Peter Davenport updates Tampa’s 2028 asteroid threat (1997 XF-11, 1.6 km wide) while Art Bell scrutinizes Navy sonar tests off Hawaii—265-foot vessel Cori Choest tows microphones emitting 195 dB blasts near endangered humpback whales, despite court challenges and Greenpeace warnings of nerve damage in divers and potential global marine disruption. Witnesses report diamond-like lights over Florida, inconsistent with military tests, and Davenport cites three unexplained disk sightings from storm clouds. The debate extends to Cold War-era tech like ELF signals and HAARP, with $150M Navy spending questioned, while callers demand protests against untested environmental risks—raising concerns about covert weaponization or broader ecological consequences. [Automatically generated summary]
We are following two big stories this night, mainly.
We'll rummage through the news again, but they are.
There is a big rock headed our way.
It's all over the news tonight.
I gave you news of the beginning of that story a day or two ago.
Well, there is substance to it.
There is an asteroid.
It may indeed hit Earth.
It is one mile wide.
It will not hit, if it hits, until 2028.
Now, what they're saying is it's about a mile in size, 1.6 kilometers.
It's been named 1997 XF-11.
You may be hearing a lot about 1997 XF-11.
It is said to pass perhaps as close as 32,000 miles from Earth.
But you see, they really don't know because they've got an error factor here of about 200,000 miles.
Now, to give you reference on how close that is, the moon is about 250,000 miles from us, I believe.
So 32,000 miles is close.
And a 200,000 mile error either way means that this one could hit.
And there are stories all over my email, all over Reuters, just about everywhere.
I've got a comment here from Brian Marsden of the Astronomical Union who said, even if we're on a path to hit Earth, technology might be available by then, capable of deflecting the asteroid.
What would be scary is if it were three days from now or three weeks or even three years.
30 years is just right because it's far enough in the future.
Now, I'll be an old guy, probably retired by then.
But as I said, maybe some kind broadcaster of the future will, if this thing really is coming in, allow me to go on the air and do what I've always said I would do and talk that baby in.
Or maybe they'll hit it with something and break it into four pieces, which let's see would be about a quarter of a mile apiece, assuming it broke evenly.
Anyway, so we'll talk about the asteroid.
And then there is another big story.
The Navy is blasting whales and blasting dolphins for some reason, so far undiscernible.
I really don't know why they're doing this.
They are going to produce incredible decibel levels of sonar in the world's oceans.
There is a legal battle of some description going on in Hawaii, but I believe they're at about the final step of being able to get permission for whatever reason to do this at a time when we've got a lot of beachings going on for reasons that we do not understand.
It didn't seem like a great idea to me.
In the last half hour, I interviewed a young man, Greg Liberacci, who was a sonar operator on board a nuclear fast attack submarine, the USS Skipjack SSN585, who said, Art, I know whales.
In fact, I was surprised to find I know things that scientists now seem to only be discovering.
I'm sure other good sonar attacks and operators would verify this.
I know about most sonars used in the Atlantic from World War II forward through the current models.
And he says, you are correct.
This is a very bad idea.
So I brought Greg on the air, and for half an hour, we talked to him about a sonar and whales.
And he does know a lot about whales.
He was a little nervous being on the air.
Then I got the following facts.
And we may bring Greg back on the air again.
Dick Algire in Hawaii works for KITV News, television news guy.
And he writes, me again, Arch, I have audio of the sonar testing and the whales taped today from my videotaped report, which I can play for you over the phone.
They are using low-frequency sonar to track submarines.
You can hear the sonar and the whale songs clearly.
I was up at 5 a.m. to fly to Kona, and I went out on a zodiac, and I was on board the research vessel with a camera with other TV crews, and we taped reports on the testing.
You said that they had a court battle, and it was the final step to allow them to do that.
This has been news for over a week because protesters have been going out in boats and throwing themselves in the water in the path of the boat, and there have been court cases.
Yes, it's a story that we've been following here locally.
Now, directly below the boat, they have a hole in the middle of the boat, and we went and watched this.
They call it, I believe, the moon hole or something.
300 feet down, they have huge speakers that came up.
I'm six feet tall, and they came up to about my waist.
They're underwater ceramic speakers, and they put out 195 decibels of low-frequency sonar waves.
So what they do is they have Navy personnel on top of the boat with binoculars and on radios watching to see if there are any whales coming up and breaching and in the area.
They're listening to see what the whales do, and then from time to time they blast out this 195 decibel low frequency to see how that affects the whales.
Scientists say the sound dissipates rapidly in water and is only loud for less than a mile.
They listen to whales and emit the sonar.
The sonar is the low tone.
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the higher tones are the whales.
Wow.
Animals naturally have highly variable patterns.
And what we have to do is to study them enough times under natural conditions when we're not transmitting, and then again under transmission conditions, and see when you factor out all of the natural variability, if there's an offset in their behavior, if under the experimental conditions, they do something differently.
Greenpeace claims Navy divers were injured by the same type of sonar.
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We are concerned that the same Cold War technology is being inflicted upon the whales, wise whales, and that there's no way that these researchers can tell.
There is no way they can tell if a whale has experienced memory loss.
There's no way to tell if a whale has a seizure.
There's no way they can tell if a female whale stops giving milk to its baby.
And that's the crux of our argument right now.
The testing will continue for the next three weeks until the end of March.
Then the data will be collected for an environmental impact statement.
Dick Alguery News 4 aboard the research vessel Corrie Choas off the Kona coast of the Big Island.
They say that they have documents released under the Freedom of Information Act that says Navy SEAL divers were injured by these very same frequencies, that they testing divers, subjected them to these frequencies, and they had all kinds of memory loss and physical problems.
I got that late today and wasn't able to really check that out.
But I'll get some more information on that.
But basically what they're doing is they say they have a new sonar system to track very quiet submarines, and they're testing it on whales to see how it affects whales.
Also, if you give me off the air, I could send a picture of the ship to you that I took my own digital camera and took some pictures, which I've made into JPEGs.
That's Dick Algaier in Honolulu, a reporter for KITV News, and you just heard a copyrighted report, and we have him to thank for that.
So what I'm going to do is stall for a second, play a commercial, and I'll be right back.
What we're going to do is pick up Peter Davenport at the bottom of the hour.
We're going to play it kind of fast and loose tonight.
We've got plenty of time on radio, fortunately.
That's the thing about radio versus TV.
We don't have to do things in a one or two minute at best slice.
We can take time and sort of digest them slowly.
Dick, thank you so very much.
And thank you also, KITV in Honolulu, for allowing that to occur.
That was quite a report.
Boy, you could hear the low frequency blasting out.
And you could hear the very high whale returns, which sound, you know, I'm not a whale listener, but they sounded, if I had to use a word, I would use the word distressed.
Now, that's just a layman's uninformed reaction to what I heard.
Low sound, high distressed sound.
But maybe that's not true.
I am very interested in the Greenpeace allegation that these very same, and I had no idea it was 195 decibels.
Good Lord.
These very same sounds caused damage to Navy divers, human beings, memory loss.
