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April 29, 1998 - Art Bell
02:40:18
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Alien Contact - Albert Harrison
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from April 29th, 1998.
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 very prolific time zones, stretching from the Hawaiian and Fish Islands out west, eastward, to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands.
Good morning there in St.
Thomas and elsewhere.
South into South America.
North all the way to the pole.
And worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
And what a night we've got for you tonight.
As a matter of fact, I'll give you a rundown of this night and what's coming up the remainder of the week and on into next week.
In a few moments...
Let me first say, as I have said I would do, I will continually keep you informed on how we are doing.
These surveys are coming out and every day we'll be getting more of them.
Today we received two.
One in Philadelphia, our affiliate in Philadelphia, WPHT.
Now WPHT is not well known as WPHT because for most of their life as a radio station they were WCAU.
Originally.
And that, of course, is a great mother of all radio stations in the country.
WCAU is indeed a great radio station.
They changed their call letters to WPHT some time ago.
And we achieved, though we're not yet number one there, we achieved the most astounding, the most astounding increases, just unheard of increases, In the survey, and they amount to, in some cases, as much as 2,400%.
Can you imagine that?
Those of you in radio will know what that means.
A 2,400% increase.
It's like the people in Philadelphia went, aha!
So here you are.
An astounding survey in Philadelphia.
And that 2,000 plus percent increase in just about every category was absolutely amazing.
And we got the survey in for, so thank you and Philadelphia for beginning to discover us.
In San Diego, the survey has come in and we are number one on KOGO, radio in San Diego.
We are so, our number oneness in San Diego is We are so number one in every demographic that the next radio station down from us, in other words, number two, is number two by about fifty to a hundred percent less.
About a hundred percent less.
And then there's about thirty or forty stations that go on down from there.
In other words, we're about twice the rating of number two.
We are so number one that You'd need field glasses from number two to even see our ratings.
Astounding!
Thank you, everybody in San Diego, and I will continue to keep everybody informed as the ratings march on.
Now, in about an hour, in the next hour, we're going to have a very, very interesting guest.
He is Al Harrison, a professor at the University of California, Davis.
Who wrote a book called After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
Now this is very interesting.
Most of the programs we have done contemplate contact, talk about contact, talk about sightings and so forth and so on, but this presumes that it already has happened.
After Contact.
The human response to extraterrestrial life should be very, very interesting indeed.
That'll be coming up next hour.
Then, tomorrow night, Dr. Steven Greer of C-SETI is going to be here, along with Steve Bassett, who is, as far as I know, the nation's only UFO lobbyist in Washington, D.C.
So we'll find out what's up with Stephen Greer.
Always a very riveting program.
Stephen Greer is a very focused, a fascinating, intelligent individual and, as he said, a very interesting organization.
Then on Friday night, remember I told you that I was going to have an expert on satellites on?
Somebody who had actually done work on our spy satellites?
Remember that?
Well, Friday night, here he comes, Ronald Regeer.
Regeer, I guess, I hope I'm saying that correctly, is going to be our guest, along with Daryl Sims.
Now that should be interesting, that should be quite a pair, and that'll be coming up Friday night.
Then, Monday night, Tuesday morning, it'll be Father Malachi Martin, back again.
I know a lot of you have been waiting a long time for this.
And he's got quite a bit to say about extraterrestrial life, as well, on the Vatican.
Monday night, Tuesday morning.
Then, on Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, Harry Brown, the probable candidate for the Libertarian Party, is going to be here, and I'm not going to say any more about that right now.
And then, Friday of next week, Laurie Toy, of I Am America.
Laurie is a prophet.
And she has some very... that's the right word... disturbing prophecy to convey to you.
She is a fascinating woman.
Just wait till you hear from Lori Toye.
So that's what I've kind of got booked for the immediate future.
ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings ran a story on head transplants.
Can you imagine that?
It ran, I guess, yesterday.
And I didn't get to see it.
But I would be very, very interested in any of you who did.
Head transplants.
Well, I did a story on that with Dr. White.
Remember?
People said, you're crazy as a loon.
Head transplants?
What are you talking about?
And how, let's see, it would be what?
Two or three weeks?
Four weeks later?
It's on ABC World News tonight.
I rest my case.
Now, a couple of things for you to note.
One, on our website right now, tonight, as of about an hour ago, a very, very extensive story on MSNBC about the entire Kent affair.
That's right, Kent, our confessed non-JPL employee, MSNBC ran a big story about it, and of course, yes, you can go to my website right now and jump across.
You'll see it right there, MSNBC.
It's called A Tale from the Cydonia Sideshow.
Pretty good title, huh?
And it lays out the whole thing, chronicles the entire affair.
So that's on my website now, A Tale from the Cydonia Sideshow.
In addition, late yesterday, not all of you will have heard it, but the man claiming to be the Area 51 caller confessed on the air.
This must be confession week, huh?
And we've got the real audio version of that, and I know a lot of you would not have heard it because it was at the end of the program.
So that is on the website.
In addition, I got a little note here.
Uh, from Michael Hemmingson.
Michael Hemmingson is the fellow who wrote the article suggesting that I might be on somebody's Black Ops payroll.
And somebody called... Somebody called the program last night and said, Art, you are Black Ops.
It's obvious because you took that article down, didn't you?
Accusing you of being Black Ops.
My God, we had it up there forever.
Yes, we took it down, but upon hearing that, Keith put it right back up again.
And so, the author of this article, Michael Hemmingsen, wrote me the following, Dear Art Bell, I noticed recently on your website, in the links, that my article about you and Black Ops payroll is back up.
I also hear almost every other night something mentioned to that effect.
Will it never end?
Anyway, I was wondering, did the Washington Post article ever come out?
Oh, yes it did, and it did mention that, by the way.
Michael, so yeah, you made it into the Washington Post story.
So that's back up.
Otherwise, news-wise, there's not much.
A federal judge has ruled that Monica Lewinsky does not have immunity from prosecution in the investigation into whether President Clinton had a sexual relationship with her.
And sought to cover it up.
The Associated Press has learned.
The decision by U.S.
District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson is under seal, but was confirmed to the Associated Press and is reported here on Reuters.
At a breakfast Thursday with American business leaders, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to coax China into lowering its trade barriers.
That contributed to a 50 billion dollar trade deficit in 1997.
The bait she offered was an easing of sanctions imposed after China brutalized the democracy movement in 1989.
Mostly ran over it with tanks, if you'll recall.
We are going to have to deal with China and if you ever get an opportunity to go to China, it will scare the you-know-what out of you.
The amount of economic activity going on there.
I sat and just watched it.
It was... It was frightening.
Pessimism spreading in Japan's business community despite a massive stimulus package announced by the government there.
More than 90% of 200 major Japanese companies surveyed believe Japan won't come anywhere near its 1.9% gross
domestic growth target for this fiscal year.
Wow!
That is really, really serious.
Now somebody sent me something saying 2 inches of rain on this day in history fall in minutes, 10 minutes, in Taylor, Texas.
Huh!
I wonder when that was, what year that was.
May 1st, 1908.
There it is.
Wow, 2.47 inches of rain in three minutes, actually.
Now that was in Panama.
The world's most intense rain shower ever recorded.
But in Taylor, Texas, I guess they're not that far behind.
Alright, open lines this hour coming up shortly.
Alright, let's rock.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hey, is this Art?
It is Art.
Hey, how you doing?
This is Ken in Jacksonville, Florida.
Hi, Ken.
There's a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about.
Sure.
One thing, Fox 30 here, they showed a face on Mars picture.
Oh?
And they even said that there was some possibility that there might have been life on Mars at one time.
Now, did they?
Yeah, it was kind of interesting.
On what program?
It was Fox Channel 30.
I don't know their... I mean, was it a news program or a... It was on the main news, you know, the nightly news, 10 o'clock news.
No kidding.
Yeah, it was really... Well, maybe we're pushing them right along, huh?
Yeah.
Hey, I'm really glad to hear that.
Between that and ABC doing a story on head transplants, I'm going to have to get further out on the edge, huh?
Oh, yeah.
Another thing, too, on the sounds from hell, I've listened to a lot of preachers, and all the people that have said that it couldn't be hell because you have to have judgment before you go to hell.
It'll be right in the Bible.
I've heard them read it.
Uh, the grave shall give up its dead and hell shall give up its dead to be judged.
Well, yeah, but how do you know we weren't monitoring the waiting room?
Pardon me?
I said how do you know we weren't monitoring the waiting room?
I didn't.
It's a horrible thing to contemplate, isn't it?
Really?
Yeah.
And another thing, I noticed a real slight little mistake you made.
You know when you were telling about that large spacecraft?
Oh, yes.
Okay, at first you said it right.
And when you first started talking about it, you said like 800, 900 feet long.
Yes.
Okay, on the second time you said 900 miles long.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Indeed not.
I didn't have my recorder on or I would have recorded it for you.
Well, when you do a five-hour-a-night radio program, those things happen.
Yeah.
900 feet is what it was.
But that's, I mean, that's still, if you think of something... I was thinking something 900 miles long.
No, no, no, no.
Even 900 feet long.
That's really big.
No, no, no, no, even 900 feet long.
Right?
That's really big, right?
And going 24,000 miles an hour unless there's a whole bunch of alien technology involved.
They must have just shifted into second gear when they hit that.
You know what I thought about at the time?
I thought if you were a hot jet jockey and you were in an F-16 and they went up and chased this thing.
Oh man.
And that thing hit the pedal at 24,000 miles an hour.
They would have thought they were on bicycles.
You got it.
It'd be very Depressing for an F-16 jockey, no question about it.
Oh, really?
Thanks for the call, sir, and take care.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Yeah, how are you doing, Art Bell?
This is Suleiman calling from the KSFO area in Richmond.
I just wanted to take a guess in regards to what you're building in your backyard.
Is it going to be a mini-observatory?
I have already said what it is.
Oh, no, I didn't hear that.
No?
No.
I mean, you have actually seen the photograph, right?
No, I have not.
Oh.
Now, you shouldn't say that now.
I bleeped that out.
There's no reason to call on our lord here in that way when we're just talking about a barbecue.
But it was an experiment.
You know, I just left the camera during the day on this construction project out there, and I asked people what it was.
And it kind of proves a point.
People said it was a garage.
People said it was an underground bomb bunker.
People said, I got everything in the world.
And yet you could see during the day people bringing bricks and slowly building the barbecue.
And there was no question in my mind that it was a barbecue, but everybody thought it was everything else until the very end.
I'll be darned.
Well, I was just taking a shot in the dark, and I thought that you would utilize the space and the clear skies in the desert to create a mini-observatory.
Maybe it'll happen this year.
Well, listen, I've got a very nice Meade telescope here, so I do utilize it.
Fantastic.
But I don't need a big... You know, that's a pretty good idea, though.
A great big observatory.
That's a cool idea.
Heck yeah.
Heck yeah.
Listen, continue to do the good work, especially in regards to the Mars scenario.
Keep the torch burning.
All right, my friend.
Thank you.
And if anybody wants to see the MSNBC story, just go to my website right now and you'll see at the very top a link to MSNBC.
And it's a long story.
I think it's about six pages long or something, detailing the entire Sorted Kemp's affair and how we broke it open.
MSNBC, up as of about an hour ago.
So, uh, go hit their site.
Let's see if we can, uh, slow them down a little bit, huh?
I'm Art Bell from the high desert.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
tonight on the presentation of coast to coast a m from april twenty nine
nineteen ninety eight the
the the
the Love is good, love can be strong.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Do you remember that day?
When you first came my way?
I said, no one can take your place.
And if you get hurt, if you get hurt by the little things I say,
I can put that smile back on your face.
When it's all right and it's coming up, we gotta get right back to it.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 29th, 1998.
Well, once again, I do seem to be here constantly surprising myself on that score.
And by the way, while we're on that subject... You may recall, those of you who read the Wave Rider communication, That, uh, one of the things that it said in the Wave Rider communication was that Robert O'Dean, remember Robert O'Dean?
He's a fellow who, uh, went to area as a child, built a rocket.
And, uh, Robert went to, uh, Area 51.
