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April 17, 1998 - Art Bell
02:49:37
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Fred Alan Wolf - Theoretical Physicist - Taking the Quantum Leap
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From the high desert in the great American Southwest I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be across all these many a prolific time zones stretching from the Hawaiian and Tahitian islands out west eastward to the Caribbean The U.S.
Virgin Islands, South into South America, North to the Pole, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, and boy are you in for a rollercoaster ride this night!
I've been shuffling and moving as quick as I can.
I have breaking news for you in several categories.
Linda Moulton Howe is about to do a You Heard It First Here interview with Dr. Mark Carlotto, who has done the amazing photographic work Uh, that now is resulting in people saying, now wait a minute, maybe, maybe it is a face after all.
And then I have an interview with a young man who I am not going to name right now, uh, that is so sensitive that I'm not even going to promote it right now for fear of something happening between now and when he goes on the air.
So, that's coming up, and then following all that, Dr. Fred Allen Wolfe, a theoretical physicist, who is an absolutely fascinating man.
So, obviously, it's going to be a very packed night, and we're going to do the best we can.
All of that's coming up, beginning in a few moments.
Are you with me?
5-5.
David Hall's North American Trading 1-800-359-4255.
Tell them our bell said call and ask about the sale on gold.
Sale on gold indeed.
All right, she is a science reporter.
She has won many awards for her documentaries, environmental documentaries.
She has done reporting for us now for years.
She was once Miss America contestant from Idaho.
Throw that in.
I'd say this, and she doesn't like me to say it, but I think she is probably the expert in this country on crop circles and animal mutilations.
A chief investigator, how about that?
Here she is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and she's got an interview with Dr. Mark Carlotto.
Here's Linda Moulton Howe.
Linda?
Hi, Art.
Hi.
Thanks a lot for that intro.
Well, first up tonight, I would like to clarify a confusion that some Coast to Coast listeners had a couple of weeks ago when you and I were talking about my new book, and I quoted government policy about extraterrestrial biological entities from a 1954 War Department training manual.
I was reading directly from the pages in my new book, Glimpses of Other Realities, Volume 2, High Strangeness, in which the documents are reprinted.
And a lot of our listeners faxed me that they wanted to see this training manual as if it were a separate piece of something.
So, to all of you listening, you can find exactly what I was quoting from and all the reproduced pages of that 1954 War Department training manual.
about extraterrestrial biological entity retrievals in Glimpses of Other Realities High Strangeness that's now out in bookstores, hopefully throughout the country.
And also, I have had several faxes and phone calls from ex-military and intelligence forces.
They say that their own experiences relate to the military voices section of my book.
One said, Some Washington insiders are upset that certain documents and information are in my book which were, quote, not to see the light of day.
I'm sure that's true.
Yeah, and I'm using his quote, not to see the light of day, and the implication is that the content is true.
So I want to thank all of you who have had the courage to communicate and hope more of you will reach me.
And because I'm going to do this extensive story on Mars, and there's a lot more to come concerning Mars, I'd like to give out my fax number now.
Sure.
At area code 215-491-9842.
That's 215-491-9842 to fax me.
That's 215-491-9842 to fax me.
And for those of you who prefer to write, my mailing address is Linda Moulton Howe,
post office box 300 Jamison, PA, that's J-A-M-I-S-O-N, PA, 1-8-9-2-9.
Again, that's P.O.
Box 300, Jamison, PA, 1-8-9-2-9.
And Art, I really want to thank you for giving a forum for these discussions on Coast to Coast and Dreamland.
Sometimes I don't think we say that enough.
Oh, you bet.
Thank you, Linda.
You know how I work.
It's all on the fly.
Tonight is a very good example.
Yes, and what listeners will find surprising is that I'm now going to do a report about Mars, and that what will follow will be extremely relevant, and all of this has happened just this evening.
Now, Geologist Michael Malin told me in February he would try to photograph the Cydonia face after aerobraking of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor stopped in April.
And he got one!
But when it was released, April 5th, the face looked so erased that the mainstream media announced the controversy about artificial structures on Mars was over.
But the case is not closed for Dr. Mark Carlato.
A computer image processing expert who does contract work for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Carlotto is also author of a book entitled, The Martian Enigmas, which clearly details his processing techniques that he's been doing for the ten years since I first met him in 1988, and explains why he has hypothesized that the unusual features in Cydonia Have a high probability of not being natural.
The past two weeks, Mark Carlotto has been trying to make sense of this new face photograph.
First, I ask him questions that you have asked, Art, about why this new picture resolution was only 1024 pixels per line instead of 2048 used in earlier Mars images.
Yes.
Now, Dr. Carlotto.
instead of 2048 used in earlier Mars images.
Now, Dr. Carlotta.
All right, here it comes.
Like your home computer, the Global Surveyor has just so much memory.
And what they wanted to do was take a long strip so that they didn't miss the face.
And so, in order to take this long strip, they had to give up something, because they just had so much memory.
And what they gave up was the number of picture elements, or pixels, per line.
They went from 2048 to have that, to 1024.
It still covers the same amount of terrain, the same number of kilometers on the ground, The resolution wasn't as high.
We only had half of what the camera could have done.
But it was still good enough.
From your point of view, it's still good enough?
Absolutely.
So you don't have any real argument with Dr. Malin's choice to save on memory and use 1024 pixels per line instead of the 2048?
No argument.
And about the questions of his having said, Dr. Malin having said, Okay, the conditions over the face were relatively clear.
and he expected that if he could shoot it, he would get a good clear image.
And then when the image was put in photographs and on television,
it seemed to be very low in the grayscale.
How do you explain that?
Okay, the conditions over the face were relatively clear.
I think he mentioned that over the Viking lander site, It was cloud cover and the surface was obscured.
But even though there weren't any clouds over the face, there was haze and the background also had brightness variations caused I think, although it hasn't been confirmed, but I think by frost.
And so this creates a situation where you have a lot of artifacts in the image, things that are making it difficult to interpret the image.
And this is why I believe they processed the picture the way they did, which washed out a lot of the detail, at least in the version they released to the media.
But the raw image had a low number of gray levels, mainly because of the haze and the fact that pictures taken in the wintertime when the sun angle isn't very high.
And so it wasn't an optimal condition for imaging.
Then I asked Dr. Carlotto about the differences in sun and camera angles between the new and the old Viking face photos and how he has been superimposing for the last couple of weeks the 1998 angles on the old 3D Viking image to see how it would compare more like oranges to oranges instead of bananas to apples.
Well, you know, when that first image came in on the fifth, it was really a couple of days before I was really oriented.
It was confusing because the camera angle was different, the lighting was way different, and of course there was a lot more resolution, a lot more detail there.
But to help make the comparison between it and the Viking, the older Viking data, I took the old Viking data and because of the way The Viking imagery was collected.
It was really easy at the time to do what's called shape from shading, which is to estimate what the terrain or the 3D structure of the face might be.
So using the 3D model derived from the Viking data, I reprojected the Viking data to look like the MGS image would look.
Meaning the Mars Global Surveyor?
The Global Surveyor image was taken about 45 degrees off Nader.
In other words, not looking straight down, but 45 degrees off, straight down.
And it was taken from the west side.
The original Viking imagery was taken almost directly above.
And at what time?
It was in the summer afternoon, wasn't it?
Summer, late afternoon, so the sun was to the northwest, which is the upper left of the face.
So to be clear in 22 years ago it was a camera looking down on a summer afternoon on the face with a low sun angle and in 1998 April it was early morning winter with a very low angle coming up from the chin.
That's right and the camera off about 45 degrees off later so there were a lot of differences but using the Viking I was able then to take the Viking and re-project it to look like the MGS image.
In fact, this is up on my website.
There's a sequence that fades from the late afternoon, the 35 A-72 image to another image, the 70 A-13 image.
These are both Viking images.
It's a substance to another image, a 70A13 image.
These are both hiking images.
It then fades from that to the MGS image.
All the features are pretty aligned, pretty close to being aligned with each other.
And I do a fade, and you can see the correlation.
Just about all the features that we had seen and we had predicted we would see in NGS are there.
It's a lot clearer now because before it was difficult to mentally map one perspective to another, but you can kind of see them all.
Once you do this, this new image is really quite remarkable.
The platform or the headdress, the base that the face is constructed on, is extremely symmetrical.
Even more strikingly symmetrical in the new imagery than in the Viking imagery.
Yeah, I think one of the major news magazines said it looked as if the bottom had been drawn with a straight edge.
Yeah, and it's also, you can see the other side of it, and it seems to be the case for the other side, the side away from the camera, that it's equally straight and highly symmetrical, not just laterally, but in both directions.
What's also very striking is this beveled edge along the side.
It's very even.
People have remarked about, if you look out of a plane flying over the southwest, you're likely to see all sorts of masons that look like the face.
I've never seen them.
You can talk to geologists.
We were talking the other night on the air with Jim Urjavik, a geologist that's done a lot of analysis on his imagery.
He said he's looked for a long time for a similar type of Mesa and you just don't find this kind of regularity.
So you've got a very symmetrical platform or base with this very precise beveled edge.
The top of the head, the forehead, has these crossed lines.
They're very straight.
We saw them in the Viking imagery and they're there in the MGS imagery.
They're very, very straight lines.
I haven't heard of a good geological explanation for that either.
But why doesn't it look like a face now?
Well, why doesn't it look like a face?
If it is a face, it's highly eroded, clearly.
The nose is not a smooth, sculpted shape.
There seems to have been some materials that slid down.
Other signs of rock slides or degradation or erosion along the nose.
The eye also is not there in the sense that we expected it.
There's a geometry that's set up by the terrain above where the eye is at the cliff.
There is also some features in where the pupil, this very small black area that Di Pietro noticed a few years ago in the middle of the eye.
And in the Viking images, they work out so that this dark area or this pupil, which appears to be a slight protuberance or protrusion, casts a deep shadow that looks black.
In the MGS image, It shows up as a bright spot where it's supposed to be, but we don't seem to have an eye cavity.
Not in the same location.
It seems like the eye cavity was a shadow cast by the brow of the face.
We didn't see exactly what we anticipated there, but we're seeing our structures that do give the impression at certain lighting angles that you've got an eye there.
Whether it was designed to do that or whether it was an accident, we don't know.
So if we can get another picture of the face from above in the next couple of months, or later on in the mission with more illumination on the right side so we can see, then that will tell us.
I think that will be the conclusive picture.
Because if we do get indications of facial features on the right side, continuation of I think we have to acknowledge that we have a facial form regardless of its present condition.
It clearly is very eroded.
When you and I talked in February, when I did the interview with Dr. Mike Malin and Glenn Cunningham at JPL, you had done the fractal work and you were saying that at least in terms of the fractal And we can pick that up after the break.
Oh, you're learning, boy.
Pick it up at just the right time.
itself was coming out in such an anomaly that the odds were in the millions to one that
it could be natural made.
What would you comment now?
And we can pick that up after the break.
Oh you're learning boy, pick it up at just the right time.
That's the way to do it Linda.
Alright now, it's interesting isn't it that he was sort of pining away wishing for another
image that would have been directly Right.
Bears a little bit on what I'm going to do when we're done tonight, huh?
Absolutely, and this story is going to ramify for a long time.
I know.
Alright, Linda Moulton Howell, hold on, we'll break here at the bottom of the hour.
Listen very carefully, folks, to what's coming.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
To talk with Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nine, from east of the Rockies, dial 1-800-825-5033.
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Now again, here's Art Bell.
Before this night is over, I think we're probably going to make some people angry.
Linda Moulton Howe is my guest right now.
She is in the middle of an interview with Dr. Mark Carlotto.
And he'll be right back.
5-1.
That's 1-800-472-5151.
Buy two, get one free when you call now.
Telemart Bell sent you.
All right.
Indeed, do that.
Back now to Philadelphia and the cliffhanger with Dr. Mark Carlotto.
Here is Linda Moulton Howe.
Linda?
Hi, Art.
Thanks.
I had just asked Dr. Carlato in light of fractal mathematical work that he has done on the face and had concluded this past year that there was a high probability that the face was an artificial structure.
What would he comment on the current new April image, Dr. Carlato?
With the face, at the scale Up to the scale of the Viking imagery it looked fractal but
now getting really close up you are seeing detail that was not present in the original
Viking data and it is beginning to look more terrain like because you are seeing the signs
of erosion which is making the terrain look more fractal, more irregular, more like a
natural rock formation than a face.
How far from the face in 1976 was the camera shot?
It was a different camera.
The resolution was 50 meters per pixel.
Now we're looking at something that's 2 to 4 meters per pixel.
It's considerably better, so you're seeing detail that That you didn't see in the Viking imagery.
It's sort of like being in a museum when you're close to a painting and you see all the brush strokes and you really can't quite see clearly the face or the flowers or the water.
But when you stand back across the room it suddenly is a very clear picture.
That's right.
In the Viking imagery we did see all these subtle features that we couldn't make out We are right at the resolution limit of the camera.
We can see these features in the MGS image.
In fact, in this new image we see what appears to be nostrils and they correspond to a flat
area on the nose.
These thin lines I mentioned above the forehead we saw, there is a broad pattern of stripes
across the face on one of the Viking images.
It is very pronounced and you can see the indications of that in the MGS image.
You can see where that's coming from.
All these things you can see in the MGS image and it really makes sense now.
You have that context of the higher resolution MGS image within the lower resolution Viking
image.
