Oct. 30, 1998 - Art Bell
01:20:50
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, as the case may be. | ||
| Boy, do I have news for you? | ||
| Serious news for you this night on what we call ghosts to ghosts a stand by on developing information as a fair time. | ||
| Information that I think is shocking to say the least. | ||
| Anyway, from the Hawaiian and Peach Islands outwest there in the Pacific to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all the way into South America, north to the Pole. | ||
| And thank God for broadcast.com worldwide on the internet. | ||
| You'll see why in a moment. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast and Beyond. | ||
| More ways than one am. | ||
| I'm Martell. | ||
|
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Hi. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I'm going to hold the second and really whopper piece of information for a few moments. | ||
| First, I want to tell you something that you may or may not believe. | ||
|
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Ghosts are real. | |
| Whatever they are, I don't know. | ||
| Whether they are souls trapped, whether they are souls, whether they're not souls. | ||
| Whatever they are, there's absolutely something as real and concrete as I would say on Dreamland as the air you breathe but don't see. | ||
| And we're going to be talking about that tonight. | ||
| The only thing we're going to be talking about is that, with one exception, and I'm going to begin the discussion with one of the most remarkable photographs you're ever going to see. | ||
| I got it earlier in the day, thanks to my good wife who's opening the mail. | ||
| And it's a heartstopper. | ||
| It comes with a letter from Myrtle Creek, Oregon. | ||
| Dear Mr. Bell, my name is Kim Moore. | ||
| I live in Myrtle Creek, Oregon. | ||
| It's a very nice lady. | ||
| I recently, she says, went to Bartlesville, Oklahoma to visit in-laws. | ||
| My brother-in-law is a firefighter. | ||
| There I was shown a photograph, a picture, that was taken by yet another firefighter, a chief, in fact, in Nixa, Missouri. | ||
| That's NIXA, Missouri. | ||
| A shed was being burned for a practice fire. | ||
| You know, fire departments do that kind of thing. | ||
| They burn sheds and other things to practice putting out fires. | ||
| The fire burst into a big flame that was bigger than expected. | ||
| The fire chief took the opportunity to take a picture. | ||
| And I hereby submit this picture to you. | ||
| In the picture, unmistakably, I'm adding that word. | ||
| I'm saying unmistakably, is the image of an Indian warrior. | ||
| And I see an Indian warrior as clear as can be on a horse. | ||
| Later, after the picture was developed, they saw the image. | ||
| The firefighters found out later that the shed they burned was on Indian burial grounds. | ||
| When I saw the image, I got chills. | ||
| Hope you enjoy it. | ||
| Thank you, Kim Moore. | ||
| Well, that's a handwritten letter. | ||
| And I sent the photograph and the handwritten letter to Keith Rowland. | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| You know it's on my website right now. | ||
| And if you want a chill for the night, if not the rest of the year, you're going to want to make it up to my website right away and take a look at this image. | ||
| It is remarkable. | ||
| I'm working another big story that normally nothing could interrupt Ghost to Ghost AM, but this will briefly. | ||
| I cannot ignore it. | ||
| So stand by for big story number two, but whatever else you do, get up to my website and take a look at this photograph. | ||
| You're going to want to archive this. | ||
| Believe me, you're going to want to archive this. | ||
| If this doesn't do it for you, why nothing can be done for you? | ||
| Remember, this is, in fact, the text of the letter is up there as well. | ||
| I'm going to want to grab that too. | ||
| This is the one, folks. | ||
| But stand by for possibly even bigger news. | ||
| Nothing to lose, but the fact. | ||
| This is a night when we do nothing but take ghost stories from all of you. | ||
| However, what I am about to impart to you, I think, is so urgent that it requires that I take a little time out and do so. | ||
| It may even require repeating in the next hour. | ||
| And I want to be cautious here, very cautious, because we're dealing with a very big issue. | ||
| You may recall the other day we got news and, in fact, put up news of what purported to be a SETI hit. | ||
| That's the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. | ||
| A system in the Pegasus system, EQ Pegasi. | ||
| I'm probably mispronouncing that, but we actually had screenshots of this signal that was being received by somebody who claims he's going to hold a news conference next week on Tuesday. | ||
| A signal that should not be there. | ||
| So I picked up the phone and I did what I should do. | ||
| I called Seth Shosak. | ||
| And Seth is in the SETI program. | ||
| Now, he doesn't have a dish that he can look at right now. | ||
| He said he thought it was a hoax, might be a hoax. | ||
| Unfortunately, Seth didn't have access to a dish and couldn't check it out immediately, or he would have been there. | ||
| He said it right then and there. | ||
| I'd be there checking it out. | ||
| But if you listen to Seth, as I pinned him down a little bit, he became a little bit circumspect about the whole thing. | ||
| And it did acknowledge that you never know, which I thought at the time was interesting today. | ||
| I received the following. | ||
| And again, I reference you, ladies and gentlemen, to my website. | ||
| This is a separate confirmation of the signal that was said to be a hoax. | ||
| Maybe it's not a hoax. | ||
| Hello, Mr. Bell. | ||
| I was listening to your October 28th show via the World Wide Web, as I occasionally do, and I heard the report that you did with a fellow from SETI about signals possibly received from the star EQ Pegasi, that's E G A S I. I heard your appeal to other radio amateurs to try and verify the alleged signals. | ||
| Being that I was equipped to do so, I went to work straight away on this mystery. | ||
| Now, I normally work stations in the 23 centimeter band around 1296 megahertz. | ||
| That's very close, by the way, and 1296 is indeed an amateur frequency. | ||
| We use it for all kinds of things. | ||
| Anyway, he goes on, I have an ICOM 8500 and a very large dish, 4.5 meters, or about half the size as the one used by that engineer. | ||
| This engineer, folks, who claims to be holding a news conference on Tuesday. | ||
| So, I was almost fully equipped to follow up on this potentially earth-shaking discovery. | ||
| I set the dish to that ascension and declination and set my radio to scan between 1445 and 1455 megahertz. | ||
| There was noise, but as soon as EQ Pegasi rose at about 1230 UTC, that's universal time, it wasn't long before my computer locked the radio on 1453.8273 due to a carrier pictured as the first red dots, | ||
| and began logging the Doppler shifting signal that you can see in the enclosed screenshot GIF. | ||
| GIF, actually. | ||
| Again, the exact frequency was 1453.8273 with a significant drift. | ||
| If this drift is due to a satellite, it really has some kind of unstable oscillator, which just so happens to mimic the Earth's rotation and rotation of some other unknown body. | ||
| Some differences between my detection and the ones posted on your site. | ||
| The signal is much weaker than was talked about between you and Seth, which may indicate it being, in fact, extraterrestrial rather than Earthbound or Earthbound interference. | ||
| I tuned my dish 10 degrees away five times after the detection you see in the GIF, GIF, excuse me, I'll call it a GIF forever. | ||
| And each time the signal went away, each time I brought it back to the coordinates of EQ pegasi, it reappeared. | ||
| I also plotted some 2,000 artificial satellites, space probes, etc., against the beam width of my dish, and none had the right frequency or the right orbital characteristics to account for the Doppler shift shown in the picture. | ||
| Yes, we have that and this text on my website now. | ||
| I had first thought all of this a hoax, but I decided to see for myself. | ||
| Now, now that I verified this signal, I'm pretty confident that contact has indeed been made. | ||
| I will continue to track this object, whatever it is, and log as much data as possible. | ||
| 73s, K.F. Benton, his name. | ||
| His call letters, GU0NHD, at Castle Guernsey in the UK, offshore, near Normandy. | ||
| I have additional messages tonight indicating, it may or may not be true, I have no way of knowing, that Harvard has apparently focused its array for some reason on the Pegasus system. | ||
| So my sense of it is, ladies and gentlemen, there is something going on. | ||
