Art Bell and guests examine a 1998 photograph of an "Indian warrior" appearing during a fire drill on sacred burial grounds in Missouri, sparking controversy. Meanwhile, radio astronomer K.F. Benton detects a Doppler-shifting signal at 1453.8273 MHz from EQ Pegasi, confirmed by British engineer Paul Dorr using Germany’s 300-foot Effelsberg dish. Harvard’s Agassiz Station halted live updates, allegedly focusing on the source, while Seth Shostak (SETI) dismisses it as likely interference, citing antenna side-lobe errors and unverified claims. Hoagland counters with Dorr’s credentials and Pentagon hints of an event in the American Southwest, leaving open whether this is a breakthrough or a meticulously crafted hoax—raising questions about humanity’s readiness to confront cosmic contact. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.