Do you feel that the door is still open on this being artificial?
Absolutely.
I think the final judgment will rest on what is on the other side of the face and ultimately
what we find in the city.
In the next past, NASA will be targeting, presumably, some objects in the city again.
I think the fortress, for example, that could be the smoking gun.
Even something that is severely eroded, if it's a piece of architecture with straight sides and edges, should look more artificial, even given that it's degraded.
More so than a sculpted humanoid face, because the face, again, if it's degraded, then you don't know whether or not that's just part of the style of the artist, not to finish it to a certain level of detail.
Just a coarse representation is good enough.
But for architecture, you would expect to see more telltale signs of artificiality,
the straight edges and repeated features, you know, internal geometry and that sort
of thing.
In the 1976 Viking photograph, what is referred to as the fort definitely has a very clear
And in the 1976 Viking photograph, what is referred to as the fort, definitely has a
very clear 90 degree angle from that particular perspective.
90 degree angle from that particular perspective.
And I think what I'm hearing you say is that if Dr. Malan could get a photograph in the
I think what I'm hearing you say is that if Dr. Malin could get a photograph in the current
resolution on that fort image, that 90 degree angle might be seen more clearly about how
it's structured.
That's right.
Even if it's severely degraded, there might be enough there, there might be enough of
the architecture still there to come through and be pretty evident.
I think the test now for artificiality kind of moves away from the face and looks to some
of these other objects.
What happens I think is if we start getting more pictures of these other objects and they
all start turning out to be like the face, they're all eroded and we're predicting like
say the right side of the face is also present in terms of facial detail.
If that's not there, and the details we're looking for in the forehead aren't there, and so on and so forth, then I think we have to abandon our hypothesis.
We're not there yet, and this new image has really done nothing to sway us.
Most of us, either way, we're a little bit more, or I should say a little less naive now as to what we expect to find, and we're realizing that these structures do appear to be very old, that they are degraded, and so the signs or the evidence for artificiality are going to be very, very subtle.
I think this point is lost with the news media, by and large, because they're looking for, you know, it's got to be black and white, it's got to be obvious.
Like a Walt Disney carving?
Yeah, or like, you know, the monolith in 2001.
You know, very often when you take a picture of these ancient cities, like the lost city of Bubar in the Middle East, done by shuttle radar back a few years ago, The indication that there was something there was very subtle and it only took, ultimately it was resolved by someone going there and digging in the sand.
Unfortunately we can't do that now and we may not be able to do that for a long time.
But there's a part of me that thinks and in fact has accepted the possibility that we're just not going to be able to verify or prove our hypothesis with MGS imagery or with remotely sensed imagery.
But privately I think that, and this is the intuition that I have and that many others have, when you look at this imagery that there is something there.
One day hopefully we'll know.
And the easiest way to reach Dr. Carlotto's website to look at his own comparisons between 76 and April 98.
It's simply by doing a search under the Martian Enigmas.
That is the way to get to his page.
And geologist Dr. Michael Malin at Space Science Systems in San Diego will be trying for another photo, hopefully of the Fort or the city area, next week around April 23rd.
And that day, by the way, Art, I'm going to be in San Diego.
I'm going to be at a Barnes & Noble on Hazard Center Drive, and if I can get any more information about what's happening, I will call you that day from San Diego.
All right.
Linda, I don't want to go into it in any detail because I don't think that would be wise prior to the event.
I received a three-page fax from a young man earlier tonight that is shocking.
I think it's extraordinary, and I think that we are going to make a very important contribution tonight.
Assuming that the details are true, and I personally feel this is a voice that should be listened to, and if, Art, this is true, then it means that the United States government already has very clear pictures Of not only the face, but of structures on Mars.
Do you consider that well within the realm of possibility?
Yes, I think it is within the realm of possibility, but then it opens up this whole huge Pandora's box of how have we gotten these color photos, and how have we gotten other details That certainly are not in the only two images from 1976 that have ever been released and the only one that we have right now of what is called the erased face.
The erased face?
Well, you heard Dr. Mark Carlotto himself suggest that with the haze And with the angle at which it was taken, which was, I believe he said at 45 degrees?
It's about 43 to 45 degrees off nadir.
And what that would be like, Art, is you know when you're a kid at Halloween and you take a flashlight or a candle and you put it under your chin?
Yes.
You know what that looks like.
Precisely.
Yeah.
That is exactly what it is.
That's exactly what it is.
That's right.
And so what Dr. Carlotto has been trying to do is to Take that same kind of severe angle back to the 76 3D image and see what it would look like if it had been taken under these very severe lighting conditions.
And the fact is that they have found all of these matching areas, including nostrils and the nose, at least the shadow where the eye, the strange straight cross edges, and I think everybody has noticed that beveled edge that goes all the way around just It just doesn't compute with what we know of arroyos and having some kind of a mesa.
Well, let me tell you this, Linda.
I was at Giza not all that long ago, and if somebody were to take a good quality 35mm photograph of the rump area of the Sphinx, in an area where there's been erosion, and there's been a lot of erosion, we're only talking here about Depending on who you want to believe, a couple of thousand to six thousand years, somewhere in that span.
In Egypt.
In Egypt.
If you were to take a photograph of just that close up, you know what you'd see?
You'd see eroded, irregular rock.
Rubble.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think that Dr. Carlotto's point about some of those radar images over the Middle Eastern deserts Where they did get the indication of some kind of artificial structure from radar, but they could not tell definitively that way.
They had to send somebody there to do archaeology.
And I think that part of the irony that you and I are sensing tonight is that we're talking about ancient archaeology and ancient structures on Mars, and we're talking about the fact that these people like Mark Carlotto are trying to cope with Degradation in a new photograph that possibly shows erosion of something that he feels was structured and yet we're going to hear from somebody who says that they have seen clear color photographs that aren't eroded.
You had an opportunity to talk to the young man I'm about to interview within the last couple of hours and your comment to me was you thought he was solid as a rock.
Yes, because you can get a sense of when somebody has not very little academic knowledge, but they know what they've seen and they know what they've heard.
Precisely.
All right, that'll be coming up shortly.
I want to ask you about one other thing, since you are and have been for so many years an environmental reporter.
There is a piece of breaking news from the New York Times that a 75-square-mile piece of the Larsen B.I.
mile square mile a piece of the larson b i show
broken uh... at in the antarctic yes and i think that's an
extraordinary piece of It was only about a year ago that you and I were on coast for about five hours and I was talking about global warming and I was talking about all of the scientific data from tree rings and arctic conditions and all of the
Various data points that have been saying that the temperature is increasing incrementally each year, and that one of the targets to be watched was the Larsen Ice Shelf.
The additional statement here is the British Antarctic Survey has predicted the entire Larsen Ice Shelf, which covers more than 4,000 square miles, is nearing its limit of stability.
And when it starts, Totally falling apart.
They know that that's going to cause some kind of sea rise.
It's going to.
It's melting and dislodging.
What exactly the consequences are going to be on the sea level, I don't know, but this has been one of the markers.
This has been one of the areas that has been predicted as, if global warming kept up the trend that the Larson ice shelf would be one of
these places that would begin to deteriorate exactly as it's doing.
And then I guess we better keep our eye on the Ross ice shelf.
Yes, all of it together.
That would not be good.
All right, Linda.
As always, I want to thank you for a very succinct report, and I think that it sets up what I'm about to do very well indeed.
It certainly does, Art, and I will look forward to talking with you on Sunday on Dreamland to catch up further, and I will be in Santa Fe.
I've been asked by Cornell University to participate as a science reporter in a workshop in Santa
Fe in which the whole discussion will be with physicists and scientists from all over the
country on the study of the ionosphere.
And I will be doing a very interesting report with another scientist on another subject
and following up, though, much more on HAARP, Arecibo, and many other areas later.
All right, wonderful.
Linda, thank you so much.
Yes, thank you, Art.
And good night.
We will speak with Linda on Sunday, of course, on Dreamland, if you get that.
If you don't, call your local radio station and ask them for it.
I'm going to take care of a little inventory right now because of what I've got coming here at the top of the hour.
And we have rearranged a schedule with the kind permission of the guest who was scheduled at this hour, Dr. Fred Allen Wolfe.
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Now, I want you to hear something.
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Links under this video In the video description From the kingdom of Nigh, Coast to Coast AM continues with
Art Bell you
Fred Allen Wolfe, Ph.D., is a consulting theoretical physicist, writer, and lecturer who earned his Ph.D.
in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963.
His work in quantum physics and consciousness is well known through his popular and scientific writings.
He is the author of eight books and I believe one comic.
Dr. Wolfe's fascination with the world of physics began one afternoon as a child at a local matinee when a newsreel revealed the awesome power and might of the world's first atomic explosion.
The world's fascination with the world of physics began one afternoon as a child at
a local matinee when a newsreel revealed the awesome power and might of the world's first
atomic explosion.
This fascination continued, leading the good doctor to study mathematics and physics in
In 1963, he received his PhD in theoretical physics from UCLA, began researching the field of high atmospheric particle behavior, following a nuclear explosion.
The good doctor has come a long way since then, now investigating other areas, including new physics and even quantum leaps toward the metaphysical. Here is Dr. Fred Allen Wolfe. Dr.
Welcome to the program.
Hi Art. Nice to be on your show. I'm so sorry that I had to push your appearance a little
bit. We had a remarkable interview we had to get done this night and I expect this to
be fully remarkable. You are a remarkable man and everybody was sending me faxes and
email saying you've got to get Dr. Wolfe on. Well thanks everybody who contacts Tim.
It's hard to describe the feeling that one has.
was really a few seeing a nuclear detonation began at all yes it was uh... hard to harder to describe the feeling
that one has um...
i think uh...
oppenheimer probably caught it
when he said death i've become death
or i've become aware of the awesome power of the universe itself
when he saw the bomb go off He recognized, he was looking at the dance of Shiva, the dance of life and death itself.
And I think that the impression I had when I first saw it was just, I was awestruck.
It literally blew my mind.
amazed at what I saw. It didn't seem possible that something like that could occur. I had
dreams about it for many, many years afterwards that really were both disturbing and enlightening.
I saw a nuclear holocaust. Maybe I was looking into the future. I don't know.
Maybe you were. As you look at it now, it's asking you more for a social comment than
anything else, but do you think what you saw will ultimately be the dance of life or death?
You mean a nuclear burst knocking us all off at some point?
Yes, sir.
No, I don't think so.
I think that we have a long history ahead of us.
If I look at the nature of the universe as a whole and I look at it from two points of
view, both from my deepest scientific understanding which includes what theoretical physics can
bring to that understanding, the table of understanding, and my mystical and spiritual
traditions that I've studied with almost as much fervor as I've studied theoretical physics,
I come to the conclusion that the universe is a very young child.
It's only at best 15 billion years old and more likely around 10.
It's a growing child.
It's expanding.
It's moving to an ever-increasing size.
In fact, it seems to be expanding even faster than we originally thought.
You embrace the Big Bang Theory.
Well, it seems to be a reasonable theory.
Now, let me say something about embracing theories and not embracing theories, because a lot of people get really caught up in this whole game that we play as scientists.
A theory is a picture.
It's a picture Which has been built consistently.
It's kind of like, as Richard Feynman would put it, building a pyramid from the top down.
When you first get a little bit of evidence, you build the first little, you know, triangular or whatever that piece is called.
I forget what they call those things.
That little pyramidal top.
And then you have to understand how that got created.
You have to build a base which is bigger and even supportive of that.
So when you add a new idea to a theory, you're actually adding something at the bottom, which has to support everything that's gone before.
And when you have a theory as powerful as our present theories are about the nature of the universe, there is a consistent story that is put together.
I can't say to you it's a perfectly, absolutely, 100% consistent story.
There's always areas that are gray that we don't really fully understand.
But nevertheless, the picture we have is a reasonably good one.
I call it the myth of science.
We have a fairly good myth, which tells us there's a big bang.
A myth of science?
A myth.
Science is a myth based upon the myth that we can understand the world mathematically, and we see certain correspondences which more or less fit that.
So we are mythological.
We're storytellers, and scientists are just Mathematical end of storytelling.
All right, well, how do we get from something that is theoretically smaller than a quark, where there is nothing else, there is nothing else moving, there's no reference, there's no other matter, and there is this sudden explosion resulting in the amount of matter that we now are able to see and look back time to, oh, I don't know, 10, 13 billion years, whatever it is, we can look back now.
It just doesn't seem reasonable to me.
No, it isn't reasonable.
The universe itself is not fully reasonable.
It's not fully logical.
There are many areas which we simply can't, we don't have the language or the tools to really find out.
So to say the universe began as a point smaller than a quark, down to a size which is so small
as to be well beyond any practicality at all, is a model.
It's a story.
And I can't think of a better one.
All right, but what part of theoretical physics, even theoretical, explains that?
Well, it comes from, basically from ideas which go back to first observations that were
made by Hubble, Edwin Hubble, who was, I think he was in California, Caltech, I don't have
my data here in front of me, who made some observations which indicated that the things
are moving apart from each other.
The universe was expanding.
For the listener at home, I ask you to imagine a balloon that is blowing up.
And I ask you to imagine yourself as living on the surface of that balloon and looking around your world as if it only existed on the surface of that balloon.
And look at your nearest neighbors, and you'll see that they're slightly moving away from you.
Look at your neighbors that are even further away from you than your nearest ones, and you'll see they're moving away from you even faster as the balloon is expanding.