| There's something going on. | ||
| I believe there to be something going on. | ||
| From New Mexico, here is Richard C. Hoagland. | ||
| Richard C. Hoagland, one-time advisor to NASA. | ||
| Richard C. Hoagland, investigator into the Sidonia region of Mars and the moon, and so much more. | ||
| One-time advisor to Walter Cronkite on television for the launch of John Glenn back into space. | ||
| Not Richard C. Hoagland. | ||
| Richard, welcome to the program. | ||
| Been a while, huh? | ||
| Good evening, Artis. | ||
| certainly has, and welcome back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So, you heard what I just read. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We've got these independent signals along with independent screenshots up on my website right now. | ||
| Yeah, I am on the web as we speak. | ||
| What the hell is going on? | ||
| Well, I don't want to get out ahead of ourselves here, but I think that the last couple of nights could be historic. | ||
| This is looking better and better and better. | ||
| Let me tell you why. | ||
| The engineer in question now has an identity. | ||
| His name is Paul Doar, D-O-R-E. | ||
| He is a well-known engineer with the British military-industrial complex. | ||
| All right, this is now the first engineer, the one that people declared his information was a hoax. | ||
| So-called Mr. Anonymous. | ||
| Yes, Mr. Anonymous. | ||
| So we now know who that is. | ||
| And he is again. | ||
| Who, please? | ||
| His name is Paul Doerr, D-O-R-E. | ||
| And if you go to your website to the links that Keith has established, and you just click on them, you'll find your way to a very lengthy bio, which includes his education, his military experience, his radar experience, electronic experience, the companies he's worked for. | ||
| This guy is not a lightweight. | ||
| He is a heavyweight. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Number two, he is working with two radio astronomers from the Effelsberg Radio Observatory in Effelsberg, Germany, which is a 300-foot steerable radio telescope. | ||
| It's 50 feet bigger than Jodrell Bank, which is in England. | ||
| It's the biggest radio telescope in Europe. | ||
| And apparently, he was able to convince two astronomers there who prefer at the moment tonight to remain unknown to confirm his observations. | ||
| Now, their dish is 10 times bigger than the one he was using, which was 30 feet. | ||
| So the signal will be 100 times greater. | ||
| And remember earlier in the evening when you called me, we had an interesting little discussion about what this might be? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There was a report on the business wire earlier from, I believe, an astronomer at Boston University claiming it was a hoax. | ||
| There is now on this website some rather interesting posts from the engineer in response to these various allegations. | ||
| He absolutely says it's not a hoax, that he mixed up some images he posted two nights ago just because he was so excited. | ||
| One can certainly understand that. | ||
| These independent confirmations you just read, plus others that are coming in, plus the fact that the Harvard experiment you cited is the Agassiz Station Radio Telescope. | ||
| It's a 60-foot radio telescope located up in northeastern Massachusetts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're also then getting independent confirmation that Harvard is looking real hard at Agassiz right now? | ||
| This is the Planetary Society's beta experiment in SETI, which has been partially funded by people like Steven Spielberg. | ||
| Up until the 27th, a couple of days ago, they would post on the web every 10 minutes an update of what their telescope was seeing in the way of live signals. | ||
| On the 27th, they suddenly shut all that down, and they have only been updating once per day. | ||
| And Dohr, when he was asked about this, says, this does not surprise me one bit. | ||
| We have had a hard time observing since this was publicized. | ||
| It seems that at times the signal is being wiped out by a close-by noise source, though I won't go as far as to say it's intentional jamming. | ||
| Additionally, I have had a car with government tags shadowing me for the last few days since my identity was revealed on the internet. | ||
| I am not the paranoid type, as I said before. | ||
| I don't trust many people, and that includes the government. | ||
| It's just my nature. | ||
| Life is just never going to be boring for me, Richard. | ||
| Hold on, please. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| Sorry to delay Ghost to Ghost AM, but I think you see why. | ||
| is Ghost to Ghost AM. | ||
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Ghost AM. | |
| Ghost A.M. from the Kingdom of My with Art Bell. | ||
| It is, and I can barely catch my breath. | ||
| We're on to a big story here, folks. | ||
| A really big story. | ||
| If you're trying to get into my website right now, get in line. | ||
| It's going to be a little slow in coming up because it's getting slammed. | ||
| And for good reason. | ||
| For a very good reason. | ||
| We may have cooperating information on a signal from the Pegasus system. | ||
| I think speculation about what it is would be wrong at this point. | ||
| Or to tell you that it's absolutely true would be wrong at this point. | ||
| But as Richard, I'm sure, will confirm here in a moment, the dots are beginning to connect a favorite Hoaglinism. | ||
| And so what I'm going to do is bring Richard back just to finish up right now, and we're going to come back at you next hour and repeat this information. | ||
| Richard? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So you're telling me that this mysterious anonymous engineer is not a mysterious anonymous engineer. | ||
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No, he is. | |
| He's one of the establishments. | ||
| His name is Paul Dorr, D-O-R-E. | ||
| He's been with the British military industrial complex for probably a couple of decades, given his curriculum vita. | ||
| He's very impressive. | ||
| He's had a lot of experience. | ||
| And one of the remarkable things, you know, your show is the hallmark of speculation. | ||
| So I do want to speculate just a bit here. | ||
| The thing that's blowing everybody away, and the reason that Seth the other night thought this might be a hoax is the power of the signal. | ||
| I mean, this thing is coming in on the equivalent of a souped-up amateur backyard satellite dish. | ||
| It's strong. | ||
| Now, this latest report we have, 4.5 meters, that's a pretty good-sized dish, actually. | ||
| Well, 1.5 meters is the one that the amateur who faxed you is using. | ||
| Yes. | ||
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That's not that big. | |
| 1.5 meters in the middle. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Again, the one that faxed me is using an ICOM 8500 and a rather large dish. | ||
| 4.5 meters. | ||
| He says I have a 1.5-meter dish. | ||
| No, no, 4.5. | ||
| I'm reading here. | ||
| 4.5 meters are about half the size of the one used by that engineer. | ||
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Okay. | |
| All right, 4.5 meters. | ||
| On the website, he says 1.5. | ||
| It might be a misprint. | ||
| It's a misprint. | ||
| It's 4.5 meters. | ||
| I've got the original email in my hand. | ||
| Well, even so, this is not a Jogrobank or an Arecibo. | ||
| So what we're looking at here is something that's incredibly powerful. | ||
| Now, the problem is this signal, if we're looking at the stars, that it appears to be coming from, in the direction of those stars, those are two little M-type red dwarf stars, very dim, about 1 ten-thousandth the brightness of the sun, orbiting around each other about 22 light-years away, which is not just next door. | ||
| I mean, by galactic standards, it is, but by radio standards, that's a fur piece. | ||
| So the signal strength at the source, if it's at the stars, 22 light-years distant, is enormous. | ||
| It's humongous. | ||
| The engineer, Paul Dorr, was asked this afternoon what he thought the signals were. | ||
| And I'm going to quote what he says, which goes back to what I was saying off here earlier. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because I was telling you that I thought this was a probe. | ||
| This is a ship. | ||
| This is an object, an artificial object, if it's real again, with that caveat, much closer to the solar system than the stars, coming in like a bat out of you know what, heading directly for us. | ||
| Richard, theirs or ours? | ||
| Theirs. | ||
| And think of the signal. | ||
| If it's transmitting on the hydrogen frequency, which is 1420, and if we're receiving it at 1453, then the Doppler shift would give us the velocity of approach. | ||
| And we can figure that out in the next break, okay? | ||