And I would like to hear from somebody in Greenpeace, and I know they're listening in Hawaii, so if you are Greenpeace, please fax me a phone number, and I'll get you on the air.
My fax number is, and everybody else, please stop faxing me for a while so they can get through.
I'd like to hear from a marine biologist in Hawaii or Greenpeace.
My fax number is area code 702-727-8499.
702-727-8499.
One other story that I just got: scientists are scrambling to determine what killed hundreds of fish spotted north of the 520 floating bridge yesterday afternoon.
That's near Seattle.
The day after they began tests of powerful air guns used to detect hidden earthquake faults.
Whether the fish kill and the air blast were related remains unclear.
The State Department of Fish and Wildlife fielded a handful of calls between 1 and 2 p.m. and biologists on board, a research vessel, spotted large pockets of dead fish, as well as a state fish pathologist was expected today to recover some of the juvenile fish carcasses to determine what caused their death.
So we're monitoring all sorts of interesting, environmentally related, worrisome stories.
And oh, yeah, wasn't the Cold War over?
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
Coast AM.
Coast AM.
The talk station, AM 1500 KSTP.
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye on the Wildcard line at Area Code 702-727-1295.
Yeah, we've had a number of listeners who have sent us some very interesting email, and we may stand corrected on some of the things we represented about that.
They have pointed out to us that, in point of fact, only, it looks like, only two of those short-finned pilot whales were flown 150 miles out to sea, not all 16 of them.
That makes a big difference in the expense of that project.
And the situation, the operation may not have been as large as the captions on those photographs, which you had on your website at one point, I know.
The operation may not have been as large as we were thinking, I was thinking it was at the time.
But we're going to post some news articles that one of the listeners dug out by doing a news search or news scan, and we'll post them on your website or our website to try to close that issue off and provide some more information on it.
Apparently, even one of the U.S. senators from the state of Florida was involved in recruiting those helicopters to fly those whales out into deep water.
To give our listeners a little rundown on how it all started, Saturday night, our hotline in Seattle started lighting up from multiple points in the southern half of the Florida Peninsula.
From Lake Okeechobee, that big lake down in the southern tip, from Tampa, from Fort Myers, from Sarasota, from Winter Park, from Val Rico, from Vero Beach, and So on and so forth.
Callers from all over the state, from the East Coast to the West Coast, and they were all describing essentially the same thing.
Namely, two incredibly bizarre-looking lights, intensely bright.
Some people described them as diamonds.
They were so bizarre in their appearance, surrounded by big halos of condensation or some kind of something that made the lights a little bit indistinct or soft, they described them.
Well, we took calls for about 24 hours.
In fact, we're still taking calls on that one.
Some of the eyewitnesses had them going to the southwest.
Some had them coming from the southeast.
Some people said they were distinctly going to the northwest.
Our initial impression was that the state of Florida had been covered by a couple of very anomalous objects.
And I have a couple very interesting audio cuts here that I think our listeners are going to enjoy.
It will give them some first-hand feeling for what we were dealing with Saturday night, and it was truly bizarre.
In fact, why don't I play a tape?
This is, I can identify the caller in this one.
This is a very, very colorful gentleman from Okeechobee, Florida, a man who's been a pilot for about 30 years of his life.
He flies warbirds or used to for what is known as the Confederate Air Force.
Those are the ladies and gentlemen who restore vintage military aircraft, bombers and fighters, and fly them at air shows all around the world now, actually.
They've been out to Bermuda and I guess maybe even to Europe and so on and so forth.
This guy is Colonel Danny Oakes.
He apprises me now that the only dog fighting he does now is with his golf game down in Florida.
He's turned into a golf pro, I guess.
But what I would like to do are display about a two-minute tape of what Colonel Danny Oakes had to report he saw that Saturday night from his home in Okeechobee, Florida.
And then towards the end of this tape, he starts discussing some of the information that was imparted to him by officials.
And I think we're going to leave those officials unnamed for the time being.
I have no desire to embarrass or put any kind of pressure on these people.
It's a very interesting tape, and it's a detailed description of what Colonel Danny Oak saw from Okeechobee.
At first, he thought the objects were coming from the southeast.
It turns out they were coming more like from directly from the east, and that's significant.
And then we'll come back, and I'll talk about some of the significance of this and the things we found out over subsequent days.
But here's Colonel Danny Oakes, Okeechobee, Florida.
It's about two minutes long or so.
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All right.
And as I stepped outside, I could see coming towards us, it looked like out of the Darrow Beach area, Fort Pierce area, coming basically from the east-northeast.
I could see two lights.
And these were not like impact lights, they looked like diamonds.
If you look at a diamond, it glitters and sparkles.
As they were coming towards us, they began to separate.
And you could tell from just watching how very, very, very fast these things were moving.
The next thing we beheld is that they began to separate.
And as they separated, you could see formations of them.
And then they come back together, and they're still coming towards us at a tremendous speed.
As they come towards us, they begin to move in another formation, like a diverse beast vector, and then they move towards us.
And when they get almost as close as we can see them, they're no longer looking like diamonds, but they're looking like diamonds, but they're big as moons.
And they go immediately straight up.
And then, I mean, they just disappear.
They leave.
It was absolutely astonishing.
I've been flying for 30 years.
I've seen every kind of rocket, every kind of missile, fired air-to-air, ground-to-air, air-to-ground.
I've seen the explode.
This was not any kind of aircraft in this world.
I've never seen anything like it.
They recorded everything on radar.
And the man explained to me, he said, well, son, you don't really have to be worried about this.
This was airplanes shooting flares out of Petrick Air Force Base.
And the interesting thing is that he was being told within minutes of the event that there were flares being fired in the middle of Lake Okeechobee by U.S. Air Force aircraft.
Now, no matter who it is, whether it's a military or any other officials, that's a pretty quick decision for them to make.
They pull it off the shelf and there it is and they use it.
But that was one of the first reports we received.
And he had these things going all over the sky.
And I had no idea at that time that within about 72 hours, another theory was going to start surfacing with regard to the alleged.
And at this stage, Art, it's only alleged.
I say only because it appears if it's true that we are dealing with the U.S. Navy and specifically a submarine, the Silent Service, and you never learn anything from those guys and gals, of course, for good reason, I guess.
And the direction that these objects were going, if they were ICBMs, the direction that they were going is still unclear to me for the following reason.
Yesterday afternoon, a newspaper In Bermuda, halfway across the Atlantic almost, published an article that they had been informed by some source that the U.S. Navy had had a double test firing, two rockets at the same time, of D-5 Trident missiles.
These are the heavy missiles that are carried on boomers.
All right, but let's use our heads for a second, Peter.
If you're off the coast of Florida and you're going to fire, test fire some ICBMs, you're going to fire them in all likelihood either in a south and easterly direction or in an easterly direction from the Atlantic.
You're sure Sal not going to fire it in a northwesterly direction, which would carry it over the biggest part of the landmass of the U.S. You just wouldn't do that, or at least I don't think you'd do that.
Or if you are doing that, you shouldn't be doing that.