And the red shift would verify that.
And the light coming from the distant galaxies is shifted into the red, which tells us that there is movement.
We can calculate from that how fast things are moving away.
So that was the first indication that If things are moving away from each other, and everything is moving away from everything else, then it must be moving in a higher dimension, which has various names depending on what physicists you talk about or talk to, and that it must be expanding from some central place, of which every point is that place.
Just like a balloon starts off as a dot and blows up, and every point on the surface of the balloon is the center, All right, Doctor, on that note, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour.
You get a good little rest here, and then we'll really kick this off.
My guest is Dr. Fred Allen Wolfe.
He is a theoretical physicist, and he'll be back, as will I, with more.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
keep it right where you've got it.
For those joining us this hour, Dr. Wolfe is a consulting theoretical
business writer and lecturer who earned his PhD in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963.
He is an eight-time published author and I think he's working on a new book right now.
Is that correct, Doctor?
Well, yes, but I keep my new books under wrap until I pretty well have them.
It's like top secret until I get to a certain point, and then I want to talk about it.
I understand.
Well, your new book, let's put it this way, we could probably be talking about it by mid-summer?
I would say so.
I would say more than likely by mid-summer, which, by the by, will be the time that my paperback version of the Spiritual Universe will be out, as published by Moment Point Press.
I'm just making a little plug here if you don't mind.
No, I don't mind at all.
You can give out numbers if you want to.
Okay, well I'm just going to say to people that the book will be appearing at all your regular bookstores plus through the outlets that you can find on the web like Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com and you can read more about me and contact me by simply going to stardrive.org.
That's S-T-A-R-D-R-I-V-E dot O-R-G, and you'll find me and a number of other interesting things put out by a group that we're working together with called the Internet Science Education Project.
Well, now that's an interesting website name anyway.
StarDrive?
StarDrive, yes.
We are looking at a number of outrageous ideas in science, including the possibility of actually doing what Star Trek does.
It's possible to warp space in such a way that we can go faster than light.
So we're looking at plus we're looking at theories of consciousness and spirituality and a lot of things.
How does a theoretical physicist, a real hands-on mathematical kind of person, get to the spiritual side of things?
How do you make that transition?
Well, it came about not quickly.
It came about rather slowly, if I may say so.
And it came about synchronistically, or in some ways paradoxically.
I was suddenly brought into this world through a number of different events.
One time a student came into my class where I was teaching and said to me, he knew me in a past life.
And I was an ancient Greek.
Teacher or something like that.
At first I thought, well, this guy is nuts.
I mean, typically we scientists look at anything that doesn't fit into their daily work.
If anybody doesn't fit, it must be nuts.
But I just became more curious about, well, maybe his worldview isn't so strange.
Let me look into it.
And then I spent time when I was on sabbatical leave teaching at the University of Paris for a year, I met a master of Ancient biblical texts written in the original Aramaic and Hebrew.
And when he told me about the worldview of these ancient peoples, it struck me that it was very similar to my understanding of the worldview of the way quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity views the way the universe was actually made.
So I began to look more deeply into what these ancient mystics were saying, and I began to realize there's some deeper truth That's being revealed to us that is deeper than I could get just through physics.
Is there a place where quantum physics and the metaphysical meet somewhere out there?
We haven't arrived yet, but is it somewhere out there, do you think?
It really, I believe, I'm convinced of it, and proving it is another thing, but I'm convinced of it, that it meets in the study of what we call consciousness.
How is it that we are aware of a world that is out there, and how is it that our models of the world out there differ from what's really happening in our true experience?
I think it's the point where we're looking at the difference between what we think is going on and what we are experiencing is going on.
That's the place where the spiritual bridge, or the bridge between spirit and matter, or the bridge between mind and matter can be built.
I think that's where we have to look.
Did you see the movie Contact?
Yes, I did.
Did you consider it probable or improbable?
It kind of depends.
It's improbable from the point of view that I don't think it's going to be massive hardware that's going to do it.
I think the type of travel or the type of contact that's being looked for in that kind That's correct.
going to take place in the subjective realm, the realm of our being.
If you think about it at all, every person listening at this moment is having a subjective
experience.
If you think about that at all you realize that there is no such thing as an experience
that isn't a subjective experience.
Everything ultimately gets reduced down to my gaining knowledge or learning something
about something.
So obviously knowledge and information must be a really deeply embedded secret to finding
out how the universe works.
If we can understand what that knowledge is and decipher it maybe we will have a better
notion of it.
Heinz Tagels, a brilliant physicist and writer, wrote a book called The Cosmic Code in which
he thought that the universe is a great big code and that we physicists are attempting
to decipher what that code is.
Well, many, many physicists, like yourself, theoretical physicists, believe that travel, faster-than-light travel, or apparent faster-than-light travel, in effect bending space and leaping across, might be possible, but they say it would take an enormous amount of power, more power than we can possibly muster right now.
As far as we understand it, that's true.
Now, to bend space, I mean, the amount of space and time bending that's going on between the top of your head and the soles of your feet is extremely tiny, but that small amount of time distortion, which is very difficult to measure, I mean, it's a very small fraction, is nevertheless just about the right amount to give us the
gravitational field that we presently exist in.
So in order to get a big amount of time bending, like a second or two, you're going to have
to have a huge gravitating mass, and that's just well beyond our speculation.
In my book, Parallel Universes, I did offer a story about how there might be what I call
nuclear cowboys in the future that are intergalactic, that somehow can lasso with some kind of nuclear
lariats, whatever the riddles might be, and tie together in a wagon train style approximately
100 neutron stars, each one so many hundreds of miles across, I think 40 miles is about
all we need.
40 miles across.
And stick them all together and get them all rotating in unison at approximately two-thirds the speed of light.
And that gigantic rotating cylinder, which would be hugely dense, will warp space and time in its immediate vicinity so badly that there will be time travel zones that one could enter, provided one enters in sneakily along the axis of the rotating cylinder, that is in the outside space around the rotating cylinder, and not coming in directly Uh, from, uh, perpendicular to it.
So sort of a cosmic version of what Jodie Foster went through.
Yes.
Yes, but this would be, you know, like, uh, a thousand, uh, let's see, a thousand, no, a hundred, a hundred, a hundred, uh, uh, neutron stars, which are about 40 miles across.
And each one weighs as much as our star does, our sun does.
So you can see there, these would be very massive objects.
And you would need that in order to get some space distortion approximately all around 500 miles out from the surface of them.
Of course, it would diminish as you move further and further away.
To me, that's not the way to go.
To me, the way I would understand it is that we have to look at consciousness itself.
And see, is there anything in the way the mind, or the way people think, or the way consciousness works, which is suggestive of a time machine effect?
If there is, if there's something that we can see there, or if there's some experiments that we can do in the laboratory which demonstrate something like a time machine effect, I think those are the natural places to look.
And quantum mechanics and some elements of neurophysiology tell us there is a time machine effect.
And it's real, and it's measurable, and it's been demonstrated.
And so now it's a matter of trying to see if we can move that frontier into real-time travel.
Now, when you say real-time travel, if a person were able to travel in time, would they... explain, if you can, the nature of what you think they would see going... would you imagine both directions to be possible?
Well, time travel...
To the past is really the most important kind of travel one would do.
Time travel to the future, in a way, we're all time traveling to the future, so I guess jumping to a totally new world where nothing around you is familiar might be considered to be a fancy lucid dream.
That's certainly a possibility, but going back to the past where you have some recognition of things through history books and whatnot, Might be, I think, I would call that real-time travel.
I mean, in a sense, that would be a demonstrable, amazing feat to take place.
Would you arrive in the physical?
Let me explain how it would work.
There's only one way that it would be consistent that it would work, and that has to be that there must be existing, simultaneous to our own universe, a number of what we call parallel Universes, an infinity of them.
Yes.
Something so vast that our mind boggles at the thought.
But who's to say that our mind shouldn't boggle at the universe anyway?
Could we think of these as endless forks in the road?
Think of each universe as a card in a deck.
Card in a deck, alright.
And time travel consists of punching a hole in one of the cards.
And moving into the card above it or the card below it, and consistently moving backwards through time, leaving a hole in each universe until you get to one, which is parallel to the one you're in.
And then you turn around and come back to the universe you left, and you have to come back in such a way that the loop that you make, the time loop, is consistent with the universe you left from.
These would be the boundary conditions which the quantum mechanics would demand.
All right.
You're beginning to lose me a little bit.
Consistent that the one you left... You can't come back to a universe... You can't come back... If you left the universe, you can't come back in such a way that the universe you left and the universe you come back to have a... what's called a logical inconsistency.
This would be the...
The prime imperative.
In other words, a paradox, which everybody is worried about, would not be possible.
You can't come back to a universe that's paradoxical.
Those things would be quantum mechanically impossible.
In other words, they would have a probability of zero.
So you have to come back in such a way that the universe you come back to is probable.
It doesn't have to have a high probability, but it has to be at least probable.
And I wrote a story about this in my book, Parallel Universes, which takes people to go up into space and come back, and what happens to one of them when he decides to kill his grandfather.
I killed my grandfather, how could I be born?
You know, you would go to a different universe, and again, my question, would you arrive in the physical?
Yeah.
Would you be able to affect things while you were in that universe?
I mean, if you're going to time travel the way I'm saying.
Now, I mean, actually, if you're going to time travel using some kind of rotating device like this rotating cylinder.
However, I just wrote this as a lesson using general relativity, but I think in quantum mechanics, in parallel worlds, there might be another way we could time travel, which is probably less painful.
And that involves the mind.
And the reason I bring this up has to do with basically the notion that there are certain states of the dreaming brain.
Which are reminiscent of the wake state.
In other words, when a person is dreaming or they're awake, when you look at their brains, you can't tell the difference.
The brain seems to be functioning as if a dreaming person's brain is functioning as if they were fully awake, which is very strange, considering that they're awake.
So what's going on here?
Well, they're processing.
They're doing a lot of data stuff.
They're looking at worlds.
They're walking around.
They're doing something.
They're dreaming.
Their eyes are moving.
This is called REM or rapid eye movement.
If you look at all of this and you wonder what is going on here and you begin to investigate
it you find out that not only are they just dreaming but it turns out that careful research
shows that there are different stages of dreaming.
Not only does it show that, it shows that it is possible to be awake at different levels
Oh yeah, lucid dreams, lucid dreams.
They're called lucid dreams, right?
You probably have talked with a number of lucid dream researchers on your show by now.
I have.
And if one takes into consideration the experience of a lucid dream, I lucid dream.
Oh, you do?
Oh yeah.
So having had these experiences, I kind of have the experience of what I'm talking about here.
You wake up in a world, and it's a world which looks very much like the world you left, except it ain't.
And the world you can walk around in.
You can do things.
You can try to gather data.
And the one annoying and pleasant fact in all of this is that you know you're dreaming it.
At first you may not.
At first you may think this is real.
But after a while you get savvy to it and you realize, wait a minute, I'm dreaming this.
And then you have to be very, in my work, Listen, Jim, you have to be very careful.
But it is subjective, though.
Well, who's to say it's subjective?
Who's to say?
Well, me.
You said everything is.
Suppose you woke up in that world and you thought you were dreaming it, and then it just lasted longer and longer and longer and longer and longer.
Well, you think, well, maybe this is the real world.
Exactly.
So we have moved now from, staying with the Hollywood analogies, we've moved from contact to somewhere in time.
In a way, that's the idea.
Like some more in time.
Create an environment which is conducive to convincing you that you're there and maybe you can wake up in a parallel reality.
Although I think that's a bit far-fetched in the movie, but nevertheless, it was a wonderful movie.
I loved it.
This is the end of side one.
And now, back to the best of Art Bell.
Part two.
This is purely, by the way, speculation on my part.
I'm not banking I'm not putting this in the realm of physical fact.
There are some indications, however, though, now that I've said that.
There are some indications that the way the brain works, when it's sensing data, that is being able to perceive, make perceptual judgments about when and where things are occurring, that we project.
We have a projection mechanism in our brains that starts probably with the thalamus.
And it seems to be able to project experience so that it appears, I'll put the quotes around the word, it appears, to be happening out there, and it appears, again quotes around the words it appears, backwards in time.
So we may be, we have sensory experiences which we can't become fully aware of for a period of time, but we, from that time that our brains finally tell us that we are aware of something, There's a projection mechanism which sends that information backwards through time and gives us an experience of the out there world at more or less the time in which we originally sensed it.
Is it possible that nationwide, worldwide, some of those people that sit now in mental hospitals have successfully made either a temporary or permanent transition that we don't understand?
Well, it's clear that if you drug a brain enough, It is going to lose interest.
Let's put it mildly.
Lose interest in this reality.
All right, Doctor.
Again, we're at the bottom of the hour, so hold on.
We'll be right back to you.
Oh, this is fascinating stuff.
As you know, right down my alley.
Good morning, everybody.
I'm Mark Bell.
Well this is Coast to Coast AM.
Well alright, back now to my guest Dr. Wolfe.
Dr. Wolfe, even in the world of theoretical physics, you must be something of a heretic.
Well, I used to be.
I think that nowadays, I don't think people think that.
Back in the early 70s, when I was first getting into this work, I was starting to write and get involved with some of these very speculative ideas about time travel.
Even before Star Trek was on the air, I was thinking about this stuff.