| And we should see some interesting things, because if it's that close, it might be destined to land. | ||
| This is their way of telling us they're on the way. | ||
| And that would square with the Defense Department information I have regarding December 7th. | ||
| Remember, we have inside data from the Pentagon on December 7th and something happening in the southwest. | ||
| Let me read you what Dorr says. | ||
| He says, when asked what he thought the signals were, he said, that would be speculation, and I would rather not speculate. | ||
| Everybody says that. | ||
| However, my expertise is in radar. | ||
| I worked on radar systems for the RAF, and I feel that this is most likely a radar or navigational signal, perhaps intended for an interstellar probe that just happens to be in our general direction. | ||
| Again, due to the nature of my work, he says, I am somewhat biased. | ||
| There's a term for this art. | ||
| It's called a Bracewell probe. | ||
| And I have a full paper by Bracewell sitting here on the desk, which at the top of the hour I will read a little excerpt from. | ||
| Well, I have a term for it, too, but I'd be thrown off the air if I used it. | ||
| All right, Richard, look, let's give people an opportunity to get to the website and see it. | ||
| They can go to two websites because we're on two separate servers. | ||
| We also have the link to the site I'm reading from. | ||
| Is it on your site? | ||
| It's on Enterprise as well as on Art Bell. | ||
| Well, unfortunately, Enterprise and the Art Bell site are served by the same servers, which are right now on their knees. | ||
| Well, not according to our master web guide. | ||
| All right, then you might try enterprisemission.com. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| All right, Richard, I'll talk to you into the next hour, okay? | ||
| Stay tuned. | ||
| Stay tuned, everybody. | ||
| Stay tuned. | ||
| Good Lord. | ||
| And again, let me try and catch my breath for a second here because dealing with this as it breaks around airtime, this always happens to me. | ||
| This always happens to me. | ||
| It's almost impossible on a night when I had planned to do nothing but ghost stories. | ||
| I will say this. | ||
| It was at least three years ago that somebody in Arizona mailed me what I consider to be one of the best ghost photographs ever taken. | ||
| It, of course, was stolen and it's all over the net now because people do that. | ||
| But I now have received what I consider to be something as good or better than that photograph. | ||
| And believe me, I get a lot of supposed ghost photographs. | ||
| When you see this one, if it doesn't put a chill down your spine, then you are not chillable. | ||
| That's what I would say. | ||
| This is the damnedest picture I ever saw. | ||
| And again, a fire department chief took the picture in Nixon, Missouri, as they were burning a practice fire, a shed. | ||
| They burned a shed. | ||
| And the photograph clearly, it just jumps out at you as being an Indian on a horse. | ||
| I mean, it just jumps out. | ||
| When they developed the photograph, because of the startling nature of the photograph, they went back and looked at the history of the land upon which this shed sat burning. | ||
| And it was an Indian burial ground. | ||
| So if you want, if you really want Something that will put a shiver down your spine, get up to my website, Toronto, and take a look. | ||
| And I know what I'm doing to myself here because my site is, while we can handle a very great deal of bandwidth, this one's out of control because we've got two things for you to go after. | ||
| So we will attempt to proceed with Ghost to Ghost AM as Halloween approaches, actually now sweeping across the country, already Halloween on the East Coast, already Halloween Midwest, and it's sweeping my direction. | ||
| So here it comes. | ||
| Anyway, let me catch my breath, and we'll be right back. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| There may be somebody out there taking a ride, and they may be coming in our direction. | ||
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| This is what has traditionally been called Ghost to Ghost AM. | ||
| This night, we tell ghost stories. | ||
| It's Halloween. | ||
| So, of course, we tell them, and they're real. | ||
| And we'll get to them shortly. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I've got something really hot for you if you get up to my website in the ghost category. | ||
| However, I'm afraid I've got something even bigger. | ||
| I've got a big, big story that's brewing at this hour as we speak. | ||
| It involves a signal from Pegasus, the one that everybody started to think was a hoax. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| Maybe, just maybe, it's not a hoax. | ||
| I have new information, and we're going to gather it together and present it to you one more time in a moment. | ||
| I'm Art Bell, and this is Ghost to Ghost AM. | ||
| Sit down, call your friends, turn the radio up. | ||
| This is either Orson Welles 50 years later, or it's the real thing. | ||
| All right, let me try and develop this information as chronologically as I'm able. | ||
| As you all know from listening the other night, if you did listen, there was a big stir. | ||
| An anonymous astronomer from Great Britain supplied screen dumps. | ||
| That's a picture of a screen of an apparent signal that he claimed was coming from EQ Pegasi. | ||
| The star in the Pegasus constellation, I guess. | ||
| EQ Pegasi is Richard Hoagland will in a moment explain to you what this system is. | ||
| It's a double star system. | ||
| But we had several days worth of signals that he claimed were coming from the star system, not natural signals. | ||
| And so my first inclination, since I know somebody in SETI, Seth Shostak, was to call him, and I did, and I got him on the air. | ||
| And Seth thought it was a hoax. | ||
| Now, unfortunately, a SETI at the moment does not have access to a dish. | ||
| They just got back from Arecibo, where they were chased out by a hurricane that was threatening very significantly the area, and they packed up and got the hell out. | ||
| Don't blame them. | ||
| So I asked Seth on the night he was here, if you had a dish, Seth, where would it be? | ||
| And oh, he said Begasus. | ||
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No question about it. | |
| But he said, and he gave several reasons why he thought it was so, that it might be a hoax. | ||
| He was a little circumspect when I pressed him. | ||
| He said, no, it could be real. | ||
| I can't rule it out, but it looks like a hoax. | ||
| Well, tonight there is significant new information. | ||
| I received hours before airtime a message that I am about to read you from a man named K.F. Benton, whose hand call is G-U-0-N-H-D in, I believe it's Costell, Guernsey, United Kingdom, offshore, near Normandy. | ||
| I received the following message. | ||
| Listen closely. | ||
| Hello, Mr. Bell. | ||
| I was listening to your October 28th show via live the World Wide Web, as I occasionally do, and I heard the report you did with a fellow from SETI about signals possibly received from the star EQ Pegasi. | ||
| That's P-E-G-A-S-I. | ||
| I learned, I heard rather, your appeal to other radio amateurs to try and verify the alleged signals. | ||
| Being that I was equipped to do so, I went to work straight away on this mystery. | ||
| I normally work stations in the 23-centimeter band around 1296 megahertz. | ||
| As a matter of fact, we use that frequency, and I can monitor that frequency here. | ||
| Unfortunately, I don't have an Azel dish. | ||
| That's my comments. | ||
| He goes on, I have an ICOM 8500 and a very large dish, 4.5 meters, or about half the size as the one used by that engineer. | ||
| So, I was almost fully equipped to follow up on this potentially earth-shaking discovery. | ||
| I set the dish to that ascension and declination and set my radio to scan between 1445 and 1455 megahertz. | ||
| There was noise, but as soon as EQ Hegasi rose around 1230 Universal Time, it wasn't long before my computer locked the radio on 1453.8273. | ||
| I repeat, 1453.8273 due to a carrier pictured as the red dot and began Logging the Doppler shifting signal that you can see in the enclosed screenshot, GIF. | ||
| Again, the exact frequency was 1453.8273. | ||
| He adds with a significant drift. | ||
| If this drift is due to a satellite, then it really has an unstable oscillator, which just so happens to mimic the Earth's rotation and the rotation of some other unknown body. | ||
| Some differences between my detection and the ones posted on your site. | ||
| The signal is much weaker than was talked about by you and Seth, which may indicate being in fact extraterrestrial rather than Earthbound interference. | ||