They actually took him up to Area 51.
It's a remarkable story.
And, in fact, uh, he writes, Bob Dean writes, because a lot of people took that to be present tense instead of some sort of prediction like they always do, of course.
Dear Art, as you well know, the rumor of my demise has been slightly exaggerated.
I am alive and well and as ornery as ever.
Take care and keep up the good work.
Bob Dean.
Had he sent me a phone number where I could have actually contacted him, I'd have called him on the phone and you could hear his voice and you would know he is well.
And that was a prediction.
And every famous person has predictions made about them.
Hell, they've had me dead two or three times now.
Usually it was the flu, but whenever any of my detractors hear me off the air for a period of more than about one day, they write my obit, which flies around the internet.
Hey, by the way, that brings up another topic.
There is, flying around the internet, a story about somebody whose kidneys have been taken.
Well, it's pure BS.
I called Florida and they said that those poor people at that medical facility in Florida receiving about 150-200 calls a day suggesting, asking about this horrible kidney thing, it's called a reason not to party anymore, you know the guy wakes up after being seduced by this beautiful girl in a bathtub full of ice and his little note says call 9-1-1 or you'll die and his kidneys are gone.
That's total BS.
And these poor people in Florida have been putting up with this for I don't know how long.
So don't send me any more copies of that.
Please don't.
I've got a million copies.
It's total baloney.
Absolutely untrue.
Somebody concocted the whole thing and worse yet put at the bottom A legitimate medical facility phone number, and it's just not true.
All right, back to open lines in a moment.
Anyway, they do that all the time.
You know, they've killed me off several times.
Robert O'Dean was not killed off, though he was predicted to be.
be. He's okay.
Well I sure screwed that up.
Robert O'Dean isn't the one who went to Terry 51.
That was David Adair.
Nevertheless, Robert O'Dean is alive and well and still kicking.
Dear Art, I just finished watching the UPN 10 o'clock news and they had an excellent report on the controversy about the face and images on Mars.
They showed the images that Richard Hoagland had taken and interviewed him as well.
They then presented the evidence to Dr. Arden Albee of JPL and he laughed it off!
Ho ho ho!
UPN compared the quality of the other photos taken hours before on Mars and showed their clarity.
Then compared them to the incredibly poor quality of the Cydonia region.
All this was ho ho ho ho!
Laughed off by NASA while Richard presented a logical, cogent argument That NASA is, indeed, hiding something.
It looks as though the whole thing is heating up, Art.
keep the pressure on.
And yes, Art, Peter Jennings showed the monkeys with switched heads the other night.
He had a mini-interview with a scientist, don't know if it was Dr. White.
The scientist said that it could be done with humans, easier, in fact, Because humans have larger necks.
And, of course, we are more familiar with human surgery.
They have some kind of spinal brace to hold things together until things healed or fused.
Well, I don't know about that.
I think that is one thing, according to Dr. White, they have not been able to conquer.
But can you imagine that?
Now, depending on how you feel about an afterlife at night might not be a bad option if you were going to go to have your head transplanted.
I'm just surprised that it was barely a month after I did the story with Dr. White, who was very gracious, that ABC World News tonight glommed onto it.
Good for them.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Yes, good evening, Art.
This is Ken in Las Vegas.
Yes, sir.
Remember me?
I was the one who debated David John Oates on March 26th.
I do, indeed.
No doubt.
I just got a chance to hear the Area 51 caller confess.
Oh, yes.
I can tell you, it really made my day.
Art, do you remember the old I Love Lucy shows?
I do.
Lucy, the redhead, when she was caught scheming, Ricky said to Lucy, Lucy, you've got some explaining to do.
I remember that, yeah.
Well, I think Mr. David John Oates, I'm not trying to rub it in, but I think Mr. David Oates has some explaining to do.
Well, that is if you believe that the confessor was indeed the perpetrator.
Well, I'm going to do some reversals on it once I get the copy.
It's on the website, by the way.
Yeah, and also, by the way, sooner or later I'm going to be downloading onto the Art Bell News Group.
I've got the reversals of the March 26-27 with me, Dave Oates, Richard Hoagland, and you, that famous night.
It's about five and a half pages.
And tonight I'm going to download it, what you said, what Richard Hoagland said, and what Dave Oates said.
Oh, it was really good.
Good.
All right.
Thank you very much and good luck with the reversals on the potential confession.
I'm not all together sure.
It sure did sound like him.
He did a very good job of it.
But whether it was him or not, I'm getting mail that's running about 50-50.
50-50 you tell me. Now I guess I'm going to read this to you.
There is a film crew, a documentary team, that came into Pahrump, Nevada, my little town, last week.
And they came here because, I'm going to explain this to you, it was a full television documentary team.
And they believe there is about to be a UFO incident here in Pahrump.
A serious one.
And they have done this previously.
Somehow they find out where these things are going to occur and they go to the town and do, check this out, pre-interviews with people.
Now I did not meet with them while they were here.
I was aware they were coming.
But I didn't meet with them.
And here is a letter copied to me from this documentary team that was here last week.
We all feel as though our initial visit to Pahrump was a success.
We've established good contacts, introduced ourselves to appropriate people, observed a very interesting town and its residents, have gotten to know each other a little better, and have developed a better understanding of our project's wonderful potential.
Phil has informed me that, partly based on our success of documenting a before picture, activity is now on the increase.
He informed me that flying balls of colored light, observed earlier this week over Colorado, are headed toward Pahrump.
They've been reported flying in the sky as blue-green and red in color, and are reminiscent of the lights in the movie Close Encounters.
Cool.
As they approach Pahrump, they will be observed as red, white, and occasionally orange in color.
The lights will be preceded by an electrical buzzing-like interference picked up by electronics in the Pahrump area.
The humming may already have commenced.
Ooh!
Anyway, I won't read the rest of it.
He says, I've copied this memo to Art Bell in the spirit of openness, He may be suspicious of our intentions, but hopefully he'll
understand that we are just documenting Journalists with a willingness to share information as we
learn about it We shall see
Thank you.
There was, in fact, another occasion on which they somehow knew that an incident was going to occur and actually went into a town and interviewed people prior to the incident.
Well, to the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, is it Sharp Bell?
That'd be me, yes.
Excuse me?
That's me!
Oh, I'm so happy to talk to you again.
You were talking about the heads of the monkeys being switched?
Yes.
I heard that they interviewed some monkeys the other day and asked them if they wanted to experiment with that procedure, and they all had the same answer.
Do you know what it was?
What?
Don't monkey around with me.
Well, if they had that kind of sense of humor, my dear, that would mean they would be sentient, and it would indicate that we should not fool them at all.
Otherwise, it sounds corny.
But if they really did have that kind of sense of humor, then you couldn't do it.
I did hours with Dr. White on the subject.
It was absolutely fascinating, and in fact, it could be done.
They could keep a human head alive.
In fact, perhaps, with more ease than they have kept a monkey's head alive.
And they did that years ago.
Now, the ethics and morality of it, that's another question.
But we obviously could do it if we wanted to.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Going once.
Oh, I'm here.
You're there, huh?
Okay.
Rarely do it.
When I get it going once, usually it's gone.
Where are you?
I'm in Northern California.
Okay.
What's on your mind?
Well, I just wanted to mention that you've cost me quite a bit here lately with your bumper music.
Really?
Yeah.
How so?
Well, I've had to go out in the choir I don't know what I can do about it.
We were talking about this the other night.
I hear a song that I haven't heard in about 15 years and I get hooked on it all over again.
Just like the first time.
I got hooked on a bunch of them.
It happens to me.
I really don't know what I can do about it.
We were talking about this the other night.
I hear a song that I haven't heard in about 15 years and I get hooked on it all over again,
just like the first time.
Falling in love all over again.
Yeah, one of the latest ones was that Crystal Gale one that you run now and again.
Ah, yes.
You know, you were mentioning some weeks ago about the lady that had the heart lung transplant.
That's right.
I ran across an article in a magazine, I guess, where there's a book coming out about that.
Would you be interested in information on the book and the author?
Absolutely.
Okay.
Fax it to me.
Send it to me in email.
Get it to me one way or the other and I will pursue it.
You bet.
I'll get a copy of the article run off and I'll mail it off to you then.
Alright, thank you.
Now one thing I would like to add is everybody asks me to have this person or that person on.
But it really helps if you have any contact information at all.
Anything that I can follow up on.
Otherwise, it's a pretty rough ride, I'll tell you.
Um, on my international line, you are on the air.
Hello?
Hello, it's Russ Dow, straight in UFO hotline.
Oh, how are you doing, my friend?
And how's everything down under?
Well, we're starting to get a bit of rain down here.
Not a lot, but it's starting to rain and we might expect rain to increase over Australia and you'll probably start drying up.
Well, it's about bloody time.
I've got three little things for you.
Some very interesting reversals from an audio tape of a woman videotaping an unusual light source in the sky.
And when she played it back the next day, she heard An unusual sound on the audio tape, um, and asked us to analyze it.
And it does appear to say, uh, you are programmed, and when you reverse it, it says, Graze controlled you, or Graze, uh, Graze controlled.
Alright, whatever we're going to do, we better do it quick, because we're near the top of the hour.
Okay, just stand by and I'll run it.
Alright.
Okay, it's only a couple of seconds, so just listen very carefully.
That's you are programmed.
and I'll run your program and it in reverse.
Did you get that?
Sounded like a machine to me.
No, I couldn't hear it very well.
There was a lot of background noise.
I do have another one where a fella called Harry Mason is talking about some scientists breaking ranks in the United States.
And telling people that they're working on Townsend and Brown's electro-gravitic systems.
And when he says importance for the use of civil aircraft, which was their statement saying they broke ranks because of the importance for the use of civil aircraft, when that's reversed, he actually says, oh hell, this is to be used in war.
Clear as a bell.
I'll play that one.
Five seconds.
Alright.
importance for the use of civil aircraft. I'll tell this to Sir Ulysses Water.
Did you get that?
I did, yes.
Now I heard that.
Isn't that incredible?
Yes, but no surprise, I'm afraid.
Well, the Australian UFO Hotline has put this on our website, and there's a lot of other little interesting things there.
Wow.
So, reverse speech has made its way back down to Australia, eh?
Well, we've been doing it for some time.
We call it subliminal reverse recordings.
Well, as you know, David John Oates is, of course, Australian.
That's right.
So he'd be gratified to hear that a lot of it's going on down there.
Very interesting.
How's everything else otherwise?
Oh, it's fine.
Everything's fine.
Things are streaming along as we would expect them.
All right.
Wonderful.
I certainly appreciate your call, and we will look forward to continuing to hear your reports since you're stuck down there.
At the time being.
All right.
Take care.
Bye.
This is one of those songs that I fell in love with again.
There's just something about it.
Listen to the words.
If you're in love, you'll know what I mean.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 29th, 1998.
29th 1998.
When I wanted you to share my life, I had no doubt in my mind.
It's been you, woman, right down the line.
I know how much I lean on you, only you can see.
The changes that I've been through, how they've done harm on me.
You've been as constant as the northern stars, the brightest light that shines.
It's been you, woman, right down the line.
I just wanna say, this is my way of telling you everything I could never...
1999.
1999.
I'm just a windblower, watch the sun rise.
Run in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies.
And if you know the way...
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired April 29th, 1998.
That's right.
Never, ever break the chain.
never ever break the chain ever ever ever well in a moment we're going to check on the health of Bob
Dean Robert O. Dean who I managed to confuse with David Adair a
little while ago But what I didn't confuse is the fact that he has been predicted to be passing on to the other side shortly, and a lot of people read that, of course, as
Meaning he has already gone, and he has not.
Or I've got a ghost on the line, one of the two, so we'll say hello to him and maybe surprise him a little bit.
There's a whole lot of stuff.
You've got to get up to the website.
MSNBC wrote a big story on the entire Kent affair.
And if you'll go to my website, it's, I don't know, about six pages long.
Big, long story on MSNBC.
It's the first item on my website this night.
So, um, go check it out at www.artbell.com.