And our listeners will fully understand the nature of the reports that we were getting about how these objects were clearly, without any doubt whatsoever, flying to the northwest or alternatively coming directly from the east towards the shore, the eastern shore of Florida, headed to the west.
And the second one continued at the same direction, same speed, and that's what kind of freaked me out because it looked like it was something on an angle, you know, at about a 30-degree and was coming straight at us because they were both moving the same exact speed direction.
One left, left a signature.
And then the other one kept moving, kept moving for about 15 seconds, and that one did the same exact turn and left the same exact dome.
So he is describing, Danny Racine in Fero Beach, Florida, looking east, is describing two objects that, now they appear to be coming directly at him and his wife.
However, he and his wife both described and described emphatically how one object suddenly, in a second or less, and he said he thinks it was considerably less than one second, did a right-angle turn.
If you're standing on the Florida shore, and even though there, yes, I agree with you, there is a parallax problem, but as an object disappears toward the horizon, you're eventually going to have to turn around and face the direction that it's leaving as it gets to be a dot and smaller and smaller and smaller.
And I don't see why there would be a parallax problem.
In other words, if they were staring out to sea, they would see it disappearing out to sea, not coming over them and headed west.
Now, if the object is just rising vertically and at some distance from them, let's say 50 to 100 miles out to sea, I guess it is conceivable that the human visual system would register that the light is coming at them.
But everybody on the western shore of Florida reported that they were looking at these things as they were flying from right to left, that is, to the north or to the northwest, distinctly to the northwest, many people said.
Now, the interesting thing about that is that the one witness who was quoted from Bermuda in the Bermuda newspaper, a chartered accountant, that is a CPA, was standing on the shore of Bermuda reportedly looking at this light display with his binoculars.
He is looking to the west or perhaps to the southwest watching this, and he reports, he's quoted to say in the newspaper, that the lights were moving from his right to the left, that is from the western sky to the southwest.
What I do not understand, and it doesn't make an ounce of sense to me, is how those lights viewed from Bermuda Can be moving from right to left, and everybody over Florida is reporting that the objects are going to the northwest, that is from their right to left.
Now, there's one interesting addendum to all of this art.
I've spent the last two days on long distance trying to resolve this apparent dilemma.
And I've run into some very, very interesting people who apparently occupy privileged positions with regard to information regarding events like this.
And I have what appears to me to be a reliable source to say he has reported to me that yes, there was a military classified operation off the east coast of Florida Saturday night.
But he assures me that there is a serious time discrepancy between what happened over southern Florida Saturday night and the military operation.
A gentleman is listening to us there out in Sarasota.
His name is Mark.
He called to report what he had seen Saturday night.
And this is fascinating.
He's a gentleman who has a very good sense of angles, elevation left and right, degrees, and so on and so forth.
He reported that what he saw Saturday night was two objects, both of which did the sudden right-angle turn that we've heard from so many sources, which tends to militate against the missile launch, the ICBM theory.
And he said, they did a sudden turn and they rose straight up in the sky.
We've heard this story many, many times from the west, we're now on the west coast of Florida.
And I asked him, how high up were they when they disappeared from sight?
They just winked out, Art.
He said, I asked him, what was the angle of elevation you estimate you were looking at when you last saw these things on the west coast of Florida?
He said, about 85 degrees.
I cannot make that compatible with a missile launch of two ICBMs.
I don't know if that's accurate or not, but I cannot imagine how missiles launched out of a submarine 200 miles east of Florida could be compatible with two objects doing a right-angle turn over Sarasota, Florida on the west coast and then rising straight up until they're almost directly overhead.
The mystery is greater tonight than it was three days ago.
This is, we're seeing this, as I mentally go back through a number of serious cases we've had reported to us, it is beginning to come clear to me that oftentimes when we get what initially appears to be a bona fide UFO sighting,
that is something truly anomalous that cannot be explained away, suddenly in a day or two or three, there is a plausible counter-explanation.
Now, in some cases, of course, that counter-explanation turns out to be the cause of the sighting.
There's no doubt about it.
Nine-tenths of the time that our telephone rings and somebody reports a UFO to us, it has nothing To do with those galactic ships, let's call them, that appear to come to this planet.
That is my opinion, anyway.
But it's that 10%, and once in a while, there's a rush to judgment on the part of somebody to bring alternative explanations to some of these sightings to the fore to apparently sort of roil the waters, muddy the waters.
We're just being absolutely smothered with data and with responsibilities of one sort or another.
I hope those ladies and gentlemen who haven't heard back immediately to their e-messages or their telephone calls will please understand that we're peddling just as fast as we possibly can.
We can't keep up with the data that's coming in here.
You probably have a similar problem down there in Perum.
I run this show by the seat of my pants, as you can tell by listening as news breaks and I try to move from piece to piece to piece.
And that brings me to something I reported on before you got on the air.
Somebody just sent me this fax regarding air cannons.
Hey, Art, I've been listening to Como TV.
That's my affiliate up there.
And the commentary they had yesterday about the air cannon trails to find earthquake stress points.
They are saying they can get seismic readings 20 miles below the Earth's surface.
And I just can't believe they don't think this is going to hurt the fish.
Now, you've just had a gigantic fish kill up there.
Coincidence?
Maybe.
But I remember, as this foxer does, you could throw an M80 cherry bomb into the water, and fish for quite a distance would go belly up and be floating on the water.
Now, this is something that has occurred right next to you up there.
To my way of thinking, of course, each of us has his own or her own respective opinion on our government.
But the question, your statement leads to a broader question, and that is, what is our government doing to or for us?
Is it under control or is it not?
And more and more I come up with the latter answer.
I think it's time for the American people to reconsider where they wish to go.
But this fish kill brings to mind the opening scene of the crocodile Dundee episode 2 movie with Paul Hogan sitting in his rowboat in an unspecified location.
Looks left, looks right, and then he lights a stick of dynamite and throws it into the water.
All the fish float to the surface.
Turns out he's just a mile off Wall Street, off the tip of New York.
It's one of the funniest scenes I think I've ever seen in a movie.
That's his style of fishing.
And I have to admit that I've tried that a time or two in my own life.
But look, the last paragraph of this fact says, by the looks of those air cannons, they showed on the news interview, it would make M80s look like cap guns.
No wonder they have masses of fish showing up.
I'm sure the fish's brains are nothing more than pudding.
I mean, in Dick's report, you could actually hear the low-frequency blast, and then the whale's answer was the higher frequency.
I'm tempted just before I put the fellow from Greenpeace on to call Dick back, and I'm, yeah, Dick, I'm going to call you, so get ready to play it again.
Because you could actually hear the low-frequency blast, and then you could hear the whale's, you know, I'm not used to listening to whales, but it sounded like a scream, a screech.
You know, I recall that that ship was off the coast of Washington State, and in fact, off the coast of Alaska and Canada as well in the 1990-91 era.
And the reason I know that is I remember an article from our local newspapers here in Seattle of a very tragic accident that occurred on the decks of that ship.
Two Navy personnel were very badly injured.
I think maybe one of them was killed when a very powerful explosive went off prematurely on deck.
What they were doing was going up and down the coast of the North American continent, setting off explosives and contouring or mapping some of the rifts and rills and valleys underwater.