| So, I tuned my dish 10 degrees away five times after the detection you see in the GIF, and each time the signal went away, and each time I brought it back to the coordinates of EQ Pegasi, it reappeared. | ||
| I also plotted some 2,000 artificial satellites, space probes, etc., against the beam width of my dish, and none had the right frequency or the right orbital characteristics to account for the Doppler shift shown in the picture. | ||
| I had at first thought all of this a hoax, but I decided to see for myself. | ||
| Now that I've verified the signal, I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty confident that contact has indeed been made. | ||
| I will continue to track this object, whatever it is, whatever it is, and log as much data as possible. | ||
| 73s as a ham thing. | ||
| KF Benton, GU0NHD, Trestle, Guernsey, UK, offshore near Normandy. | ||
| So, that kind of rocked my boat, folks. | ||
| To say the least, it rocked my boat. | ||
| I picked up the phone and I called Richard C. Hoagland, long known on this program, an advisor to NASA, Walter Cronkite, who was on TV earlier in the day for the launch of John Glenn, the relaunch of John Glenn into space. | ||
| And Richard has more information. | ||
| The first astronomer, the one who was anonymous, apparently is no longer anonymous. | ||
| Now, before going to Richard and letting him tell you what he knows, let me tell you what I have done. | ||
| I have posted this photograph, which is very different than the other one, but confirming the other one, on my website. | ||
| I now make an appeal to all radio amateurs, anybody with a sufficiently large dish and an Azel mount, azimuth elevation type mount, to take a look at EQ Pegasi, which I'm probably mispronouncing, and a very specific frequency. | ||
| There'll be some Doppler shift apparently, but a very specific frequency, again, 1453.8273. | ||
| Folks, it would appear we're getting a signal for the rest of the story from New Mexico. | ||
| Here is Richard C. Hoagland. | ||
| Richard. | ||
| Good morning, Archie. | ||
| Good morning again. | ||
| I want to be sure people get this because I know that a lot of calls are streaking across the country right now. | ||
| My God, you've got to turn on the radio and listen. | ||
| So what have you found out? | ||
| Well, first of all, you can also go to the Enterprise website. | ||
| Keith has linked to this Hall Canaveral of GeoCities site, which is kind of a clearinghouse for the information on the engineer and on the press conference that's going to be scheduled for next week on the 4th of November. | ||
| And a lot of other data, including the GIFs that you described before, they're posted on this site. | ||
| So you just go to your site, Arthur, or you go to our site, EnterpriseMission.com, and the first item is basically the link to this clearinghouse site where all the latest data is being posted. | ||
| And on this site, there is an interview from the engineer. | ||
| He's not an astronomer. | ||
| He's an amateur astronomer who is apparently bootlegging a 30-foot dish at the company where he works. | ||
| His name is Paul Dory, or Paul Dore, D-O-R-E. | ||
| And he has a very excellent resume, which is also posted on this site. | ||
| It goes on for several pages. | ||
| What till this moment, just about anonymous. | ||
| All of a sudden, he's not anonymous. | ||
| Well, there's a very assiduous British press corps, which have done what the press over here, you know, they're over there not caring about Monica, so they go and get real stories. | ||
| Anyway, they dug out his name and his bio and his curriculum B DI, and they posted the whole thing. | ||
| And he's a very well-known engineer with excellent credentials, has been in the British industrial, military-industrial complex for a couple of decades, works on a lot of major projects, is basically a radar and electronics expert who has an aficionado interest in radio astronomy. | ||
| And apparently, on the 22nd, if I can read here carefully, he picked this thing up and tried to notify some of the official SETI sites, the SETI League, which is based in New Jersey. | ||
| I can confirm that from my interview the other night with Seth. | ||
| And they basically had given the coral shoulder. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, the not-invented here club. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is probably one reason why we're not getting a lot of clamorings of confirmations from the official SETI community because it's, well, we know how those folks act. | ||
| Anyway, so he wanted to keep his name secret and his identity secret because he's employed by this aerospace company and obviously didn't want to lose his job for using equipment. | ||
| Apparently he bootlegged some kind of feed horn on this little dish and set up electronics so he could kind of observe quietly with no one knowing and he didn't want to blow his cover until he was sure he'd really found something. | ||
| So he emails his discovery frames from the computer, the plots from the screen, the so-called screen dumps of the signal strengths and the frequency and all that. | ||
| And in his haste, he made a mistake. | ||
| He apparently sent two frames of the same shot as opposed to two different frames, and everybody says, Oh, it's a hoax. | ||
| When, in fact, he sent later ones, it demonstrates that the first postings were just, you know, nervous error. | ||
| Now we've got this second guy from Guernsey who's a radio amateur who heard you and who went and looked, and lo and behold, there's something there. | ||
| And now Dorr says that he has been joined by two radio astronomers out of Effelsberg, Germany, which is the location of the most powerful professional radio astronomy telescope in Europe. | ||
| It's even bigger than the 250-foot at Jodrell Bank in England. | ||
| It's a 300-foot dish in Ethelsberg, Germany. | ||
| It's got state-of-the-art equipment. | ||
| It's fully steerable. | ||
| And they apparently have confirmed the signal and are preparing to support DOR in a press conference in London for Wednesday, November 4th. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Now, there are several interesting aspects to this. | ||
| One is the signal strength itself. | ||
| As we said in the last hour, this thing is booming in. | ||
| I mean, if you can pick this thing up on the equivalent of a souped-up backyard satellite dish, it is a humongous signal strength. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Which, of course, makes everybody in the professional community say, ah, it's got to be a hoax. | ||
| Well, there's another possibility. | ||
| And you and I discussed off the air what it might be, which is a probe. | ||
| It is not a signal coming from a star system. | ||
| Or a planet in that system. | ||
| Or a planet in that system. | ||
| But something coming from that system. | ||
| But something much closer coming from that system, and it's almost here. | ||
| Now, during the break between our last update, I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. | ||
| Let me read you what Door himself says that he thinks the signal is. | ||
| He says, quote, that would be speculation. | ||
| I would rather not speculate. | ||
| However, my expertise is in radar. | ||
| I've worked on radar systems for the RAF, and I feel that this is most likely a radar or navigation signal, perhaps intended for an interstellar probe that just happens to be in our general direction. | ||
| Again, due to the nature of my work, I am somewhat biased. | ||
| Well, I have done a little back-of-the-envelope thing here based on the frequency. | ||
| Remember, we're getting the signal, according to these two separate sources now, at 1453 megahertz. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| The interstellar background song of hydrogen is 1420, and that's been the preferred kind of water hole for astronomers to listen for possible SETI signals for the last 30 or 40 years. | ||
| If at 1453 we're looking at a moving signal, a Doppler-shifted signal, blue-shifted because the probe is heading toward us, I calculated how fast it has to be moving. | ||
| How fast? | ||
| 7,000 kilometers per second. | ||
| That's about 3% the speed of light. | ||
| Now, at that rate of speed, I can calculate, given an estimate of how far away it is when it will be here. | ||
| Or given our Pentagon source that I described in the last hour, it claims that something interesting is going to happen in the southwest on December 7th, I can invert the calculation and give you a rough estimate of how far away the thing is if it is a probe. | ||
| It's 10 billion miles out from Earth tonight. | ||
| Which would account for the signal strength. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| Which means Pluto is only 4 billion miles out, so it's only about 2, 2 and a half times farther away than Pluto. | ||