The entire cast of characters is there, Richard Hoagland, Kent, I'm sure they mentioned Linda
Howe, myself, the entire cast of characters.
In the spirit of continuing to keep you informed.
The survey out in San Diego, California, number one, folks.
About double over the next closest competitor.
We are so far number one on COGO, KOGO and San Diego.
The next closest competitor is down by about a hundred percent.
It is astounding.
And then there's about 30 or 40 stations below that.
Also in Philadelphia at WPHT, up like 2,400 percent.
It is the most astounding rise Uh, in one survey period that I've ever seen, about 2,400% Philadelphia.
Now, um, I told you there's an MSNBC article, you've gotta read it.
It's called A Tale from the Cydonia Sideshow, and it's about the whole thing with Kent.
The audio from the satellite outage caller who confessed, maybe, uh, is up there, and of course the black ops thing is up there again, too, much to the distress of the fellow who wrote it.
Now, coming to us from the other side, here is Robert O'Dean.
Robert, how is it over there?
Are you with the clouds and angels and stuff like that?
You've got a great sense of humor, you know?
It's about 70 degrees here in Scottsdale right at the moment and I'm staying with some lovely friends and I'm feeling pretty sassy, Art.
Oh, right, Robert.
I think the best thing I can do is quote Mark Twain when he said that the rumor of my demise Has been slightly exaggerated.
Well, you know, it was just, you know what it was, right?
No, I don't.
It was the time, the wave rider, it was a time traveler who mentioned in passing in one of his communications, in passing, mind you, that you had passed.
And this was, of course, years into the future.
But, Robert, people read, they sort of half-read things, you know?
And so it's my understanding that after this went up, and heck, we put that up in February, people concluded that you were dead as a doornail, huh?
Listen, my friend, I'm as ornery as ever.
I'm feeling pretty sassy, and I'm looking forward to going home one day, but I didn't have plans to get up a load to go tonight.
Not tonight?
Not tonight.
While you're still here, how about if we do a show next Wednesday?
I would like that.
Would you like that?
I would like that, Art.
I would be honored.
All right.
Then if you would, Robert, do me a big favor and put together a short bio.
That's what I tell them.
I guess I rarely do booking here on the air.
Put together a short bio that I can introduce you with on the air and the phone number where I can reach you at 11 o'clock Pacific Time next Wednesday and consider yourself booked.
Well, thank you, my friend.
It's an honor to be on your show.
All right.
Done deal, and I'm glad you're still among the living.
I know, I'm a hardnery as ever, Art.
Thank you.
Thanks, Robert.
And I'll be in touch.
Take care.
That's Robert O'Dean, folks, still with us.
And, in fact, we'll be doing a program with this next Wednesday.
See, that shows you how people misread things.
Alright, now I've got a real treat for you.
We normally examine sightings.
Fast walkers, things traversing our atmosphere at 24,000 miles an hour, that sort of thing, all sorts of areas in the paranormal.
We anticipate the possibility of extraterrestrial contact, but rarely, rarely, in fact never, have we interviewed somebody like we're about to interview Albert A. Harrison, who has written a book called After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
Al Harrison received his B.A.
and M.A.
in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D.
in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan.
He is currently a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Internship and Career Center at the University of California, Davis.
He is co-author of, check this out, Living Aloft.
Human Requirements for Extended Space Flight.
As well, from Antarctica to Outer Space, Life in Isolation and Confinement.
His articles on space exploration have appeared in such different publications as the American Psychologist, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, The Case for Mars.
Aha!
Behavioral Sciences.
A member of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, Al is currently Deputy U.S.
Editor for Systems Research and Behavioral Science.
He is also a member of the SETI Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics.
I guess it is.
Astronautics.
I think that's right.
Al, welcome to the program.
Well, Art, thanks for having me, and congratulations on being number one.
Number one, this is really nice.
I'm going to Disneyland.
Anyway, great to have you here.
That's quite a background.
I could spend a lot of time, actually, and I should, talking to you about even your other books here.
Living Aloft, Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight.
You know, Doctor, there are many people who believe that we never went to the moon.
And one of the things they cite as the reason why we never went to the moon is because they say there would have been too much radiation and it would have killed, any sort of sun flare or anything would have killed everybody on board a spacecraft going to the moon.
Once we were outside the Van Allen belt, is it?
Any thoughts on that?
Well, a couple of thoughts.
Number one is, uh, don't call me doctor.
Please call me Al.
Well, you haven't.
You're bigger.
Wait a minute.
You have a doctorate.
Well, that's nice.
I've had it a long time, so you can still call me Al.
All right, Al.
And, uh... Dr. Al?
And I'm not a medical doctor, but the stuff I've read is that, uh, doesn't convince me that one would get killed by radiation traveling to the moon.
No?
I, uh, personally believe that people have visited the moon.
Just that sort of mainstream thinking here.
Well, I happen to agree with you.
But there are people who make very strong arguments about the amount of radiation that somebody would suffer.
Would there be risk if you were on the way to the moon and there was a big sun flare?
Yes, there's risk from radiation.
But the way I look at that is it's one of the problems that has to be dealt with and solved for us to make the right kind of move into space.
Let me tell you just a little bit about Living Aloft.
That was a collaborative effort with Mary Connors of NASA Ames Research Center.
She got me interested in space exploration and we were actually surveying the psychological and sociological aspects more than the biomedical aspects.
Those have been very well handled by other people as a matter of fact.
As a result of working with Mary, I attended some conferences and learned about SETI.
And so now I have my feet in both areas.
Human exploration of space and other kinds of life forms in space.
Well then maybe I can ask you about this.
Nobody is ever willing to answer it.
Do we know whether or not it would be possible for a human man and woman to conceive in space?
To have sex and then to conceive a child In space, this is a very non-trivial question, when you get a little deeper than the obvious titillation with respect to the question, because if we're going to have long space flights, and we cannot go faster than the speed of light, we're going to have to have literal generations in space.
And so, nobody's ever answered this.
Can you?
Probably not, but what I will tell you is that in my experience, NASA's been quite reluctant to address the issue of sex in space.
My presumption is that yes, you can have sex in space.
Yes, you can conceive in space.
And there may be some questions about how the fetus would grow under conditions of weightlessness.
Yes.
I may be mistaken on this, but I think that there are some experiments either going on now or planned in terms of I'm not sure.
I'm not sure of that.
But of course, you know, in terms of the radiation problem, there are some very imaginative kinds of ideas, such as Frank Tipler's suggestion that we can send emulated people that don't know that they're different from the real things back on Earth.
What do you mean by that?
Emulated people who wouldn't know they're any different than we are.
What do you mean?
Well, what he suggests in his book, The Physics of Immortality, is that it would be possible to essentially duplicate people by means of these very mammoth, continually running computer programs.
And so consequently, what you would do is you would convey Electronic representations of people, rather than people themselves from one part of the solar system to another.
Are we getting close to the ability to do that?
The speed of microprocessors, even available to the public, of course, is going nuts.
The amount of storage is going nuts.
And eventually, we are going to be able to, it seems to me, approach, possibly even approach sentients.
It may be that we're If I remember correctly, Dr. Tipler estimated that this would occur within the next 20 to 50 years.
It's quite possible that we would have the immense computer capacity.
I have some philosophical problems with the idea that computer emulations of people are essentially people themselves and almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
But it is an interesting point.
And it is one thing that's been suggested to try to deal with some of the problems of traveling through high radiation areas.
All right, well, the people who have had people in space for longer than anybody else, of course, are the Russians with Mir.
And I have heard there have been problems with cosmonauts who have been up there for months and months and months.
What are the major problems with keeping a human in space?
Do our muscles atrophy?
What begins to happen to us?
Oh boy, there's all kinds of physical and psychological things that can happen.
One of the major things is decalcification of the bones, loss of calcium under conditions of weightlessness, muscular deconditioning because it takes less effort to do certain kinds of things, cardiovascular deconditioning is another kind of problem that's a medical problem.
There's ways to address these things, exercise programs, dietary supplements, medicines, various kinds of gizmos.
One other thing that seems to happen, aside from the physical problems, I've noticed, and the controllers have noticed, that the longer the cosmonauts or astronauts stay up there, the more testy they tend to become.
In fact, downright rebellious at times, defying orders from the ground, that kind of thing.
One of the things that happens, Art, when you have a group that's isolated like that, is that Tensions can build up under those kinds of situations.
We've got to remember, you know, it's very hard work in a lot of ways.
There's a tremendous amount of risk and stress and danger.
And what happens sometimes is that the tensions within a group get expressed to outside groups.
It's a little bit safer.
In other words, rather than, say, showing tensions in a direct way to one another, if I were in space, I might take it out on the ground control or something like that.
It's relatively safe as compared to getting into some kind of an altercation with somebody that I'm traveling with.
That's true.
A fight up there would not be good at all.
But I suppose that could occur.
Now, you are a member of SETI, the committee of the International Academy of Astronautics.
I interviewed a gentleman that we are both familiar with from the SETI organization, and we have yet to approach what we're really going to talk about, which is contact afterward, but I would like to get your take, your view, on the ongoing SETI program, which is listening like crazy for any signal from anywhere out there.
What's your view?
A lot of people criticize SETI.
Actually, I'm a SETI buff.
There are UFO buffs, and I don't mean that in an unkindly way, and I'm a SETI buff.
That's quite all right.
I think it's one of the greatest darn things.
It's the people at the SETI Institute, people like Dr. Seth Shostak, I believe you're referring to.
That's right, I interviewed him.
That provided much of the inspiration for my own work that have encouraged me in a lot of ways.
And John Billingham of the SETI Institute was instrumental in getting me to go to the International Astronautical Federation Committee meetings and ultimately getting a hitch on the SETI committee.
So I think it's the rationale to me, the rationale for SETI makes a lot of sense.
I believe that the terms in the Drake equation, which indicate the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence, I think they're quite favorable.
That with each discovery we're getting more and more circumstantial evidence.
And that the search is conducted not only at the SETI Institute, but by many other radio astronomers, could very easily yield results.
I do think that it's a very conservative kind of enterprise.
It is.
And that... Not though among radio astronomers.
Among radio astronomers, I think the SETI effort is pretty well considered to be fringy, isn't it?
Well, that may be.
I think that with people like Phil Morrison at MIT, Frank Drake, formerly of Santa Cruz, but many other places, Carl Sagan, I think the giggle factor is what we refer to it, and I think that's been reduced substantially.
My understanding is that if you pick up an introductory astronomy book these days, you're quite likely to find a whole chapter on SETI.
But yes, I suspect compared to some physicists it's seen as fringy, and I certainly, when I've talked about it to some of my physicist friends on campus, I've certainly got different reactions from different physicists, ranging from enthusiasm to, wouldn't we rather talk about golf?
Well, one of the reasons for that, I suspect, is that if extraterrestrial life was actually confirmed, it would thoroughly upset You and I talked, and I know that you have never read the Brookings Report.
It was done at the behest of the government.
But basically, the Brookings Report concluded that the first group and the biggest group to become more upset than any other over the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be, guess who?
Scientists.
They would be more upset than any other group.
Now, we're at the bottom of the hour, Professor.
See, I called you Professor.
Very kind of you.
Thank you.
He is indeed a professor, and his book is After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
And he'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 29, 1998.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast Amphitheater.
And I'm not going to be a fool to tell you that I'm not going to be a fool to tell you
that I'm not going to be a fool to tell you that I'm not going to be a fool to tell you
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 29th, 1998.
Good morning, everybody.
Professor Albert Harrison is with us, and he'll be right back.
We'll call him now, but it's hard.
Somebody who's got a PhD ought to at least be called professor, not doctor.
But I'll try.
Alright, um...
Professor, tell me, when you wrote a book like this called After Contact, the human response to extraterrestrial life, the presumption is there is going to be contact.
Do you presume there is going to be contact?
The way I answer that is that I think that the probability is high enough that I was willing to write the book.
I personally, you know, as a matter of personal belief, not scientific knowledge, do believe that there's many inhabited worlds out there and that eventually we will be able to make contact with one or more of them.