My friends and I produced a book called Space, Time and Beyond, with some of the older Listeners out there might still remember, if you have a copy of it, guard it with your life, because it's out of print and it'll be very valuable.
I can vouch for that.
That was the first book on science, quantum physics, general relativity and mysticism, I think, ever done.
It launched the whole, you might say, the whole New Age movement about science and consciousness and physics and consciousness.
So then, in a way, you're the father?
In a way, in a way.
My friends and I, Jack Sarfati and Bob Tobin, were the first to put this together.
And that book, we made a bunch of predictions, and all these predictions we made then were, whoa, we thought, wow, man, these are so far out!
You know, we're sitting in Paris and studying with this Kabbalist master, and we're having a grand old time.
And enjoying the Parisian life and the cafes and the ambiance.
I love Paris.
I love it.
It's a wonderful town.
And here we are coming up with these outrageous ideas.
It's 26, 30 years later.
This was 1974, 73, 74.
What is it now?
23 years later, 24 years, 25 years later.
This was 1974, 1973, 1974, what is it now, 23 years later, 24 years, 25 years later,
and everything we wrote is now ho-hum, ha-ha.
It's all part of the American Physical Society standards.
It's fair.
I mean, they're not talking now about teleporting one spin of an atom to another.
They've done it.
They're doing all this stuff.
IBM, IBM.
And we were predicting all this stuff 25 years ago.
So now, you know, I figure, well, I guess I'll have to bear with the fact that I'm visionary.
I can't help it.
Think of ideas that are outrageous now, but turn out in 25 years to be what people are working on.
Alright, well if you were to sit down and try to make the same projections based on current trends,
what kind of things would you be talking about?
Well, we are going to time travel. That's one thing I definitely want to do and we are going to do it.
So, it's going to be very unusual if we find out that time travel, or let's say we're going to understand time in a
new way.
Time is a big mystery for science.
We don't really know how to deal with it.
A very wise person recently asked, if time travel is going to be possible, then where are the time travelers?
Well, that's a good point.
As I said, in order to really get into this, it's going to bring up a number of paradoxes like, you know, where and when.
Other possible realities or universes or worlds, and how do we link them together?
One answer that was given was, well, they'll be here when it's invented.
Right.
Well, you see, people think that Somalia needs some great big massive machine to do it.
What I'm saying is I don't think so.
I think the first visits are going to be more or less on a mental plane, but we'll bring back data which will be indicative of the fact that we've made the journey.
There was a wonderful movie that had this idea that played many years ago.
I remember it was called La Jetée.
It was made by an American living in Paris called Chris Marker.
Oh, I haven't seen it!
Well, if you saw Twelve Monkeys, that was a blown up two hour version of a twenty minute movie which is a masterpiece.
I highly recommend anybody find the videotape of Logitech and watch it.
The premise I take it was time travel.
The premise is time travel through the mind.
The premise has to do with what would make a person do it.
Marker had a vision that I think was consistent, logical and it made perfect sense.
It was a wonderful, romantic, moving story.
I mean, what more can you ask for a 20-minute movie?
That's right.
No, that's right.
Oh, I have wished for time travel for so long, and still, I can't help but think that most, even theoretical physicists, would begin rebelling At the metaphysical point, you know, there's scientists and they're saying, I don't know, keep me away from that stuff.
Well, it's for some reason, I don't know why, I'm not really even sure why scientists take this attitude.
I understand the need in doing one's research to be critical, to be skeptical about one's claims and to be careful.
That's what science is all about.
Well, you begin applying things like repeatability.
Yeah, I mean, there are definite criteria.
There are definite things that have to be done in order to... I mean, let's put it this way.
If I'm going to tell you to do something, I better darn well know what I'm talking about, right?
I mean, I better have tested it.
I better make sure... I mean, if you're going to buy a product or something, or you're going to go drive a car, you want to make sure that somebody's really done their homework, right?
I'd prefer it.
So I certainly prefer that scientists be honest and tell the truth and do the right thing and don't be far out when it comes to telling people to do things that might be dangerous or might be wrong.
But when it comes to speculating about the way the universe works and ideas and concepts, just the opposite has to be true.
What you want to do is you want to encourage people to go far out, to really think.
But this is generally not the area of scientists.
As a matter of fact, there's a report that was done at the government's behest called the Brookings Report.
I bet you know about it.
It suggests that if extraterrestrial contact was made, the group that would have the most difficulty with it would be scientists.
You betcha.
Sure.
Yes.
You see, there's something going on here that's underneath it all, which has to do with why science?
Why mathematics?
Why do we invent these concepts?
Where do they come from?
For what purpose do they serve?
And the answer is survival.
We have figured out a way to survive, and that way is to understand the environment in which we exist.
And the more we understand that, the more we can make sense of it, the better we are able to survive.
But the basis upon which that survival first began was really a kind of a brutal one.
If we believe anything having to do with the history of early hominids, early human beings, we were basically killers and brutes.
So we came from a very brutish kind of a background.
So, we have a natural, built-in mistrust of anything new.
I mean, these are very primitive.
It's part of the primitive brain.
So, our skepticism arises from, really, that basic, very primitive brain, which says, you know, don't bug me with anything new.
I'm getting along fine, surviving just as it is.
All right, well, how about this angle of attack?
That first nuclear detonation you saw, there are mathematics that can be applied to how that happened.
Yeah.
Squarely applied to how that happened.
Yeah, to some extent.
Even that's a difficult thing to model, exactly.
In fact, when the first one went off, they weren't sure.
Some of them thought they were going to ignite the whole atmosphere.
That's true.
That's true.
Where I was going was, are theoretical physicists like yourself beginning to put together mathematical models that would begin to lead us down some of the avenues you're talking about?
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, really?
Oh, sure.
Sure.
We're doing it every day.
When I, when you, if you go online and you want to, if you go to my stardrive.org website, you'll find there's a whole flock of work that's being mentioned there on mathematical models and scientific physics models for a lot of very outrageous ideas right now.
Do you think that faster than light travel would or could be possible?
And if so, obviously with the name of your website.
I would imagine that you thought of these things.
How would it be done?
How could it be done?
Well, as I said, it's a tricky business.
One way would be to use some form of what's called exotic matter.
This would have to be matter that would have a pretty high density, but a very small region of space, and that that could cause some kind of distortion.
It would probably have to rotate at a very high speed.
I'm feeling that somehow you could bend space and fold it, just like the old science fiction story said.
And there's some serious work on papers that have been published on that basis.
We have never encountered exotic matter.
No.
It is theoretical.
Well, it's theoretical, except we have this real problem with the universe right now.
It's not behaving itself very well.
No?
It seems to be, it's gone fishing.
It's gone missing.
Like 90% of all of mass seems to be not there.
Oh, is it all gone?
Yes, I've been hearing about that.
What?
I've been hearing about that.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's a real problem.
Something is clearly not correct, and we don't know quite what it is, and there are imaginative ideas about what might be correct, but I don't think anybody really knows.
Well, Einstein said it can't be done, didn't he?
What?
Faster than light travel.
Well, what Einstein said, and it's very important to recognize what he said, is that you can't go from slower than light to faster than light without going through the light barrier.
But suppose you could leak through the light barrier in some way.
You can't get over it, because it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so, but what if you could leak through it?
Quantum mechanics allows this funny kind of tunneling where you can leak through across
energy barriers.
So is it possible to leak across the speed of light barrier?
I don't know.
I mean, these are far-fetched ideas.
There are some recent papers in the Scientific American by a physicist, a brilliant new breed
of physicist that don't necessarily believe the old codgers that tell them you can't do
that, in which they are demonstrating effects from even light going faster than light.
Wait a minute.
This is paradoxical.
Light of light is known to be a certain number, and when it travels in a medium, it slows down.
It has to slow down.
So the speed of light in a vacuum is a certain number.
It's a large number.
When it's in a medium like glass or anything that has what's called an index of refraction, it slows down.
And if you can send light so that it can go through, seemingly go through glass in such a way that it goes faster than the wood and glass, it's beating itself, so to speak.
So there's some evidence that light can do that.
What would happen to light as it would approach a black hole?
Well, there are a couple of ideas here.
The classic idea is that the black hole would, like a voracious shark, eat it.
Just suck that light up, and that light would be vanished forever.
Vanished?
But in the process of vanishing, wouldn't it exceed, conceivably?
No.
No, not according to relativity.
But this depends on who's counting.
I mean, there are different reference frames in which one makes these observations.
It gets very tricky, and I'm not sure if I could... You really seem to be saying that an awful lot of what we think we know may not be right at all.
I would say that what we believe, a lot of what we believe is clearly not right.
Including scientists like myself.
What we believe is currently not right.
We just don't have a better picture, but we smell a rat somewhere.
We sense there's something clearly not right in what we believe, the way the world's constructed.
We don't quite know what to use in place of what we believe, but we more or less stay with what we believe, and then we go and do something.
Somebody comes up with an experiment that suddenly shows us something we didn't expect.
Or somebody comes up with a new idea based on what we think we understand and shows us that we didn't really understand that.
And when that happens we realize that we have to change our belief structure.
This is called in the language a paradigm shift.
Well, precisely.
That one thing that scientists don't take to too easily.
In fact, they resist it.
Careers fall, or at the very least, scientists think they will fall.
The end of their own personal worlds, all the rest of that sort of thing.
And that would seem to block progress, or potentially block it.
Well, you know, fortunately, they get old and they die.
In other words, that's the only hope.
And the younger generation comes up and says, what the hell are those guys all worried about?
Of course you can do that.
Your view on the existence of intelligent life elsewhere.
I refer now out to the edge, whatever it is, 10, 12 billion years, whatever.
I'm sure there's intelligent life elsewhere.
I mean, it can't be anything else but intelligent life elsewhere.
Well, it could be.
Well, if it is, it's an awful waste of space.
Ah, you really did watch that.
You're right, it is, and I certainly agree with you, but one has to hold out the possibility That we're alone.
Sad, sad, sad, sad.
Well, it's a possibility, but if we understand what life is, and so far we're making some nice strides in that direction.
I can't say we do, but we're making strides in that direction.
It appears that life can exist elsewhere other than the planet Earth.
Let me put it to you another way.
If it turns out that this is the only planet in The whole galaxy of galaxies is called the universe that we live in.
Then everything that's out there is pure illusion.
There can't be anything out there.
It's all a creation of somebody's bizarre fancy.
Our radio and television signals, certainly radio, ought to be out about 38 light years or so by now.
Yeah.
So then, if there is life within 38 light years, we should be receiving something.
Well, if it's 38 light years away, we won't hear about it for another 38 light years.
Another 38 years, right?
Yeah, but the presumption there is that it just now is beginning to transmit.
You've got to assume that there are civilizations at various stages of development.
So where are the signals?
Yeah, well, I don't think there's anything 38 light years away from us.
That's probably what's happened.
A fair conclusion, I guess.
I mean, it's just maybe empty out there.
It's good to go out 38 light years.
It ain't very far in the whole universe.
I mean, after all, a galaxy is about 100,000 light years from side to side.
So our Milky Way Galaxy is pretty wide.
We're not in a particularly advantageous point.
We're pretty ordinary.
When it comes to positioning us in the whole galactic.
Actually, we're kind of in the suburbs, aren't we?
We are pretty much a burb kind of place.
Yeah, we're out there.
That's what I'm saying.
There's nothing particularly remarkable about us.
So, it seems to be that there's got to be others like us around.
I mean, I can't imagine there wouldn't be.
I mean, why would, from a spiritual point of view, why would God spend so much time in this little dot, in this vast cosmos called the universe?
So you'd be able to ride in the machine if you had your chance, huh?
What's that?
I said you'd be able to ride in the machine if you'd had your chance.
Ride in a machine?
Yeah, yeah, the machine.
What, what's the machine?
Jodie Foster's machine.
Oh yeah, sure.
I think it was that thing about God.
I would go, I would go at a heart flick, sure.
Uh, no, no problem.
No, no problem, man.
And, and actually every one of us goes on that trip.
It's called the Big D. Have you done any study?
In that area?
Near death?
Yes.
I have looked into it to some extent.
Do you think that the near death experience is the same realm that people who claim to be able to remote view, people who do the kind of dreaming you were talking about earlier, are they the same realm?
There's an overlap.
They're not the same.
There's an overlap.
There seems to be evidence of overlapping factors of out-of-body experience, certain forms of lucid dream states, near-death experience.
There's an overlap, but they're not the same.
Let's put it this way.
A physicist friend of mine, whose name I don't want to say, I had been doing some experiments with a drug called ketamine, which is the hit back in the 70s.
Everybody was doing it, including John Lilly, who is very well known for his ketamine trips.
His description as a physicist of what he experienced under this drug was very much like an out-of-body, near-death experience, but it was much more profound.
He began to lose consciousness, not of Consciousness of being conscious, but consciousness of being a particular person with consciousness.
In other words, right now, I'm conscious, but I'm also very conscious that I'm Fred Alan Wolf holding a telephone in my hand.
Is the use of that a legitimate avenue to an altered state?
If not a legal one, but a legitimate avenue?
I'm not sure what legitimate means in terms of what it does.
Legal?
No, no, no, forget the legal part of it.
Is it a legitimate I definitely think so.
I think altered states of awareness through any means is a legitimate area of research.
It's ridiculous.
Here we are living in a world We're at the top of the hour and I know that you're not a late person, but you seem to be doing pretty well.
Can you hang in?
I can hang for a little while longer.