| Now, in the next several days, depending upon how many other amateurs jump on this, we should see it begin to decelerate, which means the Doppler signal should be shifted, which would be a dead giveaway that, in fact, it is a probe, it is in our neighborhood, and someone's coming to dinner. | ||
| Richard, someone's coming to dinner. | ||
| Guess who's coming to dinner? | ||
| Richard, one other thing. | ||
| I have also information that apparently at Harvard, they've got their equipment trained on the Pegasus system as well. | ||
| I have no way of confirming this. | ||
| It's a 60-foot radio telescope at the so-called Agassiz Station, which is located in north of eastern Massachusetts, just outside Harvard, the little town of Harvard. | ||
| I've been by there many, many times. | ||
| It is being run now by the Planetary Society as part of a project called Beta that is partially funded by subscriptions from members of the Planetary Society. | ||
| That's the space group founded by Carl Sagan, the late Carl Sagan. | ||
| And its funding comes in part from a donation from Steven Spielberg. | ||
| Up until the 27th of October, these people were putting on the web every 10 minutes the screen dumps of their signal search. | ||
| As of the 27th Art, they suddenly have canceled that, and they are now only doing a summation once per day. | ||
| In other words, there's something funny going on at Harvard. | ||
| Do you have separate confirming information that they are in fact looking in the area of Pegasus? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| You do? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| By the way, EQ Pegasi, that's the correct way to pronounce it, a little tiny star system, a double star system, about 22 light years away in the direction of the constellation of Pegasus, the flying horse, which, by the way, is connected mythologically to Horus. | ||
| We won't go there tonight. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Anyway, these are two very dim red dwarf stars orbiting each other. | ||
| M-type red dwarf stars. | ||
| Not the kind of place. | ||
| So Sam was correct where he said it was not likely to harbor. | ||
| To have an indigenous civilization. | ||
|
unidentified
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However. | |
| All right, Richard, hold on. | ||
| We've got a break here at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| We've got a break. | ||
| So we've got a monstrous story brewing. | ||
| It is either a very coordinated sort of hoax for the 50th anniversary of Orson Welles, or it's the real thing. | ||
|
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We'll be right back. | |
| To talk with ourselves in the kingdom of Nigh, from east of the Rockies, dial 1. | ||
| 800-825-5033. | ||
| 1-800-825-5033. | ||
| West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. | ||
| 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| Now again, here's Art Bell. | ||
| There's exciting, and then there's really exciting, and then there's almost breathless. | ||
| And this is at the almost breathless stage. | ||
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| We'll quickly summarize, and then we'll leave this alone for a while. | ||
| But it's too big not to explore entirely. | ||
| If you want to see the photographs, now the separate confirming photographs of a signal from the Pegasus system, maybe. | ||
| They're on my website right now. | ||
| From a radio amateur near Normandy, confirming what is now no longer an anonymous engineer's photographs of a signal from the same area. | ||
| And I'll confirm this with Richard in a moment, but he said confirmation in Germany now as well. | ||
| And apparently, an awful lot of interest going on at Harvard. | ||
| So as a talk show host, if I were a journalist, I'm a talk show host, not a journalist, but if I were a journalist, my nose would be really sniffing this one hard, and so should yours. | ||
| If you want to see, if you want to read about it, go to my site, www.artel.com, and all I can say is check it out for yourself. | ||
| One more thing. | ||
| Any hands across this continent, Canada, America, wherever my voice is heard, if you've got an Azel dish and you can monitor this frequency, 1453.8273, by all means, get on it. | ||
| If you get it, send me email immediately. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This would be the rough 50th anniversary of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds. | ||
| Richard, this is either a very elaborate hoax concocted among many people in different countries, or it's real. | ||
| Or it's real. | ||
| And what's your best guess? | ||
| My instincts say, based on the Pentagon stuff we've had in the last couple of months, it's tending toward the real. | ||
| But it's not at EQ Pegasi. | ||
| I think it's closer, and I think we're in for some astonishing surprises. | ||
| I don't know some more back-of-the-envelope calculations. | ||
| If this thing is coming at us at like 4,000 miles per second, which is 3% the speed of light, that, by the way, is 1,000 times the speed of John Glenn in orbit tonight, okay? | ||
| That's a pretty advanced technology by our current public standards, but it's primited by interstellar standards. | ||
| This is near the hydrogen frequency, right? | ||
| Near the hydrogen frequency. | ||
| The actual frequency is, as you said, 1453 and change. | ||
| The hydrogen frequency is 1420. | ||
| If that difference is a Doppler shift, a blue shift is up in frequency because it's heading toward us, then the speed is roughly 4,000 miles per second toward us. | ||
| And if its arrival date is December 7th, which I think might be an interesting date based on our other intelligence, based on history, it's an interesting date. | ||
| Well, it's also a 19.5 date. | ||
| There's another thing that bothers me about this. | ||
| I've looked where the star is on the sky. | ||
| You know, there's a celestial coordinate system for the sky, right? | ||
| Just like you have latitude and longitude on the Earth. | ||
| You have right ascension, which is basically our angle from Greenwich in the sky, east to west. | ||
| And you have declination, which is number of degrees north to south. | ||
| Well, this thing, this star, EQ pegasi, this is a little double star system, is 19.5 degrees north of the celestial equator. | ||
| That's its angle. | ||
| Its rate ascension is 23 hours and 30 minutes, which is the tilt angle of the Earth's axis. | ||
| In other words, this thing, whatever it is, is being influenced at two coordinates that are uniquely intrinsic to the planet on which we live. | ||
| Could this signal, and I'm beginning to conclude there really is a signal, could this signal be one of our own probes coming back? | ||
| Not at 7,000 kilometers per second, Art. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I mean, the pioneers and the Voyagers that we have launched in the last several years. | ||
| I'm just grasping at straws, you know. | ||
| No, this is either an incredible hoax by means of powers in the secret government that are sending hyperdimensional vehicles back toward us to mimic an interstellar contact. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or it's a real primitive interstellar probe, you know, trundling along at a modest 4,000 miles per second, in which case it will arrive here in the next month or so. | ||
| It will have to decelerate, depending upon what kind of drive it has. | ||
| It should be pretty spectacular, certainly in terms of the radio observations. | ||
| And this is an incredible time to be alive, Art. | ||
| And you broke this the night you returned. | ||
| I did. | ||
| But then, you know, I sat on it because there was suddenly a release of somebody who said, oh, it's a hoax. | ||
| And even with all the screen dumps and all the rest, it was at that point an anonymous amateur astronomer, engineer, who we now know to be Paul Dorr, who apparently is the real thing. | ||
| Oh, yeah, let me read you some of his credentials. | ||
| He was born on the 30th of September in 1961. | ||
| He went to City University in London. | ||
| He has a B.Sc. | ||
| in electrical electronic engineering, first class, H-Tech Telecommunications Level 3. | ||
| His work experience includes Marconi Communications Systems Limited. | ||
| In 1988, he was at Marconi Communications Systems, and then in 93, he went to British Aerospace. | ||
| And from 93 to the present, he's been with Siemens Plessy, which is another major British aerospace company. | ||
| His specialty is radar and microwave systems engineering. | ||
| He knows what he's talking about, and there's no way on God's Earth this guy would pull a hoax. | ||
| No way. | ||
| All right, so that's Paul Dorr. | ||
| He's no longer anonymous. | ||
| Then we get this message that I've got that seems, you know, as I read it, I'm a ham. | ||