Do you think that with all, you mentioned the UFO buffs, with all of the anecdotal evidence of things traversing our atmosphere at incredible speeds, all the sightings that cannot be explained, and most of them can, but there are many that cannot, Do you consider it possible that we have or are being visited or observed?
I think it's possible, but I think it's quite unlikely.
I want to back up on that one a little bit.
Sure.
And I've been following UFOs since 1947.
I wasn't very old, but I was excited when the first reports came in.
And the problem that I have personally is that we don't seem to have learned a great deal, at least not Not the kind of stuff that we can convince people with.
And I do believe that a very large proportion of UFO sightings are either hoaxes or misperceptions of natural objects.
One gets down to the problem of is there a residual?
Is there some sort of tiny core there that does something else?
I really don't know, but what I do know is that I'm not going to end up being convinced until somebody comes up with some kind of procedure so that if in fact there is something going on in that sense that we can verify it and turn it into public knowledge.
I see that's the big difference between SETI and some of the UFO kinds of activities.
SETI is built on the premise that we have to replicate the findings.
We have to repeat them.
And that until that's happened, there is no proof.
I do understand, and there have been reports that SETI has had hits.
In other words, things that it could not explain.
Signals it could not explain, but they were not repeated.
That's true, and of course, now there's a problem there, isn't there?
Because if it happens to be a one-shot signal, you're going to discard it, and it's sort of too bad.
But you really have no choice.
If you're going to try to make some sort of momentous discovery, some sort of announcement on something like that, you've really got to be pretty sure about what you're talking about.
Oh, you've got to be very sure.
I'd like to get back to the issue of the scientists for a moment, if I might.
You might.
You know, the Brookings Report was written, gee, somewhere around 1960.
Right.
And it's quite possible that science has changed a lot since then.
I personally know a lot of scientists who I think would be absolutely thrilled and delighted if SETI managed to have a bingo, or if we discovered extraterrestrial life in some other way.
I think where the problem might be would be if somehow a company in contact, there was a lot of new knowledge that came to us from our new associates.
And it could be very frustrating, for example, in the case of a scientist who had been working on a problem all of his life or her life to discover that it had been solved a million years ago by some other civilization.
But what I like to think is that there is these Kinds of episodes could occur.
But on the whole, we'd be opening up new vistas and new opportunities for human scientists.
And in fact, it would reinvigorate the whole scientific enterprise.
So maybe the Brookings Report is correct.
Maybe I'm correct.
But maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
But I think it could have a very, very positive kind of effect on scientists, except for those who steadfastly maintain that intelligent life could not arise elsewhere.
All right.
You mentioned a great transfer, the possibility of a transfer of very advanced technology.
If one, and I'm going back to the social issues now, I think, examines contact between advanced industrial societies like ours and societies and tribal societies that have never somehow had contact with the outside world previously, inevitably, We really, really screw them up.
Now, why couldn't you transfer that, use that as a parallel, and suggest that a whole bunch of new, advanced technology just dumped on us would foul us up?
Well, see, my presumption is it wouldn't necessarily be just dumped on us.
First of all, Art, you're a very astute observer, and indeed, that does seem to be what happens.
It is the dominant historical pattern, and I can't evade that.
But I'm not convinced that it would necessarily be a situation where this information was
all gleaned at once.
Remember under a SETI microwave search kind of scenario, what's going to happen is we're
going to intercept these signals.
They're going to be hard to decipher.
The civilization will be a long way away.
There will be time delays and so forth.
So it may be that rather than a flood, under the most common kind of SETI scenario, it's
going to be a trickle, and then more information will be received over time.
Actually, the movie Contact with Jodie Foster was fairly Intriguing in terms of the manner in which it would be found.
You would find a marker signal of some sort, which said he would locate, and then you would find some sort of sub-carrier or adjacent signal, which would then give you more information, and presumably all of that would be transmitted simultaneously.
Isn't that a great prospect?
That's one possibility, and the movie sure makes it look good, but it may also be that We intercept something that we have to really work to get the information.
But there's another part to my answer.
And that is, it seems to me that there would be a good likelihood that we would not be the first society that this other society contacted.
That it would just be too large a coincidence for two neophytes to encounter each other for the first time.
And one possibility here, it's a convenient possibility, I admit, One possibility here is that this other society is going to have a lot of experience in dealing with new cultures, and that whereas we can't just sort of sit back and take what they offer us, that the process will be eased by virtue of their experience.
In the book, After Contact, as a matter of fact, I have a better part of a chapter talking about some of the dangers of technology transfer and some of the social consequences.
For instance, suppose that we had the medical skills to keep everybody alive and healthy for a thousand years.
At first that sounds really good. Well, start thinking about it.
How long you've been able to go without having a divorce.
Do you think you could make another 700 years?
Can you remember your grandchildren's names now?
These are meant to be humorous examples, but in fact there can be unintended consequences, things that we do not foresee when we receive advanced technology that we don't really understand.
Well yes, and one of them would certainly be that the Earth's resources are presently strained as it is.
So to be able to keep people alive for hundreds or even thousands of years with reproduction continuing would be a death sentence ultimately.
Yes, but now see here I'll put on my other hat and look forward to mining asteroids and moving out into space.
I think that within a thousand years there will be Nobody's going to be around to prove me wrong, and I won't be around to bear the consequences.
Within a thousand years, I think there's an excellent chance that there will be something reminiscent of a galactic civilization, or sub-galactic civilization, and that people will be scattered far and wide, and that we will no longer be constrained by the limited resources that our planet has.
Well, I'm a Star Trek fan, and in Star Trek there is something called the Prime Directive.
Which prevents any galactic federation from tampering with any new emerging civilization, based on exactly what we've been talking about, that it would disrupt them terribly, and until they reach a certain stage of development, they are not contacted.
I would imagine that we have not yet quite reached that stage, or I would guess that, anyway.
How about you?
I don't know.
What kinds of things would they look for?
It should be very easy for a very advanced society to monitor other societies and look for certain things.
Well, one of the things you might look for is the fact that they have discovered, mined, conquered Element 92 without threatening to destroy each other.
How about that?
I'm not sure I followed.
In other words, they are not constantly at war?
Oh right, yes.
And I think actually we're doing a little better on that score, don't you?
Well, a bit better, but in a lot of ways, since the decline of the Soviet Union, And the emergence of the individual Russian Confederation, there's still an awful lot of danger out there and some people would argue more than there was when we had a good solid Cold War underway.
I agree there's danger out there.
I'm an optimist but I try not to be a Pollyanna.
Another is, and I'm going to say this to you and you can deal with it the way you want, I get thousands of letters every week dealing with these topics.
And fully, 20% of them, Professor, are from religious fundamentalists.
And these folks, about that number of them by percentage, if they were to encounter extraterrestrial life, would view it as of the devil.
And if a saucer landed somewhere, just theoretically, and a little guy was walking down the ramp, he would be so full of lead before he hit the bottom of the ramp that they'd need two wheelbarrows to carry him away.
So there are a lot of people who would view any extraterrestrial life as of the devil, and there'd be real trouble.
Yes, I think, and I'm not sure if it was from the Brookings Report, but in addition to scientists, they mentioned, somebody mentioned politicians would have a lot to lose that could cause problems for people with mental illness.
Indeed.
And then people with certain kinds of religious beliefs.
Those were the four big groups.
Yes.
I think that, first, that What I'd like to point to is a number of studies suggesting that, whereas this percentage may be out there, that many people would see detection of extraterrestrial intelligence as not only consistent with their religious views, but sort of very supportive of that, in the sense of providing further testimony, you might say, to God's power and wonder.
Yes, I have heard this about people that have a very specific set of beliefs that could be challenged if life had evolved elsewhere.
For instance, Christ might not have been, but gee whiz, we can't let, in my opinion, 20% of the people shouldn't be allowed to call the tune on this.
Well, while I agree with you, I would remind you the American Revolution started and succeeded with a far smaller percentage.
Well, there might be some way to, first of all, the steady presumption is it's going to be radio contact, but if at some future point a visitation quote occurred, certainly there could be some way to engineer it to be safe.
I mean, for instance, one possibility, and this is, you know, sheer speculation, way
off in the future would be to meet on the moon.
Another possibility would be some type of sea landing where you have to have vessels
and things.
You're exactly right.
In fact, if you recall back, I think you're exactly right, incidentally.
You certainly couldn't have it anywhere within the continental United States unless you picked, say, a very isolated area of Wyoming and got everybody out of the way like close encounters.
Certainly, you couldn't allow the general public to have access to such an event, which brings me To the following question.
With regard to SETI, let us, for the sake of conversation, assume that SETI receives an unambiguous signal.
Yes.
Unambiguous.
Now, in the perfect world, you would imagine there would be a public announcement, and that SETI would do a big press release, and we'd all be told that suddenly we had been, lo and behold, thank God we've got a signal, we're not alone, And we'd all hear about it, but I don't believe for one second that's what would occur.
Even as much as I respect SETI, I think that there would be, and I bet there are, protocols for this, that the American public, or the world, would not be the first to hear about it, that contact would be reported to a government agency first.
Am I wrong?
Mr. Bell, I think you're right.
We spend a huge amount of time at our meetings discussing protocols, procedures.
The goal is to make this an event for all of humanity, not for one nation or another nation.
Sure.
The goal is to bring everybody in on it and then, you know, work together to decide who replies.
How you make this work in the day of emails, government eavesdropping, what have you, nobody's for sure.
So we recognize that it's the goal.
I think there's quite a bit of suspicion or concern on some people's parts that if a signal were detected, then perhaps governmental agencies would take over.
And rather than being an achievement of science, it would sort of become one more governmental kind of operation.
Now, nobody can prove it one way or another.
But I will say that I think that the official protocols have a long way to go.
And whenever you're trying to get Who knows, 300 nations together and marching to the same drummer, you're guaranteed to have a lot of difficulties.
You bet.
But I mean, from the moment that signal was detected, can you tell me, or do you know, who would be notified first?
Or is this something you cannot... According to the protocols, what happens is that, if I remember correctly, they are discussed length and after contact.
The first thing you do is you try to get other observatories To confirm it.
Sure.
And this, of course, requires international cooperation.
Now, I believe the chain of command is to report to various scientific societies either before or at about the same time that the announcement is made to governments.
But the idea is that scientists are supposed to have precedence in this.
Whether or not that could be achieved is another matter.
Again, in the movie Contact, the military moved in very, very quickly.
And I would have to imagine that it would be that way in real life, because it would be considered to be a national security issue.
Before anything else, it certainly would be a national security issue.
Whether it turned out to be that or not in the long run, it would be that at the moment of Contact.
Yes, and then there's concerns that one government might try to make unfair use of it, or make use of it in ways that are contrary to another government.
Of course, our wonderful government would never contemplate anything like that, would they?
No, no.
Somebody else's government might, of course, but not ours.
I'll tell you, we spend a lot of time worrying about this, and there's very few academic social scientists that are looking at this, maybe six or seven people, And frankly, we need some help from political scientists and some other people that have strong expertise in this area to try to deal with these issues.
So if there's any political scientists out there that might be interested, we'd love to hear from you.
So then we would have to imagine there would be a government notification and that they would put the clamps on for a little while until they figured out how to deal with it.
Or how to take advantage of it, or how to turn it to military advantage.
Yes, and these are exactly the kinds of scenarios that the study scientists and the people I work with are trying to figure out how to avoid.
Well, when I interviewed Seth, he suggested that because of all the email and the internet and all the rest of it, there would quickly be leaks and it would be known all over the place.
I suppose that is possible, but if the government stepped in, they could certainly keep it at the rumor stage.
I mean, there's lots of rumors that flash across the internet.
Professor, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour.
We'll be right back.
My guest is Professor Albert A. Harrison, a professor of psychology.
His book is After Contact, The Human Response.
To extraterrestrial life.
And he'll be back in a moment as will I. From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 29th, 1998.
The Coast to Coast is a musical adaptation of the 19th-century Italian opera, La Tira d'Ava.
The original score was written by the Italian composer, Giovanni Borgia,
and the original score was composed by the Italian composer, Giovanni Borgia.
The original score was written by the Italian composer, Giovanni Borgia.