Alright, good.
Stay right where you are.
I interviewed recently somebody who certainly agrees with you.
His name is Terrence McKenna.
Very, very interesting fellow.
We talked about the same sorts of things.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
To experiment with in your view.
Which?
Chemicals.
Oh.
I'm just what I have found. I have been in all this hell.
Oh, but I am.
I am.
To experiment with in your view.
Which?
Chemicals.
Oh.
Oh.
Yes, definitely.
I think it's a mistake that we don't experiment with them.
For example, I spent time with indigenous peoples in various parts of the world.
I wrote a book about it called The Eagle's Quest, where I also did whatever the shamans were doing in order for me to understand what the heck we were doing.
There are medical clinics now being built in the jungle where people are looking at various diseases that human beings are subject to and are working ways out to heal or to bring about radical change in people that would not normally be healed through the use of hallucinogenic substances, which are poisonous to the body.
Is the drug war a fraud?
The drug war is probably a fraud.
It's hard to say exactly what's going on here.
I mean, it's obvious that there's so much, according to government sources, that there's so many drugs coming into the country, it's impossible to control it all.
But it's also probably some visible way that we're supporting all of this at the same time.
So it's very difficult to say what the heck is going on there.
I'm not very good when it comes to politics.
I know it's a vicious circle or a loop in some strange, bizarre way.
I know the government has been involved in a lot of the drug research that has been done.
I even suspect that by the government, I don't mean the secret government, I mean human beings like you and I doing honest research inadvertently come across or do things which they didn't realize caused so much damage.
You're not kidding.
It's not that people are mean or evil or cruel.
It's just that we're basically not very bright.
And, you know, that's just the way it is.
I mean, you know, what really bugs me is so many people think, you know, like they have this X-file.
I'm going to tell you, the government is the secret group of powerful, rich, fat, smoking, intelligent people.
Well, take out the word intelligent and maybe you've got it right.
The rest of it is just total nonsense.
Have you ever worked for the government?
I have.
And most people in the government aren't necessarily the brightest people in the world.
I mean, if they don't take government jobs, I might try to put them down.
But I'm saying that people that are bright usually don't work for the government.
I mean, there are some very bright people working for the government.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm probably going to get my foot in my mouth by saying this.
And there are some very good people that work for the government.
That's not the point.
The point is that a lot of people aren't because the government jobs tend to be, you know, cushy or people get guaranteed for life.
I was in the Air Force.
I never saw so much waste in my whole life.
You know what I'm talking about.
It's that kind of mentality.
You get lazy.
You get mentally lazy.
And also people that teach at certain kind of schools where they get tenure.
They get mentally lazy and they just aren't effective as teachers anymore.
Are you tenured?
No, I quit.
I walked away from tenure because to me that's the quickest way to the grave is to become a tenured professor at a university.
You've got to be on the edge.
You've got to be surviving.
You've got to be fighting.
You've got to be out there.
Alright, well, one man who's out there is John Mack.
Had it not been for tenure, you can bet your boot, he would be gone.
Well, the point is, you know, in a way, as far as his compadres at the university are concerned, he is already gone.
They're not going to believe him.
So, what does he hold on to?
That's the point of it.
So, I mean, he's not going to be considered to be any more credible if he were on the outside, if he were on the inside.
I'm glad he's still there, and I like him.
He's a friend.
But the point is, you know, what are we protecting?
I mean, what exactly is going on here?
Well, it protects his bully pulpit.
His what?
His bully pulpit.
In other words, he can speak with the authority of Harvard.
And if they train wrecked him, his words would not carry the same weight any longer, so there is some value.
You know, honestly, there may be some value in the public's mind, but in people in the academic world, just because you're a professor doesn't mean a darn thing to them, because they're professors too.
So, you know, it's like Woody Allen said, I would never join a club that would nominate me as a member.
One avenue of research with regard to a subject we were talking about earlier is SETI.
Is SETI a fraud?
No.
Is it a dumb way to go about what we're trying to do?
No, no, not at all.
No, it's definitely not a fraud.
No, it's a very, very legitimate and worthwhile work done by some very respectable and I think Good scientists.
No, I don't think it's a fraud.
I mean, someone's got to do that kind of work.
For how much longer do you think we will be distributing information through transmitted, you know, transmitted television, radio, and all the rest of it?
In other words, how long do you think a civilization, as it progresses, continues to transmit in the electromagnetic spectrum?
If we make a breakthrough in light speed transmission, if we can break the light barrier, which I presume we're going to, all of this is going to seem as far-fetched to us, I mean as old-fashioned to us, as the computer is to the printing press.
In other words, that really says it's not very long.
Yeah, I think we are going to break the light barrier.
But I, myself, do not know how to do it.
So people don't call me on the phone or go to my website and say, how are we going to do this?
I mean, I don't know.
My intuition tells me we're going to break it.
So then is it not possible that once we do, we will find an entire spectrum and zillions of conversations going on which we can participate in at that point?
I would say once you break the Lord's barrier, there is no distance.
That's why I asked you about SETI.
Because it seems to me that the electromagnetic spectrum would be a very, very short-lived thing in a progressing civilization.
It is!
It's a small, tiny part of it, but that doesn't really stop doing it.
I mean, maybe there is somebody out there 50 light-years away or 100 light-years away, and we'll find that out.
So, you know, fine.
I mean, it can't hurt.
It's not costing us that much to do SETI.
You're right, but we imagine That any civilization which, for example, could transport its way here somehow or another would be sufficiently advanced that they would not use that kind of communication.
It would be something entirely different.
Do you remember the movie, the last Star Trek movie?
Well, I have them all.
Okay, the last one.
I'm a big Star Trek fan.
Yeah, so am I. Okay, so the last one, you remember what happens where this guy Finally figures out how to build a warp drive, and as soon as they make a warp signature, the ETs finally make contact with them.
You bet!
Okay, well, as soon as we figure out how to break the light barrier, I presume we're going to be in a lot of contact.
A man I've interviewed frequently, Dr. Michiv Haku, actually thinks that one other way might be that on moons it would be practical, if not probable, To plant the old 2001 obelisk, so that when a civilization, you know, gets that far, there would be combat.
Well, I think that the planting of obelisks on moons makes as much sense from my vision As going back and drilling in ships that were built in 1492 in order to explore the universe.
I mean, to me, it's a dumb way of doing things.
Theoretical physicists disagree a lot, don't they?
Well, yeah.
I mean, we can afford to.
We're theoretical.
That's true.
Do you enjoy the path you have taken?
Life is very interesting for me.
It is?
It is wonderful.
I enjoy my life.
I'm not the richest guy in the world.
I haven't made a lot of money doing what I do.
I've been on the limb.
I resigned my tenure faculty position back in the early, back in the mid-70s.
I haven't had a job since and I've been writing books, lecturing, consulting, doing scientific papers, doing research, and getting by doing what I really enjoy doing.
It's quite a turn to take.
Are you married with children?
I'm now in my third marriage and I'm very happily married and I've had children from Did your wife at the time, did she think you had lost your marbles?
Which one?
Well, the time that you left the university.
Did she think you had lost your marbles?
Yeah, I would say so.
This was a time that...
It's a difficult time in my life.
This was hard on me.
It was hard on my then wife.
It was hard on my children.
It was a tough time.
It was tough for everybody.
I can't say I'm exactly proud of the way I do things then.
I was headstrong and young and eager to explore the world and probably got married much too young for my age.
I was like 23 and started having children by the time I was 25.
It was more than I could bear.
No, but had you not made the move, you'd probably be a tenured, pot-bellied, fat, dumb and happy... Yeah, I think I'm all those, but I'm not tenured.
I mean, I'm in pretty good shape.
I run three miles every day.
I really take care of my health.
I'm pretty much a vegetarian.
I'm happily married.
I really believe in taking care of this body and taking care of my body.
People I come in contact with, I believe it's important to be positive, to be uplifting, to encourage kids to think, etc.
I'm generally a happy person.
Of these things that we talked about this evening, what do you suppose we will see in our lifetimes?
We're here for such a short time.
Yeah, in our lifetime, I'm not sure how old you are.
In my lifetime, maybe I've got another 20 or 30 years at the most.
Same here.
What?
Same here.
Okay, so I think that you and I will probably, probably see the breaking of the life barrier.
I have a hunch we're going to get through that one.
I think we're going to see, in our lifetime, we're going to see artificially, truly artificially intelligent devices which will be mimicking life so well That they deserve to be called alive.
And these will be built from sand rather than carbon.
Any danger in that?
No.
No?
No.
I don't think so at all.
Why should we assume, why should we be only prejudiced to wet carbon meat?
Why can't we also include dry silicon crystals?
Well, if we do that, have we not created?
Well, who is to say that we aren't co-creators in this universe?
Who is to say that this isn't the true meaning of what God is all about?
As I said, this is a very young universe.
we do that have we not created?
Well who is to say that we aren't co-creators in this universe?
Who is to say that this is what the true meaning of what God is all about?
As I said, this is a very young universe.
We are very, very young.
We are only 15 billion years old.
If the current models are correct, we've got at least 20 billion billion years ahead of us before we come to a big crunch.
If we come to a big crunch, or even more, if we just keep going on expanding forever.
I don't think we're going to expand forever, by the way.
I think we are going to crunch out.
During that whole period of time, I think the universe has got a lot of growing to do, a lot of maturing to do, and we as conscious, intelligent beings also have a lot of that to do.
Boy, what a pleasure it has been to interview you.
I know you're a day person, but we've got to find a time in the future when we can do this again and spend time.
Oh, sure.
I would love to do it.
The summer might be good and maybe July or August or September.
My new book, as I said, will be coming out then and we could talk about some more spiritual things if you want to get into that.
I would like to, yes.
The Hidden Secrets of Kabbalah and all that sort of stuff.
A million universes to go down.
A million universes to go down.
Thank you, my friend.
You're very welcome.
Take care.
And that, folks, is Dr. Fred Allen Wolfe, and what a pleasure he is.
I received a detailed three-page fax from, I will call him Kent for now, in Ohio earlier today.
Linda Moulton Howe has also talked to Kent.
At my behest, and feels that what he has to say is solid as a rock, Kent was a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee who was just fired.
He's on the line now.
Kent, welcome to the program.
Hi, Art.
Hi.
I think we should begin this story by finding out how you came to be employed by JPL.
Apparently, you were in the... What branch of the military were you in?
I was in the Army and I was stationed over there in Germany for four and a half years.
And while I was there, I had gone through the series of clicks and checks to get a security clearance.
I had a secret or better.
Secret or better security clearance, and the reason for that?
The reason for that was that I was a driver there for 37th Transportation Group, right there in Kaiserslautern, right there at Kleber Kaserne.
Okay.
And I was there during the very early 80s during the Pershing 2 missile build-ups.
And anybody that hauled the missiles had to have a secret clearance.
That makes sense.
You hauled Pershings.
You better have a clearance.
Yes, sir.
So you did that.
You were in the military for how long?
A total of six years.
Six years.
All right.
And how long ago did you get out, by the way?
I got out in April of 85.
April of 85.
All right.
What did you do after you got out?
Well, I got out and I got a Driving job there for Brock's Transport there out of Los Angeles.
I originally had ETS'd out of the Army up there at Fort Lewis.
I was up there with the 109th MI Battalion.
Yes sir.
And I certainly enjoyed the Northwest and everything else and I wasn't married and single and everything and had a little bit of money in the bank and had bought a vehicle so I just traveled down I-5 and kind of picked up stakes down there in Southern California for a little while.
And I got my chauffeur's license and went to work for Brock's Transport, which was a coast-to-coast produce carrier, or whatnot.
You know, they were a common carrier.
And how long were you there?
I was approximately employed there for until 92.
Until 92?
Right.
Then what?
And then I didn't really like being over the road all that much, and so I went ahead and I got a courier job right there in the Los Angeles area.
I worked for a courier company called Bezuza.
And then through that courier company there, I heard of an opening there at the JPL.
That's a Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena?
Yes sir, that's a Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Okay, so you were a courier applying to JPL to do what?
I was basically applying there to be a gopher.
Go for this, go for that.
Yes, sir.
Go for coffee, go for whatever.
Well, I didn't really do the coffee bit.
I was basically your usual errand boy.
I didn't bring Chinese takeout or anything, but I was your basic errand boy there.
I ran errands for the upper mucky mucks and the big wigs and just basic everyday stuff.
Alright, you were employed by JPL as of about what date?
June 13th of 97.
And apparently they liked the fact that you were ex-military, you'd been a courier, you had a secret clearance or better, and they liked all of that and hired you.
Yes, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Schuyler hired me down there, and he had made the comment, he said that they liked the fact that I had a secret or better security clearance there in the military.
And I had just made a quick statement, you know, a gopher, what's he need to do?
Well, he says, you might be handling some sensitive documents here and there.
I said, okay, no problem.
How long were you an employee of JPL?
How long was I employed there?
Yes, sir.
I was employed there for approximately 10 months.
10 months.
All right.
Something obviously got in the way of continued employment at JPL.
I guess it's time for you to tell that story.
You were given something for Federal Express, is that right?
Yes, one of my duties was to Federal Express out photographs.
And on the day in question, I was given a... when they give us photographs, they're in between two thin sheets of cardboard.
Makes sense, right?