The reason the Navy has to do that, allegedly, is to have very accurate underwater maps so they can detect anomalous objects, that is, submarines, hiding down in those crevasses.
But the interesting point, the reason I raise this, is that it was at about that time that it was noted that the large populations of sea lions were being decimated for reasons that are not well understood, or they weren't back in 1990 or 91.
They may be now, but I always wondered whether that mapping project from the tip of Barrow, Alaska down to, I presume, Oregon and California, might have been having some effect on sea lion populations, because I've spent a lot of time aboard fishing vessels, and sea lions love nothing more than to follow ships.
They'll be seen leaping out in front of them sometimes or following in their wake, which stirs up a lot of little sea creatures that they can eat.
But this blasting, plus, you know, too many beachings lately, too many unexplained beachings.
The story always ends by saying scientists are puzzled.
They don't understand what's going on.
Well, I don't think you've got to be a rocket scientist to finally discern if we're exploding things in the water, if we're blasting them with 195 decibels.
And there's no reason to believe, I agree with you entirely, that if it has a biological effect on an animal our size, it would not be a surprise if it would affect cetaceans in a similar fashion.
I think it's a reasonable suspicion.
Certainly we should prove that it's not the case before we go booming the oceans.
Even with the Cold War over, uh-huh, here we are doing all of this work ostensibly to find ultra-quiet submarines that are supposed to be generally dry-docked back in Russia.
I don't know.
You know, I know the Chinese are out there, but I don't think they've got ultra-quiet anythings.
I mentioned that I'm going to be speaking down in Phoenix.
For about a year, Art.
I have hankered to present my data on the sightings over Arizona on the 13th of March last year, and it looks like I'm going to have an opportunity to do that.
There is a one-day powwow that is being planned down in Scottsdale.
I think it's at the Holiday Inn Sunspree, if I'm not mistaken, on the 29th of March.
That's a Sunday night, 6 p.m. to 11.
I'm going to be there.
Colin Andrews, apparently, specialist on crop circles, of course, is going to be there.
Wonderful speaker.
Travis Walton, Jim De Latoso, perhaps other speakers as well.
And I'm really looking forward to this one.
Let me just say that if there's still anyone out there that thinks that what happened over Arizona at between 8.16 p.m. and about 9 o'clock on the 13th of March can be ascribed to military flares, if you'd like to know the real story, come to that powwow and look at the slides I have, look at the data I have, and I think they'll walk away with a different opinion.
I understand that if they're interested in getting tickets, they can call, I think it's in Scottsdale, area code 602-704-1040.
One other thing I'd like to talk about, which is rather interesting, you may have seen the news reports about this, is the alleged meteor shower over Northern California.
And one thing that I feel the news reports missed that we picked up on the hotline is the fact that that shower, from our vantage point anyway, I'm not sure we have all the data.
I'm not sure all of our data is correct.
But from our vantage point, that meteor shower over California lasted for six hours.
Yeah, that's my impression from our vantage point up here in Seattle, too.
We're getting these calls all the time.
Certainly, we're quick to recognize, I'm sure, the Earth is struck by about 10 to the 12th power meteors every day.
There's no doubt about it.
The overwhelming majority, however, are smaller than a grain of sand.
But we are getting a lot of reports.
I don't pretend to understand what's going on, but I couldn't agree more with your statement.
We're getting a lot of reports about really anomalous lights at night.
We had a good one over Washington state just about 15 months ago.
It was December 17th.
And what very few people understand is that five minutes or so after those objects went from east to west over the state of Washington, they were seen going west to east just south of Portland.
And the fact of the matter is that if a person is in mainstream science with a career to worry about, a job to worry about, and so on, they cannot say if there's something in the atmosphere that's fast and bright, they cannot say that it's anything but a meteor.
It's that simple.
But we're getting calls that suggest to me anyway that there's something very unusual about some of these lights that are being seen.
We've heard a lot about these storms all over the country.
We've now had three reports, the most recent one from down in New Mexico, of people standing looking at these storm cells, huge, big towering cumulus clouds, and watched ships, disks come out of them like a streak and go right back into them.
Whether these stories are true or not, of course, we may never know.
But we've now had three just in the last two or three weeks, and they seem to come from sources that are independent of one another.
The sources seem good to me.
I don't know what to make of it, Art.
I oftentimes find myself in a position of reporting information that is uncorroborated, and I don't understand it, but I think it is, nevertheless, my responsibility to report it.
That's Peter Davenport at the UFO Reporting Center in Seattle.
Now, we played a report.
Actually, I began talking earlier about these.
I've been just getting buried in faxes and email about what I thought was an experiment that was about to get underway.
Boy, was I wrong.
Boy, was I wrong.
As a matter of fact, let me read this to you, one report.
By Anthony Summer.
ATOC researchers testing the effect of low-frequency sound on humpback whales in deepwater off Kauai put a big distance between themselves and the U.S. Navy project testing low-frequency sonar off the big island.
Several environmental groups went to U.S. District Court in Honolulu today, which may have been yesterday, hoping to win an injunction halting the Navy test scheduled to begin Wednesday.
So I'm a little unclear because I talked to Dick Algire, who faxed me, who is a reporter for KITV News in Honolulu, and he very generously played a copyrighted report for us.
He's about to repeat it right now, of exactly what these sounds are like and how the whales responded.
I want you to listen to this very, very carefully.
We're going back to Dick, who spent a full day on the ship.
And listen, folks, this is not being fought out in court.
This is going on right now because Dick was there today on the ship.
And by the way, we now have the photographs.
Thank you very much, Dick, posted on the website so you can go see the ship that Dick is reporting on right now.
Dick, welcome back.
unidentified
Yeah, that court case you were talking about was last week.
I've just said a couple of faxes and called one person and listened to your show, and I can't keep up with you.
You're doing commercials, checking faxes, checking the time, queuing up and playing bumper music, following the internet, calling five people, running the board, and doing interviews on the fly.
First, let me say that when you hear these whale songs, I'm not sure it's fair to say that the whales are distressed, because as the scientist told me, and it's your criticism of TV, it's so short, it's short sound bites.
And the scientists explained to me, and I did not play this in my report, that whales are very active creatures.
When you hear my report, and I say, here are the low sounds and the high sounds, the low sound, and it sounds very much like a whale, the sonar that they're putting out goes like this.
unidentified
It goes, right.
And over that, you'll hear the higher of the whale.
Scientists say the sound dissipates rapidly in water and is only loud for less than a mile.
They listen to whales, then emit the sonar.
The sonar is the low tone.
unidentified
The higher tones are the whales.
The higher tones are the whales.
Animals naturally have highly variable patterns.
And what we have to do is to study them enough times under natural conditions when we're not transmitting, and then again under transmission conditions, and see when you factor out all of the natural variability if there's an offset in their behavior.
If under the experimental conditions, they do something differently.
Greenpeace claims Navy divers were injured by the same type of sonar.
unidentified
We are concerned that the same Cold War technology is being inflicted upon the whales, wise whales, and that there's no way that these researchers can tell.
There is no way they can tell if a whale has experienced memory loss.