Isn't this haunting music?
I love it.
It's Lorena McKinnon.
Those of you who don't know, my guest is Professor Albert Harrison.
His book, After Contact, The Human Response to Extra-Terrestrial Life.
And he'll be back in a moment.
That's after contact, folks.
Not too many people consider that.
most of us are considering what it would be like anticipating but rarely considering
what would occur after contact maybe this will demonstrate
with a little humor although it's not so funny I think it was a jack candy
perhaps on Saturday Night Live who said the following quote I'll bet
that aliens think that we are too barbaric to hand down the higher secrets of the universe to
one.
But I'll bet they'll change their mind, their tune, with a little torture.
End quote.
The laugh was mine.
Doctor, um, that, uh, Professor, that is, um, that's a little funny, but it's not so funny in a lot of ways.
How do you think that if we actually made contact, physical contact, and we had aliens, they would be treated?
Boy, there's so many possibilities here.
My big concern would be a chance encounter or local authorities who are quite fearful.
Oh, that'd be very bad.
But one could again hope for other types of scenarios.
Now, I hasten to add that as a steady person, of course, I'm looking forward to a nice Remote, sanitary, safe exchange of radio waves and things.
But there's all kinds of interesting things that if somebody landed, or something landed.
First of all, there's jurisdictional kinds of issues.
I mean, is it a matter for the local cops?
Is it a state matter?
Is it a federal matter?
Is it an international matter?
There's questions in terms of which bureaucracies would swing into play.
Customs and Immigration have something to say about it.
If they look like food, would the Food and Drug Administration, only kidding on that one, but seriously... Or even more worrisome, if we look like food.
Yeah, yeah, but my belief on that one is that they're going to be extremely prosperous and well-fed, so I'm not too worried about it.
Seriously, my guess is that any society that Had the means to flit about the universe, could find abundant resources on uninhabited planets or planets that did not have higher life forms on them.
One of the concerns and something which I certainly spend a bit of time on in my book is the way that various bureaucracies might respond.
And I think that the government bureaucracy, typically they're not good at dealing with Fast-moving events and events that require novel kinds of activities and solutions.
And my guess is that under any kind of contact scenario, they're going to have to respond quickly and they're going to have to think creatively.
And my guess is that very few agencies, if any, have given any serious thought to this, that the giggle factor is too high.
And also that it's unthinkable, like the Titanic sinking.
And one of the things I hope to see happen is for some intelligent discussion about how we really would react and what kinds of steps agencies might take now so that when contact occurs, if it occurs, that things can move smoothly.
Professor, we assume, perhaps incorrectly, that with evolution mankind will slowly be less and less of a warrior But there is the possibility that that assessment is incorrect, and it may be incorrect with regard to another civilization that may be very much more advanced than we are.
So to send out signals, in effect saying where we are, to send out spacecraft with a little disc containing the human genome and all the rest of it, It could be argued to possibly be a mistake.
The movie Independence Day comes to mind, where they arrived and they had really no interest in bargaining with us, didn't want to give us anything, simply wanted to kill us.
So, if you imagine the scenario that the nature of war and the nature of warriors does not really change with time, you just get better weapons, then isn't there some worry that An Independence Day type scenario could occur.
There is, but I think it's fairly minimal.
And I spent a huge amount of my time doing the research, trying to come to grips with this issue.
And the question is, is it going to be very large and belligerent societies taking over everywhere?
Yes.
And my conclusion is probably not, looking at what's going on on Earth.
Now it's fairly complicated.
There's several prongs to it.
One is that there's a shift towards democratic forms of government on Earth.
And we know that democratic forms of government tend not to go to war, at least with other democratic forms of government.
Usually there's some sort of authoritarian state there.
So as the world is becoming democratized, you might say, the risk of war is going down.
The second is that the British military historian John Keegan has argued very convincingly in one of his recent books, and unfortunately the title escapes me right now, that in fact the world is turning from war and that within a couple hundred years war will be obsolete.
A man by the name of Mueller makes the same argument saying, look, lots of nations have already turned away from war.
He calls it the process of Hollandization.
More nations are turning away.
The defeated nations in World War II being a good example.
And he said that there's wide-scale recognition now that war is both methodologically ineffective and morally repugnant.
And if this isn't enough, friends, there's mathematical studies of the survivability of nation-states.
And basically, the very simple kind of explanation here Is that countries that go around looking for trouble get themselves put out of business primarily by coalitions of other countries.
Now, admittedly, this is based on human experience.
We think that physical principles apply throughout the universe.
We're starting to think that certain biological principles apply throughout the universe.
I'm probably one of a very limited number of people who thinks that Certain psychological and sociological principles may apply beyond our planet.
What that boils down to is, I think you're saying that there is a great likelihood that if we do meet them, whoever they are, they will resemble us.
They will not.
My expectation is that they will essentially have moved beyond war.
And again, you know, it's a very long-winded argument.
Well, no, it's very interesting that they would have moved beyond war then.
Would you consider contact to be rather unlikely, if we are being observed, until we have moved beyond war?
In terms of their criterion for deciding when to initiate contact?
I don't know.
You know, one could argue that That would certainly be a possibility, and I've heard it suggested, for instance, that our ability to contain nuclear arms might be something that would be a definite sign of maturity in the eyes of another civilization.
I interview a fascinating man, a professor at New York City University, Michio Kaku.
Do you know of him?
I know of him, sure.
He has a fascinating theory regarding the state of civilizations, that there would be a Type 0, which we would be utilizing fossil fuels and the more base things that we can get from our own planet.
Then there would be a Type 1, which would utilize Uh, the, the, the power of, uh, oh, for example, zero, uh, uh, zero point energy, uh, would begin to harness these, uh, other types of powers and, uh, then other types of civilizations even further on harnessing the power of the sun and so forth and so on.
But he gives the chance of a Type 0, us, making it to a Type 1.
In other words, not blowing itself to smithereens, or ecologically destroying itself, to be a very small chance indeed.
And that very few Type 0s become Type 1s.
Would you agree or disagree?
Well, not having read his arguments, I don't know what to say, except that I think we've made it through a very rough 50 year period.
We have, yes.
And I have a belief that we're going to persevere.
And I think that technology is going to help us, not hinder us.
We need to think big, not think small.
I think we're doing well with our adolescents and look forward to maturity for the generations that come next.
So we are at more or less an adolescent social stage.
Lots of times the early nuclear era is referred to as sort of an adolescent stage.
The idea is you've got this tremendous power and stuff, but you don't really quite know how to control it.
And that's kind of a metaphor for adolescence, I think, for some people.
Should we begin our government agencies, should they be now, not chuckling, but putting into place procedures for contact so that it would not be A fouled up, I'll say fouled up, and result in our extinction or some horrible mistake that contact would be smooth, whether it was somebody coming here or the receipt of a sudden signal.
That would certainly be something that I would encourage, but I would add, now this wouldn't necessarily involve a cast of thousands and a budget of millions, but to get some people Thinking about it, talking about it, considering various possibilities and likelihoods.
The reason being that if and when contact occurs, it's going to be very quick and that will be too late to think it through and to put procedures in place.
It'll be a responsive rather than a proactive kind of a mode and it'll be a lot of mopping up.
So I think that To me it makes sense to have some people, not everybody, but some people and key agencies thinking about this as a possibility and not simply laughing and scratching their head.
There is another kind of contact or sudden realization that would be, in a lot of ways, every bit as disturbing as contact with an alien race, and that is, right now we have a spacecraft taking very interesting photographs of Mars.
And I noticed that you wrote a book called The Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, The Case for Mars.
Now, I'm sure this is not your area of expertise, but in the Cydonia region of Mars, we're taking photographs of things that people are arguing like crazy about that may turn out not to be natural.
I have interviewed a number of astronomers who would stake their reputation on the fact they're not natural.
That would indicate That a long time ago, there was intelligent life on Mars.
If we should suddenly be able to confirm that fact, wouldn't the social stress and all the rest of it be much the same as if we were having contact?
I'm not sure that it would be, because, well, first of all, yes, it would be a momentous, sensational event, and it would certainly transform science.
So that, you know, intelligent life wasn't unique to our planet.
But in this particular case, you're dealing with a long dead or remote civilization.
And so, for instance, the chances of getting a lot of, you know, advanced technology from this civilization, the chance of them invading, whatever, these things are not there.
So I think that a contact with what you might call live or sentient or active beings would
be much more dramatic.
As a psychologist, of course, I'm aware of a lot of factors in perception.
You know, we're not me, but some of us use inkblots and ask the people to look for things.
I think that the face on Mars is fascinating because it is arguable.
The problem is that if people believe it was created by conscious beings, they're not going
to be convinced it was a natural formation and vice versa.
And it's infuriating, of course, because it's so close and so far away that the definitive kinds of looks that could put it to rest one way or the other are just a little bit beyond our reach, so it would seem.
If news of that sort or a signal were actually received by SETI, do you think there would be a single blunt announcement or do you think that it would be the information would be kind of slowly given to the public in small doses kind of like a time-release capsule so as not to shock?
Sure.
My understanding of the desired way to go if SETI detects something is to understand what it is, verify it, and verify what it is, and then get the information to the public fairly quickly.
Try to really minimize the risk of mistakes.
Keep those down really, really low.
I have heard, of course, the hypothesis that There's conditioning going on that pieces of news are being released to people, that there's movies and shows, and my only comment on that is that if in fact that's occurring, I don't think it's being done particularly skillfully.
Well, in fact many people have accused me of being part exactly of that effort.
And it is indeed very quite random.
You're certainly correct.
But would they be?
I'm sure you've considered the social implications of a sudden announcement that a signal has been received and that information is coming in that we are suddenly in contact.
You've carefully considered the social implications of that.
And so how much preparation should then be done right now?
I think that people need to be educated, that agencies need to be educated, and that there needs to be some thought given to an action plan.
Let me stress that the different contact scenarios or versions of contact that people have in mind have very different kinds of implications.
It's one thing to simply bluntly announce, gee, we found a radio signal and we think it's We know it's extraterrestrial and we think it's intelligent as compared to an announcement such as, well, gee, you know, 50 years ago a flying saucer crashed and we've been carrying on negotiations with this government for 50 years and they have a base in, you know, the New Mexico desert or whatever.
Very, very different kinds of situations.
And in the second situation, then, you know, some kind of gradual release of information or Conditioning, you know, might make some sense, actually.
All right, Professor, hold on.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from April 29th, 1998.
She's got better days in sight She'll turn her music on You won't have to think twice She's pure as New York snow She got better days inside
It's too easy to unheal you How the best has just left you
The End The End
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in Time
Tonight's program originally aired April 29, 1998.
My guest is Professor Albert A. Harrison, a professor of psychology, director, internship, and career center, University of California, Davis.
as his book, After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
And we'll get back to him in a moment.
Well, all right.
If you have a question for Professor Harrison, then now would be a good time.
You've got the numbers, and we're going to go to the phones for the professor here in a moment and see what it is that you would ask of somebody imagining contact after contact, actually.
Professor, welcome back.
Hey.
I've got a couple of faxes here I'd like you to deal with.
One says, hi Art, imagine this scenario.
You're a powerful alien society that knows us from static, filled with I Love Lucy episodes, and you have decided long ago that Earth is a planet full of idiots.
Your warships just happen to be in our end of the galaxy, oh look, there's that planet of idiots, boom boom, out go the lights.
Indeed, they would have seen early episodes of I Love Lucy and, I suppose, A lot of the other early kind of nonsensical comedies, but you wouldn't imagine they'd do that, would you?
Well, I would hope not.
I hope that we wouldn't go around popping one another off because we didn't like their taste in comedy shows.
I thought they were sort of dippy or something like that.
I think that the facts make a really good point, and that is that some of the material that's out there in terms of Radio signals coming from Earth would not paint a very positive picture if in fact they were strong enough to make it to some destination where it could be interpreted.
So I do accept that point, but gee, if we kill people for being dingbats and stuff, it wouldn't be a very populous planet.
That's true.
Here's a really good one.
Aren't a question for the professor, the ETs have landed on a Monday morning.