And they roll them up very loosely there, and my job is to take the photographs and put them into the Federal Express cylinders, put the cap onto the Federal Express cylinder, seal it, take it down to the lady where the Federal Express machine is, and then she fills out the labels, puts them on there, and puts them into the outbound box for Federal Express.
Sure.
Makes sense.
Well, the day in question, I was given these photographs.
What was the day in question, by the way?
April 14th.
April 14th of this year.
In other words, just a few days ago.
Yes.
Okay.
And after receiving the photographs, I immediately went over to the Federal Express Supply Closet, which there's other people that have access there.
And we were allowed to photograph cylinders.
So then I called Federal Express and the lady answered the phone and I told her that I needed some FedEx supplies to include some photo cylinders.
And she had said okay that the courier would bring them by.
So then I didn't have much to do until Federal Express got there.
So I went into the break room.
I like sitting there by the window there at the back table.
Anyway, I was sitting there drinking some hot chocolate when the maintenance tech guy walked in.
We've always seen each other in the halls and whatever.
We always give the guy greeting of the day and everything.
So we didn't really know each other, but we've seen each other before.
So he comes into the break room and he says, you're taking a break a little early, and I told him I was waiting on FedEx.
He went to the coffee machine and got himself a cup of coffee, and he was right-handed, and the photographs in question were right there on the side of the table.
Now, these are the photographs that were in your possession to be turning over to FedEx?
Yes, and I set them down onto the table so I could eat my crackers and hold my book.
And I set them down right there at the edge of the table.
And the gentleman had come to sit down there to, you know, we were talking, and he had sat down, and he's right-handed, and his cup, when he sat down the coffee cup onto the table, the photographs rolled off the table kind of at a diagonal area.
One of the photographs had completely come out between the two cardboard sheets.
He looks down there and says, hey look it's a picture of a mask down there.
A mask?
A mask.
So I bent over to pick up that picture.
I set it down on the table and I had to unroll that so I could put that picture back in there.
There was a total of nine photographs in there.
Nine photographs.
Two were of masks and others were of structures.
When you say a mask, what do you mean?
Well, it was a full aerial shot of a face.
And the... Excuse me.
The face on Mars?
Yes.
It was on Mars.
Were there dates on these photographs?
Yes, there were dates on the photographs.
What were the dates?
All right, the one was dated April 2nd, and then there was another one there of the other mask, which was dated April 2nd as well.
April 2nd.
April 2nd.
And now this was, let us be sure what we're talking about, a picture of what you call the mask, the phase on Mars, obviously, taken from what angle?
Well it was almost a direct overlook.
The face was just to the side of the center of the picture itself.
And not at a 45 degree angle.
No, no.
Not at a 45 degree angle.
I mean, if you looked at this picture, I mean, you know, you put a mask down on a sandbox, and you take a picture of it, and maybe you're just off center just a little bit, and you take a picture of this, and there it is.
And there it was.
In great relief.
In other words, you could see it quite clearly.
Oh, yes.
Definitely.
I mean, there was a...
Um picture you know Frankenstein's head is very very flat and then there's like a headdress right there and then you come down you got the eyebrows there and then you got two eye sockets there you got the nose you got the two holes there where the nostrils go and then you got the mouth and uh it was a there was a oh I'd say a mediocre chin on it and then high cheekbones.
Two photographs of the face.
Yes, but one looked like it was taken right there in broad daylight and it was copper colored.
In other words, when you say broad daylight, when you look down at the face, and I've seen many pictures of the face on Mars Viking and the new images, the sun was directly into the features Yes, it was totally defined.
There was no shadows in the eye sockets.
Oh my.
This is the end of...
And now, back to the best of Art Bell.
All right.
And the other photographs?
All right.
The other photographs were, um, one of the photographs that we looked at was, okay, now picture, picture World War II, okay?
Picture the bombed out cities of Germany.
Yes, sir.
You know, them buildings that are all bombed out.
Right.
And there was a structure on there that had no roof on it whatsoever.
Okay?
It was kind of oblong shaped.
You're saying it was a building minus a roof?
Yes and there was one of the walls had been knocked out like say if you went inside and had a sledgehammer or something and was knocking out the wall there was like a rock of you know there was rocks that was that was coming out from that wall that would that would that would lay down and they were screwed out all over the place.
All right so it was not There was nothing ambiguous about it.
In other words, you know that you were looking at a structure minus a roof and part of one wall.
Oh, yeah.
That's a no-brainer.
Okay.
And then a few of the other photographs had what looked like pyramidic structures.
And the maintenance tech guy made even a comment.
He says, you know, if you look at these pictures real good, it looks like they took pictures of Egypt.
And I looked at him there and I said, well, Egypt's not rad, is it?
And at that time, I didn't know what I was looking at.
And about that time, when we were looking at the pictures, I heard an, oh my God, and there was one of the bigwigs, he was standing right there in the doorway.
And then he said, oh my God, it's again.
Now, we were like five or six paces away from the doorway.
He was at the door?
Yeah, he was at the doorway to the break room.
A good sized man would take five or six steps to get to where we are.
It took him three steps to get there.
He's given us a few unpleasant subtleties there as he's putting the photographs back in between the Back in between the cardboard and he immediately rushes out there with them.
So then a couple of minutes had gone by, the maintenance tech had told me that he didn't mean to get me in trouble.
I said, well you didn't get me in trouble and everything else.
So he had to go back to work and then about two or so minutes later, There's a lady that walked in and she told me to report up to Mr. Schuyler's office immediately.
Uh-huh.
So I had gone up to Mr. Schuyler's office and he started really chewing my butt big time.
And then he says, what blank are you looking at pictures from Mars?
I didn't know I was looking at Mars pictures.
Oh, he said Mars.
He said Mars.
Yes, he said Mars.
All right.
Maybe it slipped out.
I don't know.
He said, well, you go on back and do what you're going to do.
And then about quarter to two that afternoon, he calls me back up to his office there, and he tells me to clean my stuff out.
And he said that your services are no longer needed here.
I said, okay.
I gave him a few little rebuttals there, and he says, no, I don't want to hear it.
He says, your duties were perfectly clear.
Did he say why you were being terminated?
Because of unsatisfactory job or job related issues.
So it wasn't, I knew what I was being fired for because one of the bigwigs down there didn't like me looking at them pictures.
Had you explained to him how the accident had occurred?
Yes, I did.
Yes, I did and he said it doesn't matter.
You should have just put the picture back in there.
We don't need, we don't, he said, No, not him now, the other bigwig that I heard down there in the cafeteria.
We don't need the American public looking at these pictures.
Kent, where were these photographs going?
A lot of the photographs were being sent to Washington, D.C.
Some of the cylinders were being sent to the United Nations.
There was even one cylinder that I know of for a fact, because I was the one that went The CIA.
Well, yeah, obviously.
So now you obviously now know exactly the implications of what you're saying?
Yes, I do.
What made you decide to get hold of me?
Well, immediately after I got fired, I went home and my neighbor there, he works for Wells Fargo and he's got a night job.
And so we gave the greeting of the day.
He says, yeah, you're home early, ain't you?
I says, yeah.
So I went upstairs and I made coffee and I sat down there and I told him the whole story.
And he's just sitting there with his mouth open.
He says, I got the perfect guy you need to talk to.
And I said, well, who's that?
I said, I don't really want to talk to anybody.
And he says, You need to talk to Art Bell.
So he started going into this elaborate thing about your show and what it consists of and what you talk about.
Please be sure and thank him for me.
I will definitely do that.
Then I was talking to some other people and they told me definitely to do that.
So he gave me your fax number along with your other phone number to call.
So I just decided I'd go ahead and fax because there's more anonymity in faxing.
Are you worried about your own safety?
Not really, because I was in the Army and I took self-defense courses and stuff, but as far as my immediate safety from our government, a little bit because of the simple fact is that after that day, he had left and gone to work, and I went ahead and gone out that night.
I like to eat out a lot.
And so I came back to my apartment and I went upstairs and, you know, I'm a single guy and I'm a lousy housekeeper.
Kent, on that note, hold on.
We'll come back to you after the break.
My guest is Kent.
I've got his last name, by the way, and a lot of other details, which at this moment I'm not giving out.
We'll ask him if he wants to give them.
At this point, he might as well, I suppose.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Good morning, everybody.
My guest is Kent.
He was, until just a few days ago, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee in Pasadena.
He saw some photographs that we all wish we could see.
Kent, are you there?
Yes, sir.
That's okay.
The military's still with you, I can tell.
I'm just Art.
Kent, you understand, don't you, the implications of what you're saying?
Yes, I do.
Like I was saying before we went to the break there, I went back upstairs, and I'm not the best housekeeper.
I just have an ordinary telephone, one of them fancy things.
I went to go over there to call Mom, and I noticed my phone had been moved because I don't dust.
Well, I do dust.
dust just piles up around there. I understand. And I noticed that the phone had been moved. I mean it
wasn't in the same place. I mean well I could just tell that by just looking at the circle
underneath the phone where the phone used to be. I understand. And you live alone right? Yes I do.
Okay. And I'm a confirmed bachelor. And so I immediately got suspicious and I started looking
around at other things right around in my immediate surrounding right there around the couch. And I
noticed the lamp had been moved and I said wait a minute here something ain't right. And
And I took the cover off the receiver of the phone there and there was this little black, looked like a little microchip in there.
I immediately hung up the phone.
I unplugged it from the wall socket there, too, and I packed up my bag and I jumped in my pickup and went down to the airport and flew out here to see an Army buddy of mine.
And that's how you left the house?
Yeah, that's how I left the house.
I didn't want to have anything to do with these.
I was all the way on the plane.
I was sitting there thinking.
Who did I talk to?
Who did I tell?
Is this thing that big that people are going to be looking at me?
Apparently.
This is the 18th of April.
This occurred in the afternoon of the 14th of April.
When I left?
Yep.
Well, when you got fired.
Oh, yes.
I got fired at quarter to two.
Quarter to two.
Yes, I specifically remember because I looked at Mr. Schuyler's digital clock and it said 1345 when I walked out of the office.
A couple of details.
This is so important, Kent.
The photographs you say in your fax, a detail we didn't cover, were in color.
Yes, they were.
Yes, they were copper in color and there were some other landscapings by it there that were different shades of copper color.
I call it copper.
I mean, somebody might call it rust or something like that.
And reddish?
Yes, yes, definitely.
And they were high resolution photographs.
You could plainly see that they were taken.
Like if you took a picture of the Washington Monument with a 35mm camera, that's how clear it was.
And it was plainly taken over an aerial, from an aerial shot.
And this official clearly said, we don't need the American people to see these.
Yeah, one of the upper mucky mucks, the suit guy, when they were in the break room, boy you wouldn't believe the stuff they talked about in there, but he had plainly said, quote, we don't need these pitchers to get out to the American public.
So, what are you going to do now, Kent?
I'm going to go someplace where I know that I'll be safe.
My backyard, so to speak.
The place where I grew up.
It's a big country and at least up there I'll know where I'm at and I'll know that I'm going to be okay up there anyway.
During the months that you were at JPL, you must have made some friends, some acquaintances.
Yes, I did.
People you worked with, that sort of thing?
Yeah, but mostly I basically kept to myself.
I did my job.
I kept my mouth shut, just like I was told to do.
Where I was going with that was, is there anybody you can think of, Kent, that you might prevail upon to back your story up, to themselves tell what they know?
The maintenance tech, but I don't think it'd be nice for me to give his name out over... No, no, no.
Don't do that.
But I mean, if you were to try and contact him privately yourself, I mean, this is... We all want to believe, Kent, that our American government is leveling with us.
There are many people who have suspicions that for some time, particularly NASA, Can I tell you something, Art?
Sure.
Back in July of last year, things were really busy around there.
Here back in July of last year things were really busy around there.
They were right there around 24 hours around the clock.
I had come in and I had got sent out on a courier.
I had come back and I immediately went into the break room and there was two gentlemen
sitting there and they were looking at another photograph just like the ones that I had rolled
up.
And they were looking at some kind of a halfway structure or something that had crumbled down.
And I'm assuming myself personally that that was taken by the sojourner.
And they were plainly looking at something and I was over there at the coffee machine and I was just glancing at the look and it was a perfectly defined, like a Like a broken down, great big giant brick structure is what it was.
And then they were trying to define it.
And then one of the gentlemen says, are you going to meet on this?
So I put some of these conversations together and he just remembers certain things that you hear.
Alright, anything else you can think of?
No, but there was a lot of excitement there.
Preluding to March 31st, and I know this because I had gotten called in to do some special things on Saturday, which doesn't normally happen for me.
I'm a Monday through Friday type of guy, and they asked me if I would work on Saturday.
I said, sure, no problem.
And they were really getting excited about this, and they were talking about the about a probe up there on Mars right now.
And one of the things that they were discussing was that any of the high resolution photographs
come back.
And one of the guys was saying, he says, well, we can milk up the photographs any way we want to.
What they said was, milk them up.
I don't know what they meant by that.
I was assuming my own personal assumption that they could mess them up or whatever, however they were going to do that.
I was sitting there just wondering why they were going to do something like that.
Milk up a photograph or something.
Alright.
Do you want to give your last name or hold that out?
I would rather not right now, Mr. Bell.
Alright.
Here's what I want you to do.
Yes.
To keep in touch with me.
Wherever you go from there, find a way to keep in touch with me, number one.
You know my fax number?
Yes.
So you know how to get through that way.
Yes.
Try and contact this other person.
See if he's willing to come forward.