There's no way to tell if a whale has a seizure.
There's no way they can tell if a female whale stops giving milk to its baby.
And that's the crux of our argument right now.
The testing will continue for the next three weeks until the end of March.
Then the data will be collected for an environmental impact statement.
Dick Alger, News 4, aboard the research vessel Cori Choas off the Kona coast of the Big Island.
I've never seen, to me, a Navy ship is a gray ship with Navy personnel and Navy uniforms, and there were both on board.
There were civilians and Navy.
Now, I should say that they pointed out that the sounds were 155 decibels under the boat, and that sound does not propagate well in water, and that eight-tenths of a mile away, it drops off to a very low level.
If they see a whale 100 yards away, they immediately stop the test.
Let me tell you an interesting question that was asked by another reporter.
And this was not on camera, but as we were kind of packing up, a reporter from another TV station said, do you think if we were in a war situation and the U.S. were tracking hostile subs, that we would give a damn about some whales?
Well, yeah, what the scientists on, now the civilian scientists on board the ships said this is a great opportunity for them to see how sound affects whales.
The civilians said if the technology that civilian scientists had, in order to test sound on whales, you know, the speakers that they have available to them, they would have to drop them on top of the whales to get that level of sound.
So they feel it's a great opportunity to use all this high-tech stuff provided by the Navy to see how whales react.
And they claim that they're doing this to protect whales and see how whales react to sounds.
Well, pinging is one thing in this low frequency, maybe another, because the scientists on board today told us that they could see no real change in the whales' activity, that they were singing and going along their merry way and doing their whale things, and that they didn't really notice that much of a change.
Now, they would not say categorically that it didn't have any effect.
They said, well, we need to analyze our data.
They said that we need to look at the whales with no sounds and see how they react, then play the sounds and see how they react, and they need to go analyze that and then get their environmental impact statement.
All right, I want to remind everybody that was copyrighted material provided through the kindness of an employee of KITV who you're listening to, Dick Algire.
And so I want to thank you, and I want to, again, thank KITV in Honolulu.
When the moon is in the devil's house And you must turn our lives with more Then we shall guide the world by the end And love shall feel nothing This is the dawning of the angel.
I don't think the Navy has an invitation to Greenpeace Hawaii or the other people involved with this program to help save the whales because we're the ones that have been protesting it and working to have it stopped.
Well, what we have here in Art, we have a Cold War technology being used against the whales, the dolphins, and the marine life off the Hawaiian Islands.
Not only has it been used against marine life, but it's also been used against human life.
There's ample evidence that the United States Navy has conducted tests of these low-frequency sound waves upon human beings, Navy SEALs, Navy divers, and they've actually experienced permanent nerve damage, permanent loss of memory in certain areas of their brain, as well as other physical ailments.
And we believe that these Cold War experiments being conducted in a nursery, in basically a whale birthing ground for a critically endangered species, is absolutely foolish and should stop immediately.
Now, you said Navy SEALs, Navy divers have experienced nerve damage, permanent and memory loss.
What evidence do you have of that, Michael?
unidentified
There has been some documents that have been made available courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act.
One such document, for example, is titled Exposure Guidelines for Navy Divers Exposed to Low Frequency Active Sonar.
It was conducted out of the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Groton, Connecticut, which is, of course, the electric boatyard where nuclear submarines are made.
And these experiments show that U.S. Navy SEALs, Navy divers, were experienced to these sounds, and they experienced dizziness, somnolence, inability to concentrate, tingling in their arms.
Some of them, definitely at least one of them, and we think actually more, actually received seizures.
They experienced seizures being treated nowadays with antidepressant and anti-seizure drugs.
And we're actually trying to find these individuals.
We know these reports were made public to a certain level.
A lot of the reports have been made confidential, top secret by the Navy.
They have not released the names of these individuals who they subjected to these tests.
And so if that can be done to a human, would I assume similar low-frequency decibel sounds?
Is that accurate?
unidentified
That is correct.
Similar sounds at a much lower intensity.
The intensity of this experiment, when it finally gets fully cranking, will be literally hundreds of thousands of times louder than that experienced by those divers.
Do you know when, in other words, how is the experiment due to expand eventually, you say, hundreds of thousands of times more?
unidentified
Actually, yes, hundreds of thousands of times more.
When this experiment goes full blast, and that's literally the term for it, full blast, when they finally actually activate the sonar array that they're trying to construct now, all the oceans of the world can become one giant sound sphere, in effect, that will end up affecting all the world's oceans.
Not perhaps just the whales, if we're dolphins, for example, but fisheries and marine life throughout the depths of the seas and even human life that happens to be in contact with the ocean or even those that may be living near shore because these sound waves can penetrate it through rocks.
Now, I understand, Michael, that we have a need for national security, and I suppose we have to even be able to find quiet submarines, but last time I heard in Washington, they're saying the Cold War is over.
What are we doing?
unidentified
Art, actually, to the closest that we've been able to determine, this appears to be a massive pork barrel project.
We've been informed that as Dick Oligari mentioned, the Chwiss family and perhaps some other shareholders involved with this vessel, this contract vessel, have been perhaps involved with political fundraising and other such things in the U.S. mainland.
We believe this is a massive pork barrel project.
This is trying to be a subsidy for Cold War technologies that are simply no longer needed.
It is known, for example, that last year alone, 1996, the United States spent over $150 million paying Russians, paying Russian workers to dismantle their submarines and ICBMs.
We think that's the best way to go, and this is actually a waste of public's money.
What is the state now of whales and dolphins around the world?
I know that your organization, Greenpeace, monitors this very carefully because people are hunting them and all the rest of it.
We're blasting them.
How are they doing?
unidentified
Overall, the whales and dolphins are hanging in there, but quite honestly, by and large, they're often going down in numbers, not just due to the fact that they were depleted so heavily due to whaling and due to, in the case of dolphins, due to fisheries on species such as tuna, but also due to chemical contamination, PCB, DDT, mercury.
Recent studies indicate there's very high levels of premature abortion, actually, of baby dolphins and whales that may be caused by PCB, DDT, mercury contamination.
And now with active sonar now being brought to bear and other sonic technologies, we have concerns that these may also have a strong negative impact upon these endangered populations.
There have for thousands of years been beachings of whales.
However, in the last year or so, it seems like there's been a very unusual number of big beaching recently in South America, I think in Venezuela.
Do you all have any hint of what's going on?
It's almost like they're leaping out of the ocean.
unidentified
Yes, sir.
I've actually been involved quite a bit with marine mammal strandings.
In 1979, I directed rescue efforts to help 41 giant sperm whales, which were 41-foot-long whales that beached along the coast of Oregon.
And I've been involved with other things along those lines and been studying the issue of stranded whales.
There's indeed a number of perhaps geophysical anomalies, such as twisted magnetic fields or gently sloping beaches or whatever that may result in a few matched strandings or a few strandings.
But the most recent research being conducted indicates in many cases, for example, off of Florida, there's been red tides caused by pig effluent being put into the ocean.
There's toxic chemicals, as well as these sonic experiments.