Boy, now there's a, uh, I hate multiple choice kinds of, uh, exams.
If we could go to the following Sunday, my guess is they would be packed.
all the services would have to be held outside b empty
or c no change boy now there's a uh... i hate multiple choice kind of uh...
if we could go to the following sunday by guesses they would be packed i
think for many people have been uh... victoria alexander updated a uh...
interesting study of clergy from many different faiths and uh...
uh... what she found was that uh... they believe that uh...
their congregations will power shift whatever uh... would be uh... but the light of the people's very
positive I think, though, it might be kind of difficult running a church service if there was live coverage at home on TV, so if I have to pick, I would go that people would be home watching the breaking news.
One more and then we'll go to phones.
This one says, Art, you mentioned the historic precedent of technologically advanced cultures encountering and consequently decimating less technical cultures.
The crucial question here is whether this is a problem inherent in and directly caused by the technological disparity or is this more a matter of human failings of power, lust, and cultural clashes?
That is an Wonderful, provocative question and I think that one of the reasons is that there has been a problem when technologically advanced cultures have encountered other cultures is that the technologically advanced cultures have confused technology with advancement and superiority and have had plenty of arrogance to go along with it.
So if you can have the technology And not necessarily downgrade people who do not have the technology, then maybe it's not an inevitable consequence.
All right.
And one more of this one's from me.
It seems to me, Professor, that at the rate we are advancing right now, if you look at our technological society, that in any society's development, the period of time during which they would communicate By electromagnetic means, would be a very, very, very short period in the larger picture.
In other words, already we are beginning to wire the nation with cables that will carry immense amounts of bandwidth, and it will not have to be broadcast through the air.
And I can imagine that would go from there.
Why should we imagine that any civilization except for a very short period of time would even transmit radio or television or even in the electromagnetic spectrum?
That's a very legitimate concern and one that study scientists are aware of.
One of the reasons that we do radio telescope searches is that we're able to do so.
At present, it is my understanding that the SETI Institute is considering other types
of searches that could be mounted.
One could look for light communication, for instance.
One can look for energy signatures of spaceships.
And then, of course, there's always been the idea of the super civilizations that consume
monstrous amounts of energy and can be detected.
So that's a very valid point.
It may be that radio does go on forever, but we need to expand the search and we need to
look closer to home, I think, for the robot probes.
What do you think?
Oh, well, that's where I was going.
What do you think of the concept of annoyment probes?
In other words, that a very advanced civilization might seed a moon or nearby planetary body with some sort of robotic device designed to sit there and just wait and wait and wait like in the movie 2001 until This society that they had observed managed to go from point A to point B and then it would suddenly come alive and notify the robotic owners of the presence of intelligent beings.
That's certainly an interesting and plausible scenario.
I think that with respect to probes in general that because we have gotten so good at miniaturization and other kinds of things that We're more willing now to recognize that other societies may have sent out huge numbers of very small probes, some of which could be in our solar system at present.
And there's a little bit of controversy over this.
Is this being too daring and forward, or is it acceptable?
But my personal position is that I think, yeah, we have to be open to the possibility of some kind of probes.
You said that you got fascinated with all of this way back with the Roswell reported crash in 1947.
With the original sightings, I'm not sure that I recall the Roswell crash, but I certainly do recall as a child the discussions of UFOs and the many sightings in the late 40s and early 50s.
I had a conviction at the time that something might happen fairly soon.
You know, 50 years have gone by and I'm still waiting, but yes, that was a remarkable event of my childhood.
Well, we still argue about what occurred at Roswell, and of course the Air Force, you will recall, I think about a year ago, held a news conference and tried to explain away what occurred at Roswell, and I thought did a terrible, terrible job of it.
Do you think it possible that something indeed did occur at Roswell and we still don't know the truth?
I think something occurred at Roswell because I think some of the military events are unquestionable.
What it was, what it had to do with, I really gotta say, I've read a lot of, I've read some of the books, I have no idea.
I'm certainly not willing to concede that it was a Flying saucer crash, and yet sometimes I'm not entirely convinced by Project Mogul and some of these other explanations.
My guess is that Roswell will forever be a mystery.
Oh boy.
Alright, let's try the phones.
First time caller line.
You are on the air with Professor Harrison.
Hi.
Hi, this is Frank in River Grove, Illinois.
Hi Frank.
Hi Art.
Hi Professor.
Hi Frank.
I have two comments and a question.
Okay, first of all, Today I went on a field trip to the Alder Planetarium in Chicago, and we've seen a movie on Mars, and they talked about Cydonia, and said that the face on Mars was caused by an illusion of light.
And this really upset me, because I listened to your show, Art, and I felt that the person giving the speech and giving the tour was very ignorant, and wasn't looking at all the evidence.
Well, I would have been certainly happier had they said It may be caused by a trick of light and shadow.
I don't think that the definitive word is yet in on that, if you look at the latest images.
Right, they didn't even go into the geometric patterns that are up there.
Sure.
It goes to a question about, Professor, scientific bias.
There is an awful lot of it, isn't there, which is connected to the chuckle factor.
Yes, I think, but this could also be true on everybody's part, that once we form an impression of something, we tend to Process additional information to bolster our initial opinion.
It can be shaken.
It can be changed.
But my hunch is that, yes, there is a bias in science against this interpretation, but there may also be a bias in some quarters against an illusion of light interpretation.
Indeed.
Wild Card Line, you are on the air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Good morning.
Hello there.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Yes.
Where are you, sir?
I am.
My name is Ben.
I'm from Portland, Oregon.
Portland, all right.
Yes.
I was wondering if the doctor thought that there had been communication already.
All right.
Actually, that's quite a good question.
Is it possible that communication has occurred and it simply has not been made public?
Ben, it's possible, but I don't know about it until it's made Public, I can't really do much with it.
If it's already occurred, the SETI Institute and many other searchers are certainly going to a great deal of trouble and expense for nothing.
So I really don't know.
My guess is that it hasn't, but gee, I can't be 100% confident.
What about the possibility, and everybody talks of this, of life elsewhere?
Now we know From recent discoveries that the probability of planets around stars is very high, and we have begun to discover, in fact, planets surrounding other star systems.
That being the case, how likely is it, or probable is it, that there is, in fact, life out there somewhere?
Well, we all approach this, I think, in slightly different ways, but there are certain elements There have to be stars.
We know there's stars.
There have to be planets.
Now we know there's planets.
There has to be life.
We're now starting to think that life is relatively easy to form, rather than requiring a monstrously improbable series of events.
There has to be intelligence.
And my personal belief is there's lots of different ways that intelligence can arise, not just necessarily the pattern on Earth.
So when you put it all together, I come up with my personal estimate for me is that there's a very high probability of life elsewhere and a very high probability that some of this life will be intelligent.
That's not the same as saying that we found them or that they're visiting us at present.
Suppose we were to turn the tables and suppose instead of us being contacted by some other By Life Elsewhere.
We were to advance and be able to travel faster than light, and we were to encounter a civilization much lesser developed than our own, but nevertheless intelligent.
Do you think we would have the wisdom, say within the next half century or so, to be able to make contact with it without destroying it?
I hope so, but I don't know so.
I like to think that we do develop morally and socially as well as technologically.
At meetings I've been to where this type of thing has been discussed, the figure that comes up is, gee, we may be ready in about 200 years.
About 200 years.
I don't know how one manufactures that, but the fact that we're talking about this right now, that you brought it up, that we're worried about it, maybe shows that we're on the right track.
Ah, that's a positive way to think about it.
Ease to the Rockies.
You're on the air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Good morning.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Professor.
How are you doing this evening?
Hi, great.
Where are you, sir?
This is Jim in St.
Louis, Missouri.
Hi, Jim.
Listen, I had a question.
Art, you had said that a lot of your faxes and emails are from people of the religious nature who believe that... Fundamentalists, about 20%.
Yeah, anything that comes from outer space would be of the devil.
That's right.
My question is, if, let's say for the argument that These are fallen angelic beings.
Wouldn't it be safe to say that these beings have been around since the creation of time and have had this plan to infiltrate the earth with whatever agenda they have and they would not make contact until it was safe to do so?
You know, that they have knowledge of the people who know of their true identity and could harm their plan ultimately.
All right, I think that's more up your alley than mine.
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how to answer that.
My only point in suggesting the kind of communications I've had in about 20 percent, 15 to 20 percent easily, is that it would be a totally unacceptable scenario and they would be thought of as devils and they'd be shot.
I think something, too, that Western culture, the idea of maybe devils as being Little red guys with pitchforks and horns and angels, you know, the good guys being white with little wings.
I think that's something that Western culture has kind of made up in their minds.
You know, I personally believe that angelic beings are actually created.
I think that there were probably several races created and that some actually fell.
I believe in actually more than one race of angelic being.
But I'm beginning to detect from what you're saying that you're part of my 20% more or
less.
I personally believe in it, but I don't think that these creatures would actually make contact until it was safe for them to do it, whether the Christians were... Well, one thing's for sure.
It wouldn't be safe, would it?
I don't believe so, no.
I think there are definitely fundamentalists that would pull out the shotgun and try to do whatever they could, whether that would do anything or not.
I definitely believe that it would not be safe for them to reveal themselves at this point.
All right.
Professor, would you agree with that?
That's a good question for you.
Would it, at this point in our social development, be safe for a far advanced civilization to make contact with us now?
How they went about it would be extremely important.
That, you know, sort of showing up in a remote rural neighborhood if you look something like a bear or something would not be the way to go about it.
But again, you know, presumably there would be, if such a thing were to occur, where possible there would be ways to communicate and arrange things in advance and not simply You know, go through with the landing on the White House lawn.
All right.
Wes for the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Hi.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning.
This is Hans in Seattle, Washington.
All right.
And I've been listening to your program.
I try and catch it as often as I can.
Unfortunately, it doesn't happen as often as I'd like.
But the professor, as I've been listening, sounds, and I believe he said so, is very much an optimist.
And I would hope that he's correct, personally, because I'd hate to have to face down the barrel of a laser rifle at some point in time in the future.
But I think, personally, to believe that everything is goodness and light out there is to set us up for disaster.
Naive.
Yes.
You also said that the world, society as it is now, is getting towards a better and enlightened place, not as many wars and so on and so forth.
The deforestation of the rainforest.
I see Bosnia.
I see all this, you know... Well, we haven't even... You know what?
You're right.
I mean, we haven't really touched on the environmental business, but I would like to do that.
Professor, how are you fixed for time?
I'm fixed fine.
You're fixed fine.
All right.
Then, caller, hold on.
You want to hold on?
I will hold on.
Because it's a very good question.
Professor, you've got a good break coming up here.
Professor Albert A. Harrison is my guest.
His book, After Contact, The Human Response, to extraterrestrial life.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Arc Bell's Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM
from April 29th, 1998.
♪ Somewhere in time ♪ ♪ I had this lonely care of what my end ♪
♪ Oh, clear to me now ♪ ♪ My heart is on fire ♪
♪ My soul's like a wheel that's turning ♪ ♪ My love is alive ♪
♪ My love is alive, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ Ain't no place like the place ♪
♪ Where I can be free ♪ ♪ Take my breath away ♪
♪ I'm happy I can breathe in a land that's afraid of me ♪ ♪ I never hesitate to become a brave one ♪
♪ I'm barely returned to a place that's safe and quiet ♪ ♪ I won't be here no more ♪
I should make it through the day I know
Take my breath away Put it on glass, I saw you
This time you slipped away When the milkman called you
I turned to hear you say Oh, you're so good
I am your man You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier
Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 29, 1998.
My gosh, that's a pretty song, isn't it?
Pretty, pretty song.
From the University of California, Davis, my guest is Professor Albert A. Harrison
and his book is After Contact.
After Contact, mind you, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
And I should now ask him, Professor, how would people get your book?
Is it generally available in bookstores nationwide?
Can they call a number?
What do they do?