| I'm slightly familiar. | ||
| It reads as real, or it reads as somebody, if it's a hoax, who knew damn well what they were talking about. | ||
| No question about it. | ||
| This is significant email I've got here now from near Normandy. | ||
| Now, you're telling me, to summarize, that they're also looking at this in Germany. | ||
| The Ethelsberg Radio Telescope, which is the biggest dish in Europe, stirable, 300 feet. | ||
| Right, confirming what Doerr is saying. | ||
| And they're willing to go to this press conference, what, on Tuesday, Wednesday, next Wednesday, the 4th of November, the day after our elections, in London, and tell all. | ||
| And tell all. | ||
| And I presume they'll have wonderful Doppler plots, and at that point, unless somebody beats them to it, we'll know whether this thing is really out at EQ Pegasi or it's a probe. | ||
| Okay, and once again, we also now know, or think we know, that Harvard, which was posting results of its work on an hourly basis, 10 minutes, excuse me, is now doing so only once a day. | ||
| I got a message saying, guess what, Art? | ||
| Harvard is looking at Pegasus. | ||
| Well, they're down tonight. | ||
| I can't even get in. | ||
| Their site has been taken down. | ||
| What? | ||
| You can't get into it. | ||
| And then you got the Planetary Society. | ||
| And then you got information that Harvard is looking at Pegasus, correct? | ||
| Well, this is the Planetary Society Project Beta. | ||
| Funded, as I said, in part by Steven Stielberg. | ||
| And amateurs, you know, people who are members of the Planetary Society from, you know, it's from great democratic effort. | ||
| And they're obviously freaking out. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I mean, Lou Friedman would not even look at the Sidonia pictures when Carl tried to get him, you know, 10 years ago. | ||
| So I can imagine that he's not going to put on the web live signals from an interstellar probe. | ||
| Okay, Richard, let's leave it here for now, and let's implore any radio amateurs in North America to train any azimuth elevation dishes they might have that can look at this frequency, at this star, and let's see what we can confirm. | ||
| Additionally, I think that's important. | ||
| Seth Shosak, if you're out there listening, and I bet by now you are, you've got my private number, Seth. | ||
| Call it. | ||
| I hesitate to pick up the phone and wake up poor Seth at this time of night, but I might even do that. | ||
| It's only 11.45 in California. | ||
|
unidentified
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Remember, astronomers do it all night. | |
| Yeah, maybe I'll wake Seth up. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, listen, Richard, I really thank you for giving us what you've got. | ||
| If you get more, I'll be the first to know. | ||
| Good enough. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks, Richard. | ||
| Take care. | ||
| That's Richard C. Hoagland. | ||
| And I hope you understand. | ||
| I have no way of telling you that I know all of this is so. | ||
| But alarm bells are going off now all over the place. | ||
| I repeat, all over the place. | ||
| In my mind, they're going off like crazy. | ||
| And it just may be that something or somebody is on the way. | ||
| It just may be that something in the Pegasus system is, in fact, sending a signal. | ||
| As Richard would say, we're beginning to get an awful lot of data points. | ||
| Now, if that's not enough reason to go off to my website, let me give you, as we try and return to Ghost2Ghost AM, let me try and give you a really good reason to go to my website. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think she is the queen, very close to see. | |
| I've seen blue for you. | ||
| And I think to myself, what a wonderful drunk with Art Bell in the kingdom of Nile from outside the U.S. First, dial your access number to the USA. | ||
| Then, 800-893-0903. | ||
| If you're a first-time caller, call Art at 702-727-1222. | ||
| From east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033. | ||
| West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. | ||
| Call Art at 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| Or call Art on the Wildcard Line at Area Code 702-727-1295. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM from the Kingdom of Nile. | ||
| I've been friends saying, saying I need them. | ||
| Everything I've done is I can't believe I can't believe I must live alone. | ||
| I feel like much more than I want to lose. | ||
| All right, we're back. | ||
| And I'm going to delay the caller on the wildcard line for a moment. | ||
| And I'm going to bring a real SETI person, Seth Shostak, on the air. | ||
| He still, I'm convinced, thinks that this is probably a hoax. | ||
| But I want to talk to him anyway. | ||
| Seth, are you there? | ||
| I'm definitely here. | ||
| All right, you did make it into my website, right? | ||
| I did, actually, and I thank those that may have made that possible by temporarily logging off. | ||
| All right, so an awful lot has happened. | ||
| I mean, we got this first unidentified, anonymous group of screen dumps. | ||
| And I remember you're saying, well, it's anonymous. | ||
| You know, that's a tip-off right there. | ||
| Well, now, Seth, it's no longer anonymous. | ||
| We know who has been providing this, Paul Dorr, his name is. | ||
| And his complete resume is now up there on the website. | ||
| And he's got a planned press conference for Tuesday. | ||
| And he says that he's got confirmation from Germany. | ||
| What site was that? | ||
| I think he's speaking of the Effelsberg Radio Telescope that's in the mountains, or kind of big hills, actually, near Bonn, Germany, actually. | ||
| It's a large instrument. | ||
| I've used it, actually. | ||
| How big? | ||
| Well, it's 100 meters, so a little more than 300 feet across. | ||
| Really big. | ||
| Really big. | ||
| The frequency is specific this time, 1453.8273 with the Doppler shift. | ||
| I assume you were able to read the text of this latest message from the gentleman near Normandy. | ||
| I was able to read that. | ||
| I have that here, yes. | ||
| As you read through that, is there anything that hits you the wrong way? | ||
| Well, there's nothing that hits me the wrong way. | ||
| I don't see anything here that looks suspicious. | ||
| I kind of was trying to think of why it is that I think that this is not going to turn out to be our first contact with E.T. much, though. | ||
| That would be job security for me, Art. | ||
| It certainly would. | ||
| Yes, but I don't think so. | ||
| But it isn't so much because of what Mr. Benton here from Guernsey is saying. | ||
| There are a few things. | ||
| One thing is that he has a pretty small dish. | ||
| Now, depending on where I read about him, it's either 1.5 or 4.5 meters. | ||
| Well, I have the original email, and there's a misprint. | ||
| It is 4.5 meters. | ||
| It is 4.5. | ||
| Okay, well, now at 1453 megahertz, which is where he's tuning on the dial to hear this putative ET, that means that the beam, that is the area of sky that he's sensitive to, is roughly 3 degrees across. | ||
| Imagine a circle on the sky about 3 degrees, and for those who can't quite picture what 3 degrees means, it's something like 35 or 36 full moons packed together there on the sky. | ||
| Now, that's a pretty big chunk of sky. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| When we were looking at EQ PEG about four weeks ago with the Arecibo telescope, and by the way, we didn't find this signal, we found interference, we had a beam there because our telescope was so much bigger that's only about three arc minutes on the sky. | ||
| So that's about 1,100th the size of the full moon, not 35 full moons. | ||
| So that's a difference of 3,000 to 4,000. | ||
| Oh, yeah, very narrow. | ||
| Extremely narrow. | ||
| And that means if you find a signal, you can say it's coming from that star. | ||
| So point one, and this is maybe not such a critical point, but point one is to speak as if this signal is known to be coming from EQPEG, even if there really were a signal, is wrong because you've got this huge uncertainty, this big blobby beam on the sky, and you can't be sure where the signal is coming from. | ||
| The only thing he did say in the email is that when EQPEG cleared the horizon, there it was. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| He does say that. | ||
| He says shortly thereafter, whatever that means. | ||
| He also said, and that's okay. | ||
| I mean, I don't have any reason to doubt that he picked up the signal. | ||