We do know there's been acoustic experiments being conducted for well over 20 years in the oceans.
And it's just now starting to come to light exactly what might be happening.
You're aware, I'm sure, of the pysteria problem coming out of the North Carolina estuaries and actually moving into the Atlantic now.
unidentified
Yes, indeed.
And that physteria, which is, of course, pig offal, is also thought to have caused red tides and dolphin deaths and fish die-offs along that coastline.
Now, when you do talk to authorities, I don't even know if they probably don't even talk to you, but do you present them with this kind of information and say, look, if this can happen to humans and it can do this to human brains, then why is it not reasonable to assume that this kind of sonic blasting is going to affect and damage or hurt whales?
unidentified
That's a very good question, Art.
Why is it that people within authority don't listen to what seems to be common sense for everyone else?
Well, they simply say, well, they were able to research it and find that at a certain level, indeed, human beings can experience nervous disorders and can experience memory loss and perhaps experience seizures.
But they're now being very cautious after they subject these poor individuals to these tests and that somehow they are able to determine how a whale behaves, for example, when subjected to these sonic tests.
Realistically, there's no way a human being at this point in time in our evolution can understand the mind and thoughts of a giant humpback whale.
Because recognize sonar, whales themselves, many species of whales, the deep diving whales like the sperm whales with the teeth or even the orca whales that we see of the sea worlds and that sort of thing, and even dolphins, have sonar themselves.
And their sonar is even much more advanced than the technology being conducted by human beings.
And they're very sensitive to sounds in the ocean.
They're acoustic creatures.
They see with sound the way that we see with light.
And when you send off a sonar beam into the ocean, it's like flashing light bulbs into their eyes, and they do want to leave the area.
Now, he also said that dolphins, for example, use sonar to stun small fish prey that they're going to eat.
Is that true, to your knowledge?
unidentified
Yes, it is.
And it's not just dolphins, but as well as orca whales, the killer whales have been known to do that with salmon, as well as even sperm whales.
The giant sperm whales of Moby Dick's fame are thought to use that same stunning mechanism to feed on giant squid, which make it up to be 100 feet in length in the ocean's depths.
And actually, the toothed dolphins and whales that use this technology somehow are able to send a sonic beam that Goes forward and it sounds sometimes even like a shotgun shell, for example, in the case of the larger mammals, a small explosion, and they stun their prey and go up there and suck it into the mouth like spaghetti or whatever.
They don't really have to grasp it sometimes.
They can use their sonic technology that's been developed within their own bodies to help find their prey.
So then this is a basic sound is a very basic part of their entire life.
We could think of it that way.
In the water, they live by, they hunt by, they communicate by, it's thought, it's all sound, right?
unidentified
That's correct.
As a matter of fact, this technology, this very low frequency sound, is based upon studies that the Navy has conducted on how whales talk to each other.
It's been known that a blue whale can talk to another blue whale as far as 500 miles away in the ocean depths using these deep water channels called the sound channels, which are a couple of thousand feet below surface level.
And these sounds will travel for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, at least hundreds of miles in the ocean depths.
And the Navy has studied this for decades and is now trying to replicate it somewhat with this new technology.
All right, so here we are lowering these gigantic acoustic speakers deep into the water and blasting as much as 195 decibels at this point of the experiment.
If whales can hear each other that far away, then you may have heard Dick say, the Navy told him, no problem, after a mile, they don't even hear it.
unidentified
Of course, after a mile, they can't hear it.
That's what they say.
But that's not true.
These whales have got very sensitive hearing the ocean much better than our own.
Recognize that what's actually happening off the big island of Hawaii right now, off the Kona side, is they have a ship, and they're transmitting these sonar beams into the water's depths, in the depths of the oceans.
And what they're trying to say is that if the whales instantly change direction, if they instantly alter their course, then that shows they're being affected.
Well, a couple of things here.
One is that sound, especially low frequency sound, when it's transmitted in the ocean, often is very difficult to tell what direction it came from.
The human being cannot tell.
Our ears cannot tell in the ocean what the direction of sound is coming from.
On surface we can, but because sound moves so quickly through water, it's a dense medium, we don't get this stereophonic effect like we do in the air.
Well the same thing may be with the whales.
They might not necessarily even know the direction of this sound.
And unfortunately in the case of the Navy research, they really aren't even studying what the long-term effects are that are happening upon the whales in the area.
We had a report just two days ago from a group of independent researchers called from the Ocean Mammal Institute in Pennsylvania.
They observed a baby whale, just a small juvenile 14-foot baby whale, no more than a month old.
It had been separated from its mother.
It was breaching frantically, swimming around in circles.
A very unusual anomaly.
I've been on the water here in Hawaii for over 10 years regularly for days and days, and other researchers never heard of such a thing.
Baby whales and mother whales stick to each other like glue because there's tiger sharks out here and they know it.
And those whales, that little baby whales, it was alone and these Navy researchers didn't even see it, but these independent researchers did.
So there's much happening out here that they aren't really reporting properly.
I presume you tried some legal maneuvering to stop it.
What happened there?
unidentified
There has been a case filed, attempts to be filed anyway, in federal court here in Honolulu, courtesy of the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund, and it's been filed before the federal courts on the grounds that what's being happening here with U.S. Navy tests is a violation of U.S. federal law, that they're violating the environmental laws.
They have not conducted an environmental impact statement, and that what's happening here should be stopped on the grounds that it's a violation of U.S. law, and they should go through certain steps and protocols to ensure the safety of the environment, especially a critically endangered species like the humpback whale.
Why do you think, instead of always being contentious, they don't approach you and make you part of this so that you can understand it, advise, whatever?
unidentified
I would think because if it really gets out as to how dangerous this is to whales, dolphins, and the ocean environment in general, that the public outcry would simply shut it down.
I think they picked the big island, the west coast of Big Island, because it's a fairly isolated part of the world to conduct these experiments.
And they probably thought they could just sort of hide away in an unknown corner of the planet and conduct their silly war games against the whales.
Well, of course, we here at Greenpeace, Hawaii, which are based on the Big Island, we were here on hand as well as a lot of other local conservationists and fishermen and others part of the community, and we've been taking a stand to have this thing stop.
One of the reports came down recently from a Greek scientist who studied NATO exercises, North Atlantic Treaty Organization naval exercises in the Mediterranean Sea and found a link between those exercises and whale strandings off the coast of the Greek islands.
There's also some other information there, currently the Ocean Manual Institute, pertaining to what's happening here with the whales and dolphins and some other research activities.
We also have some press releases as well as some beautiful ways for people to become involved and help support the Greenpeace Hawaii activities to help save the whales here in Hawaii.
If you would like to see Michael's website, if you would like to see photographs of the ship that Dick was on yesterday, we now have all of that up on our website.
It's been one of those nights where we're flying all over the place.
So I guess all I can do is ask you all to go up there and take a look if you've got a computer.
If not, get on the phone.
Michael Bailey of Greenpeace, director of Greenpeace Hawaii, coming up on the phones next.
Are you still, have you already tried a blockade or is this something ongoing?
unidentified
There's been actually at this point in time in the past week since the Navy first started the test, there's been at least four sortes onto the ocean.