Well, I think that they can check for it at their favorite reel or virtual bookstore and or internet bookstore i guess is the
appropriate term so it's up there on amazon dot com for a little bit
okay and i am it's in most bookstores probably can make a many
bookstores what i found is that some of the smaller
bookstores the bookstores the feature paperbacks uh... don't necessarily have it but uh... the larger bookstores
seem to have it have reasonable supplies
well excellent uh... uh...
In that case, as a matter of fact, we have a new little feature on our website that will take people directly over to my guest's Amazon.com website, and they can just buy the book right there, so you guys can do that.
I've got something I want to read you, Professor.
This says, Pellegrino, Powell, and Asimov's Three Laws of Alien Behavior.
Law 1.
Their survival will be more important than our survival.
If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us.
It is difficult to imagine a contrary case.
Species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.
Law 2.
Wimps don't become top dogs.
No species makes it to the top by being passive.
The species in charge of any given planet That's got a nice ring to it, and probably more than a little truth.
But the first question I would have is, why does it have to be one or the other?
will assume that the first two laws apply to us.
That's got a nice ring to it and probably more than a little truth, but the first question
I would have is why does it have to be one or the other?
See there's this sort of overbearing Darwinism sort of survival of the toughest and so forth
and so on and that works really great when you're talking about individual organisms
or even species, but when you're talking about nation states, organizations of societies,
other things start kicking in.
And so I don't think that that biggest tiger in the jungle thing is necessarily the full and entire story.
Well, now let us ask ourselves something, Professor.
Let me give you an example.
As I understand it now, at the rate that we are burning fossil fuels, the world's main resources of these will be nearly completely exhausted in about an estimated 40 to 45 years.
Now, while I understand that we are some form of representative democracy here, and we like to think of ourselves as not being more like, if it gets down to the point where we have to have oil, How convinced are you that we will not go and, if necessary, take it?
That's always a possibility, but I would mention two things.
Number one is that if you go back 500, 400, 300, 200, 100 years and compare it with now, I think, Art, that you'd be pretty happy with where you are now in terms of the quality of your life, the kinds of things that are going on, longevity, security, those kinds of things.
The second thing, as I'm sure you're aware, is that there's a whole big pile of people out there that have some great ideas about how to bring in resources from off of our planet.
My personal belief is that if we just sort of hunker down and keep doing what we're always doing, yes, there is a significant risk.
If we're willing to bite the bullet and get a really decent space program going with some economic motives as well as adventure and science, we may be able to deal with some of these problems.
Hey, now you notice I didn't categorically say no, we won't go to war over oil, but I would like to see some of these other possibilities rise to the fore.
Alright, just before the hour, we had a caller on here.
Are you still there, caller?
Yes, I am.
Alright, you began to ask questions about the environment.
We barely even covered that.
I could sit here and I won't bore everybody with it, but from the Antarctic, which is beginning to break up, the ice shelf is breaking up, to our air, Organisms being born in our water, to new diseases, to all these things that we are presently doing to our environment, is a pretty good question, Professor.
Do you think that we'll be around long enough, make it through all of this, to even meet anybody else?
We've talked about war.
Let's now talk about what we're doing just to stay alive, our environment.
Sure.
I do want to backtrack for a second, because Hans had two really excellent questions.
We do have to keep our guard up, in the sense that one of the first things we have to do is guarantee our safety and security.
That doesn't necessarily mean blowing the other party off the face of the earth.
That's really important, Gabe.
But yeah, Hans' point is an extremely good one.
With respect to the environmental issues, yeah, there is a lot of problems out there, but I'm hoping that with the assistive technology, not by thinking small, but by thinking big, We're going to be able to address these.
For instance, there's a project underway right now that is directed by, I believe, William Webster, who was former director of the FBI, to relocate the world's nuclear waste to a Pacific island where it's less likely to cause trouble or fall into the hands of people who might want to make bombs and things.
There's a million things out there that we've got to deal with.
I hope that we will be able to do that.
What I would like to say is let's look at some of the positive accomplishments we've made as well as castigating ourselves for things we could do better.
I agree.
There's a lot that we have done to make our world better.
Unfortunately, there's a lot that Let's face it, I'm a pessimist.
I look at the world and I see a half-empty glass, unfortunately.
The media focuses on everything that's bad.
You mentioned, when is a good time for the aliens to land?
Definitely not after ID4 came out.
That would have been absolutely horrendous.
look at the number of good alien movies, E.T., compared to the ones where they come and eat
your face, Aliens, ID4, what have you.
It's as if someone out there wants us to feel that everyone out there is out to get us.
The normal person, me, everybody else out there, we get our information from the media,
We get our information from the movies, we get scared out of our pants at the theaters.
Oh my God, the aliens are coming!
Hopefully, that's not the only place that we get our information, but a lot of it is.
It worries me to think that that's the kind of mindset that we've got, but the media focuses in on the bad part of us, and it shows us all the violence in our lives, and it plays on that, and it inures us to that violence.
In its own way, you know, creating more.
I think that I understand the spirit of your question.
The conditioning by the media may be all the wrong kind of conditioning.
Would you suggest that's true, Professor?
Would you agree that's true?
There is a lot of conviction that media portrayals shape people's responses and that the comments that the caller made are Basically correct.
Landing after ID4 would not have been the best choice of time.
One person had observed that science fiction movies have become more positive towards aliens and all of a sudden there was this big rash of these horror kinds of things.
I think we have to look at what entertains and what involves people and we also have to look at the pressures on the media.
Media coverage is going to be extremely important because after all Most of us will not be there even if it landed in downtown LA.
Most of us would not be there.
We're going to learn about it from the media and the way they portray things and the way they handle it is going to be crucial in determining a world reaction.
So then let us assume an alien race preparing to contact us wishes to do it with the least amount of pain and disruption to our society.
As possible, would they be better off going to see Mr. Spielberg or Mr. Clinton?
I'm not sure, but if it was up to me, if I was trying to make contact with another society, I would send plenty of advance warning and it would be a very slow and gradual process with an accumulation of unmistakable, not ambiguous, unmistakable signs starting with something which Just gives evidence of intelligence and nothing else, and followed by increasing cues as to my identity, should we say.
And I would take my time.
There's absolutely no reason to rush something as important as that.
And you would probably want to have several national radio shows like mine with professors like you as guests who would talk about this, right?
Absolutely.
Lots of professors and people like you to emcee the landing, see?
And then everything will go just great.
First time caller of the line.
You're on the air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Hi.
Yes, hello, Art.
This is Mike in Philadelphia.
Hi, Mike.
Hi, Mike.
Good morning, Professor.
I have one question for you.
Where do you think MKUltra plays into this, if any?
And I'll hang up for the answer.
All right.
Well, that's a way out question.
MKUltra, Professor, you may well know or not, was a mind control program by the CIA.
Supposedly ended way back when.
So I guess he's asking about that kind of preparation.
I don't know anything about that.
Good answer.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Hi.
Hey, this is Curtis from San Diego.
Hi, Curtis.
Hey.
What day in November is that meteor shower?
What day in November?
I think it'll be many days in November, and it's going to be a very serious meteor shower, threatening a lot of our communications satellite, so I don't know.
Well, maybe you could have your show outside, possibly, then.
Yeah, I can do that.
I might do that.
In fact, I'd love to do that, actually.
i will do it we can thank you god or something altogether alright now
your question well i want to ask him if
what is the view on god is in uh... when it's coming i think that
uh... world will be ready i think the people will be ready it'll be it'll come like revelations in the the world will
be ready when when they come they're not ready yet
but as soon as the uh... corruptness and uh...
killings and all of that I think that's when it will be ready.
That's when we'll be ready.
Well, that certainly won't be our lifetimes.
But, Professor, he asked about God, and I'm going to... Remember the movie Contact Again?
Yeah.
You remember when Jodie Foster was in front of the committee trying to decide who was going to get the seat to ride?
Yes.
The ultimate question they asked her I would ask you, and you can refuse to answer on the fifth or any other grounds you wish to refuse to answer, and that is, if we were going to have one candidate, one person like they did in that movie, descend as a representative of the human species, would it be a reasonable question to ask, do you believe in God?
Now we're moving from science to personal belief.
We sure are.
And I'm going to say two things on that.
I think that it's appropriate to ask a question about a person's spirituality, or their beliefs, or their sense that there's something greater than themselves.
I might not personalize it in terms of a God, which frequently conjures up a human-like image.
And the second thing is, for me personally, I realized I was at church, my brother was singing in a special Easter thing, and I realized that the uh... search for extraterrestrial intelligence my thinking
about the universe
the uh... idea that there's other things out there that for me it almost serves a
uh...
religious or spiritual uh... purpose and these are very personal answers and not
to be confused with the papers i try to publish on setting
in that movie that's a kind of answer jodie foster
tried to give it first but then of course a tender down and said no
the god of the bible
the specific god that the uh... worship uh...
in church as exactly prescribed in the bible do you believe in that
Well, I don't remember all the details from the movie, but from what you say, I think the Jodie Foster character and I must think a lot alike.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Albert Harrison and Art Bell.
Hello.
Good evening, sir.
Good evening.
Where are you?
I'm Professor Montreal.
Montreal?
Yeah.
I'm Andrew speaking.
Alright.
A few points, and then I'll let the professor comment.
Firstly, Type I civilizations have been coming to Earth for approximately half a million years.
These beings, and there's a whole wide range of different beings who have come, are primarily How are you able to make that statement so definitively, I must ask you?
Well, if I just can go on and maybe that answer will reveal itself.
Well, alright.
I'll hope for revelation.
Continue.
I believe that these beings are both warriors and spiritual warriors, and as you see, that is best represented You mentioned about contact and the message that was being sent by these beings for many years, and it only took somebody to find it.
Now, that type of codes or messages have been around on this planet for a very long time, and you can see that in the Hebrew alphabet, in the cuneiform tablets, in Sanskrit.
I mean, the woven codes in the Hebrew alphabet.
I mean, you're very familiar with that art.
The type of contact that you are expecting and talking about I don't believe is going to happen for a long time, but beings have been contacting us for a very long time.
It happens in a very particular and a very selected type way.
I'm sorry, but we have a limited amount of time and there's been no revelation yet.
I asked you how you are certain that... I've been contacted by beings my whole life.
All right.
I just want to tell you one last thing.
Yes.
In Area 51, the Grays have been collaborating with the U.S.
government for a very, very long time.
All right.
Well, thank you.
Still no revelation for me, at least of hard evidence.
There are many, many, many people, though, who believe as this man does.
Doctor, it's not an unusual belief.
In fact, according to the surveys that are run by Major survey companies, an awful lot of people already believe we have been contacted.
We are being visited, I believe, greater than 50 percent believe that.
Yes, I think that's correct.
Is that one step along the way toward qualifying for real contact?
Could be.
That certainly comes up, and it comes up in my book and many other places too, that a lot of people are not going to be particularly shocked because they believe that we've been I visited already.
It gets back though to, I think, the other part is it gets back to your comment, Art, and that is the problem of definitive proof that we have belief, but we have to convince other people.
And it gets into some really interesting kinds of problems.
Half the people believe this is occurring, half believe there's no evidence.
Normally, you can find something to show things one way or the other.
But that's a far greater percentage than they would have measured years ago.
Hold on, Professor, and we'll be right back.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
And here she is.
This is Crystal.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 29th, 1998.
The Coast to Coast AM concert was held on April 29th, 1998 at the San Francisco International Music Center.
The concert was held at the San Francisco International Music Center.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 29th, 1998.
Well, I am here, and my guest is, as well, his book is After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
Aren't you curious?
He is Professor Albert A. Harrison of UC Davis, and he'll be right back.
Alright, back now to Professor Harrison.
Professor, here's a really interesting fact, and I had never thought of this, but I guess I'm thinking of it now.
I am convinced that if aliens did land in, say, Times Square, New York City, Hollywood and Vine in L.A., or North Beach in San Francisco on, say, a Friday or Saturday night, and walked among the people there, they wouldn't even raise a raised eyebrow.
But I am sure he goes on, the aliens would be shocked by the humans inhabiting these particular areas.
Actually, actually, that's really true, isn't it?
In other words, it wouldn't even rate a raised eyebrow.
Well, I guess it would depend a lot on exactly what the aliens look like.