| I think maybe a point worth mentioning here is anybody who's in the SETI business knows that when you're tuning around the microwave part of the dial, which is where all this action is taking place, you get signals all the time. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| When we were at Arecibo, every 20 megahertz worth of bandwidth that we were looking at, which is kind of the chunk of the radio dial that we look at at once, had hundreds of signals in it. | ||
| And that's because everybody and his cousin wants a chunk of the radio spectrum to use for telecommunications, for connecting cellular phones with satellites and so forth. | ||
| I mean, they're just eating up the microwave band like crazy. | ||
| So there are signals everywhere. | ||
| So picking up the signal in the microwave band is unfortunately all too easy. | ||
| There's also radars and stuff like that. | ||
| There's a lot of action up there. | ||
| If you heard, Seth, that the DISH in Germany was confirming, as is said up there, what Paul Dorr and what now this other amateur near Normandy have confirmed, would you then begin to warm up a little bit if that was true? | ||
| Oh, you bet, Art. | ||
| I mean, listen, as I say, I'm not trying to be transit, but I'm just looking at the evidence. | ||
| And if you had some of the staff astronomers there at Effelsberg and they said, you know, this is an extraterrestrial source, this is not terrestrial interference, you bet, you bet. | ||
| I would pay strong attention to that. | ||
| But let's see, one other thing that struck me in Mr. Benton's letter there from Guernsey, he says here at some point that the signal was at 1453 points such and such with a significant drift. | ||
| If this drift is due to a satellite, it has a really unstable oscillator, which just so happens to mimic the Earth's rotation and the rotation of some other unknown body. | ||
| Well, that sentence doesn't make too much logical, Captain, as Mr. Spock would say. | ||
| That doesn't make too much sense because he doesn't know what the rotation of the other unknown body is. | ||
| And I doubt that Mr. Guernsey has enough resolution in his receiver, in other words, that he has fine enough tuning, if you will, to be able to see the Doppler shift of our own Earth, which is rather small. | ||
| It's like less than one hertz per second. | ||
| And that means you have to have filters there that are down around one hertz in width, and very few amateurs will have anything like that. | ||
| You don't say the signal is much weaker, which, of course, on a 4.5-meter dish it would be. | ||
| Yeah, well, the other fellow had a 10-meter dish, so that's a factor of 4, and that's 6 dB down. | ||
| But 6 dB is not so much. | ||
| Well, 3 dB is half power, right? | ||
| Yeah, 3 dB is a factor 2, but remember his dish is half the size, so that's one-fourth the area. | ||
| So it's 6 dB down. | ||
| Okay, well, I mean, you know, I'm sure most folks don't care too much about that, but it's a fact that this signal got much weaker here. | ||
| This signal, according to what the guy says, and he doesn't give any numbers, but according to what he says, his signal was much weaker, and it shouldn't have been much weaker. | ||
| It should have been a factor of four weaker. | ||
| It's also at a different frequency. | ||
| Did you see his screen print? | ||
| I did. | ||
| Yeah, and it looks like a signal. | ||
| But that per se, of course, I don't take that as very strong evidence for E.T. because I can get signals by tuning any receiver on Earth. | ||
| I can get signals. | ||
| Can you get signals that would come and go the way he described five times? | ||
| He said he moved the dish off point. | ||
| Well, I think that's what convinced him that this was E.T. trying to call us, because he did what we do, what every radio astronomer who tries to do this experiment does, namely you point in the direction of the star system you're interested in. | ||
| If you find a signal, then you move the telescope so that it's pointed away and see if the signal goes away. | ||
| And if it does, then you move it back on the star system, see if it comes back, and so forth. | ||
| And you do this a couple times, and then you begin to get, your blood pressure begins to rise. | ||
| Seth, is there anybody you can call? | ||
| Well, let me lay out why. | ||
| Well, I don't know if you want me to. | ||
| I'm going to lay out again why I think that this is probably a red herring. | ||
| All right, here it is. | ||
| This is the way I see it. | ||
| Now, first off, you've already mentioned that the first guy calls in, he's anonymous. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And as I say, that raises a red flag with me because if somebody calls me up from Peoria and says, I've got a cure for cancer, but I can't tell you my name and can't tell you how to get hold of me. | ||
| You know, you're not going to give that a lot of credibility. | ||
| But he's not anonymous anymore. | ||
| He's not anymore. | ||
| That's true, but it took him a week. | ||
| According to the SETI league, he started doing this a week ago. | ||
| I must say I didn't know that, but that's what I'm told by Paul Shuck. | ||
| Well, even you told me that there were some posts within some SETI sites by this source. | ||
| Exactly, but they were all anonymous. | ||
| Anonymous. | ||
| But now we know everything about this man, and he does seem to have a legitimate, apparently a legitimate background. | ||
| Well, what I've read on the net, or on the web, he has a technical background, that's for sure. | ||
| But, you know, that raised the red flag. | ||
| He hacked into a SETI League Internet group. | ||
| You know, somebody who does that. | ||
| I mean, if you make the scientific discovery of the millennium, is that what you'd think of doing? | ||
| I think I'll hack into this Internet group over here and post this stuff anonymously. | ||
| Well, yeah, but what you might do is you might not go to a SETI site at all. | ||
| You would, if you really wanted to distribute this, you'd make a posting on some giant mail list somewhere and get it going that way. | ||
| I mean, putting it in a SETI site is trying to keep it confined to people who can verify what you're trying to say. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Now, then he complained that the SETI league wasn't interested in verifying what he wanted. | ||
| But that was also more than a little suspicious because, of course, they couldn't get back to him because he wouldn't give them. | ||
| It's anonymous, yes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Then, next thing he does is he puts a plot on this side, a GIF file, or is it a GIF file? | ||
| I always call it GIF file, but it's really GIF. | ||
| I'm always corrected about it. | ||
| Okay, well, I'll stay incorrect. | ||
| I'll sit corrected here. | ||
| He puts on a GIF file. | ||
| But Dawn Bonnet, that particular plot doesn't have the characteristics of what's called a drift scan. | ||
| We discussed this the other night, that the signal should go up and then come back down as the star drifts through the telescope's beam. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And Chip Cohen, a fellow at Boston University, who's very, very knowledgeable about SETI, points this out on the SETI League's group site. | ||
| And suddenly, another GIF is posted where it does go up and down. | ||
| But then it's pointed out, well, yes, but the Doppler shifts are the wrong way. | ||
| And suddenly a third GIF is put up there with the right Doppler shift. | ||
| Now, if you look on that GeoCity site where you see the original plots, there's one for October 22nd and one for October 23. | ||
| And I encourage all of your listeners to go check that out. | ||
| And if they just look a little bit carefully, they'll see that they're both the same plot, just shifted vertically by, I don't know, 30 or 50 pixels. | ||
| That's not hard. | ||
| You can see that just right on your screen. | ||
| That's not hard to see. | ||
| Mr. Benton's, though, is the 29th. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| No, then Mr. Benton's another story. | ||
| But this is the first guy. | ||
| And now he claims, at least I've heard it said, that I think Richard Hoagland said that, well, that was just another error. | ||
| He was in a tremendous hurry to get these GIFs up there. | ||
| He's excited, yeah. | ||
| And he accidentally put the same one up twice, although he did manage to shift it 30 or 50 pixels, which I find is kind of interesting. | ||
| So the point is that every time that someone pointed out something wrong with these GIF He changed it. | ||
| And you've got to say that's something interesting. | ||
| The next point is what an incredible coincidence that he's claiming this is EQPEG, EQ Pegasy, because that was the source where Jill Charter and I found a very interesting, well, interesting for 10 minutes, source of interference. | ||
| But it was only interference. | ||
