didn't know what a signature was exactly until I got a call from the Research Center for Crop Circle Studies.
And they were telling me that in the signature, or the funny little downed graph on the side, that the anomalies that they find when they examine it are about 100 times more active or more changed than in the actual circle itself.
In other words, they're afraid people are going to go tromping across their field and ruin their crop.
unidentified
Well, there are people who are disrespectful and have walked in this field.
But proportionately, I mean, most of the people walk on the one little tiny path that has been put in there, and most people will just stay off this field.
But there's a few people that have gone in the circle.
I've not yet gone out there because I just don't feel right about doing that without permission.
But the air photographs are cool.
But what I want to really say is that after we examined these air photographs and saw the signature and a few things on here, I was talking to Charlotte King in Salem, and she's...
Okay.
And she and I discovered that on these photographs, you can see some kind of energy pathways that makes a different pattern on the whole field.
And it shows up in all the photographs, both the ones taken from 1,500 feet and the ones taken from 1,800 feet.
And they come in from each corner, and then there's sort of a bar through the middle that connects them.
And the crop circle isn't really on the exact grid of this other pattern.
And it looks sort of like a 12-foot-wide, sort of like brushing effect.
And it has little swirl lines across it.
And it's fairly subtle, and yet you can pick it out once you know what you're looking for.
I mean, were there, I guess that's really hard because I'm sure There were tracks there by the time you saw it.
unidentified
Well, actually, by the time I saw it, there was only one little sign that one person had walked in, and I assumed that was the farmer to see what was in the field.
Did he indicate over what period it formed, or did he just sort of find it one day?
unidentified
He said one day it wasn't there, and the next day it was.
And Skip, who called in earlier, I'm surprised he didn't say more because he gained the confidence of the farmer early, but after Skip, this is what I understand, after Skip took the samples and whatever, he told the farmer that he was fairly convinced that it wasn't a real crop circle.
And Skip belongs to MUFON and so forth.
But I don't know how many crop circles he's actually seen, probably about as many as I have, which is like, now we're counting one.
Yeah, well, the sure sign of it is I've been trained in remote viewing, and so I didn't want to go in the crop circle because I just didn't feel right since I didn't have permission.
But I figured I could remote view it.
Well, I happened to sit down and do my remote viewing about the time they were taking samples.
I didn't really know that, but when I got there, I found them taking samples.
And what I found out, too, was that after they left there, they didn't feel very well, which is, I think, normal after you get in a crop circle, there's a lot of electromagnetic energy.
Yeah, that can affect you.
You can have headache and stomachache and that kind of thing.
So I'm surprised he didn't say any of that to you.
But maybe we can get him to call back and fill in some blanks here.
I certainly appreciate the information you've given me.
It's not every day you get to talk to somebody who actually found a crop circle.
unidentified
Well, I have another little piece of news that now that we got it on the newspaper, a couple people called me and said, oh, is this the one that's over between Corvallis and Independence?
And I said, no, this is the one between State and Salem.
So there may be another one over here because some people said, oh, I saw one over, you know, and I said, I have to go see if they really saw one or not.
So I'll wait until you finish your live, and I'll go back and pull down the archive and see whether it was actually the internet, my connection, or maybe your satellite.
And as master of the universe, why he is also realtor of the universe.
And that's a pretty good deal, actually, when you think about it.
There's also a company that will name a star after you for a certain amount of money.
Not that it is official in any way, but they send you a little map of where your star is, and you've got a star.
unidentified
My goodness, what a sight on real capitalism.
Well, I'll let you go.
It's been a great show, and from Australia, we want to just say keep up the good work and say hello to all the other Australians that are down here listening to you, including my friend Stan Davo.
I mean, can you imagine what would happen if the Reagan administration had invented the sun?
Imagine a giant, continuously exploding hydrogen bomb with no shielding.
Good God, your first guest had blown a blood vessel.
It's okay.
I mean, it's okay that we can put a little bit of, you know, 72 pounds of plutonium like there's not more uranium than that up under the ground, leaking radon gas all over the place we don't have anything to do with.
Now, if we want to get rid of it and shoot out into space where it doesn't hurt anybody, now we're going to blow a blue vessel.
In other words, had they been able to shoot that KT event thing out of the sky before it arrived, they'd still be here roaming the Earth and we'd be an afterthought.
unidentified
Very true.
In fact, I think I know of a new conspiracy.
See, I think that the vampires, first they're going to ban all of our space probes, then they're going to ban the sun.
And since we'll all be bumping around in the dark, we'll have to be vampires, see?
Yeah, they're almost not a cigarette in the sense that they have so little tar and nicotine in them, supposedly, that, you know, like, you know, every now and then somebody will bum a cigarette from you?
So I switched to the Carltons, and they seemed better.
Milder.
Almost not a cigarette, in a sense.
But still satisfying.
Satisfying to the heroin-like habitual cravings that I have.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Oh, hello.
Hello.
Actually, you know, Art, I'm called to tell you a story because I think you're probably the only person who's open-minded enough on radio to believe it, or at least to contemplate it.
Okay, when I was a child, before I was in first grade, there were seven kids in my family, and my older sister, she's almost three years older than me, there was an empty lot behind our house.
We lived in a huge Dutch colonial house in San Francisco.