And the extent to which they could be confused with humans, but I think there's a really poignant point there, and that is that there's a lot, if I understand the facts, that there is a lot of poverty and misery, and indeed we need to look at those problems.
I think an important thing to keep in mind about SETI is that it's privately funded at this point, and it uses a very small amount of the gross national product.
That's true.
Well, I think the point might be not so much poverty And all the rest of it has weirdness.
In other words, if you came down at Hollywood and Vine on a Friday night and you didn't look any weirder than, let us say, Mr. Spock on Star Trek... Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
...Ms.
Thatcher is correct.
Sure.
I prefer to think of it as variety, but the point's well taken.
Okay.
First time caller line, you are on the air with Art Bell and Professor Harrison.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you tonight?
Fine.
Where are you?
I am in Canada, Manitoba.
Manitoba, all right.
I'm calling from Brandon, a small city of 45,000, I believe.
All right.
It's on 1110 and 1500 and about four others sometimes.
Well, that would be a medium-sized town, actually.
Yeah, it's a medium one.
I've been listening to you for two years.
I'm surprised to get through, actually, this evening.
Everybody always is.
Yes, I know, and you don't sound much different, actually, either.
Thank you.
How rare.
Now, do you have a question for the professor?
Yes, I do.
First of all, I just wanted to say one point.
If aliens ever did come to our planet, I think that how they'd have to do it is they'd have to land the ship that would be so grand in size that no government would be able to hide it.
That would be a problem.
That actually would be a problem.
That's in effect what we have been toying with and discussing, and that is If the landing was unambiguous, unplanned, and we were unprepared, the odds of it turning out poorly, I'm afraid, would be pretty big.
Would you agree, Professor?
I think that we can make ourselves better off by trying to prepare, definitely.
Yes, I agree.
I agree, Art.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you are on the air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
Where are you?
I'm Melissa in Portland, Oregon.
My question is, I think that with so much talk about aliens and with people starting to believe maybe more firmly that aliens may possibly land if they haven't already, people are afraid maybe that we'll be enslaved by a more intelligent race or a more powerful race.
I think it's just as probable, maybe even in the future, if we encountered another race, if we were more powerful than they are, wouldn't we do the exact same thing and do we deserve any better treatment then?
Yeah, I hear what you're saying.
I actually deal with the problem of enslavement in my book.
Oh, really?
Yes.
Well, I think it's quite unlikely, because for what purpose do you enslave people when you have a very high technology and abundant resources?
There's really no reason to do that.
The kinds of things that one might want from our planet could be found elsewhere.
Indeed, if we look at our own planet, slavery was Except that the United States was pretty much gone about 200 years ago.
Now there's isolated pockets, I suspect, where slavery still exists.
But it's not really an institution anymore.
It's something that's in our past.
Unless, perhaps, you are a race that has, for example, evolved beyond the physical somehow, and you require physical work done.
I'm trying to imagine, in other words, Professor A., I think it is naive to believe That any race sufficiently advanced will automatically be socially advanced or will have an agenda that we project, you know, we as humans think they will, that they will meet our expectations and be peaceful space brothers.
Okay, no, I didn't mean to say that.
What I do mean to say is I think that the odds are favorable That we will not come up against an evil empire or a group that's interested in enslaving us.
That does not mean that everything throughout the universe is peace and harmony, but what we get tired of is people pointing to the War of the Worlds scenario and assuming that there's an evil empire out there that's going to take over everything.
We take the argument stronger the other way.
Actually, the one thing that I...
Independence Day, the movie, I thought the first half of it was stupendous and the last half was awful.
The first half I enjoyed for a perhaps very twisted reason.
The aliens in that really had a very clear agenda.
They didn't want to bargain.
They had no use for us in any way whatsoever.
And when we finally captured one and managed to interrogate it, it's only thought Was to eliminate and kill us.
Period.
That was it.
Very sweet, straightforward agenda.
Kill.
And then, of course, later on, it had to get into some other sort of story.
But I really thought that that was interesting.
And it is, after all, perhaps less possible, but nevertheless possible.
That you would meet up with a very dominating, war-like species that conquered and enslaved.
It is possible.
It's possible.
Of course it's possible.
But again, the point that I try to make in the book is that these kinds of customers tend to put themselves out of business in a variety of different ways.
I certainly would not Make any 100% assumptions about any individual ET that I happen to bump into.
But we're talking about relative likelihood here.
That's how, you know, professors and social scientists like to do it.
Oh, you bet.
And they're great people.
But you know what?
If contact were made, the first people to be consulted, I'm sure, would be the generals, the guys with the stars on their shoulders.
And I wonder, Psychologically, what we would expect from them?
I think they're trained for the purpose of defense.
That security and military means are going to be two of the things that come right to mind.
And security should be, but maybe there's, hopefully there's ways to communicate, negotiate.
Maybe that the It can be orchestrated in such a way that there doesn't have to be some kind of an explosion.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you are on air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Hello.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Where are you?
I am in Escanaba, Michigan.
My name is Christian.
All right, Christian.
Welcome.
Thank you.
My point is that we can only perceive other civilizations through the eyes of our own history and culture.
Look at our most popular television show, Dealing with science fiction Star Trek.
Yes.
Just about every civilization that you see there draws parallels from our own past.
Personally, I'd like to find something new.
Something that we have absolutely no idea of what it is and can't compare it to anything.
It would be interesting to say the least.
Would that, it's a very interesting point you're making.
In other words, something for which we have absolutely no point of reference whatsoever.
Yes, no frame of reference.
No frame of reference.
Completely different.
Would that be, Professor, in your opinion, better or far more dangerous?
I think that, in some ways, a very different and unique kind of organism might get a better reception.
The idea being that if it reminds you of a lizard or something you don't like, that it could raise some problems.
So that something that we had no knowledge of before might in fact be easier to relate to than something that looks like something that we detest.
Lizards would be very unacceptable.
As all the movie producers know.
And is that more likely or less likely that we would get lizards or something even weirder?
I mean, after all, Yes, quite different.
on a planet would depend on, oh, gravity, the environment, so very many things that the odds of having a very similar
environment and gravity and all the rest of it are actually rather slim, aren't they?
So it would produce a very different sort of creature?
Yes, quite different.
However, I do have several chapters in my book where I try to argue that there are certain kinds of qualities,
attributes that we could expect.
And I draw on something called Living Systems Theory, which is a general theory of life.
And the point that I make is not that we can sort of guess what they'll look like and things, but that we can have some expectations that are better than totally wild guesses.
Now, this is one of the most controversial aspects of the book, because most people wouldn't Touched this kind of problem with a 10-foot pole, but I've enjoyed working on it.
As a matter of curiosity, UC Davis is a rather liberal campus, but I'm curious, your colleagues, how have they reacted to the subject matter of your book?
You know, I'm so delighted you asked that.
It's been absolutely great.
I approached this with, you know, the humans in space, that's okay, people can take it.
I approach this with great nervousness, and most of my colleagues think it's wonderful.
One of the things I did, Art, because this is such a complex area and I've tried to cover so many topics, is I got six or seven of my friends to read either the whole book or chapters, so as not to make too big a fool of myself when the book came out.
And this kind of review, you know, a political scientist, a minister, other psychologists, sociologists, historians, what have you, You know, it really helps you develop a product.
And there are a couple people, I suspect, that there's a giggle factor.
You ran it up the academic flag.
I ran it up the academic flagpole, and I have received minimal flack on it.
I know there are a couple people who giggle, but that's a definite minority.
I've been delighted.
Well, that in itself may be a very, very interesting point.
I mean, it really is, because I think 10 or 20 years ago, Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And particularly on a campus like this.
No, could not have gotten away with it.
And I've been shocked, actually, by the degree of tolerance and interest.
Are you concerned about some of the intolerance on some other campuses?
For example, at Harvard, Dr. Mack, who has done a lot of interesting work, was raked over the intellectual coals and very nearly Well, I'll tell you, we're of course doing different things.
It's well known that Dr. Mack is a very distinguished psychiatrist with a long record of very high scholarly accomplishments.
That's why I brought his case up.
And my personal view, I've done university administration and I think academic freedom is absolutely crucial because if we constrain people, we don't let them look at the topics that they want to look at and do it in the best possible way, we're wasting our money.
I don't know the details of that case but I have very strong support for academic freedom and for allowing people to pursue interests.
I know that there needs to be some productivity and, you know, you can't run roughshod over people and things, but I was sort of disturbed by that, again, without knowing all of the details.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Hi there.
Yes, my name is Levon.
I'm calling from Glendale, Los Angeles.
Yes, sir.
Good evening, gentlemen.
Professor Art, good evening, or good morning, I should say.
Good evening.
I do have two quick comments and a question to the professor.
Oh, by the way, you're number one in New York and L.A., huh?
That's fact.
It should be, in my eyes, you're number one internationally anyway.
Well, thank you.
We do take it city by city.
The latest number one came from San Diego.
We're way out number one there.
Well, you know, the chat club and all that stuff.
And anyway, I appreciate it, but do you have a question?
Yes, I do.
In fact, the question to the professor.
Professor, do you think it's inevitable Well, I don't know exactly what the number is.
since i was a kid two thousand was a big number like two thousand three two
thousand two about contact
and uh...
another comment should i make an analogy one i'm not sure exactly what you
asked are you asking do you expect contact around the year two thousand
or well i don't think there are no i don't know exactly what
the number it could be two thousand three i mean lotto
you know people talk about two thousand two two thousand three uh... i mean
and i was going to bring that to ask the professor instead of uh... when he
thinks contact is likely I think it could occur any time, and in my more serious moments, I think it could take, you know, by the SETI procedure, it could take another couple hundred years.
But the search is accelerating.
I know what the callers, the LeBans, are referring to.
There have been specific predictions About landings and things in the year 2000 and I do not believe those particular predictions and I don't give the number any magical properties.
Alright, as likely now as 50 years from now?
I think that the chances are going to accelerate because our search technology is improving and we'll try new search procedures so that as each year goes by the chances that Again, putting on my conservative SETI hat rather than talking about landings and things.
It's going to become more and more likely, increasingly likely as time passes by.
All right.
Not a lot of time left here.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Professor Harrison and Art Bell.
Where are you, please?
Good evening, gentlemen.
This is Bob, and I'm in L.A.
I worked in the NASA SETI project when it was in existence.
And the professor has done a remarkable job.
I've read his book.
It's quite laudable, and you'll get a real good understanding of SETI if you read it.
Well, that's a good comment.
And one of the main assumptions of the SETI community is that civilizations in the galaxy are more probably much older than ours, since we're so young.
And I'd like him to entertain the possibility that instead of us discovering them, that may be rather naive and presumptuous.
In fact, because they're older, they will have techniques to discover us before we ever find them.
In fact, probably more probable, they will maintain covert surveillance until they determine we are ready for direct contact.
I agree with that scenario.
Professor?
Yeah, I agree with it too.
One of the phrases I think I use in the book is that we're not necessarily going to be the leaders in the dance.
And that there may be civilizations out there that are very well experienced at finding new civilizations and inducting them into the galactic club.
And caller, Bob, I really appreciate your comments.
They're very meaningful to me.
Well, he seemed to very much enjoy your book.
And again, the book is After Contact, The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.
Is it a big book, Doctor?
It's a real book.
It's about 350 pages or so, but it's written in a way to be accessible.
It is referenced and documented, but with little teeny footnotes in the back, not things that annoy the reader.
so it's a fairly easy read i'd i'd think that people will find it accessible and
informative it sure has been fun having you on the radio i hope that i
have not kept you up too late do you have to uh... do you teach
Later this morning?
Yeah, but what the heck.
I don't have to get up another three or four hours.
I have an 8 o'clock class.
I'll be there and do a great job for him.
Professor, thank you so much.
Thanks so much.
I enjoyed talking to you and the callers.
It was very stimulating and enlightening.
Thanks a lot.
Take care, sir.
Alright, folks.
Well, that's it.
We are grossly out of time.
It was a very interesting night.
The week ahead, the remainder of this week and the week ahead promise to be real zingers.
Keep it right where you've got it.
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