| We looked at EQPEG, actually, with Arecibo, which has, what, about 1,000 times the sensitivity of this fellow's system, probably more than that, actually. | ||
| And we didn't see any signal at any of the frequencies he claimed. | ||
| Is it not possible, though, that that signal .. | ||
| certainly it's possible a signal would be interrupted at the source for some period of time and then reappear? | ||
| Always possible. | ||
| Can't deny that. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| But the point was that we picked up a signal that, as I say, for 10 minutes looked interesting, and then it was clearly identified as just another bit of interference, which, as I say, we get all the time. | ||
| And then this guy, four weeks later, now claims that he's got a signal from the very same direction. | ||
| And that's a bit as if a prospector in the Old West looking for gold comes across some mountain, and my God, he thinks he's found the mother load. | ||
| And he goes out to the mountain, he marks it on his map, this is it. | ||
| But then, you know, he gets out his magnifying glass or his equipment, whatever, and he looks it over, and it turns out it's all pyrite. | ||
| It's all fool's cloth. | ||
| It's gold. | ||
| It's not worth anything. | ||
| Four weeks later, some other miner says, I found the mother load. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| It's right on that mountain, right where that guy claimed to find all the pyrite. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So that's a little bit suspicious in the whole sky. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And you know, the other night when you said all this, I accepted it. | ||
| I really did accept it. | ||
| And I shut my mouth about it, and I just waited. | ||
| But now comes piling in all this other information, another source, then another source, a claim from Germany. | ||
| Then the guy goes public with his name and his background. | ||
| They say they're going to have this press conference on Tuesday. | ||
| Isn't there somebody you can call? | ||
| Well, you can be sure that, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think that there are people that, well, I think that maybe the best people to look at are probably the guys, I don't want to speak for them, but the guys at Harvard that you've already mentioned, the Project Beta guys might be able to tune up to 1453. | ||
| They surely can. | ||
| I mean, there you are. | ||
| Now, listen to me. | ||
| I'm telling you the truth. | ||
| I got email separate from Hoagland that said that Harvard was, in fact, looking at that system. | ||
| Well, it may very well be, yeah. | ||
| And then Hoagland got separate emails saying, yes, it's true. | ||
| They've begun to shut down their 10-minute reports. | ||
| The whole site is down, and they're looking at Pegasus. | ||
| So, you know, it's an awful lot of data points here. | ||
| Well, they are, but they all, to me, point the same way. | ||
| There's one other datum I might mention here. | ||
| Paul Shuck's SETI League, which was the organization whose Internet group was given all these GIF files kind of anonymously, they had more than 60 fellows with their dishes go look for that original signal, and they didn't find it, none of them. | ||
| So that's another datum point there. | ||
| It is. | ||
| But if there's any way possible that you can encourage anybody to look, I mean, there's enough here that I sure would like to see this confirmed or knocked down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I think everybody feels that way. | ||
| Let me put it this way to you. | ||
| If you right this very moment had access to a good-size reflector, wouldn't you be pointed over there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm on the show here, so I suppose I would be. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Let me point out something that may not be too obvious to listeners. | ||
| You've got to be a little careful. | ||
| You know, separating out the wheat from the chaff ears is tough business because of this enormous interference that we suffer here on Earth. | ||
| You know, what you really want to do is move this whole operation to the far side of the moon. | ||
| If somebody's willing to write a check so that we can do that, that would be wonderful. | ||
| Well, it's this kind of news that will get the pens going, I think. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| But we've been fooled in the past by signals that look good in the sense that you're pointing at a given star and you pick up the signal. | ||
| And then you move the telescope off, pointing it somewhere else, and the signal goes away. | ||
| And then you move it back, and the signal comes back. | ||
| And you move it away and it goes away, just like this fellow in Guernsey experience. | ||
| But, in fact, that can happen, even though the signal is coming from something here on the ground, a radar somewhere. | ||
| It's just because it's coming in the sides of the antenna. | ||
| It's coming in the side lobes. | ||
| Every antenna is most sensitive in the direction it's pointed, but it has a little bit of sensitivity off to the side. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And so what can happen, and it's happened to us, so it really does happen, is that the side lobes just happen to be in such an arrangement that you're picking up an interfering signal off in some crazy direction, and when you move the antenna away, then the side lobes change direction, and you don't get it anymore. | ||
| So it mimics perfectly the kind of thing that the fellow endures is reporting. | ||
| So that's a possibility to keep in mind. | ||
| So all of this, then, you would characterize yourself as being very skeptical, but at least mildly interested. | ||
| Well, I find it very interesting, that's for sure. | ||
| But at the moment, I'm willing to bet any listener a double latte that this is not E.T. calling. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Seth, thanks a million. | ||
| We'll do a show again soon. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| Thanks for getting up in the middle of the night with us. | ||
| That's the real McCoy there, Seth Shostak of SETI. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| That's 1-800-232-5665. | ||
| Well, all right. | ||
| I apologize to my caller on the wildcard line. | ||
| I'm going to keep you on hold through the top of the hour news, which is rapidly approaching. | ||
| Send me a bill. | ||
| We'll pay your phone bill. | ||
| So sorry about that. | ||
| So hang in there. | ||
| There was no way I could not do what I just did. | ||
| And if only Seth had been where we last interviewed him a couple times ago at, Arecibo, I think we'd have our answer right now. | ||
| In all, if you want to know what's going on, you'll go to my website. | ||
| You will also go to my website to see this incredible photograph, and it is an incredible photograph, of this obvious American native in the fire. | ||
| It fits in perfectly for the night. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| And all of the information that you can read on my site, on the GeoCity site, which is linked. | ||
| And if you can't get into my site, which is www.artbell.com, then by all means, try Richard Hoagland's site, which is enterprisemission.com. | ||
| But whatever you do, get up there mildly interesting at the very least. | ||
| I'm Marfell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Coast to Coast A.M. We gotta get right back to where we started for. | |
| Love you. | ||
| I'm not getting right, that's where we're not at all. | ||
| I need a message. | ||
| I need a message. | ||
| When you first taken my place, I said no one could take your place. | ||
| And if you get hurt, you get hurt. | ||
| My little thing I see, I just spend my home in your face. | ||
| And it's alright, all that. | ||
| We're gonna get right back when we start it all. | ||
| Loving us good, nothing. | ||
| I can't get right back till we start going. | ||
| Like a... | ||
| You never say so just because you love. | ||
| I can't stay away from you. | ||
| You hold me up for more. | ||
| All right, and it's coming up, we gotta get right back to the way it's coming from. | ||
| Nothing is good, nothing is good. | ||
| I got it in right back to the sun and fall I got it in right back to the sun and fall I got it in right back to the sun and fall You see your love. | ||
| I just can't stay away You are the uncle You are the uncle And it's alright, and it's coming up. | ||
| We gotta get right back to where we started for. | ||
| Love you, double the shot. | ||
| We gotta get right back to where we're. | ||
| Alright, and it's coming up. | ||
| We gotta get right back to the sun and ball. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| We gotta get right back to the sunny ball. |
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