It's actually a citizens protest happening on the big island.
We are one of the participants or other individuals.
There's fishermen, there's whale watchers, there's other people involved with this organization here.
And what we're trying to do is simply try to stop the test.
And the way that we're doing it is a fundamental, traditional Greenpeace Hawaii and even type of campaign where human beings are simply putting themselves in the water in the vicinity of the Navy vessel.
We're putting ourselves within just a half mile radius of the ship, knowing full well that if they transmit their sounds at their projected capacity, the people in the water will be injured.
Any diver in the water within a mile radius can be injured by these sounds.
And these are actually very small, low sounds compared to the fully active sonar program.
The low frequency ranges in the SODAR test vary from around 100 or so up to even 200 or 300 hertz.
They actually, there's been some theories that they may go as high as maybe 300 hertz.
It's within the range of the whale transmissions.
Whales transmit a wide variety of frequencies, some of which are actually perhaps thought to be even below the human hearing range or right at the lower levels of ours, as well as higher.
And it's definitely within the humpback whales.
And even more than humpback whales, quite honestly, there's even greater concern over sperm whales and actually dolphins, which use sonar to find their squid and prey at night.
So there's actually even other concerns over the other species of marine mammals in the area.
Okay.
Has there been any other data trying to find out if there are adverse reactions by researchers instead of by the Navy?
Well, the only individuals that have been doing an independent research program on the Big Island at this point in time is the Ocean Mammal Institute that's based in actually Pennsylvania.
But they do have a group of people on the Big Island.
They were the people that just two nights ago, two days ago noticed that there was a baby whale that was abandoned or separated from its mother.
The mother whale could not be sighted.
One of the things that we are trying to do is call for a greater number of independent researchers to be on site because we feel that the individuals being paid by the Navy have simply got a job to put on kind of a cover-up for what's really happening.
And we want independent researchers, ideally even international teams, to monitor the impact upon the whales and the dolphins.
Yeah, first off, finally, after our five-year quest, I got through.
First off, I want to mention that I know studies have been done on other mammals, such as bats, with low and high-frequency sound, and it at times caused, as I understand it, major hemorrhaging and violent reactions with them in general.
Being that they use sonar as well, don't you think that there would be evidence enough for our lovely government to have stopped it right there?
Because s don't cetaceans j in general use the same or similar sonar uh theory?
Margin, is this a question for me?
Yes, cetaceans do, of course, use sonar.
Uh certain species more than others, the deep diving toothed whales like the sperm whales and orca whales use sonar.
The humpback whales themselves use a low-frequency sound to sing to each other and perhaps may have navigational potential with sound that we have yet to even determine.
And this is one of the things, of course, that the Navy discovered years ago using their own hydrophone devices scattered in the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific when they were searching after Russian and other submarines.
And they were able to determine that the whales and the dolphins, particularly these deep diving whales, could communicate to each other across many, many miles of underwater area.
And that's part of what this program is about, simply duplicating some of the whales' technology.
Yeah, also on the other side of it, I used to be in the military not too long ago myself.
And I do know for a fact, for whatever reason, the Cold War games, we'll call it, are still being played because the Russian submarines aren't mothballed, I can tell you that.
And remember the treaty not too long ago, I can't remember what it was, that grounded the SR-71, they're still in regular flight over their same areas.
Everybody will say national security, the Cold War is over, yes, but it really isn't, as this color said.
And we have to be doing these things because the Russians are getting quieter and quieter and quieter.
What do you say?
unidentified
Well, even though the Russians are perhaps getting quieter somewhat, they're not putting the level of resources into their submarines that they were 10, 15 years ago, for example.
They're still running around with the same equipment they were five, six, seven years ago or whatever.
And the United States has already hydrophone arrays.
There are listening arrays spread across the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway, spread across the Pacific Ocean.
They're specifically designed to find submarines.
And ironically enough, those hydrophone arrays are actually being allowed to go into disrepair.
And this other technology is being experimented with.
Recognize this other technology, this low-frequency sonar, is not even known if it even works.
It's simply a test of a theoretical possibility that it might work.
And there's a lot of people involved that have studied it who are scientists in their own right that actually have doubts whether it can work as accurate as the Navy really claims.
Yes, I'd like to ask Michael a quick two-part question.
By the way, Michael, congratulations on your work on behalf of cetaceans.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Okay, the first part involves the Navy's ELF submarine communications system.
You've been out in the Pacific for quite a while, and perhaps have you noticed a correlation between the use of ELF submarine communications by both the U.S. and Russia and perhaps the effect on undersea life?
Well, there's actually, as we've come recently to understand, there's many sounds happening to see that there aren't necessarily this low-frequency sonar or other things.
There's another device, for example, called the ATOC 8ATOC undersea boom box.
It's the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate, which is a sound device that's off of Kauai, and another one that's off of Monterey, California.
And what they've done, they've set up another project, which so far has eaten up $50 million in taxpayers' money and so far has not accomplished its goals.
And in theory, they're trying to determine if the ocean deepwater areas are warming up maybe one degree Fahrenheit every 30 years.
And if they're able to actually prove that, then maybe that's possible to be an indicator of global warming.
And to actually do that experiment, it's going to cost $2 to $3 billion.
And it's as if they've never heard of thermometers.
It isn't like they've ever heard actually put a thermometer in the ocean to determine if it's warming or not.
Instead, they have to devote these millions, actually, ends up being hundreds of millions of dollars to these projects.
And one of our concerns is it's simply a massive waste.
And for people really want to engage in Cold War efforts, they should simply buy the submarines from the Russians and develop other types of technology which are available, much more expensive hydrophones are available that can actually find quiet submarines.
All right.
I spoke last month on the program about the HARP project up in Alaska.
Yes, we've been watching HAARP with quite a great amount of interest.
It's my understanding, and I'm not by far an expert on HARP.
I've just seen some of the information because you are an expert.
I have a question.
It's my understanding this is an array, some sort of array of transmitters up in the Arctic that's designed to blast holes into the ozone layer and perhaps even send fields of electricity arcing across the onosphere.
That's my impression of what this thing is.
I'm not exactly sure.
Some people say it's experiments upon how to change the weather patterns.
Is it really a Navy ship, Michael, or are there just Navy people On a civilian research ship.
unidentified
You've got it, Art.
It is Navy personnel on a civilian research ship.
We believe it's a pork barrel project where effectively the stockholders and shareholders in this vessel are getting lots of money, tens of millions of dollars, to develop this ship.
And it's just a way to allow some money to slush around.
We've heard these people have been contributors to fundraising on the Democratic Party in the mainland.
It's just a rumor.
We haven't got it confirmed yet.
We're trying to find out.
But in answer to the caller, no, unfortunately, it has not been really a 24-hour surveillance.
It's been largely a civilian, just a citizens' movement, as a matter of fact, which has been with the Animal Welfare Institute in Washington, D.C., ourselves have been involved, and a number of other people involved with whale watching and fishing just on the Kona coast there that simply have a compassion and concern for the whales.
It has not been 24 hours.