Tell him what you know and see if he will then sort of jump on the bandwagon with you.
Yes.
That would definitely help.
But your story comes out quite straight to me, Kent.
Do you ever feel like the loneliest guy on the island?
I've had those moments, Kent.
Listen, I thank you for doing all this.
The American people can sit out there now and judge for themselves.
Would you do me a favor, please?
I'm listening.
Would you take Linda Howell for me?
I sure will.
And thank you, Mr. Bell.
Take care, Kent.
Yes, sir.
Alright, there you have it.
And we'll sort of let it hang out there for all of you to judge.
Here's an immediate reaction.
Linda Moulton Howe had a long talk with this man, as did Richard Hoagland.
Perhaps not a long talk, but a talk.
Richard, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning.
You heard all that, obviously, the first interview and now the repeat of it.
Yep.
Comments?
Well, I talked with our friend, Kent.
We won't use his last name for the time being.
I will tell you that he has agreed to stay in close touch.
He is going up country.
He's going to try to lose himself in wonderful, desolate country.
I urged him to sit down with an interview with the Washington Post or with Ted Koppel or some other people we could arrange.
I asked a number of questions.
I am, I would say, 98% convinced that this is a bona fide story.
There are just too many little, intricate details.
Including some information that I have from some other people that are kind of in parallel fields at the National Security Agency in terms of how truly sensitive material can be handled in a very cavalier manner for people who don't think that you might put these kind of extraordinary images in FedEx.
In fact, it's exactly what people have done and continue to do because it's the needle in the haystack.
Now, you have, without saying exactly what it is, because we don't want to give it away, you've got cooperating evidence in the works from him?
Yes.
Yes.
And we're talking about bona fides of employment and things like that.
He left in such a hurry that he didn't have time to really bring any records, but he's had friends now.
He's actually called them at my behest, and they've gone to his apartment.
And, you know, materials that will prove pay stubs from Caltech, things like that.
So even if JPL were to electronically vanish him tomorrow, which they could easily do, when you call or I call and we try to find out his employment and they claim he never worked there, we will have on paper proof that in fact he did work there.
So we're making those kind of moves.
Let's back up and look at the larger picture.
This is the reason why we need the grand jury.
It's exactly this kind of evidentiary material which is more proof that in fact we are not being leveled with.
And, frankly, I am very upset about this.
Because it is so brazen, and so blatant, and so cavalier, and so denigrating to the American people, if this should prove to be an accurate story, which at this point, as I said, I really think, if this guy is not for real, he deserves an academy, I could not find a false note, and Linda talked to him a long time, I talked to him for about half an hour, the poor guy is dead on his feet.
He is staying with a friend who's leaving for the airport tomorrow, One odd note, he has been researching on his own now, because obviously when you encrypt it, it spurs your curiosity.
Oh, of course.
He went to the library and found one book called The Face on Mars, which of course is Randy Pozo's description of our own independent Mars investigation, and when I connected the dots, you know, I'm the Dick Hoagland in the book, he practically fainted.
He said he never imagined anything like this.
He never imagined that he'd ever be talking to, you know, I told him the scale of the audience that listens to you.
Yes.
He was blown away.
Yes, well, it's just as well he didn't know.
This is a nice guy who's just at the right place at the right time, or if you want to look at it another way, the wrong place at the right time.
And I'm really thinking that we've got a very important lead.
And let me say this.
If anybody knows Kent, if anybody is friends with him or really believes in the Constitution, Now is the time to fax Art or myself and to provide us with additional information.
All right.
I'll get those fax numbers out.
I just wanted to bring you on for a quick reaction.
Richard, thank you so much.
Thank you, Art.
Take care.
All right, folks.
We'll do an hour of open lines coming up.
The.
From the Kingdom of the North.
This is a little bit of new bumper music that I thought you might want to sample.
I heard it, I don't know, about two or three weeks ago and fell in love with it.
702-727-1222. 702-727-1222. Now, here again, the Izards.
Good morning. This is a little bit of new bumper music that I thought you might want to sample. I heard it, I don't
know, about two, three weeks ago and fell in love with it.
So tonight, here it is. Listen to a little.
And in the thin time of day, in the trees around me In the ocean blue, and the birds in the air, and driving
rhythm of day And I will go, and wrap my feet, in the blue veil of the
night And shut the dreams in the night
In the thin time of day, in the trees around me In the ocean blue, and the birds in the air, and driving
rhythm of day Good morning from the high desert.
She has a haunting voice, doesn't she?
Kind of reminiscent of the early Stevie Nicks, I think.
That's brand new, and I'm not going to even tell you what it is just yet.
I've got something very serious coming up for you in a moment, so stay right where you are.
Well, now I've seen it all.
They're on the web now at www.play.com.
That's P-L-A-Y dot com.
Well, alright, in the last hour, for those of you who did not get to hear it, Linda Moulton Howe interviewed Dr. Mark Carlotto doing the photograph enhancement work from the photographs taken by Dr. Malin.
Dr. Carlotto was lamenting the fact that they were taken at a 45, in other words, the face on Mars was taken at roughly a 45 degree angle.
from the spacecraft to the face, and he was lamenting, of course, the haze that Dr. Malin now admits was in that photograph as well.
The obvious wish would be that they had taken a photograph of the face from a spot directly above the face, so that we might duplicate what we had previously so many years ago, 22 years ago, with the Viking images and judge whether or not we had the same thing.
Well, what if we do have those photographs?
I received a detailed three-page fax from, I will call him Kent for now, in Ohio earlier today.
Linda Moulton Howe has also talked to Kent at my behest and feels that what he has to say is solid as a rock.
Was a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee who was just fired.
He's on the line now.
Kent, welcome to the program.
Hi, Art.
Hi.
I think we should begin this story by finding out how you came to be employed Uh, by JPL.
Apparently you were, you were in the, what branch of the military were you in?
I was in the Army.
The Army?
And I was, um, stationed over there in Germany for, um, four and a half years.
Yes, sir.
And, um, while I was there, I was, um, I was supposed to, I had gone through the, um, series of clicks and checks to, uh, get a security clearance.
I had a secret or better.
Secret or better security clearance?
Uh, and the reason for that?
The reason for that was that I was a driver there for 37th Transportation Group right there in Kaiserslautern, right there at Kleber Kaserne.
Okay.
And I was there during the very early 80s during the Pershing 2 missile buildups.
And anybody that hauled the missiles had to have a secret clearance.
That makes sense.
You haul Pershings, you better have a clearance.
Yes, sir.
So you did that.
You were in the military for how long?
A total of six years.
Six years, alright.
And how long ago did you get out, by the way?
I got out in April of 85.
April of 85, alright.
What did you do after you got out?
Well, I got out and I got a driving job there for Brock's Transport there out of Los Angeles.
I originally had ETS'd out of the Army up there at Fort Lewis.
I was up there with the 109th MI Battalion.
Yes, sir.
And I certainly enjoyed the Northwest and everything else and I wasn't married and single and everything and had a little bit of money in the bank and had bought a vehicle so I just traveled down I-5 and kind of picked up stakes down here in Southern California for a little while and got my chauffeur's license and went to work for Brock's Transport which was a coast-to-coast produce carrier or whatnot.
They were a common carrier.
And how long were you there?
I was approximately employed there until 1992.
Then what?
Then I didn't really like being over the road all that much, so I went ahead and I got a courier job right there in the Los Angeles area.
I worked for a courier company, Alada Bezouza.
Then through that courier company there, I heard of an opening there at the JPL.
That's a Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena?
Yes, sir.
That's a Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Okay, so you were a courier applying to JPL to do what?
I was basically applying there to be a gopher.
Go for this, go for that?
Yes, sir.
Go for coffee, go for whatever?
Yes.
Well, I didn't really do the coffee bit.
I was basically your usual errand boy.
I didn't bring Chinese takeout or anything.
I was your basic errand boy there.
I ran errands for the upper mucky mucks and the big wigs and just basic everyday stuff.
Alright, you were employed by JPL as of about what date?
June 13, 1997.
And apparently they liked the fact that you were ex-military, you'd been a courier, you had a secret clearance or better, and they liked all of that and hired you.
A gentleman by the name of Mr. Schuyler hired me down there, and he had made the comment, he said that they liked the fact that I had a secret or better security clearance there in the military.
And I had just made a quick statement, you know, a gopher, what's he need to know, he said you might be handling some sensitive documents here and there.
I said okay, no problem.
How long were you an employee of JPL?
How long was I employed there?
Yes sir.
I was employed there for approximately ten months.
Ten months.
Alright, something obviously got in the way of continued employment at JPL, so I guess it's time for you to tell that story.
You were given something for Federal Express, is that right?
Yes, one of my duties was to Federal Express out photographs.
And on the day in question, when they give us photographs, they're in between two thin sheets of cardboard.
Makes sense, right.
And they roll them up very loosely there, and my job is to take their photographs and put them into the Federal Express cylinders, put the cap onto the Federal Express cylinder, seal it, Take it down to the lady where the Federal Express machine is, and then she fills out the labels, puts them on, and puts them into the outbound box for Federal Express.
Sure.
Makes sense.
Well, the day in question, I was given these photographs.
What was the day in question, by the way?
April 14th.
April 14th of this year.
In other words, just a few days ago.
Yes.
Okay.
And after receiving the photographs, I immediately went over to the Federal Express Supply Closet, which there's other people that have access there.
And we were allowed to photograph cylinders.
So then I called Federal Express and the lady answered the phone and I told her that I needed some FedEx supplies to include some photo cylinders.
And she had said, okay, that the courier would bring them by.
And so then I didn't have much to do until Federal Express got there.
So I went into the break room.
I like sitting there by the window at the back table.
Anyway, I was sitting there drinking some hot chocolate when the maintenance tech guy walked in.
We've always seen each other in halls and whatever.
We always give the guy a greeting of the day and everything.
So we didn't really know each other, but we've seen each other before.
So he comes into the break room and he says you should take a break a little early and I told him I was waiting on FedEx.
So he had gone to the coffee machine and got himself a cup of coffee and he was right handed and the photographs in question were right there on the side of the table.
Now these are the photographs that were in your possession to be turning over to FedEx?
Yes, and I sat them down onto the table so I could hold them.
I don't know.
eat my crackers and hold my book.
And I sat him down right there at the edge of the table.
And the gentleman had come to sit down there, we were talking, and he had sat down and he
was right handed and his cup, when he sat down the coffee cup onto the table, the photographs
rolled off the table kind of at a diagonal area.
And what I did was I sat him down and I said, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to sit
One of the photographs had completely come out between the two cardboard sheets.
He looks down there and says, hey look, it's a picture of a mask down there.
A mask?
A mask.
So I bent over to pick up that picture.
I set it down on the table and I had to unroll that so I could put that picture back in there.
Right.
There was a total of nine photographs in there.
Nine photographs?
Nine photographs.
Two were of masks and others were of structures.
When you say a mask, what do you mean?
Well, it was a full aerial shot of a face.
And the, uh... Excuse me, uh, excuse me, uh, Kent, the face on Mars?
Uh, yes.
It was, uh... The face on Mars.
Were there dates on these photographs?
Yes, there were dates on, there were dates on the photographs.
What were the dates?
Alright, the one was dated April 2nd, and then there was another one there of the other mask, which was dated April 2nd as well.
April 2nd.
April 2nd.
And now this was, let us be sure what we're talking about, a picture of what you call the mask, the phase on Mars, obviously, taken from what angle?
Well, it was almost a direct overlook.
It was almost a direct overlook.
The face was just to the side at the center of the picture itself.
And not at a 45 degree angle?
No, no.
No, not at a 45 degree angle.
I mean, if you looked at this picture, you put a mask down on a sandbox, and you take a picture of it, and maybe you're just off center just a little bit, and you take a picture of this, and there it is.
And there it was, in great relief.
In other words, you could see it quite clearly.
Oh, yes.
Definitely.
Picture Frankenstein's head is very, very flat, and then there's like a headdress right there.
And then you come down, you've got the eyebrows there, and then you've got two eye sockets there, you've got the nose, you've got the two holes there where the nostrils go, and then you've got the mouth, and there was a mediocre chin on it, and then high cheekbones.
Two photographs of the face?
Yes, but one looked like it was taken right there in broad daylight, and it was copper colored.
In other words, when you say broad daylight, when you look down at the face, and I've seen many pictures of the face on Mars Viking and the new images, and the sun was directly into the features Yes, it was totally defined.
There were no shadows in the eye sockets.
And the other photographs?
One of the photographs that we looked at was World War II.
Picture the bombed out cities of Germany.
The buildings are all bombed out.
And there was a structure on there.
That had no roof on it whatsoever.
It was kind of oblong shaped.
You're saying it was a building minus a roof?
Yes.
One of the walls had been knocked out.
Say if you went inside and had a sledgehammer or something and was knocking out the wall, there was rocks that was coming out from that wall.
That would lay down and they would shoot out all over the place.
Alright, so it was not, there was nothing ambiguous about it.
In other words, you know that you were looking at a structure minus a roof and part of one wall.
Oh yeah, that's a no-brainer.
Okay.
And then a few of the other photographs had what would be, looks like, pyramidic structures.
And the maintenance tech guy had made even a comment.
He says, you know, if you look at these pictures real good, it looks like they took pictures of Egypt.
And I looked at them, and I said, well, Egypt's not rad, is it?
And at that time, I didn't know what I was looking at.