The Navy says they're only transmitting in the daytime, but so far it's been an experiment to see if it even works as far as making sure the people in the water, the Navy doesn't transmit.
And so far it's working, and there's definitely hopes amongst all of us involved with it all that it will increase and that the Navy efforts will be stopped.
Well, here's a news flash for you then.
In Dick Algar's report this evening, he reported off seven miles off Puako, which is about 40 miles north of about 50 miles north of Kailua Kona.
I work here about 10 miles out of Kailua Kona from 10 at night to 6 in the morning.
And right off of Dakona Airport, I watched the vessel operating about 2 miles offshore, about 40 miles farther south than what the day reports are.
And this vessel is actually skimming up and down the coast about two miles offshore and doing about 10-mile runs back and forth north to south.
So they are running 24-hour operations and they are doing something out there at night.
I don't think they're just burning gas.
What do you think?
It could easily be conducting many other types of activities there at night and even other times.
We even heard over the past year, for example, of people diving off Kona, people that go night diving and they see these beautiful manta rays that soar through the water at these night dives, hearing underwater sounds.
The Navy denies it's them, yet we really don't know who else it could possibly be.
And we're looking at the ship right now.
Pardon that?
I'm looking at the ship right now.
I'm looking at her lights right now.
It's right there.
It's definitely a ship off the ship.
Right off of the Kona International Airport, about maybe two, three miles offshore.
Well, you've got to really have some brave people to go and stay in the water for hours with the possibility the Navy will say the hell with it and throw the switch anyway.
unidentified
That's correct.
There are some brave people, and I guess that's one of the challenges one can face if one really believes in helping save the whales and the environment here.
I've been taking notes and listening to what your guests have been saying.
My question is, what do we do now?
Where do we go?
Who do we contact?
And also, beside that, does Greenpeace have a national number?
Well, the national organization in Washington, D.C. isn't really directly involved with this campaign.
This is largely a local effort here by our own autonomous Greenpeace Hawaii operation here, and, of course, the other people and individuals and organizations that are based in the Big Island of Hawaii and throughout the state here.
The best way to simply contact the campaign front is to call Greenpeace Hawaii on the big island, the big island of Hawaii.
The number is 808-969-9910, 808-969-9910.
If you want to send a fax, we'd love to hear from you.
973-0235.
Any letters of protest you want to send off, just copy them to us.
973-0235.
We'll make sure they're sent to the Secretary of the Navy and other key people.
There's been some people that we've been speaking with that are very highly experienced in the world of underwater physics and sounds.
They have serious doubts whether this technology can even work the way they say they're going to.
Supposedly what it is, they have this sonar array of these refrigerator-size transmitters, 30 to 50 of them hang off a line, it goes straight down into the sea 500 feet, and somehow this is able to beam a low-frequency sound,
which is very difficult because low-frequency sounds don't beam very well, and they bounce it off the ocean bottom and up towards the surface somehow, and somehow get another reflection back, and somehow sort of maybe try to get a reading on something.
And there's those that have actually stated that the frequencies that they're using, They can't really get bounce backs from.
So it's quite possible this is something else entirely.
I kind of agree with the fact that there may be a cover-up going on here because it doesn't seem logical to me to be blasting all this high-frequency or high-intensity sonar into the oceans.
But at the same time, earlier on, you were talking about the hydrophones and everything.
You know, they could be going obsolete.
That's the reason why they're letting them go.
Because, you know, remember Hitachi had that thing with Japan a while back where Hitachi had let some of the technology go and the Russians got a hold of it.
Okay, yeah, I was going to say that, you know, the point I was trying to get to was that this may very well be a different type of weapon that they're trying to make up over here or some way of being able to incapacitate the sonar listeners.
Because, you know, they've already gotten to the point in technology where it's almost impossible to hear these submarines.
And maybe the sonar listeners are getting so good at it, they need to have some kind of a screen to put up, and this is the way that they're going to do that.
You know, Tart, you're a ham.
You understand about radio propagation and wave propagation.
I do.
And the propagation of a wave in the water is probably very similar in the ether.
And so if you have shortwave radiation, it doesn't get around corners very well, but long wave does.
Now they're talking about low frequency sound here.
If you're using long wave radiation in the low frequencies like that, it propagates very well throughout everywhere.
And that could set up some kind of a screen for these submarines or whatever they're doing.
And this could be the type of thing that they're doing.
Well, there's a question I'm sure Michael doesn't mind.
unidentified
Definitely not.
People can simply call us.
Actually, I'd actually prefer if they actually would fax us.
Our telephone lines have a tendency to get jammed because we do have a very small office over here.
It'd be easy if they could fax us.
Simply faxing us at 808-973-0235.
That's 808-973-0235.
Send us in your information.
If you look on our website, we have a membership form.
And of course, the website there is http colon slash slash greenpeacehi.inhawaii.net.
That's G-R-E-E-N-P-E-A-C-E-H-I dot in Hawaii I-N-H-A-W-A-I-I dot net.
There's a membership form.
And basically at this point in time, all the funds that we get are being used for this campaign.
And we, of course, Quentin Office are one of the few organizations here in the Pacific that are involved with this issue.
It's Greenpeace, it's the Animal Welfare Institute in Washington, D.C., and a handful of other people that are based on the big island themselves, citizens that are involved with this.
And financial support is definitely needed.
It is definitely a might against mammoth situation.
But you know what's interesting, Art, and whoever's called in here, people around the world are responding to this in unprecedented numbers.
And it's not just the fact that it's the whales and it's the dolphins, it's the environment, but of course in recent days, starting today, people became aware that there's been United States Navy personnel exposed to these sounds, and they've undergone serious physical disabilities due to it all.
And what I will do also is, Michael, if somebody from the U.S. Navy or in charge of this project was interested in debating you, I take it you wouldn't mind such a setup.
I was just going to say another possible idea, of course, for cover-up, is that maybe there's extraterrestrial life down there, and they realize that and they don't want to admit that.
Well, I don't know about that, but there certainly is a lot of life that we don't understand at the bottom of the sea.
As a matter of fact, Michael, recently they have discovered that there's life where there ought not be life, near volcanic venting, very, very deep in the ocean.
You're aware of that?
unidentified
Yes, I am.
Particularly off the big island of Hawaii, for example, there is an underwater seamount that's been rising up to the surface for millions of years, and it's actually erupting.
And from the eruptions, from the gases and chemicals, there is life.
It's actually this new life they found makes them believe that perhaps there might even be life on Mars or even some of the moons of Jupiter, because where there is not sunlight, we used to think there's no life.
Well, now we discovered with volcanic activity, there can be different types of life.
And I was a radioman, but one of the things I've been keeping very, very close track of is Russian submarine technology and things like that.
Now, one of your previous callers hit it right on the money when he said that a few years ago that Hitachi had indeed sold this non-cavitating propeller design to the Russians.
But also there was another thing that was in the news very, very quietly, a little tiny article that was in about two or three years ago, about this time of the year, that according to Jane's Intelligence Weekly, as you know, the most authoritative private intelligence source in the world, the publishers of Jane's fighting ships, according to Jane's, the Russians have developed a 200-knot torpedo.