And about that time, when we were looking at the pictures, I heard And oh my God, and there was one of the bigwigs, he was
standing right there in the doorway.
And then he said, oh my God, it's again.
And now we were like five or six paces away from the doorway.
And he was at the door.
Yeah, he was at the doorway to the break room.
And this, you know, a good sized man would take five or six steps to get to where we
It took him three steps to get there.
He's given us a few unpleasant subtleties there.
as he's putting the photographs back in between the cardboard and he immediately rushes out
there with them.
So then a couple of minutes had gone by, the maintenance tech had told me that he didn't
mean to get me in trouble.
I said, well he didn't get me in trouble, everything else.
So he had to go back to work and then about two or so minutes later there was a lady that walked in and she told me to report up to Mr. Schuyler's office immediately.
So I had gone up to Mr. Schuyler's office and he started really chewing my butt big time.
And then he says, what blank are you looking at pictures from Mars?
I didn't know I was looking at Mars pictures.
Oh, he said Mars.
He said Mars.
Yes, he said Mars.
All right.
Maybe it slipped out.
I don't know.
But he said, well, you go on back and do what you're going to do.
And then about quarter to two that afternoon, he called me.
He calls me back up to his office there and he tells me to clean my stuff out.
He said that your services are no longer needed here.
I said okay.
I gave him a few little rebuttals there and he said I don't want to hear it.
He said your duties were perfectly clear.
Did he say why you were being terminated?
Because of unsatisfactory job related issues.
I knew what I was being fired for because one of the bigwigs down here didn't like me
Had you explained to him how the accident had occurred?
Yes, I did.
Yes, I did and he said it doesn't matter.
You should have just put the picture back in there.
Not him now, the other bigwig that I heard down there in the cafeteria.
We don't need the American public looking at these pictures.
Where were these photographs going?
A lot of the photographs were being sent to Washington D.C.
Some of the cylinders were being sent to the United Nations.
There was even one cylinder that I know of for a fact because I was the one that put the label on myself and it was going to Langley.
The CIA?
Well, yeah, obviously.
Obviously now you know exactly what those photographs were.
You know why you were fired.
Yes.
And you understand the implications of what you're saying?
Yes, I do.
What made you decide to get hold of me?
Well, immediately after I got fired I went home and my neighbor there, he works for Wells Fargo and he's got a night job.
And so we gave the greeting of the day.
He said, yeah, you're home early, ain't you?
I said, yeah.
So I went upstairs and I made coffee and I sat down there and I told him the whole story.
And he's just sitting there with his mouth open and he says, I got the perfect guy you need to talk to.
And I said, well, who's that?
I said, I don't really want to talk to anybody.
And he says, you need to talk to Art Bell.
And so he started going into this elaborate thing about your show and what it consists of and what you talk about.
Please be sure and thank him for me.
I will definitely do that.
And then I was talking to some other people and they told me definitely to do that.
So he gave me your fax number along with your other phone number to call.
And so I just decided I'd go ahead and fax because there's more anonymity in faxing Are you worried about your own safety?
Not really because I was in an army and I took self defense courses and stuff, but as far as my immediate safety from our government, a little bit because of the simple fact that after that day he had left and gone to work.
I went ahead and got out that night.
I like to eat out a lot.
So I came back to my apartment and I went upstairs.
I'm a single guy and I'm a lousy housekeeper.
Ken, on that note, hold on.
We'll come back to you after the break.
My guest is Ken.
I've got his last name, by the way, and a lot of other details, which at this moment I'm not giving out.
We'll ask him if he wants to give them.
At this point, he might as well, I suppose.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm going to be playing a song called, The Man Who Killed My Father.
I'm going to be playing a song called, That's area code 702-727-1295.
code 702-727-1295. That's area code 702-727-1295. This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Good morning, everybody.
My guest is Kent.
He was, until just a few days ago, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee in Pasadena.
He saw some photographs that we all wish we could see.
Kent, are you there?
Yes, sir.
That's okay.
The military is still with you, I can tell.
I'm just Art.
You understand, don't you, the implications of what you're saying?
Yes, I do.
Like I was saying before we went to the break there, I went back upstairs and I'm not the best housekeeper.
I just have just an ordinary telephone.
One of them fancy things.
I went to go over there to call Mom.
I noticed my phone had been moved because I don't dust.
Well, I do dust, but dust just piles up around there.
I understand.
And I noticed that the phone had been moved.
I mean, it wasn't in the same place.
Well, I can just tell that by looking at the circle underneath the phone where the phone used to be.
I understand.
And you live alone, right?
Yes, I do.
I'm a confirmed bachelor.
So I immediately got suspicious and I started looking around at other things right around in my immediate surrounding right there around the couch and I noticed the lamp had been moved and I said, wait a minute here, something ain't right.
And I took the cover off the receiver of the phone there and there was this little black, looked like a little microchip in there.
I immediately hung up the phone.
I unplugged it from the wall socket there too and I packed up my bag and I jumped in my pickup and went down to the airport and flew out here to see an army buddy of mine.
And that's how you left the house?
Yeah, that's how I left the house.
I didn't want to have anything to do with these.
I was all the way on the plane.
I was sitting there thinking.
Who did I talk to?
Who did I tell?
Is this thing that big that people are going to be looking at me?
Apparently.
This is the 18th of April.
This occurred in the afternoon of the 14th of April.
When I left?
Yep.
Well, when you got fired.
Oh, yes.
I got fired at quarter to two.
Quarter to two.
Yes, I specifically remember because I looked at Mr. Schuyler's digital clock and it said 1345 when I walked out of the office.
A couple of details.
This is so important, Kent.
The photographs you say in your fax, a detail we didn't cover, were in color.
Yes, they were.
Yes, they were copper in color and there were some other landscapings by it there that were different shades of copper color.
I call it copper.
Somebody might call it rust or something like that.
And reddish?
Yes, yes, definitely.
And they were high resolution photographs.
You could plainly see that they were taken Like if you took a picture of the Washington Monument with a 35mm camera, that's how clear it was.
And it was plainly taken over an aerial, from an aerial shot.
And this official clearly said, we don't need the American people to see these.
Yeah, one of the upper mucky mucks, the suit guy, When they were in the break room, he had plainly said, quote, we don't need these pitchers to get out to the American public.
So what are you going to do now?
I'm going to go someplace where I know that I'll be safe.
My backyard, so to speak.
place where I grew up.
Yes.
It's a big country and at least up there I'll know where I'm at and I'll know that I'm going
to be okay up there anyway.
During the months that you were at JPL you must have made some friends, some acquaintances.
Yes, I did.
People you worked with, that sort of thing?
Yeah, but mostly I basically kept to myself.
I did my job and I kept my mouth shut just like I was told to do.
Where I was going with that was, is there anybody you can think of, Kent, that you might prevail upon to back your story up, to themselves tell what they know?
The maintenance tech, I don't think it would be nice for me to give his name out over... No, no, no.
Don't do that.
But I mean, if you were to try and contact him privately yourself, I mean, this is... We all want to believe, Kent, that our American government is leveling with us.
There are many people who have suspicions that for some time, particularly NASA, has not been leveling with us.
You would seem to have evidence of that being true.
Can I tell you something, Art?
Sure.
Back in July of last year, things were really busy around there.
They were right there around 24 hours around the clock.
I had come in and I got sent out on a courier.
I had come back and I immediately went into the break room and there were two gentlemen
sitting there and they were looking at another photograph just like the ones that I had rolled
up.
They were looking at some kind of a halfway structure or something that had crumbled down.
I'm assuming myself personally that that was taken by the sojourner.
They were plainly looking at something and I was over there at the coffee machine and I was just glancing over their shoulder just briefly to look and it was a perfectly defined, like a broken down, great big giant brick structure.
That's what it was and then they were trying to define it and then one of the gentlemen
says, are you going to release this?
He says, there's no way I'm releasing this.
I'm not taking any heat on this.
So I put some of these conversations together and you just remember certain things that
you hear.
Anything else you can think of that you heard while you were there of that same sort?
No, but there was a lot of excitement there preluding to March 31st.
I know this because I had gotten called in to do some special things on Saturday, which doesn't normally happen for me.
I'm a Monday through Friday type of guy and they asked me if I would work on Saturday.
I said, sure, no problem.
And they were really getting excited about this.
And they were talking about a probe up there on Mars right now.
And one of the things that they were discussing was that any of the high resolution photographs come back.
And one of the guys was saying, he says, well, we can milk up the photographs any way we want to.
What they said was milk them up.
I don't know what they meant by that.
I was assuming my own personal assumption that they could mess them up or whatever, however they were going to do that.
I was sitting there just wondering why they were going to do something like that.
Milk up a photograph or something.
Do you want to give your last name or hold that out?
I would rather not right now, Mr. Bell.
Here's what I want you to do.
Find a way.
To keep in touch with me, wherever you go from there, find a way to keep in touch with me.
Number one, you know my fax number.
Yes.
So you know how to get through that way.
Yes.
Try and contact this other person.
See if he's willing to come forward.
Tell him what you know, and see if he will then sort of jump on the bandwagon with you.
Yes.
That would definitely help.
But your story comes out quite straight to me, Kent.
Do you ever feel like the loneliest guy on the island?
I've had those moments, Kent.
Listen, I thank you for doing all this.
The American people can sit out there now and judge for themselves.
Would you do me a favor, please?
I'm listening.
Would you thank Linda Howell for me?
I sure will.
And thank you, Mr. Bell.
Take care, Kent.
Yes, sir.
Alright, there you have it.
And we'll sort of let it hang out there for all of you to judge.
As I so frequently do, what else can I do?
But if you want my opinion, and I'm willing to give it in this circumstance, I think you just heard a real story.
In a moment, Dr. Fred Allen Wolfe, and I believe he's been listening.
It'd be very interesting to get his take on this.
Or maybe he wouldn't want to give it, and I wouldn't blame him.
The Zeit?
A lot.
And so I came back to my apartment and I went upstairs.
And, you know, I'm a single guy and I'm a lousy housekeeper.
Where the interview is going to have to stop.
There was more to it and some significant more to it.
But we're going to have to stop it there because of our own time constraints right now.
Here's an immediate reaction.
Linda Moulton Howe had a long talk with this man.
As did Richard Hoagland.
Perhaps not a long talk, but a talk.
Richard, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Alex.
Good morning.
You heard all that, obviously, the first interview, and now the repeat of it.
Yep.
Comments?
Well, I talked with our friend, Kent.
We won't use his last name for the time being.
Right.
I will tell you that he has agreed to stay in close touch.
He is going up country.
He's going to try to lose himself in wonderful, desolate country.
I urged him to sit down with an interview with the Washington Post or with Ted Koppel or some other people we could arrange.
I asked a number of questions.
I am, I would say, 98% convinced that this is a bona fide story.
There are just too many little intricate details, including some information that I have from some other people that are kind of in parallel fields at the National Security Agency.
In terms of how truly sensitive material can be handled in a very cavalier manner.
For people who don't think that you might put these kind of extraordinary images in FedEx, in fact, it's exactly what people have done and continue to do, because it's the needle in a haystack.
Now you have, without saying exactly what it is, because we don't want to give it away, you've got cooperating evidence in the works from him?
Yes, yes.
And we're talking about bona fides of employment and things like that.
He left in such a hurry that he didn't have time to really bring any records, but he's had friends now.
He's actually called them at my behest, and they've gone to his apartment.
And, you know, materials that will prove pay stubs from Caltech, things like that.
So even if JPL were to electronically vanish him tomorrow... Which they could easily do.
When you call, or I call, and we try to find out his employment, and they claim he never worked there, We will have on paper proof that, in fact, he did work there.
So we're making those kind of moves.
Let's back up and look at the larger picture.
This is the reason why we need a grand jury.
It's exactly this kind of evidentiary material which is more proof that, in fact, we are not being leveled with.
And, frankly, I am very upset about this because it is so brazen and so blatant and so cavalier And so denigrating to the American people, if this should prove to be an accurate story, which at this point, as I said, I really think if this guy is not for real, he deserves an Academy Award, Tom Hanks, move over because every single nuance rings true.
I could not find a false note.
And Linda talked to him a long time.
I talked to him for about half an hour.
The poor guy is dead on his feet.
He is staying with a friend who's fortunately a very You know, someone that you'd really feel safe staying with.
Sure.
Who's going to take him to the airport tomorrow.
One odd note, he has been researching on his own now, because obviously when you trip over something like this, it spurs your curiosity.
Oh, of course.
He went to the library and found one book called The Face on Mars, which of course is Randy Pozo's description of our own independent Mars investigation.
And when I connected the dots, you know, I'm the Dick Hogan in the book, he practically fainted.
He said he never imagined anything like this.
He never imagined that he'd ever be talking to, you know, I told him the scale of the audience that listens to you.
Yes.
He was blown away.
Yes.
Well, he didn't know.
This is a nice guy who's just at the right place at the right time, or if you want to look at it another way, the wrong place at the right time.
And I'm, I'm really thinking that we've got a very important lead.
And let me, let me say this.
If anybody knows Kent, if anybody is friends with him or really believes in the constitution, Now is the time to fax Art or myself and to provide us with additional information.
All right.
I'll get those fax numbers out.
I just wanted to bring you on for a quick reaction.
Richard, thank you so much.
Thank you, Art.
Take care.
All right, folks.
We'll do an hour of open lines coming up.
What a night, huh?
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